Cloud app for retail SMEs to manage their orders and inventory for their ecommerce and retail shops.
Business overview
Location | Swansea, United Kingdom |
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Social media | |
Website | www.veeqo.com |
Sectors | SaaS/PaaS Digital B2B |
Company number | 8391581 |
Incorporation date | 6 Feb 2013 |
Idea
Introduction
Veeqo is a cloud-based app for retail (online and offline) small businesses which would allow them to manage their orders and inventory across all their sales channels.
Businesses now sell through ecommerce websites, Facebook, retail stores, eBay and Amazon and we want to make that process easier and more efficient.
We are raising further seed funding after being approached by investors who suggested a more aggressive integration development plan, so that we can bring on board more ecommerce/marketplace/courier integrations quicker.
Intended impact
Whilst we think managing orders in each of their sales channels systems is very hard for a retailer, we aim to bring all their orders into Veeqo to manage.
We would make managing these orders much easier with courier integration to print shipping labels automatically, so no copy and pasting addresses anymore, with tracking numbers updating the original sales channel. Advanced order workflow management, grouping orders by status/warehouse/sales channel and more.
We think syncing inventory across all those sales channels is even harder and often ends in over sellings. Veeqo would manage this for you, syncing your inventory in real time to all your sales channels.
The system would manage cost of inventory very carefully, thus allowing business to see their true margin by product/group and, most usefully, by sales channel.
Substantial accomplishments to date
Come out of beta on 1st Jan 2014 and signing up on average 14 trial users per week, anticipating ro convert 2 of these to paid accounts.
Completed integrations with Magento and WooCommerce in January/February.
Released loads of new features including product labels with barcodes, bulk shipping with Royal Mail, advanced export/import for products, inventory reports.
Monetisation strategy
We would operate as a SaaS, with a monthly fee for customers depending on their size.
See our pricing model here: http://www. veeqo. com/pricing.
We don't plan to charge setup costs for customers and would offer a 30 day free trial.
Use of proceeds
Will sustain a full time development team of four Ruby on Rails web developers and one front end developer plus a designer.
Hire a experienced b2b sales manager and sales guy, instruct a retail PR agency to announce our launch, kick off UK marketing push through PPC, banners on retail blogs, SEO improvements.
I am not taking a salary from Veeqo.
Market
Target market
Small and medium businesses around the world that sell online.
Initially we would target the UK, but would start integrating key couriers (UPS/FedEx) after that so we can launch in the US.
Characteristics of target market
There are 228,000 online retail businesses in the UK alone. This would be our initial target, but we expect that the app would work around the world.
Marketing strategy
Our marketing strategy would consist of:
(1) Back linking campaign to target keywords in Google to achieve top 5 rankings in organic search results.
(2) PPC campaign in Google and Bing. Limited budget required due to niche terms we are targeting.
(3) Heavy use of Twitter and Facebook to build a targeted following. Leverage our partner's support (such as Shopify) to push our messages out.
(4) Self promotion on UK based small businesses forums.
(5) Incentive exiting customers with to refer us in return for cash reward.
(6) Integrate, Integrate, Integrate. Every ecommerce system we plan to link with would open our systems to thousands more users. We also believe most systems would market our service in their app store.
(7) We have built the system with the plan to release an API so anyone could integrate their website/pos/accounts into our system.
Competition strategy
The idea of Veeqo was born from the frustration that none of the existing solutions met our needs.
In our view, ChannelAdvisor and eSellerPro both lack transparent pricing/instant setup and in the end charge over £1,000 a month.
Our app would have features we consider missing from others such as:
(1) Click & Collect feature, to let customer choose a store/warehouse to collect goods from.
(2) Ability to create orders and choose different warehouses to fulfil that order, which maximises your inventory across the business.
(3) Web based app, which means it would work on PCs, Macs, tablets and even smart phones. Stock takes, for example, could be done by walking around your warehouse/store with an iPad.
(4) Product gross margin matters: we would carefully calculate this so that it's easy to see what your gross margin would be on any given day/month/year.
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