“We definitely knew there were going to be risks because we have mortgages to pay, but we also knew that if we kept on doing the work for somebody else instead of ourselves, we were going to miss our opportunity.”

Interview by Mike Sullivan

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Mike:
Hello, I’m Mike Sullivan. Thanks for joining us today on MO.com, where we feature small business owners and entrepreneurs and then bring you hints, tips, insights, and perspectives on what it takes to be successful.

Joining us today is Amy Balliett and Nick Grant of ZippyCart. ZippyCart is an online tool that allows you to compare different e-commerce solutions and find the one that’s best for you. Amy and Nick, thanks for joining us today. I appreciate it. Can you start out by giving us a little bit about your background?

Amy:
I’ve been doing SEO for quite a number of years. I’ve done in-house SEO work and I’ve also done just my own consulting. Basically in that time, I’ve learned web design and development as well, and so I’ve basically been able to kind of combine those efforts to build sites and get them a lot of love in Google. Then Nick does the other side of things.

Nick:
Yeah. I’ve been in Seattle since 2003. Sorry, we’re getting construction back here as well. Since 2003, primarily working in different business development capacities in pretty much an entrepreneurial type role where I’m essentially tasked to find new ways to help sites monetize, either through leads, advertising, whatever the case may be. So that’s my background in a nutshell I guess.

Mike:
What exactly is ZippyCart, and how can small business owners benefit from this site?

Amy:
So we started ZippyCart in 2009. ZippyCart prior to us taking it over was just another e-commerce shopping cart solution. It was . . . .

Nick:
PayPal driven.

Amy:
Yeah, a PayPal driven script that you could add to your site. Nick had noticed that there are a lot of sites out there that have just entered the marketplace when it comes to SaaS solutions for e-commerce software.

But there weren’t really any sites that were reviewing them in a way that wasn’t biased. So we decided, well, let’s create a site. Let’s take ZippyCart and take the brand its built and become the unbiased solution, the unbiased resource out there that reviews all of the other e-commerce solutions and helps people find something that’s right for them, not necessarily just promoting two or three specific solutions, but saying if you’re this type of merchant, this one is going to be good for you, but maybe this great solution won’t work for you at all.

So there are other sites out there that do that, but they don’t update their sites too often, or they take payment to rank the solution and basically to give a really nice review on the solution instead of being honest.

Mike:
There are a lot of options out there as far as e-commerce solutions. What would you recommend or consult a small business owner towards when they’re looking for an e-commerce solution?

Amy:
In my opinion, most small business owners want to do as much work marketing their store and really just being proud of their store as possible, instead of spending the time setting up the store and programming the store and designing the store.

So, because of that, we often suggest hosted solutions over license solutions, because if you’re a small business, right now there’s a race to get online. So you’re going to get online much faster if you go with a hosted solution, because with a hosted solution, you can very quickly and very easily set up your online store. You can design it all from the admin panel backend. Sorry about that noise.

You can design it all with the admin panel backend without having any design experience or any HTML knowledge or anything like that. What’s great is the hosted solutions out there these days are incredibly affordable. You can pay $19 a month. You have great hosting, great bandwidth, and a great e-commerce solution with so many amazing features.

The other great thing about the hosted solutions is that they’re constantly updating because they’re all competing with each other. So they’re constantly trying to have the next best thing in e-commerce. So if you go with a hosted shopping cart solution, you’re going to constantly be getting updates, like the ability to sell on Facebook, the ability to start tweeting out your products, all of those things that e-commerce is moving towards as social media just becomes our reality.

Nick:
I would say the only other thing to add to that would be the customer service aspect, which is big with the SaaS based solutions. Again, like Amy was saying, since they’re more marketers by nature, they’re really looking to utilize that skill set, and when it comes to something technical, they want to know they can hop on the phone, get somebody to quickly address their situation so they’re not stuck with a license solution with their hands up trying to figure out everything A to Z all by themselves.

Mike:
You’re both right in the heart of things. What do you see the future of e-commerce looking like? What direction are we going to take?

Amy:
There’s actually a lot opportunities for e-commerce right now. Co-creation is getting huge, and group buying is getting huge. The fact is offering daily deals on an average site, that’s just a basic retail site might actually be a really huge play in the future for everybody. Allowing people to custom design their products is going to be huge.

The fact is we’re dealing now with the me generation having the buying power, and that’s the generation that’s grown up with YouTube and social networks and they want to be the center of attention. So e-commerce is going to keep on trending to a place where it’s convenient for everybody to use so that they don’t have to leave their house to shop, but also that centers around the customer more than anything else. It’s really hard to be customer centric when you’re not face-to-face. So there are newer technologies every day coming out to make it so that you could do virtual try-ons of clothes.

Nick:
Yeah, the augmented reality.

Amy:
Exactly. Augmented reality systems so that you can really feel like you’re in the store while still having the convenience and the affordability of online shopping.

Mike:
You both had jobs. What risk did you take and what steps did you take to prepare for starting ZippyCart?

Amy:
Well, yeah, in this economy especially, we’re taking a huge risk. We spent a year planning it, and we did what we could to save up as much money as possible, because we’ve never gotten funding. We are the bootstrapped startup, the epitome of it, but we work very long hours and very hard. We spent a year working our day jobs and working an additional 40 hours a week on ZippyCart before we went full-time. We definitely knew there were going to be risks because we have mortgages to pay, but we also knew that if we kept on doing the work for somebody else instead of ourselves, we were going to miss our opportunity.

Mike:
So you offer this comparison online and you recommend a solution. But what is your revenue model? How does ZippyCart actually make money?

Nick:
All of the different solutions on our site have pretty much a standard affiliate program or we’ve worked with them to create some sort of referral program. Like Amy was saying earlier, we strive to be unbiased, but we still want to make money off the website. So the perfect solution to that was just to be part of their affiliate program or have a partnership type relationship with them so that we’re getting compensated when people are physically either purchasing a license solution or signing up for one of the SaaS based solutions. That’s the primary revenue driver.

We also do cover various products and things like that, so we make different commissions from Amazon and related places on the blog. But really, the core of it is trying to rank organically for all these different e-commerce solutions, people looking for reviews of e-commerce solutions and really get them into a free trial, get them to see what the options are out there and try to get them to sign up for one. Really, that’s where we make the money.

Amy:
Yeah. Another good thing to point out there is because we still want to provide unbiased reviews, if you look at our site, we’ve limited . . . there are hundreds of e-commerce solutions out there and we’ve limited the solutions we review to the ones that are the best of the best. We’re not going to try and sell somebody on a dinky solution that doesn’t work.

We have a group of e-commerce experts that review all of our solutions, and they do it in an unbiased way so that, in the end, we can say, okay, these are the ten best, and they’re the best because they actually are the best, not because there’s any money associated to that.

Nick:
We’ve had some solutions approach us and they just don’t seem anywhere up to par with the other ones on our site, and regardless of them having a program for affiliate commissions or whatever, we’re not going to put something out there that’s not high quality.

Amy:
Exactly.

Mike:
Thank you both very much for your time. We’ll talk to you soon and good luck.

Amy:
Great.

Nick:
Great. Thank you so much.

Amy:
Thanks.