Blog Magento
Our review of Shipwire as a fulfillment partner for Magento Online Stores
Written by Jase Clamp Friday, 22 July 2011 13:26
When you are developing your new eCommerce solution, you are likely planning to pack and ship orders directly from your in-house facilities. What most people know is that in the world of "fulfillment" there is another choice. Fulfillment is the act of outsourcing that business function with includes both the storage of and the shipping of your orders/products. There are many companies that focus just on shipping and packing and there are also those who provide a full solution of eCommerce blended with fulfillment.
For larger companies of brands such as Nike and Ralph Lauren, their job is not to be experts at fulfillment, their job is to focus on brand and product development. That is why it makes sense for them to work with a fulfillment partner.
In recent months we've reviewed fullfilment resources that are available specifically for medium sized businesses that are using Magento eCommerce. We unturned one called ShipWire that we thought was good enough to blog about here.
Choosing the right solution for an online shopping cart
Written by Jase Clamp Friday, 22 July 2011 13:16
The race is on...
You have identified your challenge and presented a well-outlined list of yoru ecommerce requirements in an RFP. That is commendable. But, that does not even get you close to solving your ongoing issues and challenges. Now comes the tricky part. How will you sift through the myriad of proposals that have been delivered for you to evaluate? Who will you trust with this monumental undertaking, this endeavor? As we are sure you are aware, your decision will have potentially immense implications on your organization’s overall structure and workflow.
Open source or proprietary?
One of the key aspects of your decision making process is going to be your selection not only of a vendor but, more importantly, of an ecommerce platform. Your entire ecommerce strategy will be based on your selection of the right platform. As you make this decision you will also knowingly or unknowingly be choosing between proprietary or open source ecommerce platforms.
Speed up Magento
Written by Jase Clamp Thursday, 01 July 2010 00:00
A couple of years ago our national sales manager got us in the door of a large national online retailer. This company is best known for their catalogs but they do a lot of trade online also. We were really impressed at their operation, you obviously do not get to that level without having your ducks in a row. They had proprietary formulas for AdWords management, analysis on market trends, predictions. We knew they were talking to us because there might be an oportunity to provide programming support. Anyway, so the president of marketing asks us, "so what is the average time limit for a page load before people start to desert the page?" We knew he was asking us not to gain the knowledge but to test us. Instead of guess and make ourselves look foolish we had to say "we don't know." (doh!!) "7 seconds," he said "you have to keep it under that or people will start leaving." Needless to say, we did not gain a large contract there.
But the point is, with eCommerce, page load time can be even more critical than just with normal content.
