CoreCommerce

BarCamps have sprouted up all over the country over the past few years and not just in technology circles. Real estate, public transit, health care and even politics have their own version of BarCamp. BarCamps have been held in over 350 cities around the world, in North America, South America, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Australasia and Asia.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with BarCamp, it’s a user-generated conference (an un-conference)…think about that for a minute. The attendees generate and steer the direction and content of the camp–some people camp out overnight–thus the camp part of the name. Instead of the traditional industry-type conference that uses high profile key-note speakers, it’s simply the average Joe sharing his experiences and expertise with other attendees–learning from one another. Think “traditional conference” on a miniture scale, but hosted by anyone, anywhere. Sponsors typically allow the event to be free or really cheap to attend and average a few hundred folks. As an attendee, you get to network with like-minded folks in your area, learn some new stuff and most importantly–HAVE FUN.

This weekend, we are sponsoring BarCamp Memphis. Some of the CoreCommerce staff will be at BarCamp Memphis this weekend. If you live in the Memphis TN area, stop by and say hello or follow BarCamp Memphis on Twitter. If not, consider attending a BarCamp in your area in the near future and experience this event.

So, the question is–will BarCamps replace the traditional conferences that span huge Expo Halls with thousands of people (with high profile keynote speakers and such) and be replaced by alot more smaller and intimate groups of several hundred of BarCampers?

Your thoughts?

Alison Moore started selling custom embroidered baby blankets and gift 12 years ago.  Their first online ecommerce store was with Interland and web.com.  “Web.com cost me so much money in downtime and they really could have cared less,” Moore said.  “I was beyond frustrated.”

She went looking for the right ecommerce solution for her online store babyobaby.com and found CoreCommerce.   Moore says what makes CoreCommerce stand out the most is their customer service. “Although I love the shopping cart and all the fabulous features, their superior customer support service and tech support is what I appreciate most!  They are always there and always provide a timely answer.”

For Moore she expresses how important it is to find an ecommerce solution provider who is there to help you be successful.

“They make it easy to do business on the web.  I feel like CoreCommerce is my partner.  I recommend them at every opportunity.  I just can’t express how refreshing it has been to deal with people who truly want to see me be successful.”

Bulk CCTV Store is managed by Jack Mason which markets to the CCTV / surveillance industry. They are also focused on telecom, networking, low voltage and computer products.

Bulk CCTV Store, has been in business since 2003. Nathan tried many ecommerce solutions before finding CoreCommerce.

“We tried several other E-Commerce solutions that were recommended by Google Checkout and we found that most of them had one thing in common. They were all very hard to setup if you wanted to use your own web server. The startup costs were very high. The back end features were not very user friendly. Lastly a lot of the companies we looked at didn’t include upgrades.”

Nathan continued his search until he found CoreCommerce.

“Our company did a lot of research on the different e-commerce companies before choosing CoreCommerce. After taking a look at many of the different companies we found the CoreCommerce was the easiest to use, offered the quickest setup time, had a lot of store layouts to choose from and we liked the administrator user interface. The product was very easy for my staff to learn and what we like best was you don’t need a full time computer guy on staff to use the program. Everyone from my sales staff, marketing team and my accounting department became quickly acclimated to using all the feature of the software.”

Nathans first experiences came with the CoreCommerce support team.

“CoreCommerce listens to the customer. We have sent in a few feature requests and CoreCommerce has always been very accommodating on trying to get those features added to the software. The biggest benefit to using CoreCommerce is the support they offer. Every time we have had a question or problem our matter has been resolved in about 30 minutes or less. Great support like this is very hard to find and we have been nothing but impressed with the support we receive from CoreCommerce.

WIth his store up and running using CoreCommerce, Nathan and his team has expanded their web presence and customer base.

“Our main avenue of sales has been the direct channels. CoreCommerce helped us to quickly gain a web presence and expand in a whole new market of customers. We have found that we have gained a lot of new, larger customers because of the website. This has been a great way for us to find dealers that we never would have been talking to if we didn’t have our products available for online ordering.”

Nathan is excited about the future plans of Bulk CCTV Store.

“Our current plan for our e-commerce store is to add more products and expand our marketing to the other major online marketing groups (Yahoo, MSN, etc). We are also looking in the next few months to have a custom store layout done. Now that we have proven the store works we are looking to spend more money to help improve the look and feel of our page.”

Nathan had some final thoughts for companies looking to sell online.

“I would say to anyone looking to begin to sell online that CoreCommerce is by far the best choice based on all the companies we looked at and tried. When you combine the ease of use, quick setup and outstanding technical support it was a very easy decision for us to make when we decided to use CoreCommerce.