Marc Schillaci - Oxatis Founder and CEO

Oxatis Celebrates Ten Years

Yesterday, Oxatis celebrated its ten-year anniversary!

Thank you to our customers for making it possible:

A look back in images:

Google, SFR and Oxatis - Working Hard to Get French Businesses Online

I'm extremely excited to announce the launch of a very important project that we've been working on for months now:

This morning, Oxatis, Google and SFR are launching a joint initiative: Mon Entreprise En Ligne, the French equivalent of Getting British Businesses Online, which allows any and all small businesses in France to create their website free of charge.

Internet is a proven way to boost the growth of small businesses across the globe. However, only 3 out of every 10 small to medium sized businesses in France have a website to present their company and services.

This initiative to get these small businesses online and help them understand all of the opportunities that Internet has to offer was developed in partnership with Google and SFR, emblematic Internet companies in France, and is supported by the French Ministry of Economy, Finance and Industry.

• Oxatis has put forth its expertise to develop the technical platform and site-building tools and hosts all of the websites created through this initiative,
• SFR provides assistance with the use of web technologies via its SFR Pro 1001 service,
• Google proposes its online tools for generating traffic and optimizing visibility (AdWords, Analytics...) and offers 100 Euros to all users registered on meel.fr for their first AdWords ad campaign.

Mon Entreprise En Ligne is an exceptionally open and flexible initiative:

• No subscription required, no long-term obligations
• All information contained in the site belongs entirely to its creator
• Free services for 1 year: system and tools, domain name and hosting are free of charge the first year. They are then provided at 5 Euros Excl. VAT per month.

The Mon Entreprise En Ligne team will be taking to the road on a bus tour of France throughout the month of May to spread the word and get those small businesses online!

Training and seminars, in partnership with local Chambers of Commerce and Industry, will be provided for small businesses, as well as personal (and free!) help and support with creating their website. 

The Mon Entreprise en Ligne bus tour will be visiting the following cities:

• Rouen, 09 May 2011 
• Lille, 11 May
• Strasbourg, 12 May
• Lyon, 16 and 17 May
• Marseille, 18 May
• Nice, 19 May
• Montpellier, 23 May
• Toulouse, 24 May
• Bordeaux, 25 May
• Nantes, 26 May
• Rennes, 27 May

Franck Cadoret, General Director of SFR, Jean Marc Tassetto, General Director of Google France, and I, hope that a multitude of French SMEs will come out and take advantage of this special opportunity!

For those of you French-speakers out there, feel free to visit the site meel.fr for more details about the project.

European E-Commerce, is a cross-border market possible?

With 45.5% of Oxatis e-merchants wanting to take their business abroad, here's a survey conducted by YouGov Zapera for DIBS Payment Services that should peak their interest!  

With regards to consumers, the study found that 90% of European Internet users purchase online, but apparently, how much each person spends varies significantly from one country to another.
Note: I re-read the study a few times and it claims that ... "90% of all Internet users in the selected eight countries, have made online purchases". That seems a little exaggerated to me.

Nevertheless, the study becomes very interesting when it starts looking at cross-border spending habits.

• On average, a third of consumers in Europe purchased on a website outside of their own country.  
• In the heavy spender category, 52% made purchases on foreign websites.
• The two most important reasons to shop abroad were to find lower prices for 61% and to find products that weren't available in their own country for 55%.

The front runners among these cross-border consumers are Norway, Finland and Denmark.
We really don't give enough thought to Nordic countries!

And how are these buyers going to find your online store? The answer's not too original...either they know you already (which doesn't explain how) or through search engines, online marketplaces and shopping comparison services.

However, it's important to note that nearly 30% find you based on a friend's recommendation. Our customer's friends are our future customers ...

For more details, I recommend taking a closer look at this study to benefit from the wealth of information and advice to be found when starting out. 

As they say in Norway, Alle mine ønsker om suksess!

Sell on eBay with Oxatis MarketPlace Manager

Bad news:

If you had other plans this week, you may fall a bit behind as there's some work to be done for your Oxatis store! 

The good news: You're going to sell on eBay!

I won't waste your time going on and on about eBay, its 233 million members across the globe and its 14 million active shoppers in the UK alone.  

We're all familiar with this marketplace made up of individuals and small businesses where millions of transactions are processed every day.

eBay is the virtual equivalent of a local market where merchants sell products from their high street store to expand their clientele and develop a new sales channel. It's an excellent opportunity to increase product visibility from the comfort of your own home or office.

For your Oxatis store, it's as good as done! This month we launched MarketPlace Manager - eBay.

Activate the MarketPlace Manger, list your products and sell them on eBay and fully manage the sales cycle directly from your Oxatis admin console.

Inventory in synchronized between the two platforms and eBay orders are automatically retrieved in your Oxatis back office.

What else do you need to know? The sooner you get crackin' the sooner you can start selling on eBay, the world's online marketplace!

Note: Don't make too many plans for the upcoming months...other marketplaces are sure to follow!

  

Easy E-Commerce: Oxatis Shop Pages Now Built with Drag and Drop

Since last week, new Drag and Drop page layout technology has been available for Oxatis e-stores, saving shop owners precious time when configuring their catalog layout.

All you have to do is "grab" elements and drag them to the zone you want them to be displayed in.

For more details, check out our help center.

This interface includes several new features allowing the store manager to: 

1. Make changes and preview in real time
2. Add desired elements by dragging and dropping
3. Horizontally and vertically align elements independently
4. Configure additional display settings
5. Create complex and attractive page layouts

And we didn't forget about you graphic artists and integrators working on the platform. We added numerous CSS classes to allow you to go even further when customizing the catalog.

We hope these new features find you well and make it even easier and faster for you to set up your catalog pages and customize your shop.

Oxatis wishes you a happy new year!

Life (is Beautiful) at Oxatis

As the year comes to a close, practically the entire Oxatis team got together at the beginning of the week to mix a bit of business with a bunch of pleasure.

It was a chance to assess our performance over the year, to talk about some recent achievements and to announce some things to come, between us of course for the time being ;) But you'll be the first (or second) to know what's coming.  

It's rare that I talk about our corporate get-togethers, which often finish around a good meal of local fare, even though we make a point to organize a few a year. 

But this one was quite memorable! 43 members of the team - those who couldn't make it were missed - came together for a chocolate themed evening filled with plenty of music (certain voices will be engraved in my memory forever!) and holiday spirit.

Watching these 43 people have fun, laugh and spend some quality time together outside of the office, I couldn't help but think about those who'll be joining us. 

It's always frustrating and a bit unfortunate not to address this side of the corporate culture when we recruit applicants. So if you're coming in to Oxatis for a job interview in the near future, beef up your resume and take a quick look at these photos. At Oxatis, we're always looking for people who know how to work well and play well together!

A big thanks to the entire team for a great evening!

 

Oxatis Back From Business Startup Nov/Dec 2010

Do you have a subject concerning e-commerce or the web that you want to share? Come and co-blog it here!

This post was written by Tania Chamma, Oxatis Country Manager UK

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Oxatis is back from London today after the Business Startup show at Earl's Court 2 on 30th November and 1st December.

The snow couldn't keep us away! Rather it kept us around :)

And it couldn't keep the visitors away either! For the third time around, Oxatis was there to support budding businesses with their online projects and bring them advice concerning everything web.

 

If you missed our seminar at the show - "Make Your Website Work For You" - you can catch up on the slides below for some simple techniques on how to persuade buyers to buy more and buy wiser. Feel free to comment below with any input or queries.

Make Your Website Work For You - Business Startup Nov/Dec 2010

View more presentations from Oxatis.

Christmas in November: Dress Your Site Up for the Holidays!

Online sales take off in the weeks before Christmas. And this year is no exception! New Deloitte research claims that nearly: 

• 7 out of 10 people in the UK will purchase gifts online this year!

And we at Oxatis want to provide you with as much advice and suggestions as we can to help you sell better and more online. So stayed tuned to the blog!

Here's wishing you an avalanche of sales and a smooth ride when it comes to fulfillment and tracking this holiday season!

First things first:

Dress Your Site Up for Christmas
A special season calls for a special design!

• Dress up your site and/or logo for the occasion to remind your visitors that they need to start thinking about what they're going to put under the tree.
• If you write a blog, don't forget to dress it up along with your site so that people make the connection.
• Communicate a sense of urgency. Christmas is coming on fast and they need to think about ordering. For example, install a countdown that indicates the number of days left before Christmas:

Tips:

To find some inspiration and keep up with the times, take a look around your favorite sites. They've probably thought about dressing up for the occasion as well.

Don't forget that everything must come to an end... schedule an end to the festivities and bring your site back to how it was before the holiday season. Nothing's worse than driving past houses that are still blinking with Christmas lights and decorations weeks after the holidays are over!

 

Congratulations to the E-Commerce Academy Winners - October 2010 Session

For the October 2010 session of the Oxatis E-Commerce Academy, we announced the winners following a conference at the Salon des micro-entreprises in Paris. This trade show closely resembles the Business Startup show that we'll be attending in London at the end of the month.

This time around, the jury was made up of:

• Christine Lorimy – Coliposte
• Henri Kaufman – Hipipip
• Grégoire Leclercq – EBP
• Blaise Vignon – Microsoft
• Antoine Dary – Audacia
• Denis Fages – Chacunsoncafe
• And Hervé Bourdon, Nathalie Perchard and Philippe Leroy from Oxatis.

And the winners are:

Master Category:
- Géraldine Pichard from Épilation Expert
Géraldine told us that she was recruited by ODC Distribution, another Oxatis customer, for an internship. She didn't know anything about websites, but built hers on her own.

Women Category:
- Julianne Fischer from Obelligne

E-Commerce Partner Category:
- Pierre SAYEGH from France Electric

Newbie Category:
- Marion Olivieri from Figurines Avenue

General Category:
- Jérôme Leveille from Espace Ombrage
Jérôme told us about how he discovered Oxatis at the Salon des micro-entreprises exactly two years ago!

Congratulations to all of you!

See you at the next session ...