itease

"Malls" (Or: Storenvy for the Collective)

itease posted November 25, 2011 14:42 ago

Hey Jon, this one's a suggestion.
I suggest Storenvy roll out a feature I dub "Malls" for small businesses who have more than one brand that they'd like to sell products through, without brand cross contamination.

I happen to own a screen printing and advertising shop, so my implementation is pretty obvious.

I have several stores within itease.storevny.com, and they basically just plain CLASH.

The clash wasn't so apparent until I decided to support the #occupy movement with a line of tees, decals and other merch.

I went to add the line to my facebook page via the app, and ALL my products show up.

There's no way to remove them.

I point visitors to specific sub categories that I use that to allow my customers to run drives for school t-shirts, military command t-shirts, club t-shirts and event tees without having to buy a bulk of shirts in advance. They run the sale through a certain date, and they pay for their print run based on how many shirts they were able to drive out. The more they sell, the cheaper they get them from me. I print in one run, and the customer picks up their box, a rebate check for their cut of the action, and a stack of neat packing slips and distributes them for me. It combines brick and mortar beautifully with eCommerce, and I recommend it highly to any screen printer needing to gain business, offer a unique service, and cut down on customer hesitation to buy.

There isn't any need for cross promotion for the majority of my products, although some of the more interesting shirts, and shirts that we designed just because we like designing t-shirts, I'd like to make accessible across the board.

Storenvy would be my perfect retail solution if it could offer a login that then basically let you set up MORE logins underneath. A "Mall." Each subset would be a full storenvy account, with domain availability, customization to look different, and all of the other features that we love in Storenvy. Ideally, in the Mall account, there would be an option of which stores to cross promote- if any.

As it stands, I'm about to begin shifting items from the main account to split off the #occupy store so that promoting it is easier to manage. It's going to take re-typing EVERYTHING. I got a monkey for that. Ideally, stores within the mall could import items between one another so that if you created an item in one store, you could move it to another if needed.

I hope that I've been clear in what I could use from Storenvy, and that perhaps the implantation isn't too much of a pain in the butt. If you could roll this feature out, it's EASILY worth $20 a month. I charge customers $35 to set their store within my store up, and I usually have at least 2-3 stores going at a time for various clients.

Thanks for everything you've done to help keep small business relevant in a sea of box stores!

You're the best!
Ember

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