How it is used
Small enough today, big enough the day after tomorrow
What makes a system heavy for a small shop is rarely that it can do too much — it is that it shows too much. Here you start with one market and one price list, and the rest arrives when you need it.
Three situations
Three who will recognise themselves
No company names and no figures. These are shapes rather than customer stories — we have none to tell yet, and an invented one would be worse than none.
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The shop with one market
- The situation
- One currency, one price list, and no plans for anything else. Anything that looks like an enterprise feature is something to click past every day.
- Here
- One market and one price list is a complete shop. The price is a single field on the product, and nothing has to be filled in before you need it.
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The retailer across borders
- The situation
- One price list per country in spreadsheets, another channel that wants its own list, and a product published in Sweden with no price that stayed up until somebody rang.
- Here
- Every customer type gets one price list in each market, and the channels sell from them. An item with no price in Sweden is not sold there, and the shop says «Not for sale».
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The direct selling organisation
- The situation
- A back office holding the organisation and the commissions, which nobody wants to replace, and where everything new has to live beside it rather than replace it.
- Here
- The back office stays, and the platform works directly against it. The organisation is read from there and changes are sent back, every order shows who it is credited to, and CV and PV sit next to the price.
Growing
And none of these steps is a new platform
The first shop and the third are the same system with more set up. None of the steps is a switch.
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One market becomes two
A new market is added in the admin, and its prices are a new price list. The same customer type cannot be in two price lists in the same market, so there is nothing to clean up afterwards.
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Another customer type
Resellers who need different prices are a customer type, not a discount code and not a separate shop. The same products, a different price list.
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Another channel
A business portal for resellers is a new sales channel, with its own customer types and sign-in. The products are the same — you tick where they are published.
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And the organisation
The day somebody enrols somebody else, direct selling is added. Until then you see none of it — no screens, no fields, no empty columns.
Side by side
Side by side
The same platform in all three. The difference is how much is set up.
| What | The shop | The retailer | The organisation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Markets | One | Two or more | Several |
| Customer types | One | Often several | Always several |
| Sales channels | The online shop | Online shop and business portal | Several, per market |
| Direct selling and crediting | Not in use | Not in use | In use |
| Where the customers live | Here | Here | Usually in a back office |
«Not in use» means the part is not included: no screens, no fields and no empty columns in the admin.
Comparing
Three questions to ask everyone you talk to
The questions below are meant to be asked of anyone you are considering, including us. They are chosen because the answers are hard to dress up.
1. What happens to a product with no price in a channel? The answers in the wild are: it shows as 0, it is silently hidden, or the page says it is not sold there. The first two are the same mistake — a missing value that looks like a decision.
2. What does the system do when the source cannot write? Does it draw the button anyway? A button that answers «Saved» and did nothing is the most expensive answer, because a customer finds it rather than a developer.
3. How many places hold the same list? If «which channels exist» is written in three places that have to be kept in step by hand, that is three places it can fall out of step — and only one of them is being looked at.
When it does not fit
And when you should not choose this
If you sell one thing, in one country, to one kind of customer, and will still be doing that in three years — an off-the-shelf product is both cheaper and faster, and nothing here will pay for itself.
What is paid for here is that the axes exist: several markets, several customer types, several channels, and data that lives somewhere nobody is going to move it from. If you need none of those, you are paying for flexibility you will not use.
It is worth saying, because the opposite — finding out a system cannot do what you assumed — costs more than hearing it now.
Questions
Practical
Can we start with one part?
Yes, and it is usually the best way. You can start with the shop and leave customers and orders where they are today, and take the rest when it suits you.
What do you not have yet?
You will hear that in a demo, by name. That is not modesty — a list of what a system does not do is the only thing that makes the rest of the list worth believing, and it moves too fast to be printed on a page.
Which of the three looks most like you?
Say so when you get in touch, and the hour is about that rather than a tour.