mohchi: Blog

Building Online Stores: The Old Guard is Changing

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:19:00 -0400

There was a good Entrepreneur.com article published yesterday entitled “Ecommerce Basics: 10 Questions to Ask When Creating an Online Store” which discusses the points brick-and-mortar businesses should consider when going online. In broad strokes, the author, Kim Shandrow, provides general advice for businesses with little to no prior knowledge of ecommerce and/or technology. We’ll cover each point as a separate blog post.

Topic 1: “How do I start building my online store?”

Though the author mentions the big names in ecommerce service providers, all of them require financial risk on the part of the business from the outset (in terms of monthly fees regardless of effectiveness). One of the common threads across these providers, among many, is that each and every single one of these providers embody an increasingly outdated model of ecommerce, a model where businesses pay monthly fees to create islands on the internet, disconnected and virtually undiscoverable by structured search. The internet is strewn with examples of businesses who’ve utilized these types of services to create standalone websites and utterly failed due to lack of scale and consumer traffic. Unfortunately, these service providers’ business models rely upon fixed monthly fees to exist because that’s all they know and the only way they can now remain in existence.

A key selling point common to most of these providers is the extent of possible customization. Though at face value the ability to totally customize every aspect of the business storefront appears to be a benefit (from fonts, to page structure, column widths/heights, foreground colors, background colors, background images, active link colors, inactive link colors, visited link colors, shopping cart design, shopping cart features, button heights, button widths, button colors, heading sizes, heading colors, etc.—the list goes on), for many small businesses, it is far more an unnecessary and painful distraction which can often lead to poorly designed, hard-to-use sites. This leads to further capital outlay in the form of hiring web designers/developers to get the ecommerce site not only into usable shape, but to provide maintenance going forward. It’s often throwing good money after bad.

Finally, these providers all place limitations on their customers in some way, typically in the form of limiting the number of products that can be listed, the bandwidth that is consumed by their site (which is usually beyond the control of the business), storage, available features (e.g. notifications, analytics, marketing, user accounts, promotions, import/export of products). We’re all familiar with the upsell model (aka bait-and-switch)—the limitations can only be removed by paying higher monthly fees in accordance with the tier at which the desired feature becomes available.

What options does this really leave for small businesses?

Marketplaces are the Future

Ecommerce for small businesses is changing and it is changing as we speak. Standalone ecommerce sites are appropriate for medium to large enterprises (which have the time and resources available to create, maintain and market their sites), but certainly not small, mom & pop businesses. There is strength and leverage in numbers, not only from a risk mitigation perspective, but from a marketing, discovery and technology perspective. Marketplaces are analogous to physical-world shopping malls but with a critical difference—not only can you find a variety of businesses in one location, you can search for specific products across all the businesses without knowing what businesses are present. The common infrastructure decreases fixed costs while providing shared value across all businesses as long as the businesses sell products sought by consumers.

Showrooming: What's the Small Retailer To Do?

Thu, 02 May 2013 18:53:00 -0400

First there was the Australian store owner who began charging customers a $5 fee for “just looking” (aka “showrooming”) in store by posting the sign (to the right of this post) on the store’s front door. The New York Times just today posted a discussion to write an effective script for retailers to confront such offending customers in their aisles.

But is the customer really to blame for wanting to comparison shop and find the best price for an item, whether it be online or in store? How is the small brick-n-mortar retailer to defend itself against online, price and scale-advantaged online behemoths a la Amazon and Walmart?

Surely, confronting a customer (in and of itself, let alone with a fee!) is surely to lose that purchase and long-term relationship. Rather, small brick-n-mortar businesses will have to differentiate—whether it be through a superior level of customer service, or offering of truly unique, hard-to-find brands and products that the likes of Amazon will not have available at deep discount.

In response to the latest discussion, we propose small business owners approach such price-conscious shoppers in-store, not with the mentality of “confronting a showroomer” but rather one of “engaging a customer.”

mohchi Merchant Alpha Now Live!

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 15:49:49 -0500

mohchi Merchant Alpha is now live and available to merchants by invite only. Register at http://www.mohchi.com to request an invite.

Let us know if you have any favorite small, local merchants you’d like to see on mohchi.

Wishing everyone, their families & friends a very happy and prosperous new year!

How Small Retailers Can Control Their Own Data

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 07:16:00 -0500

Amazon’s Participation Agreement for Amazon Storefronts states:

“You grant us a royalty-free, non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable right and license to use, reproduce, perform, display, distribute, adapt, modify, re-format, create derivative works of, and otherwise commercially or non-commercially exploit in any manner, any and all of Your Materials, and to sublicense the foregoing rights to our affiliates and operators of Amazon Associated Properties.”

Most small business owners gloss over this type of legalese in the online agreements they agree to—everyone’s guilty of this at some point or another. In cases with former Amazon Storefront businesses, however, this clause has caused their own products and empty storefronts to be used against them by Amazon and a recent article in The Daily Dot outlines exactly how Amazon does this. Through morally questionable (however, perfectly legal pursuant to the above clause) their methods drive consumers searching for items previously sold by the former seller to other sellers on Amazon, including to the behemoth itself.

Though, as a small business who’s signed-on with an Amazon storefront, you are legally bound (while granting certain perpetual and irrevocable rights to Amazon) to the Participation Agreement, one way to ensure Amazon cannot use your product images once you’ve left their network is to watermark each of them with your trademark, which can be as simple as your business name. Since Amazon “will comply with your removal requests as to specific uses of Your Trademarks,” you can demand that your trademarked images be removed from their site if you decide to leave.

Seed Funding Announcement

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 12:00:00 -0400

We are pleased to announce that we have closed our $250,000 seed funding round with participation from a group of private investors. We could not be more honored and delighted that our investors recognize our unique vision to help small businesses and local shoppers.

mohchi provides small businesses an online marketplace on which they can quickly and easily establish commercial presence and visibility to neighborhood shoppers while allowing consumers to search for, find and purchase the products they seek from their local businesses. Through platform consolidation and rationalization of logical business services such as e-commerce, loyalty programs, deals, etc. under a single, unified platform, mohchi is positioned to simplify and fulfill the e-commerce needs of small, local businesses.

The funding will be instrumental to building-out the core, web & mobile, business and consumer platforms in preparation for the invite-only alpha release later this year. The platform is currently in active development, with NYC as its initial market.

Tighter Spring MVC Integration with Spring Security's @PreAuthorize Annotation

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 14:46:00 -0400

Have you ever wanted to integrate @PreAuthorize into Spring MVC’s controller mapping mechanism?

Unfortunately, using the @PreAuthorize annotation on controller methods out-of-the-box is not very straightforward nor is it recommended by the Spring Security team to use it with the <global-method-security> element (read more here). Regardless, with <global-method-security pre-post-annotations="true"> enabled in the DispatcherServlet’s context you can do the following:

@RequestMapping("/")
@PreAuthorize("isAuthenticated()")
public String authenticatedHomePage(Principal principal) {
    return "authenticatedHomepage";
}

However, all this achieves is blocking invocation of this method. There’s little integration between Spring Security and Spring MVC in terms of authorization-based request mapping. For instance, if you wanted to map two different pages to the same URI based on whether the user has authenticated, one (rather clunky) way would be:

@RequestMapping("/")
public String homePage(Principal principal) {
    if (principal instanceof UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken) {
        return "authenticatedHomepage";
    } else {
        return "unauthenticatedHomepage";
    }
}

For every mapping with different pages based on authorization, you’d need to write an if/else block and code to check the authentication. Alternatively, you can use Spring MVC’s interceptors or servlet filters to re-route requests based on the current authentication. Still, that’s not perfect since separating the logic from the controller makes it more difficult to understand how requests are being routed.

We wanted to keep everything neatly in one place and to leverage Spring Security’s powerful security expressions to concisely define the level of authorization desired at the controller-class and controller-method levels. Here’s what we achieved (without using <global-method-security>):

@RequestMapping("/")
public String unauthHomePage() {
    return "unauthenticatedHomePage";
}

@RequestMapping("/")
@PreAuthorized("isAuthenticated()")
public String authHomePage() {
    return "authenticatedHomePage";
}

The behavior is what you might expect. If the “isAuthenticated()” expression evaluates to true, the second method is invoked when a user navigates to “/”. Otherwise, the first method is invoked.

What happens if you only have a single method?:

@RequestMapping("/")
@PreAuthorized("isAuthenticated()")
public String homePage() {
    return "homePage";
}

If the “isAuthenticated()” expression evaluates to true, the method is invoked. Otherwise, since there are no mappings that can handle an unauthenticated request, an AccessDeniedException is thrown. This exception can, in turn, be used by Spring Security’s ExceptionTranslationFilterto determine how to proceed (e.g. redirect the user to a login page, return a 401 error code, etc.).

How do you do it?

Spring MVC 3.1 makes it easy to accomplish this. We looked into how Spring Security’s <authorize> JSP tag works and plugged that functionality into Spring MVC using a custom RequestMappingHandlerMapping. The result does everything that <mvc:annotation-driven> can do + handle @PreAuthorized annotations.

Since the classes are a bit long, we won’t inline the code in the post. You can take a look at them here:

If you have your security configuration isolated to your parent application context, all you need to do is replace <mvc:annotation-driven> in DispatcherServlet’s context with the following:

<bean id="extendedWebMvcConfig" 
  class="com.mohchi.web.framework.ExtendedWebMvcConfiguration" />

and let the magic happen.

Feel free to adapt this code for your own project, but keep in mind that it has not been thoroughly tested. In return, we would like to get your feedback (bugs, suggestions, and design comments welcome). If you write about this, please include a reference to us.

mohchi: The Future of (Local) E-Commerce

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 20:35:00 -0400

Though we’ve been silent for a few months, we’ve been busy building the mohchi platform. Many of you, however, probably don’t know what mohchi is and what we’re in the process of creating. We hope this post will shed some light on what we’ve been doing how we’re trying to change the world of local commerce to help small businesses, consumers and our communities alike.

Despite existing technologies and services, one of the most problematic issues from a consumer e-commerce perspective is the simple fact that it is exceedingly difficult or nearly impossible to search online for and purchase products from your own neighborhood businesses (much less discover which businesses carry which products).

How often have you, as a shopper, wanted or needed to search for and buy something locally, but have been frustrated in your efforts to do so? If you’re like most shoppers, it happens more often than not. In most cities, virtually all consumer goods are available from your own neighborhood retailers; the problem is that this information is opaque and not readily transparent without significant consumer legwork (e.g. researching and compiling a list of potential merchants; calling each business to check whether they carry the product(s) sought; trusting that the employee handling your call is aware of the scope of business inventory and availability; then picking-up and paying for the product).

As a small, neighborhood retailer, how many of your sales have been hijacked by online competitors? Are your year-over-year revenues/profits decreasing as a result? Do you have a commerce-enabled website? Do you have your products uploaded and readily available for search and purchase by potential customers? Is your site SEO-ready and readily findable by consumers on major search engines? Most businesses we’ve spoken to respond in the negative.

Partnering with small businesses, mohchi provides the searchable online marketplace, technical/business know-how and requisite business tools (e.g. inventory management, promotions, multiple fulfillment options, etc.) to make it easy for merchants to create effective online storefronts without any economic risk or mandatory monthly fees. This enables local businesses to expand their customer reach, reward & retain their best customers and grow awareness and reconnect with their neighborhood customers.

On the other hand, mohchi provides consumers unprecedented ability to search for and fulfill products sold by their neighborhood businesses without the need to purchase online, pay for shipping or wait for delivery.

mohchi does not provide gimmicky or value-destructive services to our merchants or their customers. Our services are intended specifically to augment and extend existing business capabilities and to help them effectively leverage the internet to better compete with online competitors.

mohchi bridges the online and offline worlds in order to provide consumers a seamless and consistent online commercial experience by providing transparency on the products sold by their own local, brick-and-mortar merchants. For businesses, mohchi provides a common marketplace where consumers can discover businesses and their distinctive products from a centralized online destination without enduring the pain of manual research. All while providing the convenience of local, immediate fulfillment.

Please visit us again soon for more updates and feel free to contact us to find out more.

Why Custom Designed Websites Are Absolutely Wrong for Small Businesses

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 11:38:00 -0500

…when done for the wrong reasons. There was an editorial piece posted on Inc. yesterday entitled, “Your Homemade Website Isn’t Cutting It Anymore” on the topic of small businesses and their approach to building websites, particularly, e-commerce enabled sites.

Under the pretense that he has small business interests in mind, the author, Jon Gelberg, proceeds to expound upon his notion that if small businesses wish to get on the web and conduct e-commerce, they need to stop building their own websites. Later, in the middle of the advertorial, he reveals a disappointingly irreconcilable conflict of interest—that he’s actually a shill, a representative of a custom website development firm that offers services to large, multinational corporations.

The key points he uses to support his marketing pitch are that i) building an e-commerce site 10 years ago was an expensive proposition and that you had to hire an outside firm to do so; ii) today, businesses have open-source (i.e. free) alternatives to build complex e-commerce sites; and iii) despite these free options, business should stop trying to build their own on the cheap and, instead, pay an outside firm like his to build a fully custom site for their small business. Huh? In other words, nothing’s changed in the last 10 years from their perspective and, as a business owner, you should simply ignore modern alternatives.

The piece is disingenuous on its face and attempts to frame the author’s position as objective and in the best interests of small businesses when, in fact, he’s peddling his firm’s services. Their custom development model works fine with their core market segment (large multinationals who already have brand recognition), but is ill-suited to dealing with a completely fragmented market of small businesses, which, when taken individually, lack meaningful marketing clout and consumer recognition to drive traffic once their custom site’s been created.

In order to hammer home baseless fears into business owners so that his own firm’s costs and services seem reasonable in comparison, he proceeds to make overstated claims about what small businesses require in order to implement their own e-commerce sites:

a team of at least 6 people:
- information architect
- designer
- front-end coder
- back-end developer
- quality assurance expert
- a project manager
but, he says, you need the “right design team” (and given what he subsequently describes, he means you need to find a team that provides services like his firm)
then, the design process starts with a planning phase
followed by a design stage
then, front and back-end coding begins
oh, and then, by the way, you need to drive traffic to your isolated island of a website with “sound marketing strategies” which he conveniently fails to explain, likely because that’s the biggest, and unsolvable, problem with their bespoke approach

Few, if any, small business would (or should) ever undertake the unnecessarily pedantic efforts he suggests are required, but that’s exactly the point—they’re not; it’s an alarmist and unrealistic scenario created to engender fear and drive unsuspecting, un-tech-savvy small business owners to firms like his. The article, ultimately, is nothing more than a less-than-subtle advertisement that uses unsubstantiated FUD as the hook.

Large web development firms whose primary focus is large corporations don’t typically understand small businesses or their specific challenges vis-a-vis e-commerce; and just because such firm has a list of recognized corporate clients doesn’t mean they know how to help small businesses implement effective e-commerce sites.

What works for large, established corporations doesn’t necessarily work for small businesses and the solutions for one are not fungible with the other. It’s like fitting a square peg in a round hole.

mohchi is Proudly Made In NYC

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 11:34:00 -0500

mohchi is proudly engineered in NYC by New Yorkers.

This logo was created with the Gotham Bold and Ultra typefaces (which seem particularly appropriate for the task) and has been released under a Creative Commons license per below. If you use this logo (or want a higher quality version), please drop us a note.

“Made in NYC” by mohchi inc. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Fixing The Local Online Commerce Model

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 09:45:00 -0500

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
~ Albert Einstein

Small businesses and e-commerce have not traditionally mixed well due to a number of pervasive factors which remain virtually unchanged, up to this day. Existing e-commerce and web “solutions” for small businesses repeat well-worn, yet ineffective models, even if they look superficially different than their spiritual predecessors.

What has become clear over the past several decades of online commerce is that simply possessing a website itself is not at all adequate for generating online commerce without an effective, mutually beneficial ecosystem of businesses, consumers and service providers where every stakeholder gains sustainable value. Most existing solutions fail this basic litmus test as they neglect the needs of one or more of these key links in the commerce chain, typically sacrificing one for another (e.g. sacrificing business value to provide benefit to the provider and consumers). These models are broken and will only become less and less effective over the long term as small businesses begin recognizing these exploitative models which pander to short-term corporate greed.

Small businesses who are serious about venturing into online commerce must shift from a reactionary, tactical view of the web to a strategic, long-term view of how to build sustainable value for their online businesses. There is some need to “let go of the ego,” especially in connection with the misguided desire to possess overly unique/distinctive sites which, as a result, tend to do everything else poorly (e.g. display and marketing of business products, e-commerce transactionality, etc.).

We believe the most effective solution to these problems is solved through virtual consolidation the fragmented small business market under a single umbrella, whereby each business can leverage the power of the whole, yet remain independent and unique.

Rethinking Small Businesses and the Web

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 11:17:00 -0500

Small, local, neighborhood retailers and service providers have long struggled to effectively leverage the web. Week after week, they are chased by one group deal company or another that want businesses to trade in profits for the promise of new, repeat customers. Of course, this usually provides little to no real positive value and, instead, these cost real money and time—things small business owners have little of to spare.

Despite all this attention from various companies, why are small businesses still unable to effectively leverage the web? We have some theories.

Common small business pitfalls:

Deal sites are value destructive, generally speaking: of course there are exceptions to any claim, but the mounting evidence seems clear—most businesses aren’t able to generate an appreciable increase of repeat, regular customers, despite the sacrifice of profits required to create these flash coupon mobs via these deal companies
Decentralizing the online business presence: this happens when businesses don’t have a proper online strategy and, instead, choose to spread their business information across innumerable sites (Yelp, Groupon, CitySearch, etc.) in the hopes that low-quality content volume is a satisfactory substitute for having a proper business website of their own; it’s not.
Implementing a custom website: we all like to have our own personalized things, but, unfortunately, a lot of businesses end up with potentially confusing and inconsistently designed websites that end up looking unfinished/unpolished. In addition, this is often a very costly route and may not return on investments.
Implementing a custom software e-commerce platform: needless to say, these solutions are far too complex for small businesses and require fulltime staff of developers and designers to fully exploit such solutions.
Paying for low-value websites: paying repeating subscription fees for trivial “one-page” “business profile” sites is money wasted. If you have a real business, these sorts of sites are decidedly unprofessional and lack the most basic commerce and business capabilities. Furthermore, the value these sites claim to provide can easily be replicated on a free service at no additional cost or effort.
Lack of online reputation control: due to sites like Yelp (and various other review sites), businesses have started to lose control, often unfairly due to malicious competitors, of their online reputations. In the absence of an official business website, these 3rd-party services become the de-facto consumer-facing facade for businesses.

At the end of all that, small businesses still don’t have their products/services online for search and, therefore, remain outsiders to the exploding world of e-commerce. If you’re a brick-and-mortar business, isn’t it important to not only let people find your business, but to also let them transact business with you online? Why only settle for half the equation when you can have both?

“How did we end up in this mess?” you may ask. The sad reality is that companies have not attempted to build products that actually provide small businesses tangible value, instead, they’ve focused on questionable/unsustainable business models (pyramid schemes, group coupons, etc.) that provide value to their own companies, but not to the small businesses they claim to serve.

What steps can small businesses undertake to take control online?

Consolidate your online presence: in other words, stop spreading yourself thin; eliminate, delete and consolidate the myriad of ineffective online accounts that have provided little to no measurable value and concentrate on the handful of platforms/services that actually help. No potential customer wants to digest fragmented business information across multiple sites.
Be professional online: in the context of e-commerce, it’s infinitely more important to convey a sense of professionalism and trust rather than demanding a totally unique site that’s unable to engender trust from potential customers.
Be professional offline: in order to compete with low-cost online competitors, small businesses must make the additional effort of engaging and cultivating their customers so that they return, even if they’re paying a slightly higher cost with your physical business than they’d be charged with an online competitor. Act quickly to service customer needs, mitigate complaints and incorporate good suggestions.
Understand the motivations of those purveying internet services to your small business: let’s be honest—most internet companies don’t have your best interests in mind, and never will. Such companies try to push their idea of products onto small businesses without regard for whether they actually provide value. Make sure that your service provider wants to help small businesses and that they are structurally aligned with your goals.
Be prepared to pay for value: we all know nothing worth having in life is ever free. This is also true for small business e-commerce. As a business owner, this fact shouldn’t come as any surprise especially if the value is real and greater than the value invested.

Feel free to contact us at info [at] mohchi.com to find out how mohchi can help solve these problems for your small business.