MI Pro

It was as an aspiring musician that Mark Pitchforth and his software developer colleague Russell Dudley discovered a knack for e-commerce that would eventually lead to the birth of Edoru, a company that offers the confused MI retailer with an eye on the internet the answer to all his prayers.

“We’ve been doing e-commerce for nine years now,” says Pitchforth. “It started off when I realised I wasn’t going to make it as a pro musician, and decided to look elsewhere. I started in web development as a way to help promote bands, and it turned out I was better at it than actually being in a band. We had the idea to set up Proloops, which sells loops and samples online.

"As well as working as an archive, Proloops is also a shopping cart system for over 15,000 products, so we’ve had to develop e-commerce software that’s capable of providing this service for people across the world on a 24-hour basis. At the time, we didn’t think of it like that, we thought we were trying to make a living as musicians. It was then that we realised although that’s what we were trying to do, we’d built a massive e-commerce system handling all these products.”

The happy accident that led to the realisation that many MI retailers could really do with a hand getting a fully functional e-commerce website up and running saw Pitchforth and Dudley getting to work on a system that would make the internet less of a scary place for those of us who know nothing about computer wizardry, without breaking the bank.

“A good website is expensive, a good couple of thousand pounds for a bespoke system on average,” continues Pitchforth. “For an independent retailer who wants to go online with their business, it can be cost prohibitive. So, for the last couple of years in conjunction with a couple of MI businesses we’ve worked to develop Storeware. Storeware is a fully featured e-commerce template based system.

"It costs £249 to set up, you get a free .co.uk domain name, and essentially in the amount of time it takes to put products up there, a retailer can be trading online. It’s fully editable, and has all the features that a business needs to get online and get trading. There’s no long-term contract with the system, unlike a number of similar products which you need to sign up to a minimum 12 month contact; ours is a 30 day rolling contract, £25 a month and if retailers don’t want to continue with it, there’s no problems.

"You automatically get inclusion on the Proloops directory, so there’s access to a lot of music specific traffic. It’s also fully PayPal integrated, so you don’t have to worry about setting up merchant accounts or secure payment, as PayPal takes care of it all. It’s a way of taking a little bit of the fear out of getting online, and it also means that stores can have a professional, easy to navigate and use site that will represent them well.”

An ex-Freestyle employee of six years standing, Pitchforth knows all about the problems encountered within the industry, and has with Storeware come up with a viable, easy to use solution to one of the biggest problems dogging independent retail across the UK.

Check out www.storeware.co.uk, or for information on Edoru and the Storeware system, visit www.edoru.co.uk. Mention MI Pro and receive a ten per cent discount on your Storeware set up…