The Solution

Committing to a new venture

Paul set himself up with a makeshift packing station – a milk crate and a piece of plywood – and began photographing products to list them on eBay. “People thought I was mad, but within three months I was busy and one year in I had 500 products listed,” he says. The business continued to grow exponentially and after a couple of years, Paul realized he should launch his own online store but there was one big problem… he had absolutely no idea where to start.

“I attended an internet conference and that’s where I met the Commerce Cloud team. They created my website for a very reasonable price and I’ve never looked back. The support has been amazing; they have a genuine interest in seeing your business grow, so you’re treated as a valued customer – not a number.”

Re-jigging the business for expansion

As an integrated multi-channel point of sale platform, Commerce Cloud lets retailers do business where their customers want to shop. “The guys at Commerce Cloud preloaded my products to my online store, which were then mirrored on eBay so I only load them once to get them sold across both platforms,” Paul explains. “And with integrated SEO, once tags are entered it means my products get found in online searches as well.”

More importantly, the system facilitated the expansion of his business. “Within three and a half years Hooked Online had over 2,000 products listed and I was ready to open up a physical store as well. Commerce Cloud links my inventory across eBay, the Hooked Online website and my brick and mortar store so everything talks to each other and I always know how my business is tracking.”

Commerce Cloud streamlines efficiencies and increases profits

Paul’s business now turns over a million dollars per year on eBay alone with only one full-time staff member and one casual. “We can punch out about 80,000 orders per year with such a tiny team because Commerce Cloud streamlines the way we work.” Take stock orders for example. A once laborious task that swallowed up 40 hours per month and meant that Paul had to walk up and down his warehouse aisles doing manual stock checks. Thankfully those days are over. “I simply login to my Commerce Cloud control panel, filter through suppliers, run a sales analysis on the previous 12 months and enter the order. I order by data, not gut instinct which maximizes sales. And it only takes me two hours per month,” he says.

Since Paul started using Commerce Cloud in 2009, Hooked Online’s year-on-year growth is 74%. “There’s no way the business would have grown the way it has without Commerce Cloud; we simply couldn’t manage the volume of sales without it.”