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According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, consumers spent more than $194 billion online in 2011. With this kind of spending, it’s not surprising to see small businesses moving some, or all, operations online.
Starting your own online business is an exciting time with many choices and options. You must choose the type of products you wish to sell, the design of your website, coupons and discounts you can offer and more. Creating and managing an online business is hard work, and the heavy load can be overwhelming. Ecommerce software is designed to make opening and running an online store as fast and trouble-free as possible.
This has fueled the impressive growth hosted eCommerce software companies have enjoyed in recent years. Hosted solutions provide everything you need to convert a business website to an eCommerce web store without tech and design knowledge.
This type of application should help you, register a domain, design your website, upload and manage your inventory, connect to a shopping cart and provide secure payment options to your customers.
You just need the inventory, and here in lies a problem.
Product oriented small businesses have inventory, and for these companies current software platforms are more than enough to add ecommerce components to an existing website or move a ‘brick and mortar’ company online.
However, for home-based businesses these solutions fall short.
In late July, I attended the Online Retailer Conference and e-Commerce Expo. After four days of presentations of industry thought-leaders offering strategic insights and tactical ideas, I ran into a colleague of mine from Siebel Systems who was intrigued by the approach of a Charlotte, NC based company. The company is Loudbounce.com ( http://www.loudbounce.com, ) and to say its ‘flying under the radar’ is an understatement. I was unsuccessful contacting the company, but according to their website they are ‘beta’ testing and will be online later this year.
Apparently the company integrates shopping cart software, online store builder tools with web-based multi-channel merchant ERP software. Why is this important? This platform enables businesses to not only create an online store, but to sell products without sourcing, managing or maintaining inventory. It works by providing merchants a hosted ERP platform to upload their product inventory to a consolidated catalogue in the cloud. In turn, web stores select products from this catalogue to list on their site, and their customers can ‘checkout’ without being redirected to a third party retailer. It’s designed for web stores to look and feel like a traditional ecommerce store hosting on-site inventory.
So soccer moms, students and the like,… the promise of profiting off the internet may now be within reach.
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Source by Vikram Razdan