Boosting Visibility

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 had 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.