please help, new to e-commerce

[dbeck29]

So i have done a search and really didn't find all the information which I was looking for. I have a b & m wholesale business which has been around for 17 years and my partner and I have decided that its time to move to the web. Our industry which we are in is a rather archaic industry which has really bucked the trend of the net but in my eyes that leaves us a huge opportunity to lead the pack. We have begun moving forward with the due diligence on this and I am now at a point where i am looking for inventory, order processing, customer manangement, accounting software which I can use as the back end. I have been looking around and i came across both infopia and channel advisor which have some of the features i am looking for but also focus more on multi channel sales such as ebay, amazon, good price, ect. Can anybody recommend me some good software which is user friendly and web based, i believe its called API technology? Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

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[LightHouse]

A lot of that stuff should be handled in the E-com software itself. Anything outside of what that would do would be industry specific plus whatever accounting software you use.

API is an Application Programming Interface. This is like a doorway to a database backend. you can potentially hook up your order management to your accounting software via API but the softwares themselves are not API's.

 

[TC2]

If you are already familiar with wholesale business. I would suggest you to offer drop shipping service to other e-commerce stores. So you don't have to deal with the first hand customer service or return.

If you have the budget, you can try Amazon store. Which will bring you a lot of potential customers. I believe Amazon's fulfillment services can handle wholesale too. In other words, you can have your vendors to stock up your products from Amazon.

If you decide to do drop shipping, you will need different software to handle that. The fastest way to find out what software to use is to ask other wholesale companies. Many of them are customized for their own need. With minor changes, you can have it up and running in a short time.

You will also need a good system that allows your vendors to get the most up-to-date inventory availability. So they can easily import or download into their system.

 

[dbeck29]

If you are already familiar with wholesale business. I would suggest you to offer drop shipping service to other e-commerce stores. So you don't have to deal with the first hand customer service or return.

If you have the budget, you can try Amazon store. Which will bring you a lot of potential customers. I believe Amazon's fulfillment services can handle wholesale too. In other words, you can have your vendors to stock up your products from Amazon.

If you decide to do drop shipping, you will need different software to handle that. The fastest way to find out what software to use is to ask other wholesale companies. Many of them are customized for their own need. With minor changes, you can have it up and running in a short time.

You will also need a good system that allows your vendors to get the most up-to-date inventory availability. So they can easily import or download into their system.

i understand your thoughts but thats not really what i am going for. I am a distributor for many different manufactures of similar products all which dont really have a great presence on the web. There are people on the web doing what i will be but more in a "half a**ed"attempt. As of right now i dont sell to the puclic, rather OEMs but what I am going to do is bring my wholesale pricing to the retail market.

I am not worried about customer returns as that is something i deal with now as well.

I have software right now which I use but not web based so i cant use it for my online shopping cart.

I just found VCOMMERCE.COM, is anybody familiar with them?

 

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