"Discover the secrets to generating BRAND NEW BUSINESS online for your office products dealership

... cutting edge solution delivered with all the tools you need to generate a steady stream of NEW CUSTOMERS"

Dear Friend,

Being ex office products dealer ourselves, we understand how stressful it can be running a modern office products dealership. The daily effort to find new business and retain existing customers is relentless. With pressure on margins, and the constant threat from the big box players, it's never been more challenging to be an independent office products dealer.

Read on to find out more about who we are, and how we help office products dealers differentiate themselves from the competition, and generate more customers.

A Bit About Us

My name is Patrick Donnelly, and the company is Evolution-Connect Ltd. Before getting involved in the software business, I'd been working in office products dealerships for 10 years. The dealers i worked with were guys that I would refer to as "digital dealers", guys who were very much at the forefront of what was happening in ecommerce and electronic trading.

I learned very quickly in these roles the techniques and the strategies used to make office products websites bill money. I've taken the knowledge gained in these roles, and together with an amazing team of people, spent the last 2 years developing, what i would suggest to you, is the best office products ordering platforms available anywhere.

When setting up Evolution, i did my homework. I was clear to me that most dealers had a solution that they used to trade more efficiently with their existing customers, a B2B solution. This solution was typically purchased from the wholesaler, back office provider, or the dealer group.

Having researched all these products, I made a few observations. The first thing I noticed is that most of these products, although very functional, were aggressively ugly. Most of them were using old fashioned list and link user interfaces, and to my mind, were very difficult and clumsy to use. Other observations made, were that almost all of them were a disaster from a search engine optimisation viewpoint, and relied on a specific backoffice solution or a specific wholesaler catalogue to function, no real independence, or data portability.

I deduced from this that these products had amazing functionality, however were not designed to get new business, just help you deal with the stuff you've already got.

On the B2C side you had the odd dealer who had commissioned a third party developer to build them, what I'll refer to, as a consumer website. These sites looked great and had more of an appeal to search engines, however were very limited in their ability to cope with the specialist discounting methods, catalogue and user management scenarios that are unique to the office products industry, ipso fact, less functional that the B2B website.

Having done this analysis, I started to ask myself the following. Why do you need to have two websites? Why can't you have one site, that looks and feels like Tesco.com, Amazon and Itunes, that has all the B2B functionality such as budget controls, authorisation tools, matrix pricing etc... that you need to get by in the office products industry.

We started development of our software almost 2 years ago, and as I write this, have 76 independent dealers in the UK using our web stores. Our customer list reads like the who's who of the products industry, please see below a selection of our customers and some amazing testimonials.

The 3 Key Factors That Make a Great Ecommerce Solution

Look & Feel

The best way to understand the importance of the look and feel of a website is to analyse your own behaviour as a buyer. What are the kind of websites you use to purchase things out with work, and how does the look and feel of those sites differ to the traditional B2B platforms in this industry.

If you're like most people, you'll use websites like Tesco and Amazon to purchase goods and services, this is because these website look great, work great, and are just a nice place to be. We adopt all these principles when designing our web stores, the result is that they look modern, all important information is easily accessible from the homepage, and again, there just "a nice place to be".

Data & Functionality

You can have the best looking website in the world, however if the data is rubbish, then few customer will use it. You and I both understand what a Q Conn Env DL S/S is, however to the person 300 miles away on the end of an internet connection waving their credit card at you, it means nothing.

We take great care to enhance all our descriptions, and where available, highlight link sells, alternatives, and recycled alternatives, this gives the customers access to meaningful data and helps them make purchasing decisions faster.

Office products is a very specialist market, with very bespoke functionality required. The ability to...

• Bespoke price each account
• Manage cost centres
• Manage users
• Manage departments
• Manage budget controls
• Manage addresses
• Integrate with backoffice systems

...are basic requirements, in no other industry will you find this much control and flexibility as standard. The Evolution web stores encompass all this functionality and more to make sure that you can cater for the most intricate customer requirements.

New Business Tool

I think it's nonsensical to provide someone with a website, and not any tools to make it bill any money. All our web stores come with amazing functionality baked in, that help you generate traffic, repeat orders, increased order values, and allow you to market to and laser target your hottest prospects.

Please see below a small selection of our suite of new business tools.

Rewards Scheme

On a per customer basis, you can decide how many pounds equal how many reward points, and opt people in and out of the rewards scheme. Rewards points can be redeem against product that you define, and are a great way of increasing customer loyalty and repeat business.

Price Feeds

All products on the site, street priced, can be exported to a number of different price comparison engines including Froogle, Kelkoo, Pricerunner, BizRate and shopping.com. This is a great way of creating instant sales opportunities, creating links, and driving qualified traffic to your web store.

Discount Codes

Create discount codes, define what those discount codes mean, and email them to your customers. An example of this would be...

"I'm going to create a discount code that gives a 10% discount off all orders between 60-100 pounds; the discount code can be used 250 times, however not more than once by the same person."

This is a great way of keeping your existing customer coming back for more, more often!

Email Marketing Tool

This tool has two sides to it. The first side is "what are you going to send" and the second side is "who are you going to send it to".

Email promotions can be created using the built in WYSIWYG editor, or alternatively, you can upload promotions from wholesalers, manufacturers and dealer groups, and simply send these to your customers.

As the email marketing tool is baked into the software, there is no need to export addresses to and from it, it's constantly looking at the registered user base on your web store. Consequently, it gives you the flexibility to make some decisions about who you are going to send your email to. You can filter by customer type (Surfer / Account), location, company name etc... to generate the required list of recipients that are perfect for your promotion.

OK I'VE HEARD ENOUGH, WHAT NOW?

We want you to do two things

Go and view our dedicated testimonials page, remember, these are real people who took the time to write to us and express their gratitude for a great piece of software. After your finished reading our testimonials then...

Go to our contact us page and request a demonstration of our software. We look forward to speaking to you soon.

Good Luck!

Patrick Donnelly
Managing Director
Evolution-Connect Ltd