The better way to sell online

Quick Q&A session with Steffan Klein

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You may recently have noticed that your GlobeCharge account has been re-branded as ShopFactory Total Care. This is an indication of the future strategic developments of ShopFactory.

You may recently have noticed that your GlobeCharge account has been re-branded as ShopFactory Total Care. This is an indication of the future strategic developments of ShopFactory.

To let you know more about where this is going, we had a quick Q&A session with Steffan Klein, one of the founders of ShopFactory, who is in charge of development.

Can you tell us about ShopFactory Total Care's general background?

Steffan Klein: ShopFactory has been continuously developed since 1995 and it has always been designed to make ecommerce fast and easy for non-programmers. In its early years ShopFactory was just a software package — lacking many of the services of today’s solution, such as vouchers, reseller management, online order management, selling of digital goods, fraud protection and so on.

However these services are extremely important, if you want to be successful in today’s environment. So we have over the years introduced many of these services under the GlobeCharge brand. But really they are part of ShopFactory, and this has caused some confusion among our customers. To alleviate this confusion we changed the branding for all these services to ShopFactory Total Care to make clear that they are a part of ShopFactory.

The GlobeCharge brand is now being used for the secure check-out process, as this provides a better branding for a secure checkout process than ShopFactory.

How do you access ShopFactory Total Care services?

Steffan Klein: "All the ShopFactory Total care services are hosted by us. This has the advantage that we can more easily maintain them and that they are always accessible from anywhere in the world to our customers. It also allows us to extend the functionality of ShopFactory way beyond what would be possible with a normal software package which runs on your desktop.

If you provide an eCommerce solution as powerful as ShopFactory as desktop software, it is important that you back it up with powerful services. That’s what we have done with ShopFactory Total Care."

What are ShopFactory Total care's biggest strengths?

Steffan Klein: "ShopFactory’s biggest strength is that it allows you to build your store on your local Windows computer. You build your shop directly on your desktop — which is much faster and less frustrating than building and maintaining your shop on the Internet.

ShopFactory shops then use a client-side shopping cart which runs directly on the computers of your customers — which makes buying considerably faster than for customers and as a result converts more website visitors into paying customers. By the way this uses the same technology Google now uses for many of its services.

One of the strong points of Total Care is its ability to extend the functionality of ShopFactory shops to convert even more customers into buyers. A simple example is a 'reward voucher', which can be sent automatically to customers as a 'thank you' for making a purchase. It can be used by them the next time they make a purchase, ensuring customers will return and spend more.

Another strong point of Total Care is the ability to manage orders and customers online from anywhere in the world.

A big advantage if you rent Total Care is also, that you get upgrades to new versions of ShopFactory for free. This means you are always up to date with your software and have the benefits of all the online services.

What plans do you have for future development?

Steffan Klein: "All our development is based on market needs, research and feedback. As the market changes we react by improving, developing and implementing new features on a regular and ongoing basis. Our current development plans are to provide support for a broader range of new platforms including mobile phones.

Another development focus is on more after-sales order management tools and customer relationship management (CRM) features."

What advantage does ShopFactory Total care offer to a ShopFactory user who has a shop created with an older version of ShopFactory?

Steffan Klein: "With ShopFactory Total Care you can build and maintain your shop on as many computers as you want. If you have an established store which was built with an old version of ShopFactory on your own computer, you will be able to increase your sales easily with the modern templates included in ShopFactory, and you will be able to boost sales by using the many additional services. ShopFactory Total Care combines the advantages of building a shop on your own computer with the advantages of hosted services, so that you can combine the best of both worlds."

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