LaGarde goes bankrupt
Another one bites the dust. LaGarde has filed for Chapter 11 bankrupcy protection — months after launching Phoenix, its new software-as-a-service platform. This is another example of the market consolidation that is underway among ecommerce technology vendors. Read more
Catalysts, Ecommerce Platforms for SMB’s
Everyone starts somewhere. Many small and mid-size retailers need a new, affordable ecommerce platform. While they may have a recognized brand, not everyone has the immediate potential to drive $5 million in online sales. So where do they turn?
Catalysts are designed specifically for the small- and mid-market. Unlike enterprise solutions that demand a million dollar software investment or tens of thousands every month in hosting fees, catalysts deliver a far more limited feature set with ultra-easy deployment options at an ultra-low cost. Some open source options are even free!
Here are more than 50 SMB ecommerce platforms that won’t break the bank:
Not all these vendors are alike. Some, such as Onestop and Virid, offer a full range of professional services. Others, such as ChannelAdvisor and NetSuite, offer ecommerce as a bolt-on to their core services. Amazon, Yahoo and ProStores are extensions of massive shopping portals. And packages solutions like osCommerce and Magento are virtually free software you download, install, and custom-configure on your own server.
Multiple ProStores outages affect merchants
According to ProStores’ message board, an unplanned, system-wide outage took place on Tuesday, May 28. The cause was said to be a third party vendor of data services. The issue lasted for hours and affected all merchants and tech support lines.
At 3:00PM Tuesday, ProStores reported, “We’ve identified and resolved the problem and are taking steps to ensure that it doesn’t happen in the future.” But within 30 minutes, a second outage occured; and was “related to the first.” The second outage took nearly five hours to resolve.
As a courtesy, successful transaction fees will be refunded to ProStores merchants for the month of May. This exposes one shortcoming of multi-tenant software. A service glitch at the data or application layer can affect everyone all at once.
Netsuite rocks on IPO
Who’da thunk. Netsuite debuted on the NYSE yesterday with its IPO under the symbol “N.” The maker of small business software, including its SMB ecommerce platform, jumped in value more than 36% in its first day. It closed at $35.50. The company has never turned a profit and is majority owned by Larry Ellison of Oracle.
Shares were up another few dollars this morning on pre-market trading.
Superpages.com now offers ProStores ecommerce tools
In an effort to further enhance its online ad services, Superpages.com, a division of Idearc Media Corp., will now resell the ProStores ecommerce platform as part of “web hosting solutions.” The package, called Professional eCommerce, is a custom configuration for small business clients of Superpages.com. Unlike direct customers of ProStores (an eBay company), clients of Superpages.com will not incur transaction fees on top of the $99.95 monthly subscription.
