AviaCommerce Vision
Long term vision of aviacommerce
Simplify e-commerce ecosystem by creating and unifying smart services and providing consistent, cost-effective solution to sellers helping them sell more.
There are many e-commerce suits available in the market, but none provides every essential service under one hood to complete e-commerce store. These individual services charge a lot and as a result the total costs for any SME store shoot up. For eg. For a million customers a smart CRM platform would $3000-5000/month, shipping software(excluding shipping charges) would cost $500/month, email service would cost $4000/month, sms service would cost $1800/month.
If this system of e-commerce platform and their connected external services can be brought together under one roof, it will enable the clients to experience consistency in various services and, a huge reduction in cost. Our initial research shows the current cost of running an e-commerce system can be brought down by a factor of 7X in short-term and by 10X in long term.
Services that integrate with e-commerce systems do so with the help of plugins. These plugins require stores to have their own accounts/subscriptions with services such as Mailchimp, Sendgrid, ShipperHQ, ShipStation, Twillio etc.
With Aviacommerce, we want to target these third party services in 2 ways:-
- Provide solution for costly third party services as a bundle. Eg. Shipping, CRM, Marketing
- Use third party services and negotiate for better rates over volume. Eg. Email, SMS, Delivery Services
Example of first approach is our product aviaship which is an alternative of shipstation, shipperhq. It will integrate directly with aviacommerce.
Example of the second approach can be best illustrated in case of delivery services[1]. Let’s say if you are shipping a hypothetical package that is 5 pounds, 5 inches wide, 5 inches tall, and 5 inches long from Atlanta, Georgia to New York City, these are the estimated rates that UPS offers Ground Shipping: $13.75, 3 Day Select: $29.00, 2nd Day Air: $37.86. These rates are negotiated with large volumes to around Ground Shipping: $9.25, 3 Day Select: $21.00, 2nd Day Air: $25.86.
Targetting these services makes sense but before that it is important to have a minimal working e-commerce platform which can help sellers get started with selling. Any e-commerce system is incomplete without marketing tools, analytics tools, transaction email, sms, shipping support, cloud images and accounting services. In the next phase, we are creating plugins for aviacommerce to support these third party services. This would help us launch a system which is complete. Once this is done, any e-commerce seller can start selling using the platform. After this phase, we can start to target the third party services in the 2 ways mentioned above.
It is important to note that third-party apps/plugins can’t be fully replaced. This is NOT what we plan to achieve. It would be practically foolish/impossible to provide all the services out there which can be provided by the complete gamut of plugins from the third party services. In fact, this is the real power of having a plugin/extensions model. It provides for more choices, driving competition which results in better services to the sellers. Only those services that cost most and make sense to develop internally will be targeted. Services like shipping, CRM and targeting, email, SMS, delivery networks etc.
To run a decent[2] e-commerce system, it currently takes around $12k-15k/month and it goes up with volume. We believe there is a clear opportunity to bring down this cost and our efforts are in line with this belief.
So the plan is simple:
- Release open-source e-commerce along with plugins for basic services, provide cloud hosting for sellers.
- Provide solutions for the costly third-party services, reduce cost by 7X.
- Add more services to the offering, reduce cost by a factor of 10X with volume.
That’s about it for now. Sweet and Simple!
[1] Delivery networks have the provision for broker accounts.
[2] E-Commerce systems with 1 million customers .