Find out more about this interesting shop in the following interview with director Tony J. Namdar.

What is the idea behind your online store?
The idea is to create an online rug store which offers a huge choice by archiving the rugs and carpets of wholesalers worldwide into one database with user friendly access for everyone.

When did you start your online store?
The online store exists as the B2B version since 1997, as B2C since 2005.

I joined my father’s company in Hamburg/Germany after university. Hamburg and London are two of the main locations for Oriental carpet importers worldwide. Our main activity was to find the right carpets for retailers and wholesalers from overseas. Mainly this was done “in bulk” i.e. our customers were looking to buy several hundred square meters of oriental carpets and rugs each time. Often there were inquiries for certain oversized rugs – large than 3 x 4 meters – in certain colors from certain provenances etc. Eventually, I made it my mission to archive these rare rugs in an in-house database, in order to offer them to our clients quickly without having to search for them. This database has grown rapidly and was made available online. Initially only for retail customers, then increasingly for private use. The database was later expanded to include all types of carpets.

In this way we provide carpets directly from the importer to private customers at low prices and the customers can subsequently browse the stock of thousands of wholesalers worldwide.

How important is the UK and the international market for you?
Since the business started off in Germany, our main clientele is still there. However since opening our office in London our business within the UK has grown rapidly. The USA is an important market for us as well because we have the world’s largest choice of large and oversized oriental rugs and the USA are the biggest market for large rugs.

Which shop-system are you currently using?
We had it custom made for our purposes. It was not possible to “weave” the special characteristics and categories of rugs into a standard shop system.

Which payment systems does your shop offer?
We currently accept credit card payment for MasterCard, Visa and Diners Club. We are planning to accept American Express, PayPal and direct debit.

What are the advantages of your online shop against a high street store?
The first and most important advantage is the unbeatable choice. With a powerful online database browsing the products and finding the right carpet is much quicker and easier than finding a rug in any high street store. Lastly we can offer lower prices by not having to keep a stock of thousands of rugs, all made possible by the world wide web.

Does your store have any special features or functions?
The sheer number of criteria by which rugs can be searched on our website is the main functional advantage we have over our competitors. You will not find another website that covers all of these criteria including whether the carpet should have an allover design or a medallion, whether it should have a Mahi or Bukhara design, whether it should be new or antique (down to 20 years accuracy). All this is made possible by a sophisticated database, and the meticulous categorization of each rug.

Which special services do you offer?
Each rug is described in detail including the history of each rug origin/provenance and its special characteristics. We try to describe each rug and its condition (in case of used antique rugs) as honestly as possible.

For special requests, we also offer a comprehensive service. We are often asked whether we can make an assessment of the value for money performance of certain carpets. We do this gladly and objectively. One important reason being that due to our business concept of not having our own stock we are objective and not under any pressure to sell specific rugs which have been in stock for a longer time because wholesalers keep the stock for us. Nor are we motivated to sell rugs with a lower purchase price and therefore higher profit because our markup percentage is the same with each carpet. Therefore truly objective advice and guidance is possible, by the nature of our business in a way.

Customer phone service goes far beyond normal business hours, simply because our phone system automatically transfers calls to the mobile phones of our employees who can access all carpet data via a special technique on their mobile phones. E-Mails are answered within 20 minutes, mostly quicker, also beyond normal business hours (the Blackberry makes it happen).

What measures have you taken to increase consumer confidence?
First and foremost becoming a member of Trusted Shops was an important measure which is basically like the MOT for online shops. Another very important step was to grant our customers free shipping within the entire European Union and within the USA. Lastly our customers have full right of return without any shipping costs involved.

Which recommendations would you give to other e-tailers?
Find a niche of difficult to find products and invest in usability of your website and in good customer service.

What are your plans for the future?
I am currently working on a completely new design of our website under a new domain which covers modern rugs as well as oriental rugs.

What is your favourite online-shop as a consumer?
That is easy, amazon.co.uk. They are always my first stop when I want to buy something online.

To find out more about this shop go to oriental-carpets.com or have a look at the shop’s profile at Trusted Shops.

Learn more about the Market Ready Package Germany.

The Germany ready package is the largest free available extension for Magento, and it is a part of symmetrics SaaS platform for sophisticated e-commerce solutions. This release by symmetrics in close cooperation with Trusted Shops is an important contribution to the community and it is actively working on the dissemination of Magento on the German market.

The backround

Magento out of the box, configured as a universal and international product for shops of any size on the German market is not easy to handle. It takes time and requires expertise in the countless configuration steps. To help with these processes the missing valuable modules, as well as the valuable theme of the legal security symmetrics decided to launch a part of the SaaS configuration in this package. Symmetrics not only hope to inspire significantly more dealers for Magento, but also to improve the professionalism among developers, agencies and partners to drive forward the permanent standard tasks. They permanently carry out standard tasks and now they can automated solve it through the package.

A B2B package for the Magento Enterprise Edition and interfaces to more leading e-commerce services are in progress.

Here are some of the changes which are made by the localization package:

1. Creation and adaptation of information pages for supplier marking (imprint, terms, disclaimer, shipping, payment types, data protection), and filling the pages with variables from the centralized Imprint module
2. Standard configuration of the entire store for the German market (customer groups, rates, date formats, VAT rates, currencies, daily settings, basic store configurations, display of cart items, etc..)
3. Involvement of meaningful and easy to find links to information pages
4. Centralized management of all data in the new imprint module
5. Displaying and linking the price of components and additional costs incurred (including 19 percent VAT, plus shipping) to the necessary authorities
6. Optimization of orders (indication of delivery time and shipping weight, ad inventory through traffic light function)
7. Adaptation of the information in the order process and invoicing and others by a new accounting module
8. Relative SEO and options of performance
9. Distance warning from endangered formulations Shop and e-mail templates and delivery patterns of German texts (Must be the pattern with their own and replace variables in the texts of the imprint module)
10. Integration of the current German Language Pack with extensions
11. Numerous other optimizations, in particular to reduce the risk of a legal warning

With immediate effect the German localization package for Magento Commerce is ready for free (OSL 3.0 license) download for all interested parties on Magento connect.

Find out more about this subject in the following post.

Part one of this article gave an overview of the status quo in mobile commerce. Lets get into detail and have a look at some companies that have successfully integrated mobile commerce into their platforms.

Examples for todays mobile shopping platforms

Some companies already offer mobile shopping versions of their websites that were optimized so they can be displayed and used with the most common mobile phones. Popular platforms like amazon.com, otto.de and billiger.de use simplified versions of their websites that don’t contain long texts, graphics and unnecessary features.

Especially price comparison sites that offer this kind of service for mobile devices can be very useful for online shoppers as they allow comparing the prices of a high street store and of hundreds of online-shop right on the spot. The shop-system Magento has already implemented such templates and the others will hopefully follow soon with their solutions. In addition to the mobile websites that work on the mobile browsers the renowned smartphone producers have started making available platforms for the development of own applications that work as independent programs. Amazon for example has developed an application lately that is available in Apple’s Appstore as well as in the Blackberry Application centre. The application provides the customers with full access to their personal choice of products and also offers a unique 1-click check-out-process that will be hard to beat. A special feature of the application is the camera of the mobile device into the shopping process.

Think of a scenario like this:

“You take a photo of the shoes of the person sitting next  to you in the subway upload it into amazon’s application which will then display an offer for exactly that pair or a comparable of pair of sneakers. I think this example shows the potential of mobile commerce.

Advantages of native applications

The special requirements of mobile shopping that I’ve mentioned above currently means that mobile internet is used mainly for communication- and information purposes. The moment all the technical problems are solved and a one-click shopping experience is possible there will be a considerable growth in mobile commerce. Native applications of different providers especially the Android-developer-community will hopefully improve mobile online-shopping in the near future.

A good example in this context is Apple’s appstore, a native application on the iPhone which enables customers to buy, download and automatically install programs with just a few clicks. The payment process is easy but you have to be a registered iTunes user. Another new feature will be the integration of a shopping function into the new 3.0 iPhone software which allows developers and users to sell their products directly. This new function could become interesting for other platforms and online-shops. But this could also be a good chance for suppliers of shopsoftware that could provide their cusomers with a mobile version of their software through this channel.

The future of mobile shopping

The use of mobile commerce highly depends on the industry sector. Especially in mobile ticketing mobile commerce seems to be working quite well already. There are numerous solutions available that allow ordering train-tickets or the reservation of hotel rooms with a mobile device.

If you take a look at the shopping experience for daily goods you’ll find some successfully implementeed functions . Another example from the Appstore shows that there are already a lot of shopping list applications. Here the user can create shopping lists and the program will find the closest store with the best price for the chosen products.

The well known product recommendation function works well for mobile commerce, too. Think of the following scenario:

You enter your favourite clothes-store and the smart-phone recognizes the store and immediately shows the products that you’ve bought the last time. According to this choice it can now start showing similar products or special offers in this sector which are available in your size. So the smartphone could lead you trough the store constantly giving personalized recommendations. If it is a barcode scanner, products-upload or a RFID connector, there will be various possibilities how offline products can be transferred to the online world to use the endless functions offered here and to increase the offline shopping experience. The best successful example is mobile price comparison.

1. www.comscore.com
2. www.magentocommerce.com
3. www.ecc-handel.de
4. appshopper.com
5. mashable.com
6. www.bahn.de

Click here for the German version of this article in the shopbetreiberblog.

Are there already any success stories in mobile commerce?

This is the first of two posts around the subject of mobile commerce. In the following article Hendrik Lennarz e-commerce technology expert at Trusted Shops is giving an overview of the current situation in mobile shopping:

Whether you are on holidays at a family meeting or in your favourite restaurant it’s always very handy to be able to check your e-mail or have a look at an interesting eBay auction you’re bidding on.

The mobile internet has grown up

Because of the very fast transfer rates at affordable rates latest generation mobile phones play an important part as a channel for transactions and information in the daily life of many people. Consumer have constant access to price comparison sites and sites with product details of online-shops. The hardware sector today is still dominated by Apple’s iPhone but encouraged by google’s new mobile operating system the competitors are introducing their own models to the market. This competition on the market will result in falling prices for mobile devices which will further penetrate the market. A study conducted by comscore affirms this development. Compared to january 2008 the number of mobile internet users has nearly doubled in 2009.

Mobile commerce is just a question of the technical development

The way that e-retailers can profit from this development today is still limited by the technical development. The number of various different devices that all have different requirements for hardware, operating systems, browsers and operating controls still present obstacles to the developers of mobile applications for online-shops. At the same time these new applications require technical but sometimes even conceptual changes to truly improve the usability.

The requirements can be:

1. Adjustments to the screen size
2. Adjustments to Internet browsers
3. Adjustments to the bandwidth
4. providing secure connections
5. integration of payment systems

but also conceptual requirements like:

1. compressing grafics
2. shortening of texts
3. limitation of certain functions and features
4. avoiding unnecessary entry of data
5. shortening of the check-out process

For SMEs implementing mobile commerce into their shops might be too early as the costs of the implementation are high and the number of potential customers still too low to justify these high costs. For some shops like the German Wine Trading platform Hawesko mobile commerce already plays an important role as this company is already receiving up to 50 orders a day via mobile devices.

Click here for the German version of this article in the shopbetreiberblog.

A pre-certification has many benefits for online traders as well as for producers of shop software. This was confirmed by the latest study about shop software solutions. (ECIN eShop Report)

For the access to a new group of buyer’s scepticism and security worries are the major obstacles. Standardized security standards through trustmarks can build sustainable trust and overcome inhibitions.

Around 75 % of the analysed shop systems had already implemented that logic and prepared their systems for an accreditation.

Especially the Trusted Shops trustmark seems to be the standard when it comes to trustmarks. About every second Shop solution was prepared for the accreditation by Trusted Shops.

The following shop software-solutions were pre-certified by Trusted Shops and offer special accreditation conditions for online traders.

1. 1&1 eShop
2. 4sellers
3. abas Webshop
4. aconon® Enterprise-Shop
5. Actebis Peacock
6. AFS-Shop
7. Afterbuy-Shop
8. Applicas Software
9. apt-ebusiness
10. b.com Partnershop
11. BestSELLERS.de
12. blackbit
13. com4shop
14. CosmoShop
15. CP::Shop
16. Cybershop
17. DaVinci Shop
18. ePages
19. es:shop
20. Gambio
21. GEOS Shop
22. GS ShopBuilder
23. Host Europe
24. HotDigital
25. Ingram Micro
26. Interaktiv.net
27. Lycos WebShop
28. Mauve Mailorder
29. Mondo Shop
30. My-eShop
31. netclusive
32. omeco webshop
33. OXID eShop
34. plentyShop
35. Powergap
36. PX-Webshop
37. Sage GS-Shop
38. shop to date
39. Shopware
40. SmartStore.biz
41. Sonepar eas-y
42. store systems
43. STRATO Shop
44. T-Home Shops
45. T-Online Business
46. TRUITION
47. vioneSHOP
48. WEBSALE
49. WEBSHOPVISION
50. xanario
51. XoniC-Webshop
52. xt:Commerce

What is Unitedprint.co.uk?
Unitedprint.com is a Europe-wide association of online print shops and unitedprint.co.uk is a full subsidiary.

Why did you decide to start an e-commerce business?
The aim of making printed products easily available for the general public.

When did your shop open?
Unitedprint.co.uk was opened on the 9th of March 2007 and our first shop (print24.co.uk) was launched on the 1st of July, 2006.

How did you start setting up your online shop?
We programmed the system ourselves. This way the conditions perfectly fit our needs and, essentially, the needs of our customers.

What are the advantages of your online shop against a high street store?
Our advantages against a conventional print shop are the easy and straight-forward handling, the price and our employees’ professionalism.

Are you working full time?
We are working full time for our online shop.

Which payment systems do you offer?
We offer Advanced Payment, Cash On Delivery, Credit Card, Paypal and Debit Card.

Where are your customers located?
unitedprint.co.uk primarily appeals to business customers, such as advertising agencies, graphic designers, printers and event organizers. But even if you are not an expert in printing you can use our freedesign tool on the website to create your own flyers, business cards and much more.

What did you do to increase the visibility of your shop?
Our marketing activities are focused on search engines and affiliate marketing. Besides we are conducting a direct marketing campaign at the moment.

What are your plans for the next months?
It is our primary goal to increase our customers’ confidence in us and to deploy the given resources ideally.

Customers can design their own brochures, business cards, letterheads etc. with the help of this configurator.

What have you done to increase consumer confidence?
We consider the following features in all our actions:

• Top quality – controlled production with up-to-date technology
• Fair price – best price offers inclusive – no hidden costs
• Promptness
• Satisfaction guarantee – trust and security
• Highly recommended helpdesk and service.

If you want more information click here for the Shop or take a look at the Shop profile at Trusted Shops.

What is Tailerstore.co.uk?
tailorstore.co.uk is the web shop of Tailor Store Sweden AB for our customers from the United Kingdom. The aim of this web shop is to provide a tailor made offer to customers from the UK.

Why did you decide to start an e-commerce business?
The big advantage of doing e-commerce is to be able to reach a huge amount of potential customers. A web shop makes it also easy for the customer to do shopping from a familiar environment like the living room and avoid all the stress that comes along with going shopping in stores like finding a parking space or fighting yourself through a crowd of people in the shopping mall. On the other hand we can offer our products cheaper as we do not have those high costs for rent and clerks. This assures a big competitive advantage.

When did your shop open?
Tailor Store started its online business in the 1st quarter of 2004 but at that time under the name “Tailor Shirts”.

How did you start setting up your online shop?
Our online shop is a self development. The current online shop is the 3rd version with a much better user interface, more choices and flexibility.

What are the advantages of your online shop against a high street store?
As mentioned earlier, our customers can get their highly individualized shirts from Tailor Store with some clicks from their couch at home. With Tailor Store it’s even fun to spend money online. Just look at the shirt designer interface which is very easy to use. We also try to design the order processing as transparent as possible. The customer can at any time go to our online shop, log in and check the order status to see if the order was approved by us after checking measurements or if the shirts were already produced. The biggest advantage will always be the price. To get a comparable product in a store the customer would have to spend at least double as much money.

Are you working full time?
Everybody employed at Tailor Store is working full time.

Which payment systems do you offer?
Tailor Store proposes credit card payments. When a customer pays by credit card his order is directly marked as paid. This decreases the lead time as we do not need to wait for the payment to arrive. Besides that, Tailor Store does not charge extra for credit card payments. Other payment alternatives for our UK customers are ClickandBuy and PayPal.

Where are your customers located?
Our main target group are people with knowledge about online shopping. We put our focus on males between 20 and 60 who need to wear shirts on the job. Other segments include males who like to wear shirts in their free time and females.

What did you do to increase the visibility of your shop?
We have taken several steps to optimize our online shop for search engines like Google. We are also investing in Google AdWords and try to put more emphasis on banner advertisement.

With the store’s Shirtdesigner you can customize and design your own shirts choosing from a big variety of colours, fabrics and cuts.

What have you done to increase consumer confidence?
We believe that giving the customer as much information as possible is crucial to build up confidence. Our online shop contains many pages with information about our products, our service and who we are. Last but not least we are convinced that a short response time on customer inquiries is a must.

What are your plans for the next months?
We are planning to extend our production capacities to be able to deliver our products even faster. Our main product the tailor made shirt will soon get optional embroidery and we will launch a new product: the tailor made piqué shirt.
For more information click here or go to the Trusted Shops Profile of Tailor Store.

What is Bombero?
Bombero are retailers of contemporary interior accessories, gifts, furniture and lighting – a collection that includes designs from Europe’s most innovative manufacturers and most talented designers. Our aim is to give our customers the best product design, product quality and customer service available, both in our hight street store in Bangor (Northern Ireland) and online shop. We always try to make shopping with us a completely enjoyable experience.

Why did you decide to start an e-commerce business?
By the end of 2005 we were trading very successfully from our high street shop and we were looking for ways to take us to the next level in our development. To grow, we knew we needed to reach a broader customer base than we could from our high street store alone. We began seriously to consider trading from an online shop.

When did your shop open?
Our high street store opened in November 2003 and our online shop in May 2006.

How did you start setting up your online shop?
We identified the ISP and an online shop software package that we felt met our needs in terms of cost, reliability and ease of use. We didn’t want a huge capital outlay and we wanted software that we could manage ourselves. By May 2006 our online shop based on epages was opened and we were receiving orders.

What are the advantages of your online shop against a high street store?
Together, our online shop and our high street store have been a great success. Many of the costs and skills are shared by both: The same stock and warehouse space service both , the same staff operate both, so skills learned in one can be used in both. The enormous benefit of online trading is 24-hour opening: our online shop is always open. We can receive orders at anytime and process them during normal working hours.

Which payment systems do you offer?
Our online payments are processed through WorldPay and PayPal.

Where are your customers located?
Our customers are mainly based in the UK and Ireland.

What did you do to increase the visibility of your shop?
We promote our website in local newspapers and magazines. Advertise on search engines and sell on shopping comparison sites. We encourage suppliers and others to create links to our site.

What have you done to increase consumer confidence?
Consumer confidence is fundamental to online trading, which is why we sought Trusted Shops accreditation. We also try to reassure our customers by having clear and constructive terms and conditions.

What are your plans for the next months?
We plan to refine and improve our offer, bringing new and exciting designs to our collection and delivering the best possible customer service.

For more information Check out the store or have a look at the Shopprofile at Trusted Shops.