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Did you enjoy your New Year’s Eve holiday by spending time with your family? Our big-ticket retail clients did, because they weren’t worried about whether their websites would be live during their blowout New Year’s inventory clearance sales. One of the most critical decisions you’ll ever make as a big-ticket retailer looking to transition to e-commerce is whether to host your own website, or to use a managed solution. Blueport Commerce examines the pros and cons of hosting your e-commerce website yourself, or outsourcing it to a managed solution provider.

In-House Hosting Gives You Total Control – And Sole Responsibility

The benefits of an on-premise e-commerce hardware solution include increased control, budget flexibility, owning the source code and being able to make changes at any pace you desire. Because you are hosting the e-commerce hardware yourself, you are able to exert more control over your e-commerce website, and iterate at any time. And at first glance, hosting yourself will allow for lower initial costs.

That said the drawbacks of an on premise e-commerce solution are that as your business grows, the complexities and hidden costs start to multiply. Hosting your own e-commerce hardware means you need a fully trained technical staff to maintain it, servers to keep the website up and running, licenses for all of the hardware and software associated with the website, a budget to stay compliant with federal rules and regulations, and money to stay current with threat assessments. Inevitably, the maintenance, constant availability and security needs of hosting a first-class e-commerce site become something few companies can afford to handle internally, from a resource, bandwidth and cost perspective. You will spend more time, money and effort trying to manage all the disparate puzzle pieces than you would by working with a managed solution provider.

Managed Solution Means Manageable Cost

Blueport Commerce, the only e-commerce technology and services company that localizes big-ticket retail online, embodies the benefits of a managed e-commerce solution. With a managed e-commerce hardware solution, you’re free to focus on what you do best: selling big-ticket items, instead of worrying about keeping a website running at optimal performance. And because you’re not staffing up when you use a managed solution, your overall costs are actually lower – and those savings can be used to grow the business. Additionally, managed solutions like Blueport Commerce have key partnerships and alliances with vendors that allow for enterprise-grade equipment to be purchased at a cost-savings that is then passed on to the client. Blueport’s business partnerships with established best-in-class technology partners like Cisco, Microsoft, Akamai, Dell and F5 include Tier 1/Priority Support, with dedicated local reps and faster response times when needed.

Because Blueport Commerce is an all-in-one managed e-commerce solution, our clients have all of the formerly disparate puzzle pieces already assembled for them – allowing Blueport and our clients to collaboratively focus on customizing their website for optimal return on investment. By figuring out the best way for each particular client to do business online, Blueport Commerce’s managed e-commerce solution sets each client up for success and allows for the one item you can’t really put a price on: peace of mind.

Once upon a time, it was believed that site load speed depended on the size of your website. So for e-commerce businesses, that meant the more products you featured on the home page, the more images you displayed for each product and the more advanced widgets consumers could interact with would all lead to a longer site download time and the risk of losing your customers. But technology has advanced and things have changed.

There are some new truths in the world of e-commerce:

• While a 3-second download time is the target, it’s not as important to consumers as it used to be.
• The size of a website does not directly correlate to its download speed.
• Metrics now have a major impact on how long it takes for an e-commerce site to load.

RetailWeek recently wrote an article that examined a Pingdom study comparing the performance of the top 100 e-commerce websites. It found that site size and the number of files requested do not seem to have much of an impact on speed. For example, “two of the fastest sites (REI.com and Kohls.com) are also among the most bloated – they’re more than twice the size of an average site in the study…. CVS, at just over half the average size, is simply slow compared to almost all the other retailers.”

Then what dictates site speed? “Ironically, what’s slowing down some of the big-chain sites are services that rely on third parties – such as web metrics and tracking services – that drag down site load times but are outside the control of retailers. What’s slowing down some of the big-chain sites may not be problems that retail IT shops can easily fix.”

As a business, e-commerce fuels itself with its data, and in some cases, slower load times are the price to pay for it. Here at Blueport, we put a premium on the data the e-commerce channel can provide in targeting consumers as well as informing local business decisions. Of course, much of this data collection and monitoring requires third-party partners. We work with our big-ticket retail clients to determine which services make the most sense and then help them analyze the impact each cookie might have on site speed versus the value it provides. We continuously monitor how the third-party calls affect performance and proactively work with the vendors should any issues arise.

If you are working with third parties of your own, here are some things to keep in mind. Ask the vendors what systems they use – this will give you an idea as to where the files are hosted. You can also monitor your site’s performance with a free tool like Pingdom or Firebug that will help you see which files are coming from your own site and which are coming from someplace else and how long it all takes to load.

Related posts:

• Get Your E-Commerce Website Ready for Daily Deals
• How Can You Get the Best buy If the Retailer's Website is Down?
• Keep Your E-Commerce Site on Target and Avoid Outages
• Why You Should Consider a Hosted E-Commerce Solution

Looking at last week’s post, it seems marketing and IT have switched personalities for this discussion, as marketing is usually the promoter of the bright and shiny future while IT proceeds with caution seeing dangers around every corner.

After years of working with in-house tools and best-in-class SaaS solutions, Blueport’s marketing department has a few words of caution for our kin who are working to gain control over their own technologies.

Know What the SaaS Will Really Offer Your E-Commerce Website

There is an ever-increasing number of technologies being pitched to marketing as being the key to higher conversions, with easy-to-use interfaces and “little IT involvement” required. But beware of false promises and flashy demos. For every app that really makes your life better (like social media posting apps), there are apps that will only add to your workflow, not your bottom line. Many seemingly promising apps turn out to be so limited and inflexible that in a month your ideas will have exceeded their capabilities.  Even worse are the apps that make website pages grind to a halt as they call numerous third parties to display data in a fancy new interface.

Technical Resources Required

One of the benefits of your internal development team is their ability to help identify your needs and find a real solution. While the solution may be found outside your company, marketing will still need business analysts and vendor managers to help evaluate and maintain these new services. These professionals, which typically sit in the IT part of the organization, will have insights and questions that are not evident to all in the organization. These same talents are needed to ensure these services are implemented correctly and doing what you expect them to do on the client side – many of these SaaS provides offer little handholding around the backend of things. I would caution marketing to be too willing to take over their own IT projects without first having these resources in place.

Tracking All Your Systems

Lastly, be aware that tying these systems together with other marketing efforts and internal systems to gain a complete view of your customer becomes more and more difficult with each new service. Each service will come with its own usage data, which may or may not conflict with other information you have. Make sure this new information really adds value, and not just inactionable data.

When IT and Marketing Collaborate, There’s Some Letting Go

For e-commerce companies and the like to truly advance and be competitive in a world where the latest technology consumers want to experience may come from anywhere, marketing and development leaders should sit down and set some ground rules as to who makes the calls – with input from the other – on what functionality. In other words, they should draw the lines between core (IT’s domain) and subject area (marketing) expertise. On an e-commerce site, the key shopping cart workflow would be ultimately owned by development but product reviews would be marketing’s domain. While it is necessary for each side to provide input and support on changes and technology, clear owners will help keep projects and advancements moving along.

Related posts:

• Retail CIOs Should Champion Collaboration Across Departments
• When It Comes to the Newest Technology, Set Objectives First
• The Next Big Thing in Big-Ticket E-Commerce
  
• What You Should Know About E-Commerce Hosting
  

Copyright 2010, Official Blog of Blueport Commerce

Here at Blueport, we’ve been passing around last week’s StorefrontBackTalk blog post “Should CIOs Now Surrender to Marketing?,” and it has sparked some discourse between our own marketing and technology functions. As Director of Integration, do I think CIOs should surrender to marketing? They already have!

Some don’t know it yet and some have walled themselves up in time capsules, and for both those groups, the battle has passed them by. Those CIOs who don’t know it yet lead organizations that just can’t seem to make up lost ground chasing the most profitable new technologies. Those who have walled themselves off behind pretexts of the need for conformity and centralized control have done nothing but stifle and stratify the process of business evolution critical to ongoing competitiveness. IT organizations that encourage and support peer business unit management of specialized, cost effective, outsourced applications have won the day.

When CIOs Let Go, Bigger Opportunities Result

By foregoing complete control of all that has become the technology function, the CIO also realizes benefits and reveals opportunities. No IT organization has excess resources to spend making specialized applications that compete with today’s best-in-class cloud and SaaS solutions. Spinning off responsibility for tools that cater to subject area expertise allows CIOs to focus resources against core projects where their resources thrive as opposed to working a potentially complicated solution in an unfamiliar discipline.

A Real-Life E-Commerce Example

The real opportunities result when, through a collaborative approach to enabling specialized applications, a vision develops of the next generation corporate infrastructure, an infrastructure that enables and supports snap-in specialized solutions and opens the door to the same type of quick, cost-effective solutions for all business units. Collaboration between the company’s business functions leading to a common enabling infrastructure gives the CIO the benefit of steering decisions on critical issues central to modern IT, such as compliance and security. Finally, the specialized applications researched and implemented by business units act like a research and development IT skunk works, exposing the organization to the newest technologies and solution patterns.

A real world example of this is your typical big-ticket retail e-commerce website.  Assuming the CIO chooses to develop the e-commerce solution in house, the company first needs to decide on a technology for catalog, order tunnel, fulfillment, and reporting. Then the CIO must hire a development team or train existing staff. While the staff is either hiring or training, none of them are advancing the IT organization’s other core solutions. And, as the new e-commerce team is building the website against the initial technology chosen, they are already falling behind technically. When the in-house solution finally launches, it is already underwhelming to consumers and, more often than not, the effort needs to be set aside immediately to resume work against the ever-present backlog of requests for changes to core business solutions.

All the while, the CIO could have used one of the SaaS solutions that are evolving quickly and constantly setting new user experience paradigms.

Alternately, if the CIO chooses to embrace an SaaS e-commerce solution advanced by the marketing team, the CIO’s team would have input on integration and security, as well as an easy case with management for building enhancements to core infrastructure and systems. The enhancements to the core infrastructure, quickened and focused by working against the new SaaS e-commerce solution, open the door to additional SaaS or cloud solutions as well as new technology core solutions by the in-house team. And don’t forget the finished product: SaaS solutions evolve very quickly and constantly set new user experience paradigms – customers love the new website. The next SaaS integration is very cost-effective, and the CIO is the hero. Best of all, nothing of true importance was actually surrendered to marketing.  

Next week: Marketing responds!

Related posts:

• HTML5 Moves to the Head of the Line for E-Commerce Web Development
  
• When It Comes to the Newest Technology, Set Objectives First
  
• The Next Big Thing in Big-Ticket E-Commerce
  
• What You Should Know About E-Commerce Hosting
  

Copyright 2010, Official Blog of Blueport Commerce

Excerpts from Lazard Capital Markets  Tech and Media Conference
March, 13, 2011; Boston, MA

Blueport Commerce executives recently participated in a panel presentation titled “E-Commerce 2.0: The Next Wave” at Lazard Capital Markets Annual Technology & Media Conference. Held in Boston, on March 14 and 15. This conference brought together industry executives in a fireside chat format, with presentations from more than 50 leading technology, media and Internet companies. 

Drawing on his deep expertise developing online strategies for leading big-ticket retailers, President and Chief Executive Officer Carl Prindle, discussed the next e-commerce frontier and what brands need to do to capitalize on its growth.  Below are some key excerpts from his presentation:

Colin Sebastian – Lazard Capital Markets:  Carl, please take a minute to introduce Blueport.

Blueport is the only managed e-commerce provider focused on localized, big ticket commerce.

Think of us as GSI Commerce (GSIC) for players that need to involve local stores in their online efforts and whose products don’t fit in a UPS box.

Our clients range from a $250M furniture chain in Chicago, a $1B appliance, electronics and furniture superstore chain in Canada, a $4B flooring retailer with 1,100 independent dealers, to Sears (SHLD).

We provide each with a managed e-commerce solution – a localized, cross-channel commerce platform and the managed services to make their unique businesses work online.

CS: The pace of innovation in e-commerce is accelerating.  This is also driving another step forward in the shift of commerce and advertising from offline to online channels.  Given this overall trend, in your own businesses and markets, can you specify what are the 2 or 3 most important drivers of growth today?

Well, this session is definitely aptly named.  We’re at an inflection point – the start of a second wave of e-commerce.

The first wave of ecommerce was characterized by the Amazon model – online shopping for relatively simple, understood products shipped via UPS. 

There’s very little local store involvement in this model.  Customers buy things on their lunch break, and a guy in a brown shirt delivers it. 

A massive eco-system has grown supporting this model in last 15 years – advertising, merchandising, technology and so on. And, it works great – we see 45% penetration in some categories like PCs.

But, the e-com 1.0 model is bounded in a couple of ways.  One boundary is size – this model probably only works for less than half of all retail, less if you include services. 

The other boundary is profitability – e-com 1.0 was first because it’s easier.  Because it’s easy, it’s prone to commoditization, price pressure…it’s an efficient market, with all of the margin pressure that it entails.

What we’re seeing now is a second wave that pushes past these boundaries, engages the rest of the retail economy, and can be more profitable.

What’s driving it? Consumers looking to apply the habits learned via the Amazon model to new areas.  Companies that that have for a long time been on the sidelines because they DIDN’T fit that model – are now heading to the internet to meet them. 

The energy, the growth, is in the technology connecting the two – whether it is mobile, social, coupon sites, etc. – new technologies are giving new players access to new customers.

And Blueport is providing the multi-channel solutions for these new players to do something meaningful with that traffic.

CS:  You mention mobile. How big a factor is mobile becoming, for example as a percentage of your own transactions or volume, or as a lead generation tool?

Mobile is a huge factor, but different depending on whether you are an e-com 1 or e-com 2 player.

For e-com 1 players, mobile’s increased convenience is arguably driving new volume.  It’s also increasing price transparency, which accelerates the commoditization of some of these categories.

For an e-com 2 player, it’s a huge factor in a different way:  local.  Where e-com 1 was national, e-com 2 is local – local businesses, local services, huge retail chains were their offering is fundamentally local.

Take appliances as an example – I don’t think we’ll see refrigerators transacted via phone any time soon, but mobile can drive customers to local stores, critical for retailers trying to gain a slice of precious weekend “in-store” shopping minutes.

The game changer that starts to blend the two is the tablet…increased use of big screen browsing plus local is intriguing.

CS: There is a fairly rapid increase in merchant and enterprise use of Facebook, not only as a tool to reach out and communicate with consumers, but also to drive transactions.  Similar to the mobile question, how quickly is social becoming a meaningful part of real lead generation and driving online sales?

Well, Facebook, at its most powerful, is a personal network of friends.  A company interrupting that conversation can be pretty cringe worthy.  A company trying to be your friend doesn’t really work.

At the same time, along with apps, Facebook has become the “other” Internet, and retailers have to be there. 

We’ve seen it work in three ways:

1. Brand Building: in high engagement categories, brands can interact with their customers on topics they are passionate about.
2. Deals: Facebook can replace email as a way to distribute deals.
3. As a Platform: we look at Facebook as an emerging platform/operating system that can host online stores with built in traffic.

CS:  Blueport appears to be in a sweet-spot helping merchants in challenging product categories figure out their e-commerce strategies.  Can you talk about the multi-channel environment, how the pace of that shift online may be changing?

It’s a phenomenal time to be where we are.  As we’ve talked about, there’s a seismic change from e-com 1 to e-com 2, and we’re in the middle of it.

You asked about the multi-channel environment.  The term multi-channel has been around a while, but its meaning is changing. 

In e-com 1, multichannel meant exactly/only that – more than one channel.  Retailers in categories that work well via direct ship built drop ship e-com systems, often entirely separate from their store business.

In e-com 2 today, we see true multi-channel, or cross-channel commerce (or just “commerce”).  Retailers are using the internet to drive their core business, not build a separate one.

Companies that were on the sidelines are now investing in solutions that reflect their businesses.  They look to online to drive customers to local stores, sell their local inventory and services, reflect their local pricing and local deals – to drive their core business.

A client, CarpetOne, is one of my favorite examples of this.  They are a $4B flooring retailer in 1,100 local markets.  They didn’t want to be Lumber Liquidators and drop-ship cheap boxes of hardwood.  They wanted to drive their core business – local installation of quality flooring. We enable that – their site reflects each market’s local product, pricing – pictures of owner’s dog, whatever makes that local market work.  It’s a seamless online experience that connects online to local store.

Sears (SHLD) – is a company taking another innovative approach.  They are reentering the furniture category via a unique cross-channel strategy.  They’re putting small footprint galleries in their stores, that drives traffic to a dedicated furniture website that we run for them, http://sears.furniture.com.  The site taps into local inventory, and Sears customers can get a sofa delivered tomorrow for $79.  Blueport powers the whole thing.

So, we’re seeing massive change in these categories, the evolution of true cross-channel categories, and it has accelerated dramatically in last 18 month. 

CS:  What are the key attributes that a bricks-and-mortar retailer or supplier of goods look for in an e-commerce vendor?

When looking at vendors, look at what experience they have in YOUR vertical.  Are you looking for an e-com 1 solution, or e-com 2?  Do you want a direct ship, separate enterprise, or do you want your local markets involved? 

Make sure the vendor has experience in your markets and your vision of what you want ecommerce to do for your core business. 

You can make some disastrous mistakes trying to sell appliances or furniture like you do shoes & apparel.

CS:  What would it cost a retailer or brand to build and maintain a state of the art e-commerce site from scratch, versus using a service provider such as Blueport?

Here again, it depends on what you’re selling. 

If you’re looking for an e-com 1 solution – you can put up a Yahoo! store up for next to nothing.  My 10 year old has one.

For e-com 2 – it’s more complex, requiring far more integration with your local stores’ existing systems and operations.  There’s no Yahoo! store or ready-made platform for that (but Blueport is close).

If you try to build an e-com 2 solution yourself, you have to look at three costs:  the cost to build it, the cost to run it, and the opportunity cost of screwing it up. 

We have a current client who first tried to build it themselves.  They spent $3M, and it never got off the ground.  It was two years of lost opportunity. 

With Blueport, they pay a monthly platform fee and a revenue share.  We’ve done major redesigns of their sites three times in the last two years, and added countless new features.  And they pay only their share of the overall platform and hosting costs.

We also help run the business for them from a marketing, merchandising and services perspective.  This is paid through the revenue share, so they get a turnkey, expert staff on a pay for performance basis.

This story has repeated itself a number of times – people trying it themselves, then deciding to work with us.  At the other end of our contracts, we’ve never lost a renewal, so people see the value of what we do (and would prefer not to have to do it themselves).

Part of the story is that the categories we’re in are a good fit for outsourcing.  They are challenging, don’t match the internal expertise of the players in them, and ultimately, they’re not like PC’s or software, where online is 45%-65% or more of volume. Stores are still key, so our clients get to focus on that part of their business, while we port and drive that business online.

CS:  Can you talk about the competitive nature of your business, who do you see as the most successful competitors and what are trends in pricing for these e-commerce services?

Sure, we segment the market on two dimensions. 

One dimension is e-com 1 versus e-com 2.  Is the customer in a market that will be a simple drop ship model, or do they need a cross-channel solution involving local stores?

The other dimension is platform versus managed solution.  Does the customer just want a technology solution, or are they looking for a partner to help them manage their online business?

On the e-com 1 side of the market, e-com 1 platforms are increasingly commoditized and under a lot of price pressure.  It’s a pure customer acquisition game.  Yahoo stores again.

For e-com 1 managed solutions, GSI Commerce (GSIC) is dominant with a huge lead in infrastructure and increasingly in services, where they’ve made some great strategic acquisitions.  While Amazon (AMZN) keeps looking at this space, GSI is the clear leader.

On the e-com 2 side of the market, e-com 2 platforms are mainly custom builds from players like IBM, and ATG (ORCL).  These are big dollar projects with two commas in the total cost, and they leave the customer to manage the solution - there’s no marketing, management, etc. And, they don’t have a ton of experience in these e-com 2 categories.

For e-com 2 managed solutions, where Blueport plays, we’ve yet to run up against a true competitor. 

I guess we really have two competitors: a customer doing nothing, which is less and less of a factor, and a customer trying to do it themselves, which with our case studies, is an easier and easier argument to overcome.  In a lot of cases, people are coming to us now who tried themselves, and now want out.

We expect competition to evolve, but we have a technology platform and service staff with a lot of specific functionality and experience in these markets, which makes it easy to talk to prospective clients, most of whom have been on the sidelines waiting for a provider that understands their business.

CS: That’s time – thanks to everyone for their participation.

Copyright 2010, Official Blog of Blueport Commerce

When it comes to evaluating your ecommerce hosting site options, you have a lot to consider. And perhaps the most important question to answer is whether you should host your own website or work with a hosting provider. This article from Practical eCommerce goes into the specifics of whether or not you should host your own site, and it makes good points supporting the merits of both options.

When examining ecommerce hosting sites, the point is that you always want your website to be running -- efficiently, quickly and securely. Maintaining your own server in-house can be more inexpensive and gives your business the control to make sure your site is performing as you and your customers demand it to be. On the flip side, using a hosting provider gives you access to people who specialize in servers, so if a problem arises, it will likely be able to be fixed more quickly.

More to Know About Ecommerce Hosting Sites

If you decide to go with a hosting provider, you should be aware of these options so you can decide which would make the most sense for your ecommerce business:

• Shared hosting: This is when your website gets space on a physical server, sharing it with other websites. Keep in mind that with this hosting solution, problems on another site that lives on the server can affect your site.
• Virtual dedicated hosting: This option still has your website living on a server with other sites, but it acts as if it is on its own standalone hardware. If one of the other websites on the server crashes, your site would not be affected.
• Dedicated hosting: Dedicated hosting would give your website and any of its subdomains its own server. Reasons to go with this option would be if you have a highly trafficked site or if your website offers audio and video downloads, which can require a lot of bandwidth.

As you delve deeper into considering Internet hosting providers, you will also want to know about their contingency plans should anything go wrong, as well as how their customer and technical support works.

Blueport Commerce hosts the entire technology platform for its ecommerce clients, including server hardware, maintenance, expansion, upgrades and secure, PCI compliance, leavgiving our customers valuable peace of mind. You can learn more on our Hardware & Secure Hosting solutions page.
 

If you are looking to add an ecommerce component to your business, you need to conduct an ecommerce software comparison. With so many ecommerce software providers out there, this may seem like a daunting task.

Mighty Merchant offers 13 techniques for evaluating which companies might be right for you and your unique business needs. Here is a quick look to help you get started with your ecommerce website software comparison:

1. Look at and use real websites powered by the ecommerce software you are considering.
2. Note the visual design of these sites, including whether they all use the same template or if there is customization.
3. Does adding items to cart require creating an account?
4. Check the sites’ Google PageRank.
5. Look for the sites using major search engines.
6. Evaluate which features come with the base package and which are add-ons.
7. Carefully examine what is included in the setup costs.
8. What merchandising tools are available?
9. What are the administration tools like?
10. How easy or hard is it to add additional pages and make site changes?
11. Is this solution hosted by the provider, or do you need to manage that?
12. Get references on the ecommerce website software provider.
13. Call the provider to gauge customer service and support.

At Blueport Commerce, we create ecommerce website software solutions that specifically meet the unique needs of big-ticket retailers. You can learn more about our solutions here.


 

Downtime is never good for a website, and for an online retailer it's seriously detrimental. Time is money, and your customers depend on being able to access your site whenever might be convenient for them.

And with the holidays approaching, the impact of downtime dramatically increases. One large warehouse retailer recently experienced three hours of downtime during a Labor Day sale.

So what can you do to prevent a disaster on one of your busiest days?

Talk to your hosted ecommerce software provider now. Do not wait until there is an issue to see how they respond. Your hosted ecommerce software provider should have a contingency plan should anything go wrong. Become familiar with how it would work, who you would need to contact and what the escalation process would be.

Blueport Commerce's hosted ecommerce software solution ensures uptime even during the busiest shopping seasons. We provide around-the-clock support, giving peace of mind to our retailers and their IT staff, and letting them focus on their sales, not damage control.



 

Most retailers looking to make the foray into ecommerce are quickly hit with the high capital investment required for ecommerce hardware, network equipment and hosting.

In addition to price, there are security regulations to consider.  The impact of down time on your website and stores can be disastrous.
The entire process is complex, expensive and challenging to maintain. Its especially daunting to a retailer that is just stepping into the ecommerce arena and is already juggling with a multitude of factors to get their online store up and running.

Its easy to see the benefits of ecommerce outsourcing for ecommerce hardware and hosting.  Not only does outsourcing of ecommerce hardware help drive down the operating costs for the retailer, but the right hosting solution will help ensure minimal down time.

Blueport's ecommerce platform is hosted by us.  We buy everything that is required to keep your store live and make the process as easy for you as possible - the ecommerce hardware, operating systems, network equipment, bandwidth.  Our scale drives down prices while the retailer gets worry-free (and cap-ex free) ecommerce hardware.

In addition, we provide ecommerce hardware maintenance, expansion and upgrades as well as operating system upgrades. We also provide 24x7 support, meaning no late night or weekend headaches for the retailer. Leaving you to focus on running the online store from the business side, not the technical one.

That's just one of the ways Blueport Commerce makes ecommerce easy.

Whenever I speak with a big-ticket B2C retailer about expanding their store online, a recurrent question inevitably arises: "Why not handle e-commerce development in-house?"

Many of these retailers have been considering the online marketplace for some time and are wondering how they can participate without overburdening their current staff and technology.  Their big-ticket businesses are complex and a standard platform won't accomodate them, and the addition burden of taking on B2C e-commerce development in-house is a daunting and resource-intensive task that many retailers just can't handle.  In developing their multi-channel strategy, using a hosted ecommerce software solution starts to look like the best option.

At Blueport Commerce we have one focus — helping customers exactly like these retailers.  We focus on what makes their business unique, so they can focus on what matters most — growing their new ecommerce online store.

Whether they have products that are unbranded, have a higher price point or are highly customizable, Blueport Commerce helps retailers connect with buyers worldwide. Complex delivery requirements a problem? We can help and ensure that a retailer's customers receive the white glove treatment they deserve, and more importantly, expect.

We match e-commerce development and services to address every retailer's unique business needs, not squeeze them into a commodity-focused, inflexible platform that doesn't address the intricacies of their business. 

At Blueport Commerce, we're a turnkey solution specialized for big ticket that ensures the transition to e-commerce is easy, worry-free and profitable. By combining the industry's most advanced technology platform for localized, big-ticket retail, dedicated integration services and personalized B2C e-commerece development, Blueport Commerce can port every retailer's unique business to a ready and willing online marketplace

Unlike most retailers looking to sell their products online, big-ticket retailers need an ecommerce platform that is specifically designed to address the "big-ticket" barriers that have prevented them from going online.

Unlike their mass merchandise counterparts, big-ticket retailers need a platform that will help them overcome challenges such as:

• Merchandising products that are challenging to sell online because they are expensive, unbranded, not well understood or highly customizable
• Managing shipping requirements and costs for products that have complex delivery requirements that can't be met by standard parcel services
• Integrating franchise or co-op models where brand, product offering and distribution is controlled locally by independent dealers
• Greater emphasis on cross-channel shopping

These retailers need a system that goes beyond just a standard ecommerce platform.  They need a business solution that integrates their ecommerce store into a seamless multi-channel strategy offering. 

Key ecommerce platform requirements for big-ticket retailers include:

• Localization
• Custom System Integration
• Online Merchandising
• Online Marketing
• E-Commerce
• Order Tracking
• Franchise/Co-op Extranet
• Store Intranet
• CRM & Email Marketing
• Inventory Management

The Blueport platform represents a decade of big-ticket learning in a specialize, comprehensive, hosted solution used by retailers representing billions in big-ticket sales. 

At Blueport Commerce, our ten years of experience in big-ticket, localized retail allows us to understand your business and apply technology intelligently — not just hopping on the latest technology bandwagon, but finding solutions that work for your unique managed e-commerce retailing needs.

Blueport Commerce works with you to review your site strategies and programs, as well as with other technology providers to guarantee your customers the highest quality hosted e-commerce solution available, and to guarantee you the highest e-commerce returns possible – including leads to your local stores. We keep on top of the latest technology so you don't have to. We find the best providers, test them against our unique consumer profile, and adopt or develop best in breed e-commerce technologies to meet your needs. 

Key features include:

• Website Development – Blueport Commerce works with you over the course of our agreement to add new features and functionality to your e-commerce platform.
• Partner Plug Ins – Blueport Commerce includes leading technology providers into our platform, driving down your costs through our scale and integrated platform.
• Custom Integration – Blueport Commerce integrates with your retail systems, enabling cross-channel shopping and simplifying its management.

Choosing whether to host and maintain your web site is a tough decision, and factors include cost, staffing, and security. While the immediate assumption is to handle it internally like your store systems, once you start researching the hardware, equipment and hosting its complexities become clear.  The security requirements, ability to keep it up 24x7, and the constant maintenance is not something your company can take on internally.

Blueport Commerce's hosted ecommerce solution can let you worry about the business side of your web site, not the uptime.

Key features of our hosted ecommerce solution:

• All hardware and hosting for your ecommerce site, driving down operating costs for the retailer.
• Benefit of our partners with leading providers like Akamai to speed delivery of your website content.
• Server hardware maintenance, expansion and upgrades as well as operating system upgrades.
• A highly secure, PCI compliant ecommerce platform.

Blueport Commerce's hosted ecommerce solution is cost-effective, and with guaranteed uptime and 24x7 support we can also give peace of mind to our retailers and their IT staff. Click here to learn more about how hosted ecommerce might be the right choice for you.