ePages sales vice president and WHIR Blogger Sören von Varchmin presents
The WHIR is reporting live from Germany at WebhostingDay 2010. Stay tuned to our news, features, blogs and WHIR tv for more updates from the event.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The fourth morning keynote on Thursday was delivered by Soren von Varchmin of ePages, who promised to provide hosting providers with some insight into how to profit from ecommerce “in the cloud.”
At this point, it should be mentioned, that just about every presentation at every event I’ve gone to this year has had “in the cloud” in the title, so let’s assume the real thrust of this one will be mostly about profiting from ecommerce.
He begins with a bit of an overview of the German market for ecommerce, saying that only about 11 percent of the country’s small businesses are selling online, and the vast majority of those are, one way or another, selling through eBay. These are online shops, he says, that you as service providers should be hosting.
The obvious connection, though, is that 89 percent of SMBs in the country do not yet sell online. Among those, 23 percent see technical issues as an obstacle, which means that by fixing or addressing those technical issues, that market could increase from 11 percent to about 30 percent.
Among the challenges facing hosts in this market, however, are the big fish, as he calls them – Amazon and eBay, making a big impact selling online stores to small businesses.
He says the ecommerce shop is the aspect of a hosting account that has the highest churn, due mostly to the fact that it is very easy to track the amount you’re paying for the shop versus how much you’re making from it. Another factor is that people might underestimate the amount of work it’s going to take to get a shop to the point where it is successful, or at least profitable.
He also says that, on the topic of moving from basic hosting into becoming a more complex hosting provider, ecommerce is among the most significant services, along with messaging and collaboration, for instance.
ePages, he says, has 50,000 hosted shops, which it delivers through more than 100 partners. The company works exclusively through the channel, the most important part of which is service providers.
The company’s service is divided into a set of products, designed around the lifecycle of an online merchant, that is mapped more or less to the shared hosting, dedicated/vps hosting and clustered/complex hosting models.
ePages product provides the reseller with consulting, training, support (for their customers), white-labeled hosting of the product, application management, retention services, designing and consulting services, SEO services, white-labeled marketing services and a technology partner matchmaking system (designed to set resellers up with a strong network of technology partners in a wide variety of businesses).
At this point, he introduced a couple of ePages partners, David Backstall of Sage Pay, Fermin Palacios Torres of Arsys and Thomas Renner Jones of Trusted Shops, each of which went through a bit of an explanation of their own services and then described the nature of their relationship with ePages, and how that relationship has benefited their business.
Sage Pay provides an in-frame payment and checkout solution within the ePages solution. Trusted Shops provides a security seal for online retailers in Europe, also integrated into ePages. Arsys is a hosting provider based in Spain that has been offering a cloud-based ecommerce service built on ePages since 2008.
Arsys has worked with ePages on a plan to increase its shop count and decrease churn. It ran a joint promotion with ePages (a limited-time free offer that increased its new monthly subscriptions significantly. And it has been able to deliver its own customer feedback to ePages, which can influence the development of the project.
Von Varchmin concludes by saying the mainstream ecommerce market (among SMBs selling online) is just taking off, and that hosting providers should act now. Of course, his opinion is that the best way to act is by working with ePages.
