Back in 2000, my wife and I decided to have children. Part of our plan was for Holly to stay at home to care for our children, at least while they were young. However, she still wanted to earn a side income, so she decided to try her hand on this new website called “eBay”.
Holly started by selling the children’s clothes on eBay, and later branched out into selling handmade items. Eventually, she was selling thousands of dollars of merchandise, procured through a variety of partners and distribution networks. Her “side job” was quickly turning in to a successful small business, but eBay was becoming more and more popular and competitive for smaller sellers. Holly realized that to continue to be successful and yet still have time to spend with our children, now toddlers, she would need to strengthen her brand and make it easier to manage all of her sales channels. So after a romantic dinner consisting of mac and cheese, gold fish, and sippy cups, she turned to me and asked “Honey, will you help me build a website?”.
Having an engineer’s mentality, I said, “Sure, I can solve this problem with an online store”. However, we quickly discovered that introducing a new online store created an entirely new set of issues…keeping inventory in synch across multiple sites was a huge challenge, and making sure each listing had the best descriptions, images, and templates took a tremendous amount of time. To make things even more complicated, every time we added a new sales channel, we were forced to learn an entirely new admin panel and back office system to process our orders.
There were simply not enough hours in the day for us to manage all these independent websites and web stores, and this “part time” side business threatened to consume us if we didn’t find a better way! So with my Engineer hat on, we went back to work building a tool to address these challenges. In early 2003, the first version of our new tool AuctionBlox was born/launched.
AuctionBlox was crafted through our own personal experiences, and from the input of hundreds of other merchants selling online who were facing the same challenges. Over the years, we’ve worked closely with our customers to make sure that the platform continues to adapt as online eCommerce channels have changed. We’ve traveled around the globe, listening to our customers input and requests to help them “keep it simple”.
Our name has changed over time, our children are now entering college, and there are now more online sales channels than ever before. But we remain steadfast in our commitment to listening to our customers, building great solutions, and making it easier for our customers to “Sell Everywhere” online.
If you’re considering solutions to help you sell on multiple online channels, we hope you’ll give us a call and consider trying Sellware!
Sincerely,
Anthony Musselwhite
