point
The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

November - 2007 - issue > Company of the Month

Merchandizing online, the Vendio way

Jaya Smitha Menon
Friday, November 2, 2007
Jaya Smitha Menon
Two college mates, who have decided to share an apartment, are on a cyber shopping spree. They are busy collecting the necessary items to set up their home and are looking for best online shopping deals. Instead of logging onto every single shopping portal, they log on to Dealio.com powered by Vendio, where they get a comparative price list of products from all major online shopping sites. It allows individuals to see lists of prices for specific products by sourcing prices from etailers from whom shoppers can buy. They decide to go for a refrigerator through shopzilla, laptop through eBay, and a wooden file cabinet from Staples online store. Happy with the result of their search, they make the payment for the products online with their credit card and the products reach their doorstep in a week’s time.

At the other end, when these young pals make the payment through the payment gateway, the seller gets instant alert at his inventory system. It automatically takes note of the order and starts executing the order. Automated customer communication keeps buyers informed effortlessly at each stage till the product reaches their door steps. Once the order is executed, it also ensures the restocking of the product and issues automatic feed back form to buyers to understand the customer experience.

With the internet boom in the late 90’s, online shopping has really caught up with buyers, and an array of shopping portals has mushroomed. Sellers began vying with each other to attract customers and increase their profits. Today the sector has broadened so vastly that the portals now benchmark not only on the best deals but also on order execution, the time frame to that, and on overall customer experience. Realizing this potential market, Vendio made its entry into the ecommerce solutions market in 1998 with products and services to help ecommerce merchants to reach customers, manage transactions, and profitably grow business. Initially, the company focused on sellers at eBay helping them to manage inventory, merchandise and sell on eBay effectively. Over time, they have successfully integrated with other emerging and growing marketplaces like Amazon, Yahoo and comparative shopping engines such as Bizrate, Shopping.Com, Shopzilla, Froogle and their own storefronts to provide a truly Multi-Channel Sales Automation software. Today, Vendio has grown from one of eBay’s first developer partners into an award-winning innovator across the Web’s leading marketplaces.

This emerging ecommerce space is exciting to the team of Engineers at Vendio’s India center and they are focused on making the space a more exciting one to the buyers and sellers. They have built products like the Sales Manager, Stores, Research, and Customer manager, apart from others. “The online shopping market continues to grow significantly with more and more new viable channels emerging and hence there is a huge opportunity for a multi-channel Sales automation & optimization for Merchants” says Ravi Garikipati, Senior Vice President and Managing Director of Vendio India Operations.

The sales management tools of Vendio help customers in many ways. Besides automatically updating the products and ensuring that items are available to buyers at all times, it also gives restock alert reminders when inventory levels reach a preset trigger point. Through Vendio’s Sales Manager account the seller can access and manage sales for two or more separate eBay IDs. The Stores application of Vendio helps sellers use a single inventory system to manage both online auctions and stores. Stores also help sellers reach more buyers by distributing items to Google Product Search, Shopzilla, and Shopping.com. The Customer Manager software integrated with eBay, automatically imports a record of every customer, sale, and email for all items closed using Sales Manager. This helps the merchant to find the details of a past sale or answer a customer inquiry quickly. Thanks to the sales management tools powered by Vendio, more than 70,000 online sellers across the world have been able to enhance customer experience and maximize their profits.


Share on Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
Share on facebook