Targeting small online retailers doing $30 million or less a year in sales, Dydacomp has introduced the first software-as-a-service version of its licensed Multichannel Order Management software, CEO Fred Lizza says.
The new SaaS product, Freestyle Commerce, enables retailers to process orders from multiple selling channels, such as the Amazon.com marketplace as well as their own e-commerce sites. SaaS technology is hosted on the Internet by a vendor and made available to retailers for a subscription fee.
Freestyle Commerce forwards order information to a retailer’s fulfillment center or drop shipper, providing information for packing slips and shipping labels while also updating inventory records. Retailers can view on a web dashboard information such as sales and inventory levels.
Freestyle Commerce has been designed to be pre-integrated with the open-source Magento e-commerce platform from the X.Commerce division of eBay Inc. By working out ahead of time an application programming interface connection between Magento’s technology and Freestyle Commerce, retailers already on the Magento platform can connect to the Dydacomp SaaS application within hours, Lizza says. Dydacomp has also developed a similar data pipeline to the Amazon marketplace. An application programming interface, or API, is a set of software instructions for exchanging data between two applications.
For now, Dydacomp has set up the API connection with Magento’s free Community edition and its licensed Enterprise edition; it also plans to eventually provide the connection to the Magento Go SaaS version, Lizza says. As an open-source technology, Magento makes its source code available to users and software developers who want to customize the application.
Dydacomp chose to launch Freestyle Commerce with Magento because Magento is the most popular e-commerce platform used by Dydacomp clients who don’t run their e-commerce sites on SiteLink, Dydacomp’s own e-commerce system. “Magento also has, by far, the most well-formed community of software developers,” Lizza says.
Dydacomp will eventually build API connections between Freestyle Commerce and other e-commerce platforms and e-marketplaces, Lizza says.
The cost to deploy Freestyle Commerce includes a set-up fee ranging from $2,000 to $6,000 based on a retailer’s size and order volume, plus a monthly subscription fee ranging from $400 to $1,000 or more, Lizza says.
Freestyle Commerce was designed to attract new retailers to Dydacomp that range in size from startups to those doing up to $30 million in annual sales, Lizza says. The SaaS version isn’t designed for existing customers who may want to migrate from the on-premise, licensed Multichannel Order Management System, also known as M.O.M., he says. For now, “Freestyle is all about bringing in new customers,” he says. But he adds that the company may offer its licensed customers the option to migrate to a SaaS version next year. Dydacomp has about 2,000 clients operating on its licensed software, which generally supports e-commerce sites with up to $50 million in annual sales.
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