Shopsite today announced the release of version 10 service pack 2 revision 1 (v10 sp2 r1). The new version includes
You can also read a detailed list of features at the Lexiconn blog.
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Today, my first guest article was published on Practical eCommerce. Titled “Inventory Management: Use 80-20 Rule“, I discuss the following topics in the article -
I also provide a few tips on sourcing products via Tradeshows and Distributors.
We are very excited to see the Ordoro presence on a popular ecommerce magazine such as PeC. Please give me feedback on the article either there or right here on this blog.
I also want to extend a big THANK YOU to Gary Yorke – the owner of ChildTherapyToys.com. His input was extremely valuable in writing that article.
Also, the entire Ordoro team wishes to thank all you readers for your support via RSS subscription, Facebook and Twitter.
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Tags:ecommerce·Inventory·practical ecommerce·shoppingcart·sourcing
Last night, we presented at the Texas Moot Corp semi-finals. We did a great job, and we are proud to announce that we advanced into the finals. Ordoro is one of the 5 finalists of the Texas Moot Corp competition.
We had an amazing time doing the 15 minute pitch of our business plan. I started the pitch focusing on the pain experienced by thousands of small business ecommerce merchants. I then introduced the Ordoro solution and talked about how excited our customers were to see the alpha version screens – our focus on usability had paid off. Naruby followed up with an overview of where Ordoro fits in the market place, and talked about all the hard work we did over the past one year to take us to where we are today. Sangram topped it all off with the financials and a discussion about the entire Ordoro team.
The response from the judges was very positive. Every one concurred that Ordoro addresses an important pain in the market and that we have the right team structure to build a great solution. They gave us great suggestions for marketing and also highlighted a couple of areas that we need to focus on. All in all, great feedback from four experienced investor/entrepreneurs.
Now on to the big event – the Texas Moot Corp Finals. Just getting into the Moot Corp Finals itself means a lot to us. We get to pitch in front of another panel of successful businessmen and women. Yet another round of constructive feedback on our business plan. And more exposure within the Austin investor community. And last but not the least, bragging rights.
The entire Ordoro team wants to thank all the small business ecommerce merchants out there who have helped us with all the market research. Thank you for all the early feedback that has helped us build a great product. I know you are waiting for our product release announcement. It is coming soon.
For now, the march is on for February 17. Come cheer for us at the Texas Moot Corp Finals.
Tags:business plan·competition·ecommerce·moot corp·small business. merchants·won
Let us say you have built a strong fan following on Facebook via your business fan page. Other than bringing traffic to your webstore, is there an easier way to monetize on this fanbase? Now there is.
ShopTab is a new way to monetize your popularity on Facebook and to increase your ecommerce sales. ShopTab is a Facebook application that lets your fans browse your webstore catalog and make purchases from within Facebook. The ShopTab app lets you create a facebook “feed” of your product catalog. This is very similar to the Google Products approach that I wrote about a few days ago.
Once you upload your products onto the ShopTab interface, your fans will be able to browse the products directly on Facebook. They are also presented with a “buy now” button and if they click on it, they will be taken to your webstore home page to complete the purchase.
ShopTab costs only $10 a month to list 500 products. This flatfee model is great if you do not like the “percentage of sales” model used by platforms such as eBay and Amazon.
More details about this application can be found here.
Every small business owner who is looking for a shopping cart for their ecommerce business is faced with hundreds of options. According to Practical eCommerce magazine, there are about 500 ecommerce shopping cart solutions. How do you decide which one is right for you?
This is my attempt to aggregate and list information about the majority of small business ecommerce shopping carts.
The list below is in no particular order -
…. I will be adding to this list over the coming days. In the meanwhile, here is a wikipedia article that does a good comparison of shopping cart software.
Please help me complete this list. Please add your entries to the comments section with links to relevant reviews and I will move it to the main article.
If you would like to be notified when I update this list, please follow us on Twitter @ordoroteam
Tags:choices·comparison of shopping cart software·ecommerce·hosted·list·pros and cons·SaaS·shopping cart·small business·Webstore
This is a no-brainer for every ecommerce merchant. Upload your product information into Google Product Search. It’s free, and will improve the chances of your product showing up during Google search.
Google Product Search lets online shoppers compare products and their prices across multiple online retailers. Some of the new features introduced in November 2009 are -
Tags:ecommerce·products·Sales and Marketing·SEO·small business
eMarketer discusses a Zara iPhone app that fails to deliver. The app is just a catalog with pictures of products, but with no option to check the price or to buy the product.
Practical eCommerce has another article that reviews some of the popular ecommerce iPhone apps.
Like I commented on that page, I believe that these apps do not fully utilize the capabilities offered by the iPhone platform. When new technologies arrive, most people blindly copy over their existing model to fit the new platform without fully considering the potential of the new platform. iPhone, being a handheld computer, can offer much more than what a regular web-based catalog can offer.
A good example that utilizes the iPhone platform is the Tesco Wine app. With the Tesco app, you need to just take a picture of a wine bottle, and it will offer you tasting notes and other details about the wine. It’ll then let you buy a bottle via the same app from the ecommerce store.
Another good example is the Shoeboxed iPhone app from Shoeboxed.com. If you are not familiar with Shoeboxed, here is what they do. You can send them all your receipts and business cards packed in an envelope and they will scan them, organize them, and give you online access to them.
So how does their iPhone app work? You just need to photograph the receipt. The iPhone app extracts the data from the photograph and displays it on the iPhone. You can submit it to your online account on the spot.
My point is that ecommerce merchants should try to get a deep understanding of the customer’s mindset and then provide creative solutions that utilize the capabilities of the iPhone platform. That will give you better results than just porting over your current webstore into an iPhone app.
Tags:ecommerce·iphone app
An annual survey conducted by Sterling Commerce highlights the increasing demand for an integrated shopping experience across multiple retail channels.
According to the survey results from January 2009 -
Though these results are from a year ago, they highlight the increasing need for an integrated inventory management system for multi-channel e-commerce merchants.
How are multi channel retailers responding to this trend? According to a survey conducted by AMR Research -
via eMarketer.com
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Following are our 10 most popular blog posts from last year – based on page views. Thank you to all our readers for the continued support.
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The original article is behind the pay wall. You can access the Comscore press release mentioned in the article here.
Below are my findings from the two articles -
Online sales for the 2009 holiday season (November 1 – December 24) was $27 billion. This is a 5% increase compared to the same period for 2008.
However, we had a additional shopping day this year since Thanksgiving fell on Nov 26 (compared to Nov 27 in 2008). Adjusting for the additional shopping day the increase was only 3.5%.
If you consider year-to-year change, the holiday season online sales had fallen by 3% from 2007 to 2008. So this 5% growth is a positive change for online retailers.
However, there is more to it than just this aggregate number. On the down side, Comscore says that amount spent per buyer was lower in 2009 compared to 2008.
They attribute the 5% jump to the following factors -
The product categories that had strong sales this year were -
Large retailers outperformed small businesses
Dallas Morning News points out that 55% of online sales this year was conducted through the top 100 internet retailers. Big online retailers such as Amazon and Walmart fared better than small business online retailers this year. These big companies are performing better on pricing. They also have higher customer satisfaction ratings because they have the spending power to improve web shopping experience.
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Tags:ecommerce·holiday sales