Store Connect, an e-commerce solution, is helping small to medium businesses consolidate all their marketing, sales and support channels into one system.
The company is a point of sale and content management system built on Salesforce. It targets companies that don’t have the budget to go after the enterprise level solutions that Salesforce offers.
According to Mikel Lindsaar, chief executive officer of StoreConnect, the platform aims to help SMBs save time and costs while also enhancing customer experience.
“Small businesses don’t have any time, and this is one of the reasons I actually created StoreConnect. They’re very time poor, but they have big ideas and big goals. They’re very tangible.”
Lindsaar said StoreConnect wants to guide SMBs to a fully integrated platform.
Here’s how it works:
StoreConnect will pair an SMB with one of its solution integration partners who best suits the SMB’s industry and market. Next, StoreConnect inventories the SMB’s existing architecture.
“Many small businesses would have Shopify and they might have WordPress for their website. They might have some CRM platform, and then they might have a mailing system and an SMS platform,” Lindsaar said. “They’ll have this mess of small little packages that they’ve defaulted on as they’ve gone.”
StoreConnect, with Salesforce, can take all of these different solutions and put them in one, unified platform.
“So it can completely replace your WordPress site, a Shopify site, your help system, your CRM, your messaging platform, and have all of that data into one system,” Lindsaar said, noting that using multiple platforms is a ”massive drain” on small businesses. The StoreConnect process helps SMBs save money, but also helps them better manage their organization and their time.
Lindsaar pointed to one example of a client who looked at StoreConnect because their old system, which involved printing out some orders, was error-prone. On one occasion, a piece of paper with order details on it was misplaced, so no invoice was created.
“That order got printed out, passed along the desks, and that piece of paper literally fell between the cracks of two desks with a $20,000 order. And the client calls them up three months later saying, ‘thanks for this stuff, but are you gonna invoice us?’”
StoreConnect can also help consolidate efforts, making it easier for customers.
For example, one of StoreConnect’s clients runs an import business for about 20 brands across four countries. If one of those brands releases a new product, the business has to go in and input it for each country, with a new currency and description, and potentially file it under different categories. StoreConnect simplifies this process by allowing the business to enter that data once.
“It automatically publishes that across all of those stores internationally in multiple prices and multiple currencies,” Lindsaar said. “So you’re not having to duplicate and redo everything multiple times. You can just do it once and you’re done.”
He noted that the solution also betters the customer experience by allowing SMBs to address customers needs at a faster rate.
“Having all of that data in one spot makes a big difference for the customers.”
