If you'ved logged into Shopster recently, you'll find a totally reworked interface! Instead of a really cool code name like 'Jaguar', or 'Whistler', internally this release was called 1.13, and it is a whopper.
Ooohh, shiny!
But there's a whole lot more that got improved other than the color scheme. In my opinion, there are two major features which have been under discussion a very long time, and I am overjoyed to see them released. There are a few companies who are partially our competitors, and have dubious practices to say the least. I, and many others on the inside, have been pushing for more transparency for our retailers, to prove that we are different.
View Customers
We've always said that Shopster doesn't own your customers, you do. Finally, as a retailer, you have access to customer's email address, phone numbers, and personal details. Although incredibly valuable, Shopster has always believed that the customer belongs to you. We've never contacted them beyond keeping them updated on their order, and now you can market directly to them yourself.
Pricing Change
In the forums, over and over again we heard retailers complaining about pricing. Sometimes justified, sometimes not. The major problem was, in the past, the price you saw in the warehouse was not the 'wholesale' price from the supplier. It was the the wholesale price, plus the payment gateway fee (more about that in a sec), plus any applicable handling fees. These are all costs you would have incurred even if you had bought the product directly from the supplier, but it was a mistake on our part not to make the pricing stack more transparent.
When you browse the warehouse now, the product details are displayed in popups, as not to break navigation:
Here's a product from Electronics and Accessories 11 (an excellent supplier by the way). Here I've clicked the 'Supplier' tab to see the Handling Fee (if applicable).
Wholesale Price: $114.99
Transaction Fee:$4.17
Total Price: $119.16
Handling Fee: $3.00
The wholesale price is exactly the same price we see when we get the product updates from the supplier.
What is this 'transaction fee'? Here's a hint, calculate transaction fee divided by wholesale price. Yup, 3.62%. Sound familiar? It's the first 'half' of the transaction fee which is charged by the payment provider to process the transaction. The second 'half' is on the margin you make on the product (the fee that gets deducted from your profit checks). Both the transaction fee and handling fees are charged by Shopster to purely cover the cost of the transaction, and we make nothing from them.
So, notice that the MSRP on the product is around $140. To make this product attractive, I've added it to a margin goup of 17.48%, to bring the price up to MSRP, and then added a 10% sale:
When the user checks out, here's what he sees:
And there's the $3.00 handling fee we saw earlier.
It nice to finally see features being released which bring the product closer to how I originally envisioned it. I hope we will continue to be able to grant more and more transparency into the system for our retailers.
