Shopping Cart Elite is one of the newest SIIA members. I had a chance to meet with their CEO, Igor Soshkin, and ask him a few questions about the company and their marketplace.

Rhianna: Welcome to SIIA! Tell me a little about Shopping Cart Elite and what makes you unique.

Igor: We are able to provide an all in one solution that combines features from a dozen companies for a fraction of the price. Anyone who is looking for an affordable solution that combines Shopping Cart (Volusion or BigCommerce), CRM and ERP (Netsuite), Multi-Channel Marketing (Channel Advisor or GoDataFeed), Hosted Search (SLI Systems), Price Spying (PriceManager), Support Desk (Zendesk), SEO applications and Social Media applications would love Shopping Cart Elite.

You can read our full story here.

Rhianna: You had great success in the wholesale and automotive industries. Why did you decide to start with a focus on those two verticals?

Igor: When we first started in eCommerce in 2001, it was just my brother Nick Soshkin and I. Since there were no dot net open source shopping carts on the market at the time, we decided to create our own for our company.  We had $20,000 to start the business. Fast track to 2005, we hit our peak gross sales of three million dollars, and we realized that we hit a dead-end. We were paying $125 per hour for data entry and data management, which is a minimum wage job. There was no way of getting inventory levels from our drop ship suppliers; there was no technology to automate the product synchronization between multiple marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon. It was frustrating that we were paying thousands of dollars for security consulting to address server issues, and audit the software for compliance. We had to hire in-house designers to update the website at $60 per hour. When we had to address random website issues, test new releases and pay for servers, our monthly expenses exceeded $40,000 in development. These unnecessary expenses were depleting our profits.

In 2006, we officially stopped growing, and we realized that for us to continue growing we would have to hire more engineers to address minimum wage tasks. We also had to develop more tools to automate parts of our business, which meant more developers on payroll. As the economy started to slow down, we had to find a new way to address our software and technology needs. Paying half a million dollars each year for a small eCommerce business was ridiculous. We sold our eCommerce company and started to focus on figuring out a permanent solution for eCommerce businesses to utilize our knowledge.

When we sold our eCommerce company, we made it our goal to take everything we’ve built thus far and create the best shopping cart on the market. We wanted to address everything that stopped us from growing beyond three million dollars per year. I am extremely passionate and deeply involved in this technology problem. Being an eCommerce expert, I knew what the eCommerce industry needed. Our technology would allow new entrepreneurs to create a real ten million dollar company of their own.

The industry needed a platform like eBay or Amazon, but for eCommerce websites. The platform would use the same template, it would just have different graphics to make it personal. This way we could uniformly enhance the technology every month, and everyone could benefit from the enhanced features without any effects on their design. Over time, the new features would outweigh a custom design, which would only remain custom to the store owner for as long as it took someone to copy the design. Customers don’t care how pretty the website is as long as it is professional, trustworthy, and functional. They only care about the price and inventory. Don’t take my word for it. Just ask any eBay or Amazon top seller how their sales are doing on a platform with 100s of other competitors who look exactly the same, sell the same item, and show up in the same search results. Look at any Fortune 500 website such as Staples, OfficeMax, or BestBuy. They all look alike. All the Fortune 500 companies use the same expensive third party plugins such as social reviews and hosted search.

There are over 500 shopping carts on the market. None of them address the problem that Shopping Cart Elite is trying to solve. If they did, all the Fortune 500 companies would be using them instead of paying millions for custom software development and third party plugins. Shopping Cart Elite is a solid platform for serious eCommerce businesses. We will change the game and put all other failed shopping carts out of business.

Rhianna: You have a marketplace module that allows companies to push their products in various marketplaces. Tell me about this and how you also integrate SEO content.

Igor: Companies can use Shopping Cart Elite as a central data portal. Shopping Cart Elite will then take the product data and synchronize over 30 different marketplace including eBay, Amazon, Google Shopping and every other one you can find. Customers can pick and choose what to submit, and what marketplace. They can choose only to submit certain products with inventory, or the complete store. We also synchronize their inventory to these channels, and we will soon support price and order synchronization.

As for SEO, we are the only Shopping Cart in the industry to focus on native SEO application built right into Shopping Cart Elite. Since the SEO applications are natively built, our customers can benefit use their existing product data to automate their SEO campaigns. For example, a customer can create hundreds of blogs focusing on different niches within their vertical, and have our blog poster syndicate those blogs with content from their store. You can create articles and use our LSI keyword research and SEO content optimizer to exceed the best SEO practices.

Another SEO feature that we have is called Visitor Generated SEO. You have visitors coming to your website, and searching for products using different variations of rich and long tail keywords. Wouldn’t it be awesome if when they typed something, the relevant search results would be turned into an SEO indexable page for Google?  It would be even better if that webpage automatically added itself to the sitemap and ping Google to cache it immediately.

This awesome feature happens to be available on Shopping Cart Elite, and it is called Visitor Generated SEO. It does everything I just described and more. You can also get groups of keywords from Google Adwords Keyword Generator and plug them in by the thousands into your website. This will automatically create

unique content pages for all the popular keywords that Google recommends for your ranking and visitors will start pouring into your website in no time. Shopping Cart Elite is the only platform in the industry to focus on Organic SEO applications. We believe organic should be the core traffic source of any eCommerce business, and our customers agree.

For further details about our SEO, check out the information on our website here.

Rhianna: You have partnered and integrated many third party solutions to your offerings. How important are these partners and will you continue to integrate more third party solutions as appropriate?

Igor: We do partner with many companies, but we do it a little differently from other shopping carts by choosing our partners carefully. We want to deliver a great experience to our customers while making sure the customers pay an affordable price for the complete bundle.

The companies that have a partnership with us benefit from a very close relationship. We usually make sure that we natively integrate their solution in order to achieve a rich user interface and experience for our customers. We opt-in all of our current and new clients on launch day for our partners. We also make sure that all of our new clients are made well aware of our partner solutions. We partially marry our partners, and they become a part of our infrastructure.

We welcome companies to partner with us, but they need to make sure they bring real value to the table.

Rhianna: What are some of the main areas of focus for Shopping Cart Elite in the coming 12-18 months?

Igor: We finally completed our mobile strategy, and we enhanced our customer templates to automatically render the website based on the visitor’s device. The website will automatically reposition and resize elements to fit any screen including desktop, tablet or mobile.

We are also working on a new feature called Traffic Quality Analyzer which will deduct click fraud, bot traffic, visitor who engage (You can read more here about click fraud). We are very active with product development, so it is hard to predict what exactly we will be developing in 12-18 months. This year we exceeded our development roadmap by releasing over 3000 new features, and we plan to exceed that milestone again in 2013.

We are committed to making an affordable all in one ecommerce solution for companies of all sizes.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.