Fledgling Canadian retailer Saffron Rouge Inc. had been in business for about a year and a half when it decided to open an organic beauty store on Amazon.com in addition to its own store in cyberspace. The Amazon store made its debut in May of last year, and sales have jumped 20 percent, said co-founder and chief executive officer Jeff Binder.
But the small company — until recently, it had only 15 employees — knew it wouldn’t be able to keep up with the volume of data it expected to go back and forth between it and Amazon every few minutes. So the beauty e-tailer tapped software and services company Mercent Corp., which specializes in connecting retailers to online marketplaces, to automate the connection between Saffron Rouge’s systems and Amazon’s.
“If we had to do it internally, we’d have to broaden out our team extensively, and it would have taken us a lot longer doing it on our own,” said Binder. Also, he estimated that Saffron Rouge would have spent more to do the integration because Mercent already has the connections and technology in place.
Saffron Rouge will hook up to all the other online marketplaces Mercent offers later this year. These include shopping portals such as Yahoo and MSN, and comparison search engines such as Froogle and mySimon, said Mercent ceo Eric Best. (Mercent’s other customers include Crabtree & Evelyn and Guess.) The integration with Amazon took five months, but the other sites will go faster because Saffron Rouge is up and running with Mercent, said Binder.
When a customer places an order through Amazon, Saffron Rouge sees all the pertinent information in its back-end system. If a customer wants to change the order, he or she can call Saffron Rouge and the company can make the change.
If Saffron Rouge hadn’t hooked up with Mercent, it would have had to manually create all the product and pricing information to hand to Amazon using Amazon’s tools. To see orders placed in Amazon’s system, the company would have had to download an Excel file from Amazon and import it into its accounting system.
That’s fine for companies with few stockkeeping units and orders, but Saffron Rouge offers more than 600 items, and “we didn’t want the joy of doing continual manual imports and exports,” said Binder.
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“We do a hell of a lot with a very small team of people,” he said. “That level of automation was important to us. We would be pulling our hair out if we didn’t have it.”
It must have done the trick because Binder and his wife, Kirstin, a medical herbalist who also is president and co-founder of the company, found time to open their first offline store earlier this year, in the university town of Guelph, Ontario. The store offers a soothing environment with river rocks and a fountain as well as classes in unusual subjects such as infant massage and first-aid aromatherapy. The company is named after their daughter, Saffron.