Month: May 2008

I liked the look of Zlio (and the idea behind it too), so I called Ilan Abehassera, an executive at the company, for a chat. Here’s the transcript:

TheCartBlog: Tell me about Zlio.

Zlio: We started with the idea of making creating a store as easy as creating a blog – and what we came up with was Zlio. You have access to over 145 merchants offering millions of products; we bring them to you.

TheCartBlog: And you get paid as an affiliate marketer?

Zlio: Exactly. Different merchants offer different percentages, but yes, it’s a commission model.

TheCartBlog: So I guess the closest thing might be AStores from Amazon, right?

Zlio: Yes, but remember AStores only offers Amazon’s inventory. And the customization features of AStores are quite limited. Astores is really targeted at bloggers. Zlio is only about 5% bloggers; the rest are people who have stand-alone stores.

TheCartBlog: How many Zlio stores are there?

Zlio: About 270,000.

TheCartBlog: Wow – that’s great! And how are they doing?

Zlio: Remember Zlio is not for the professional seller; it just allows people to monetize some of the time they spend online. Twenty percent of Zlio sellers are very active and are making up to $1,000 a month in commissions with no cost of inventory.

TheCartBlog: So this would be good for stay-at-home moms, students … other people who just wanted a little something on the side.

Zlio: Exactly. Now of course, you have to spend some time working on your store and promoting your store …

TheCartBlog: LOL! Just like everything else in life!

Zlio: … well, yes, but we just want to be sure people understand that it’s not a case of “build it and they will come.” You have to put some effort into it.

TheCartBlog: Fair enough. OK, let’s talk more about the competition.

Zlio: We see ourselves as a “social commerce” venue, which we think is different from “social shopping.” We are just looking for sellers. EBay and Etsy are looking for buyers and sellers. Our sellers have to find their own buyers. Or look at Shopify. Shopify is fantastic for merchants who have a physical presence and inventory and are looking for a way to add the Internet as a channel. But our sellers aren’t like this – they don’t have a bricks and mortar operation; they don’t have inventory. So that’s where we come in; “we bring the items to you.”

TheCartBlog: OK, what about Squidoo?

Zlio: Squidoo is very content focused; a particular lens may or may not be about affiliate selling. We want our stores to look like stores and be all about ecommerce.

TheCartBlog: Can you add content to your Zlio store?

Zlio: Sure – but again, we want all our stores to look like stores. The products are the focus, not the content.

TheCartBlog: Tell me about the support model for sellers.

Zlio: We have a blog, a community forum and a newsletter.

TheCartBlog: And how can sellers track their income?

Zlio: We have an admin panel for each shop that tells the owner how the shop is doing; reports, sales breakdowns and so forth.

TheCartBlog: How do sellers become successful with Zlio?

Zlio: Promotion is the key. Obviously SEO is important, but beyond that, you need to promote your store – put it in your signature, talk about it on forums and blog posts – drive traffic to your store.

TheCartBlog: Pretty typical stuff for an Internet business. Well, thanks for taking the time to talk with us, and we look forward to seeing more great stuff!

Zlio: We have a number of improvements in the pipeline that you’ll be seeing soon!

Thanks for the talk, guys!

Last week, Mountain Media issued a press release to announce their PCI compliance. I got intrigued and called the company for an interview. Here’s the transcript:

TheCartBlog: Tell me about the product.

Mountain: Well, it’s a hosted offering built on the LAMP stack. We’re at version 7.0 of the product now. We’ve had a very strong focus on SEO and flexibility from the start, so I’d say those are the two biggest strengths we bring to the game.

TheCartBlog: Great! So as a hosted product, you can’t really change much except for templating, right?

Mountain: It’s funny – that’s a common objection from people who are coming from open source, but in truth, the fact that they’re constantly fiddling with their cart is a bad thing – it leads to problems, instability and so forth. But to answer your question directly, first of all, we don’t call it templating, because each cart’s look and feel is unique. Our implementation process starts with a design interview, and we develop the interface based on the outcome of that interview …

TheCartBlog: I’ve looked at some of your implementations and they’re really quite beautiful. So you do the skinning?

Mountain: Yes. We have a number of designers on staff. Now once the implementation is complete, the customer has the flexibility to change wording, text, even the css, but we find in general that they’d rather not do that sort of thing.

TheCartBlog: Build your business, not your shopping cart, right?

Mountain: Exactly.

TheCartBlog: I tell storeowners that every day. So it sounds like professional services is a big part of your business – right?

Mountain: It is, but if people are working with a designer they like, we’re happy to work with them.

TheCartBlog: Tell me about the company.

Mountain: We’re in Saratoga Springs, New York, about 3 hours north of New York City. We have 15 people on staff.

TheCartBlog: And the typical client?

Mountain: A lot of our customers are coming from other hosted solutions like Yahoo Stores or Volusion. A typical store might have half a million in sales. We get a few well-funded new launches, but a lot more existing businesses looking to grow.

TheCartBlog: And what do implementations generally run?

Mountain: We’re doing a lot around $5K these days. It’s a 30-60 day turnaround, and most storeowners do inventory input themselves.

TheCartBlog: Can you run your whole store from MountainMedia?

Mountain: The back end is very strong. If you have a multichannel operation, you might want to link into some external order management tools, and we can do this integration for you, but many of our customers just use our product.

TheCartBlog: So what’s next?

Mountain: We’re always looking at ways to make our implementation process smoother, faster, more affordable. And we’re looking at more advanced sales tools, like buy one thing, get another thing free.

(Ed: Remember to pitch Better Together and the Better Together Admin Panel to them!)

TheCartBlog: That’s great! Well congratulations on your PCI certification, and we look forward to seeing great things in the future from you!

Thanks for the talk, guys!