GOb2b Blogs

We’ve just delivered a very exciting new Shopfront site to the Shannon-based European distributor of industrial footwear, Shoes for Crews. Integrated to their Sage 200...

We’ll be making mobile-friendly versions of Shopfront available to all our customers in the very near future. There’s already big demand from our B2C customers but we think there are also great opportunities in the B2B market, particularly when combined with the power of QR codes. QR scanning apps are available for iPhone, Android and Blackberry – and it’s a native application in Windows phones. When QR codes are printed on packaging, customers can place a re-stocking order simply by scanning the last box on the shelf. You can see a preview version here of how we’re developing this kind of capability for a new customer. The QR code to the right will take you straight to a product if you scan it from your phone – or try this free generator.

I first started using the Internet in 1997 and had an ADSL line installed by the following year. From that moment, I was hooked on the possibilities of this incredible medium. Of course, since then it’s become accepted as an essential part of everyday life and as commonplace as any public utility.

The new EU Privacy Directive concerning the use of ‘cookies’ on websites has now been in force for over a month and potentially impacts many customers. Our clients rely on us for specialist advice on all issues that affect their ecommerce business, so after assessing the detail of the legislation and researching industry opinion, we’ve developed an implementation for our Shopfront solution.

The Learning Trust, a not-for-profit company responsible for administering education services in the London Borough of Hackney, had an obligation to take their business operations online by 1 April 2012. At tender they selected Apidistra’s Shopfront solution with Sage 200 to provide ecommerce facilities for a range of services including initiatives like ‘Behaviour Support Programs’ and ‘Governor Training’.

The perfect business would be fully integrated and have no staff (actually the perfect business makes money without staff or customers!) but we must balance the cost of that integration against the return it is going to give. In the beginning of Internet time (1999) a successful businessman set up WebVan, an online grocery delivery business in the US. It was fully automated with 300,000 sq ft distribution centres and special vans. Ultimately the business failed because the margins were too thin and as a start up it was costing $210 to acquire each customer. Tesco started a pilot web grocery business at the same time. After running it for 6 months they shut it down and reflected. I was lucky enough to be at the Manchester Business School at the time and listened to a talk on the lessons learned from one of the directors. They re-launched with in-store picking, special vans and sold to existing customers; they were profitable by 2001.

If you have a highly integrated ecommerce system you can make considerable labour savings either by employing staff or redeploying existing staff. Of course you need to invest to achieve this but I constantly come up against stiff price resistance. ‘What! You want £X,000 for a website?’ An ecommerce website can sell to the whole world but customers who will pay £25,000 for a new van or £100,000 to fit out a shop will not pay for software.

Have you ever ordered online and the goods didn’t turn up because they were not in stock? Irritating isn’t it. I recently ordered some sportswear: two pairs of shorts in black. I got a call a day later saying they only had one pair in black and would I accept a blue pair instead. This was great customer service and I went ahead, but could the call have been avoided? A real time stock facility would have enabled the site to let me know there was only one pair available and an ‘alternates’ facility could have showed me the blue shorts. Of course, once I saw what I wanted was not in stock I may have simply gone back to Google until I found a site with them in stock. We recently ordered some Cricket equipment for my son and it took two weeks to realise that they were never going to have the goods; needless to say we will never shop there again.