June 28, 2010
By the ZippyCart Ecommerce Software Reviews Content Team
Last week, the acquisition of Vendio by Alibaba.com was announced, ensuring that Vendio’s free online storefront solution will continue to provide merchants with innovative ways to find success selling online. This morning, we spoke with Michael Levit, VP of Marketing for Vendio, about the acquisition and what it means for current and future merchants using the Vendio Platform. Levit was more than happy to answer our questions, and very excited about this merger, which he views as a Win Win Win for Vendio’s customers, Vendio, and Alibaba. Below are the questions we asked, and summaries of his answers:
1. What sparked the acquisition of Vendio by Alibaba?
We talked to Alibaba about a partnership back in November, and if you go back to 1999, we were evaluating opportunities for small businesses and trying to figure out how to provide value for merchants. [Zippy Aside: And they found many ways to do this with Vendio Research, Vendio Reports, and the Vendio Platform]. Mid last year, we found out that merchants need help with sourcing. They want differentiated products at great prices, which for many means working overseas, but there aren’t many easy ways to do this. We found that Alibaba provided the best opportunity for our merchants.
2. How does Alibaba help merchants with sourcing?
Alibaba is a wholesale marketplace that is similar to eBay in the sense that eBay is customer to customer, but Alibaba is business to business. Now that we are connected, our merchants can use Alibaba and Alibaba Express to reach out to manufacturers or suppliers and order products at low wholesale prices. Alibaba Express provides services for small to mid-sized businesses with all products available for review online and prices ranging from sample costs to bulk prices which merchants can purchase using PayPal. Alibaba will take care of the export and import of all goods, which will be delivered to a merchant’s doorstep.
3. What is your plan for making Alibaba an available source to your merchants?
We did a small trial with a subset of our customers and saw that this was a need worth meeting. Vendio has always connected products, orders, and customers through eBay, Amazon, and their own private label storefront using Vendio Marketplaces. Now, with Alibaba, we can connect our users to even more products. We added a sourcing tab on the Vendio Platform where merchants can connect with Alibaba, order products, and easily add them to their product section of their online storefront. They can then push these products to eBay and Amazon as well. Using Alibaba as a source is a feature that comes completely free with Vendio Platform, which is Vendio’s completely free online store solution.
Beyond adding products through the Alibaba marketplace directly to a merchant’s storefront, Vendio will also soon provide a resource similar to Vendio Research. Vendio Research is a tool that licenses all of eBay’s closed item data to suggest to merchants what products to sell, the probability of a product selling, what keywords and categories to sell in, and more. Soon, the same research will be available for the Alibaba product catalog so that merchants will know what products will bring them the most success.
4. Why and how can Vendio provide such a feature rich free online storefront?
Vendio grew up around ebay and built a robust business that helped users sell on eBay by taking a small percentage of merchant sales. This allowed us to become profitable, which we have been now for 5 years. So with a profitable business, the next question we asked ourselves was “How do we grow the heck out of a stable solid business?” The answer was that we provide a solution that lets merchants control their items, orders, and customers all in one place. That is the Vendio Platform. This free online store makes it easy to host a private label storefront, but often people want to push their products to Amazon and eBay. Managing Amazon and eBay and using their tools provides a lot of barriers, but with the Vendio Platform, customers can choose to upgrade for a very low cost to extend their products to Amazon and eBay, without having to hit all of those barriers. So we offer a free solution for any merchant wanting to sell online, and if they want to extend into other channels, then we offer an extremely low cost to entry that drives success for everyone involved.
5. Are there any features on the horizon for Vendio?
We are working on coming up with more exclusive deals and sourcing opportunities for customers, similar to our work with Alibaba. With this new acquisition, we can use a service that Alibaba created called Gagadeals. Gagadeals provides a service similar to a flash deal, which is kind of a lesser extended Groupon. Through Gagadeals, our merchants can provide a limited opportunity sale for a select number of customers to get a product at a great deal. This is becoming very popular online, so we want to be sure to meet this deal [Zippy Aside: this is yet another thing that would come with the free version of Vendio].
Keep your eyes peeled for further innovations from Vendio. It is clear that Alibaba acquiring Vendio is the beginning of some large improvements to an already robust and feature rich free shopping cart solution.
Amy is the co-founder of ZippyCart. She went to school for film in Cleveland, Ohio and ended up working in the field of viral video marketing, which eventually led her to her real profession: SEO. When she's not writing for ZippyCart, she can be found out and about Seattle, WA.
Importing and exporting has become a dangerous venture with sites like dhgate being fullscammers pillaging good people’s moneyand never communicating again. When people begin researching wholesale, they’re usually the top source of information found. Awesome read though.