• Your Merchandising Questions
• Your Marketing Questions
• Your Operations Questions
• Your Finance Questions
• Your Store Questions
• Your IT Questions
• And, for the CEO

   

your Finance questions

In Finance, the buck stops with you.

Incremental e-commerce growth sounds good, but what will it cost? What are the risks? Our business model is designed to answer these questions, making e-commerce a positive ROI effort almost immediately.

What will all this cost us?

We believe that to be effective, outsourced e-commerce must be a partnership. For that reason, we invest in our client partnerships, and are paid based on how we grow your business.

Most of the work in our Custom System Integration and Integration Package is done at our cost. We provide the technical and business resources to port you to our platform. We purchase all hardware and hosting required to bring your business online. Compared to our competitors’ pricing or going it alone, your start-up costs are minimal. We offer you a multi-million dollar technology platform, adapted to your unique business, at a fraction of the cost.

In exchange, we charge a revenue share on successfully delivered online orders. Store referrals, the biggest benefit of online big-ticket retail, are free. Revenue shares are set as a percentage of online sales. The exact amount is based on the scope of our integration effort, the size of your business and the length of our agreement.

What's the catch?

There really isn't one, although there are some details to our model that should be noted. Because of the structure of our agreements, we require long-term contracts that allow us to recover our upfront investment. Some clients pay us an additional monthly fee, which enables them to pursue projects unrelated to online sales. Some clients pay more up front to enable unique customizations to our platform or to reduce revenue share rates.

These are refinements to our pricing premise. E-commerce should be risk free and positive ROI for our clients — from day one.

Who books top-line revenue? How are we billed?

You book revenue. We simply facilitate collection of orders and customer funds online. Orders are placed in your Point of Sale system and funds transferred to your merchant accounts. From an accounting perspective, an online order looks like an order placed in a store. When that order is successfully delivered to your customer, we'll invoice you for our share of that revenue.

What about fraud and data security?

As the retailer of record, you are ultimately responsible for chargebacks related to credit card fraud. Blueport Commerce does everything possible to prevent these chargebacks.

Our Fraud Intercept service screens orders before they are sent to you. Through a combination of proprietary algorithms and manual intervention, we screen orders and only pass you those that meet agreed to standards. You only receive scrubbed orders, dramatically reducing your fraud risk. Most of our clients find online fraud rates to be no worse than that they see in their stores, and in some cases, they are better.

From a data security standpoint, our clients share in a best-in-breed hosting implementation, designed to protect you and your customers information. Our e-commerce solution is fully PCI compliant.

What kind of reporting can I get about the online sales?

Results for your online store can be reported like those for any store, from your existing systems. Blueport Commerce also provides rich merchandising and marketing reporting. Daily reporting on online transactions allows you to reconcile cash drawer reporting and fund receipts from merchant account providers. Finally, Blueport Commerce provides monthly detailed invoicing of Internet sales.