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E-commerce Made E-easy

A ttention, ISOs! Do your merchants just want to be able to drag and drop? Do your merchants want to be free from lengthy leases and complicated contracts? Do your merchants want to pay an all-inclusive, inexpensive monthly fee for all of their e-commerce needs?

If the answer to these questions is "yes," then let GoEmerchant.com present to you the "Amazing, Super Fantastic, No Experience Necessary Buy_Me Button."

All hype aside, this is a story about two individuals who looked at the merchant payment-processing industry, sized it up and put out a product that was developed by listening to merchants. From small beginnings in the basement of a family-owned Philadelphia five-and-dime store, Gary Dvorkin and James Battista, veterans of the computer hardware business, created GoEmerchant.com using what they knew best to provide easy-to-use products at reasonable prices.

The result: the first horizontal and vertical integrated service provider of its kind.

"Our technology was so revolutionary at the time, we were convinced someone would steal it from us, but no one found us," says Dvorkin, the company's CEO.

What exactly is this revolutionary technology? According to Dvorkin, it's all about automation with secure gateways for transaction processing.

"We own it all," says Dvorkin, whose company has both U.S. and international patents on the entire drag-and-drop Buy_Me Button technology process. "We work through several processors, giving merchants more than an Internet store that is brain-dead-easy to set up. We give them an Internet store product, a Buy_Me Button and a Buy_Me Button Creator."

GoEmerchant.com heard merchants lament, "Don't you have anything I can just drop on my Web page?" Dvorkin says, "What we had were merchants telling us what they needed, and we figured out how to fill their need. We're not brilliant. We just developed an information channel and control system.

"Every time we heard something repeated two or three times a day, it was sent to development. If you listen to people in business, what they say is pretty sensible. We are merchant-centric. I don't know of any other companies who can even get the development community on the phone."

Sitting in his office one night, setting up stores and monitoring systems, Dvorkin started playing with the browser with the HTML editor on one side. Pulling objects off the browser and throwing them into the HTML editor, Dvorkin thought, "Why not create an object on the browser, drag it from the browser into the HTML editor and save it on the HTML page, and then post it on the Internet, keeping the button on the page?"

Two and a half weeks later, enter the "Amazing, Super Fantastic, No Experience Necessary Buy_Me Button." Within two weeks, GoEmerchant.com was selling 5 to 1 with the Buy_Me Button. Merchants were able to keep their Web site with its current design and just drop in a button to provide for e- commerce transactions.

But Dvorkin didn't stop there. His next vision was to aggregate GoEmerchant.com's e-commerce solutions and bundle them all, leaping from selling a single product to a bundled e-commerce product set. Sales soared again.

Dvorkin's inspiration continued. Watching transaction reports, seeing the Buy_Me Button stores moving more quickly because of their vertical e- commerce enabled process, Dvorkin asked himself, "What if these people could make an e-mail to all their customers containing a graphic, product description and a Buy_Me Button?"

It would be an efficient way to reach out to customers without having them go to the merchant Web site. CyberCircular was born. An interface through which any merchant could type in their name, upload graphics, build an e- mail and send it to a customer list, GoEmerchant.com's patented CyberCircular sent transactions soaring even higher, giving merchants the advantage of impulse purchasing.

"Our hot product is our E-commerce Total package," Dvorkin says. "With one merchant account, you get an Internet store, the Buy_Me Button Builder and Creator, CyberCircular, a stats package and a financial-management console."

An added plus to the package is that batch transactions are not written in bank language. "We want merchants to understand what they're doing," Dvorkin says. "We make it as simple and easy as possible."

What sets GoEmerchant.com apart from other e-commerce solution providers?

"No one is doing it the way we're doing it," Dvorkin says. "First, they must have the technology and a sales force who know how to sell it. We close better than 36 percent of our inbound sales leads, and we have less than 3 percent attrition. We have taken a lot of time to set up a system that allows our sales people to sell our products. There are other companies that have stores, gateways, etc., but we have it all. We even own our own multiprocessor, certified-transaction gateway."

There is clear-cut appeal to ISOs. Consider the two options GoEmerchant.com offers.

"First, if you are a NOVA guy, you can brand our product, own the merchant account, discount-rate the product and brand it as your own," Dvorkin says. "If you're an NDC reseller, you can do the same thing. We work directly with NOVA and NDC. We also are working with Concord EFS as well."

The second ISO scenario involves simply passing a lead on to GoEmerchant.com and receiving a finder's fee, so to speak. "Send us a lead and we will send you back $265 for each lead closed," says Dvorkin.

For the lead option, the agent clicks over to GoEmerchant.com's Web site and fills out a form. Once it is submitted, the seller automatically creates his or her own reseller site. The agent agrees to a reseller agreement and enters in his or her own information as related to the Web site, creating a Web address to which the ISO can send all business.

"The ISO notifies all their customers that they now have an e-commerce package that has their brand on," Dvorkin says. "Those leads are automatically generated to GoEmerchant.com's sales office. For these transactions, there is no ISO ownership on these merchant accounts, no residuals. But they do get $265 up front."

If ISOs prefer to own the merchant account and receive residuals, that's the GoEmerchant.com "Branded ISO Program."

"We give them a discounted buy rate for the product, and they determine the set-up frees and discount rates," Dvorkin says. "They are basically just buying the product from us wholesale."

ISOs enter their merchant data into GoEmerchant.com's merchant-enrollment process, and GoEmerchant.com handles all technicalities.

"The ISOs own these accounts," Dvorkin says. "GoEmerchant.com ACH's merchants for their piece of the pie."

The catch is that this program is only available to NOVA resellers, NDC resellers and Concord EFS resellers. GoEmerchant.com has 2,700 resellers.

The appeal to merchants, on the other hand, is the "no lease, no contract" aspect of GoEmerchant.com.

"We didn't want merchants signing up without education," says Dvorkin. "No set-up fee meant we wouldn't charge anything. Ours is a virtual-tenancy, at- will program - pay as you go, every month."

The monthly cost is $49.95 with no advance notice in writing needed to cancel the service. It's an easy-in, easy-out process that GoEmechant.com hopes will facilitate e-commerce to everyone who wants it.

"We want it to be the way that small to midsize businesses can stick their toes in the water and see if it works for them," Dvorkin says.

GoEmerchant.com knows that if it works for them, their merchants will stay ... and they are staying, even in these times of "dotcomaphobia."

"If they get up on the Web, it is a compendium to their sales efforts," Dvorkin says. "They don't have to wait for traffic using the CyberCircular, using the Buy_Me Button. We give them a gateway, an Internet store and all the trimmings. They're not going to get this anywhere else."

Where else can merchants put together a list of their customers, get their e-mail addresses, load them in and send out e-mails with their best merchandise and see how many buy from them? ISOs, wouldn't you all become golden to your merchants!

GoEmerchant.com also has the big boys using its e-commerce packaging. About 6,000 merchants are enjoying GoEmerchant.com, with 400 to 700 accounts being added per month.

What does GoEmerchant.com attribute to this ramp-up? Dvorkin believes that merchants need to find the ease of the facilitation of e-commerce, the real- world profitability of it rather than the dreamscape scenario.

"The bottom line - e-commerce was confusing," he says. "Suppose you had invented the wheel and it had eight corners on it. That was the problem with e-commerce - a lot of the stuff out there made no sense. The first thing we understood was that everything had to be simple."

GoEmerchant.com strives to share that simple philosophy with sales training.

"Depending on the size of the ISO, we will send someone down to train them," Dvorkin says. "We also have in-house training. We will also give ad slicks, the whole nine yards."

GoEmerchant.com also offers free customer support with a real live person from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. EST. Headquartered in Havertown, Pa., and Cherry Hill, N.J., GoEmerchant.com has an in-house staff of 72.

"Ours is a David vs. Goliath story where David just had a clearer vision of the future and, therefore, prevailed," Dvorkin says.

For more information, visit www.goemerchant.com.