Many people in the promotional products industry have told me that eCommerce will not work in their industry because what they sell is made to order and most products have too many options that need explaining to their customers
Now this sounds like a challenge to me and after studying the market we discovered that quite a few companies in the US where now doing very substantial sales online Branders.com probably being the most high profile
At this point we received a phone call from one of our customers asking whether we thought it was possible to build an ecommerce site for promotional products – 4 months later we are pleased to announce the launch of promoexpert.co.uk
Building on some of the features we found looking at the US market we used the Magento framework and a couple of new extension developed by ourselves to create what we believe is a simple to use end to end ecommerce solution for promotional products
End user feedback so far has been very favourable and we have a happy client – now all they need is to generate some visitors and enjoy substantially lower admin costs – it must be why the prices on their site are substantially lower than most of their competitors
This all just goes to show that ecommerce nowadays is about more than just selling stock items online – it is and will continue to change the way almost every business works
The other main challenge for the industry is getting product data in the right format. At this stage data has to be manually modified as product suppliers are not used to providing it in the right format for ecommerce but as more companies start to sell products online this will have to change and the suppliers offering ecommerce ready product data will have a competitive advantage. At the moment processing product data for ecommerce still represents quite a time consuming task
If you think ecommerce will not work in your market sector then please give us a call we love a challenge
