PalatnikFactor.com

The Future of eCommerce with David Farache of Fortune3

August 4, 2009 by Pablo Palatnik

In this series of the Palatnik Factor interviews I’ll be interviewing David Farache, Vice President of Fortune3, an e-commerce shopping cart software company located in Doral, Florida. Fortune3 has been around for over 10 years providing small to large business with e-commerce platforms to sell products online. I sat down with David and asked him some questions we’re all wondering about what’s to come in the next year in the e-commerce space.

Disclaimer: THIS IS NOT A SPONSORED INTERVIEW AT NO COMPENSATION TO PALATNIKFACTOR.COM.

Q: What are some important factors clients need to have in their e-commerce platform

A: There are many important factors for any e-commerce platform, but I will describe the top six factors that FORTUNE3 considers to be the most important, and therefore the factors which we have prioritized for our shopping cart software and service:

The first and foremost, would be site perfect functionality. A successful online store needs to function with perfection, never showing customers errors or problems while browsing or shopping. This is something that is basic, but far too many e-commerce software providers overlook. Fortune3 has given special emphasis to having all of our customers’ sites perfectly functioning and arranged.

A second and equally important factor is feature set. Having a system that has a complete feature set is essential, it enables a site administrator to alter the site, the shopping cart and checkout functionality to the point where it is fully flexible, adapting to the needs of each company. Having a good feature set can also make the order fulfillment process and offering support to your customers a much easier task, saving you money and time.

The third most important factor is having a software that optimizes online stores for marketing and search engines. An e-commerce website cannot sell unless it is exposed to potential customers on the web, therefore an essential part of establishing a successful online store is the ability of the e-commerce platform / software to get the site listed on search engines, with a high ranking. Fortune3′s software has accomplished maximum search engine exposure for our customers by making sure that every single page on our customers’ sites is properly optimized for search engines (meta tags, creating .html static pages, text optimization, etc).

The fourth important factor is having a superb customer support team for the e-commerce platform. Getting quality, fast, and efficient customer support for your online store is as essential as anything else. A complete e-commerce system is a huge software, containing millions of lines of code and thousands of features and functionalities, therefore, it is important to have an expert support staff ready to answer your questions, guiding you to fixing issues, and helping you with anything that you cannot figure out on your own. A successful online store cannot be sustained without a proper customer support staff. This is why in our company, we pride ourselves of offering 24/7 customer support, answering 95% of our support inquiries within 20-60 minutes.

The fifth most important factor is security. Security is an essential part of achieving online sales. At the first sign of any security vulnerability, most of your customers will abandon your checkout, mostly because they are afraid that their personal and payment information will not be safe. The checkout and secure pages must, and I emphasize this, must have a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate installed, and clearly visible for your customers. A lock icon should be shown on the browser on all secure checkout and login pages, where customers enter sensitive information. Fortune3 provides all of our shopping cart software users with a free Geotrust SSL. It also always helps to get additional security products that assures your customers that their information is safe. For example, we offer customers the ability to purchase more advanced SSL certificates, which can include a clickable Site Seal by the trusting agency (Geotrust) being shown on each page of the site, assuring customers that their information is secured through a Geotrust SSL, and the Browser “Green Bar” SSL, which turns the URL bar of your site to a green color, and displays your company name to customers on your secure pages. Our ecommerce hosting platform and databases are also 100% PCI compliant, offering our users the ability to sign up for a PCI-Scanning account through a company like ControlScan or McaFee, so they can display a logo or Seal on their site certifying that your site is PCI Compliant to their potential customers. All of these additional security features and seals can greatly increase an online store’s sales, by up to 20%.

The sixth and final factor is design, layout, and branding. Having a beautiful and professional site layout and logo can really impress visitors and build visitor trust in your company. Many potential customers could be turned away by a non-professionally designed website. Impressing potential customers on their first click with a high-end professional and clean design, will surely increase any company’s sales. Branding is also very important, and so having a good logo can make all the difference in the world. This is why we have made the Fortune3 ecommerce software completely flexible for design and layout, and we also offer custom design services, which involves our expert graphic and web design dept. building a professional custom design, logo, and page layout for our users.

Q: What current trends do you see rising right now that will have an impact in the next year for online retailers?

A: Social features and video

Q: With the current economy in a downturn, what are some things online retailers can do during times like these to stay on top of their game?

A: A good strategy during economic downturns is always to balance your budget, finding the best solution your dollars can give you, for the lowest dollar amount possible. This is a big reason why our monthly plans are very inexpensive, to give our customers and users a chance to have a successful online business, without breaking their wallets.

Q: What would you say is the major upside between having software based e-commerce store than web-based?

A: There are many advantages to having a partially PC based e-commerce system like ours, as opposed to a fully web based (browser based) system. There are also some disadvantages, but the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages, and that is why we chose to have our software partially PC-based.

In more detail, the 3 most important advantages of having a PC-based ecommerce system are the following:

a. Your PC is and always will be much faster than any web site, or anything being accessed by a web browser. Therefore, building and making changes to your e- commerce site will always be much faster with a PC-Based software like ours.

b. Your PC is equipped with great tools, that web applications are not equipped with, making the software more versatile and easier to manage when it is PC-Based. A great example is our software’s unique Product Tree structure, which allows you to manage your products in a Tree-like structure, making it extremely fast, efficient, and easy to build and make changes to your product information and structure. Our PC-based “Tree” structure also enables you to quickly and easily re-organize your categories, products and options, or any part of your product structure, with tools like copy / paste and drag / drop. The use of most of these tools would not possible with web-based software, and isn’t. These are tools that make our software and system truly unique.

c. Data and Backups stored on both local PC, and servers. By using a PC-based software like Fortune3, you will have backups of your site’s data on both your computer, and on our servers. This assures you that no data will ever be lost with our platform. This also enables you to recover older backup files and data, in case you make a mistake and need to retrieve an older version of your site, this is always available with a system like ours.

Q: Has the current economic situation affected the amount of businesses opening up web-based stores or do you see an increase in business?

A: We have seen a slowness in growth in new businesses opening up online stores, but it is starting to turn around now. E-Commerce is a young and growing industry, and it is still continuing to grow even with the current economic down… a slowdown in growth is all we noticed, but that seems to be abating now as well.

Q: What is Fortune3 doing to stay innovative in the world of e-commerce?

A: Fortune3 is always releasing new features, new versions, and integrating new technologies that become available into our ecommerce software platform. We release a new major version once a year, and deploy about 200 new features each year. These new features are always built using the latest programming technologies, to make them as efficient and user-friendly as possible.

Q: In the coming year, will fees for e-commerce businesses, such as credit card fees, online store fees, increase? Decrease?

A: Fees for online stores and credit card processing are usually pretty stable, since they are mostly based on transaction fees (percentages). I do not see this changing in the next year, but this also depends on overall economic inflation / deflation.

Q: If you had to give one piece of advice for someone is about to jump into an e-commerce business, what would it be?

A: Find the best software, with the best support staff, and best hosting platform (Fortune3- sorry for the shameless plug but I believe and endorse our product), work hard to have a beautiful and professional site, and to get your site exposure, and you will be successful.

Thank you David. If you’re looking to try out a software based e-commerce platform, you can download the Fortune3 free shopping cart software trial at www.Fortune3.com