E-business is growing globally 23% a year on an average. According to eMarketer, the annual sum of e-businesses sales will reach up to 27 trillion dollars by 2020 – and this is only the revenue forecast for retail. It is a vigorously growing trend – and not jumping on the bandwagon would be a mistake… We ’ve modernized the functionality of our e-business connector to help make setting up an e-shop easy and user-friendly – as is customary with Erply.
Erply E-business Connector
Erply clients are already accustomed to modules, and the e-shop connector also comes with a variety of modules that can be added and used as needed.
Functionality and user-friendliness are our priorities. There is no need to worry about your business becoming unmanageable thanks to our simple yet powerful e-commerce solution. When you take e-shop orders, these would be sent directly to Erply from your e-shop through our integration, where they are easy to manage in the program and processes you’re already familiar with.
Our integration isn’t required right away! You could start by only using the product catalog app to centralize where your product information lives. Along with the store’s growth and gained experience, you could add other necessities such as payment information, customer information, inventory management, et al. In short, Erplyhelps you keep down expenses and start an e-business, without the obligation of taking the entire packet.
e-Where to build your e-shop?
Erply focuses mainly on the Shopify environment because compared to the competitors, the overhead is low, the setup is quick.
You don’t have to be a programmer to integrate Shopify and Erply, because the connector is simple and can be used intuitively. After creating a Shopify account, the Erply setup is as easy as a few clicks! As always, if you have questions Erply customer support is here to help.
Shopify business logic is as simple as Erply’s – which makes us a perfect combo. Shopify and Erply are both SaaS (Software as a Service) platforms, so implementing them is easy. Since we offer an open API, integrating the two systems is painless and without losses. Also, you don’t need to worry about foreign currency translation, because the information always reaches Erply in the user’s chosen currency.
Erply app can be conveniently found from Shopify store, so your company’s prosperity is only a click away.
Why Shopify?
- Thanks to its size and popularity, Shopify has the required experience and quality to provide good service to Erply customers
- Widest variety of additional features
- The most comprehensive e-business platform
- Super simple installation
- Management doesn’t require special skills or a separate IT-team
- Offers all the functions needed for a smooth operation
- Customizable design and various extensions are available
- Almost all product categories can be sold – goods, digital and downloadable products, services, and drop-shipping
- SaaS provides full service without additional server maintenance costs
- SLA (Service Level Agreement) means that the service provider and user fix the quality standards of the service
- More than 500,000 e-shops
- Two weeks free, monthly rates from 29 dollars
What you gain with an e-shop? An inspiring success story
In 2010, two enterprising women in New York founded a beauty product mediation company Birchbox and became a wonderful success story thanks to e-commerce. The idea of Birchbox (powered by Erply POS) is simple: Send your subscribers five personalized beauty product samples every month. For a 10-dollar subscription fee, their customers can try out haircare, makeup, skincare and perfume samples.
Katia Beauchamp’s and Hayley Barna’s business aimed to help the customers who can’t or don’t want to go to beauty stores and scour the endless shelves, testing lipsticks or face creams. The idea is that for a subscription fee, customers get product samples regularly, and choose what to buy from the e-shop based on those.
Compared to their competitors, Birchbox made a different offer to the beauty brands: Firstly, they promised to open up new markets to the beauty companies – such as women who were not fans of beauty product, yet still interested to try them out. Secondly, if the customers like the product, everybody wins.
When they started Birchbox 8 years ago, Beauchamp and Barna had raised 1.4 million dollars in seed funding from the investors, which they used to hire 6 employees. Initially, they included representatives of 20 different trademarks and had 1,200 subscribers.
Five years later, in 2015, Forbes wrote that the two women’s company had expanded into six countries, had over 800 partners, and more than a million subscribers. The company had raised over 70 million dollars in funding, and its net worth was estimated to be 500 million dollars.
As of May 2018, Birchbox – with its 2.5 million subscribers – has raised almost 90 million dollars. The USA retail giant Walgreens recently gained minor holding in the beauty box start-up and will start trying out Birchbox offers in their 11 stores next year.
What was the key to success for Birchbox?
In short, the magic word is e-commerce. Birchbox created their e-shop, where customers could immediately purchase the beauty products after trying them out. They also opened an Instagram store, in addition to the website.
Forbes wrote three years ago that one of the key factors in Birchbox’ success story is data processing. One of the company’s co-founders, Katia Beauchamp, gave an example of how they use the data. They ask for their customers’ opinion about every product: this gives them information about customer preferences, and they can link people with their favorite products. They also use this information to give feedback to their partners, for them to see which products are liked more and which are less preferred.
But the main – and the biggest – difference that gave Birchbox an edge in the tough competition of the beauty industry was that they immediately opened up their own e-shop, where they sold the products sent as samples. No other competitor on the market provided this kind of service.
Despite the fact that beauty companies initially repeatedly rejected their collaboration offers, getting free samples from companies was the easiest part in setting up the business, Beauchamp told Forbes. According to her, a much bigger challenge was setting up the e-business. That meant managing inventory, customer service, shipping logistics, and payments. However, after finding the right software, it was no longer an issue.
Birchbox’ beauty box in itself is not innovative – it became innovative along with e-commerce.
Already have an Erply account and want to get started in e-commerce today? Contact our e-business specialist to learn more about the Erply-Shopify connector: E-mail help@erply.com or call +1 917 210 1251
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