Jipaban.com is a social selling platform with multiple retailers and multiple shopping malls in the back end. In the front end, users can create their own ecommerce shopping malls using Jipaban. It is an interesting concept. You can create a store similar to Jipaman using iScripts Multicart Enterprise version. You can actually create something with completely branded storefronts with iScripts Multicart. If you are looking for a Jipaban clone script let us know.
December 22, 2010
December 15, 2010
How To Print Your Own Money
Everyone on the internet who is serious about a business plan is trying to find their own way to make a mint with the next best idea. This includes everyone who is retailing goods made in their basement to serious entrepreneurs who are searching for start-up money, hoping for a giant IPO or sale to Google. What they don’t know is; they can create their own currency with a platform from iScripts.
With the newest release of iScripts eSwap 2.2, we have implemented a feature to trade specifically with points-enabled transactions. These points can be custom-tailored to any hard-currency value, from $.01 to $1000 or more. The interesting part is comes in when someone wants to obtain points for a transaction. They only way users can get points is to buy them from the administrator. This about this for a second: If someone wants to swap for an item that someone put on your site, they give you the money and the person who owns the product gets the points. How much better can it get?
Since its release, we’ve seen some very interesting niches utilize iScripts eSwap with this exact business model. Some are trading “junk” in a garage-sale fashion, some are trading high-end art. We even have a single site devoted to the homestead community, trading goods dedicated to self-sufficient living. The internet continues to evolve, connecting people with all sorts of affiliations together and many times these people are willing to trade with each other for hobby goods, important needs, or even just for collecting.
Check out the fastest way for your iScripts eSwap site to get up and running, now!
November 23, 2010
Distributed eCommerce: The Way of the Future
Initially, during the birth of ecommerce, we envisioned a very simple sales process; one vendor, one storefront, and one distributor. As the shape of ecommerce is changing, the product fulfillment is also taking a different shape
In 2006, Amazon Marketplace began to usher in a new era of “distributed eCommerce” and multiple vendors on a singular storefront. It was almost as if the retail giant was taking cues from the release of iScripts MultiCart in 2004!
Now, distributed ecommerce is evolving into a business model all with multiple sellers, multiple vendors, multiple branded storefronts, and multiple fulfillment models all managed by a single platform. This model has been successfully utilized by many kinds of marketers, resellers, and brick-and-mortar operations.
In response, the iScripts team has developed a massive, forward-compatible platform that is flexible enough for even the most detailed product fulfillment business plan. We challenge you to bring us an idea that this platform cannot manage!
August 28, 2009
Shopster Business model
If you are not familiar with shopster.com, it is a wonderful business model to create a ecommerce platform. They allow drop shippers and store owners together. Drop shippers can sell items through a number of store fronts. Resellers can create online stores and select products to sell from the catalog of drop shippers. Sellers get commission for selling items. Drop shippers get a number of storefronts to sell their items and hence increased sales. Shopster gets money from BOTH.
Here is a quick video of how the business runs from Shopster.com
If you want to create a store front or you want to locate few sellers to sell items Shopster is great place. But if you want create a market place just like shopster talk to iScripts. We have crated a new version of iScripts MultiCart with multiple vendor, multiple seller support. It’s not yet publicly available. But if you have cool business idea similar to this send me an email, I will send you a live demo. No, we were not trying to create a Shopster clone script. Since Shopster does something similar it’s easier to explain that way. We were trying to create a distributed shopping cart solution with multiple vendor, multiple reseller capability. As usual we can customize this based on your input.
Contact me at abraham(at)iscripts.com
April 29, 2009
How flexible is your online business?
I see a number of online businesses getting started using hosted platforms or encrypted software solutions. Initially it might be okay when you think you know exactly what your customers want and need. As things progress you will realize the business model you had in mind may not be very accurate. Success of a great business is to adapt to a successful model early in the life of the company. The slower you are, more painful it is going to be.
There are number of articles about the flexibility of business models. Two main examples cited are Paypal and YouTube. Paypal started out as a company to beam money between palm pilots. Fortunately they figured out how to reinvent their model in time. YouTube started out as a online dating site. Imagine what if YouTube was created using a hosted application or using software which is encrypted.
Some of you creating the online businesses know exactly what your business model is and know who your customers are. Good for you, since you are among the tiny fraction of entrepreneurs. For most of us mortals, we have a good idea of what we want to do and we have an idea who our customers are what they need. Beyond that we have not done any user group research that would cost us tens of thousands of dollars. Our focus group testing is normally at beta launch or for some, after the site launch. Sometimes we know we have been right all along, sometimes we figure our models need little bit tweaking. Wouldn’t it be nice if you have freedom and flexibility to do so? When you are using a hosted solution or an encrypted software solution you will not have the freedom to do so. Before you buy any web business software, you want to know if you what it takes to customize the software and what’s involved and the cost. You would be surprised with the answers from many solution vendors.
iScripts develops the turnkey web software and distributes it with full source code that runs behind it. We don’t encrypt anything at all and we are proud of it. It’s not the smartest thing to do for a software company to share the source code with the world. We understand it and we are fine with it. We want you, our customers to have an option to change your online business anyway you want to. With the source code, you can get any PHP programmers to make the changes. iScripts can also do these changes for you. In most cases we would be the most economical and timely solution as we created it from scratch. You come to us for customization because you choose to, not because you have to.
Compared to hosted solutions and SaaS offerings, installable software might be teeny bit time consuming to install and set up. You might save few minutes in setting it up. But you are trading it for being stuck it in a rigid business model for a very long time. Once your business is established what would be the cost of migrating to a new platform if you can at all. However for short term projects hosted or encrypted solution is very well be fine.
Here is the bottom line you might need the flexibility for your business model more than you think. It’s good to know you have the option with us at iScripts.com
January 18, 2009
Dawdle.com and Etsy.com Business models and iScripts MultiCart
We get a number of enquiries from potential customers asking us to compare the inherent business model of iScripts MultiCart to that of existing marketplaces. Customers used to ask how its similar to Amazon market place model. Recently we are getting questions on how it’s comparable to Dawdle.com and Etsy.com.
Our Chicago neighbors Dawdle.com is a new online marketplace specifically for gamers. Main point of the site is to make it “moronically easy” for gamers to list, buy or sell games. The site caters to both individual sellers and professional sellers. The site does not charge any listing fees. Dawdle charges a commission (12% for public) when a transaction is completed. Dawdle charges buyers and sends the money less commission to the sellers by direct deposit. This is similar to the business model of iScripts MultiCart. Additionally, Dawdle has a Priceline like name your price method. This is not part of iScripts MultiCart, as the idea behind iScripts MultiCart is to create storefronts and not auction sites.
Etsy is a peer to peer marketplace for handmade items. Brooklyn based Etsy describes their site as a crafty cross between Amazon and Ebay and Your Grandmas basement. Here users list the items for sale. There is a $0.20 listing fee per item. Once its sold, similar to eBay buyers pay directly to seller through paypal. Seller ships the item to buyer. When the transaction is successful Etsy charges a small commission (3.5%) to the seller’s credit card on file. There are few differences from this model and iScripts Multicart model. First of all in MultiCart buyer pays to the main store not the seller. This is to provide the security of paying to a well known merchant instead of some stranger somewhere. I would be very skeptical to pay to stranger compared to an established business. Another reason for not having a peer to peer payment is that, it limits you to buy from one seller during a transaction. With iScripts MultiCart model a single transaction can include items from multiple sellers. However if you choose to follow Etsy model, it can be achieved by MultiCart with some simple customizations. Also Etsy has a listing fee and iScripts MultiCart does not.
Another business with a similar business model to that of iScripts MultiCart is Amazon marketplace. There seller lists an item at Amazon.com. Buyer buys it. Buyer pays Amazon.com. Seller recieves the order and ships the item to buyer. Seller gets a check from Amazon, after deducting the commission. Some of the advantages with Amazon Model is that I, as buyer am paying to a Amazon. Not to some schmuck in a basement somewhere. That’s huge confidence booster. For the seller Amazon does the marketing, payment processing etc.. for a small fees. This allows the seller to focus on what they do best making widgets as fast as they can and make them well. For Amazon they transfer the product manufacturing, fulfillment etc.. to the seller. They utilize their brand name and powerful online store technology to earn revenue. This is a win-win-win situation. This is the same model iScripts MultiCart follows. As I mentioned earlier in another post, we created this model before Amazon adopted it. No, I am not going to ask for royalty from Amazon.
DaWanda.com is the European version of etsy.com. This marketplace sells unique handmade items and tailor-made items. DaWanda charge a commission of 5% when an item is sold. They payment is going from buyer to seller just like eBay.com or Etsy.com. There is no listing fees for sellers. iScripts Multicart software would require only some minor changes to clone the DaWanda business model.
If you want to create an online marketplace with multiple vendors support take a look at iScripts MultiCart script. If we are close to what you are looking for, we can customize the software to cater your specific needs.
December 5, 2007
What do Amazon.com and handcrafters have in common?
We created iScripts MultiCart almost 18 months back after 6 months in development. Initially the idea started out as a website for handcraft products. There are a lot of people who makes these cute little things with clay, clothes and anything you can imagine. Most of them do this as a hobby or side business. They are good in crafts. Well… most are. They never strike me as good marketing folks. So the idea of them managing their own ecommerce store selling these crafts did not make much sense. As a one man/woman show they can either spend time on creating new beautiful crafts items or doing web marketing. It is a crime to ask them to do the marketing by themselves. if they hire they need fork over most of the money from the sales to the so called experts (including us) for any meaningful results. It did not make much sense. So we thought wouldn’t it be wonderful if we create a co-op web store for handcrafters? All they need to do is list the products and ship out to the buyers. We would in turn take care of the marketing, technical aspects, payment processing, tech support for the handcrafters. in turn we would charge them a small fee based on the cost. as its a narrow vertical, we can market things well.
After talking to bunch of handcrafters in the summer fairs we created handcraftweb.com. Initially it was working out very well. but it turned out, we are very good in creating web software. Not very good promoting a website. It meant going to all those craft fairs and selling this idea to hard crafters. Then visiting bunch of forums and magazines for crafters and advertising. It sounded too much work, in an area where we have not much interest or experience. So the site kind of slowed down.
then we got a call from somebody looking for a multi-vendor site for baseball cards. He asked if we willing to sell the software and customize it for his site. sure, why not? We did it and their business was doing pretty good. Then we realized this is a good software for small industry niches, where it does not make sense for individual players to create their own stores. So this offers entrepreneurs an opportunity for creating a one stop shop for that niche. The niche could be handcrafts or baseball cards. Finally we decided to make the software more customizable and make it an official iScripts product. so we created iScripts Multicart as a multi-vendor shopping cart.
I looked around and did not see many products competing with it directly. So I was happy we came up with something very unique and new. Explaining this to customers who calls to find out exactly what this software can do for them. Most of them had some business model in mind and wanted to find out if this can meet their need off the shelf or can we customize to make it to meet their model. I used to explain it as a multi vendor system with a single store front. Then folks where confused about who handles fulfillment , who takes care of payment etc.. So to make things clearer we used to explain it as a virtual mall software. So as a mall, you would have a number of vendors selling their own things. But it would be under the umbrella of single entity(mall). Most of the potential customers called during the time was looking for a business model where individual shops need to manage their payment processing as well as fulfillment. So I was looking for better ways to explain what exactly iScripts MultiCart do?
Last week when I was explaining the software to a potential customer for this script, she asked if it works like the new Amazon.com. Well it is.. It was an interesting realization that Jeff Bezos settled on the same business model for Amazon, as we did for handcrafters. The only business model which made any money for Amazon after all these years. If you notice lately(2006-07) Amazon is not just selling products under their brand. They push customers to other vendors, even competitors, who does the fulfillment. Only difference is Amazon used their super weight brand to attract customers and then push to other vendors for almost everything under the sun. In the case of handcrafters, we were focusing on a very small niche.