If experience is life’s greatest teacher, Todd Andrew has earned his PhD. In the 10 years since he transitioned his luggage and bag company, Shop Bags, from a mall-based store to online-only, finding the right e-commerce partner has been filled with stops and starts.
“We’ve been with several different hosting and e-commerce companies, including having a site built to our specifications,” says Andrew, president of Shop Bags. “Overall, this is a conglomeration of the problems not with one vendor, but with all of them. The biggest problem was getting a site designed … on the back end to make it easier to process orders that we ship from here and the orders that we have drop-shipped.”
Each in a series of technology partners would make changes to the platform that challenged Andrew’s way of doing business or would be unresponsive to changes that needed to be reflected on the retailer’s website. “A problem we had with our last vendor — and the main reason we changed — was that they made some changes with their system that dramatically affected our ability to process our orders in a reasonable amount of time,” he says. “They were hard-headed about it without consulting their consumers.”
The changes included eliminating the ability to forward an order to a vendor for drop-shipping; instead, the order details had to be cut-and-pasted into an e-mail. Another frustration: When an item’s inventory dropped to zero, the system would not only hide it from shoppers, it also deleted it from the subcategories. When the item was restocked, it had to be reassigned to each of the subcategories. “Some of our products fit into five to seven classifications, so it takes time,” Andrew says.
Andrew came across ShopVisible, an Atlanta-based provider of e-commerce platforms that boast search engine optimization, content management and total integration. He checked with current ShopVisible customers: While the reviews were glowing, what ultimately won him over was the management team’s experience in online retailing.
“I’ve had tech people not grasp the importance of how something should be done,” he says. “These guys knew what we wanted it to do and why we wanted it to do it. They also could view our business from the customer’s point of view. We got a lot of good tips and suggestions to use.”
ShopVisible has plenty of other assets to bring to the table, including Site Manager, which allows an e-tailer to list products on sites like Amazon, Google, PriceGrabber and Overstock.com. Inventory is maintained across the networks, and price changes can be managed seamlessly. Search engine optimization boosts the profile of its retailers, often allowing them to curtail expensive pay-per-click advertising. Content management allows for blogging, product information and user-generated reviews.
New to ShopVisible in recent months is Amazon One-Click ordering, through which a customer can purchase from Shop Bags using pre-stored Amazon shopping information. That brings an instant credibility to a user who may be hesitant to offer credit card information to a company with which she hasn’t previously done business.
“I’m shocked at the number of people who are selecting Google or PayPal or Amazon payment options over entering their credit card information,” Andrew says. “They give it to someone they trust, and all three of those companies stand behind it. If there’s a problem, they don’t have to fight it out on their own with a company they don’t know.”
ShopVisible believes in “rapid and nimble deployment,” says company CEO Sean Cook. “We like to innovate on a regular basis. We actually roll up our sleeves and think strategically with our customers to come up with the next innovations.” Its service offers seamless integration of systems, a feature that Cook describes as “less sexy, but where retailers are going to find tremendous benefit in the kinds of things that we do. Being able to consolidate and integrate these systems that are currently being piecemealed streamlines operations.”
It means a retailer can connect both its warehouse and drop-ship fulfillment services, rather than hoping that disparate systems and programs can be forced to communicate.
Giant ball of code
“Retailers go to one place and get the website designed, then to another provider for an order management system, another for analytics, software for inventory control and still other software for content management,” Cook says. “Then they try to find a technologist who can tie all of these together. They end up with a giant ball of code that doesn’t work together. The retailer ends up wrestling with technology instead of spending time strategically thinking, ‘How do I sell more products?’”
Those streamlined operations are handled from one dashboard that connects with drop-shippers, fulfillment partners and associate sellers. It also allows a user to connect with its own customers, such as by sending an e-mail to everyone who spent more than $100 in the past week.
“We’ve never had such extensive abilities available just from the dashboard,” Andrew says. “You can Twitter directly from the dashboard, or see the most-viewed pages on the site or view your Amazon ship alerts. We’ve found it really handy from the standpoint of watching sales. It’s also nice to see the open customer tickets; it reminds you there’s something to be done there.”
Like being on Main Street
One of the keys to ShopVisible’s success is its efforts to live up to its name — making its partners more visible on the vast and increasingly cluttered Internet. Since its work with ShopVisible began, Shop Bags has gone from an Alexa traffic ranking in the millions to 383,000. Andrew’s goal is to make Shop Bags one of the 100,000 most-visited websites without paying hefty pay-per-click fees. Given that he’s seeing improvements on a monthly basis, it’s not out of reach.
Shop Bags now is “able to get in front of people everywhere,” Cook says. “Their products and services showing up on page one of a Google search is like being on Main Street in every town in America. Their reach has expanded dramatically. And they’re able to expand their catalog because we fully integrate with manufacturers and fulfillment partners.”
Shop Bags increased to about 5,000 SKUs and intends to continue growing its inventory, largely because of the ease of adding new products to the website. “On some of the lower-priced items, we might have asked in the past, ‘Is this worth the time and effort to put it up?’’ Andrew says. “Now, we literally put everything on.”
ShopVisible charges a license fee to use its platform and has incentives tied directly to a user partner’s revenues and targets. That, says Andrew, was a huge draw. “That forces them to keep current with the latest trends and whistles and bells that make your business better,” he says.