ShopSite® is the easiest-to-use shopping cart software for small to medium-sized businesses.
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This store celebrates Chinese culture, and carries many products especially for children. ChinaSprout uses ShopSite's custom templates and database upload to build and maintain an ever-changing, ever-growing store.
ChinaSprout opened its virtual doors in June 1999 to a community of families who had adopted children from China and who were eager to learn more about Chinese cultural products and services. We soon became the number one destination for anyone who had an interest in China, offering a careful balance of content, commerce and community, the famous c-c-c mantra in the early online retail days.
ChinaSprout's unique value proposition lies in our continuous re-generation of products & services on our site through a never-ending stream of creative ideas, new products and fresh content. Most of our products are sourced directly from China - there is no store in any of the Chinatowns across the U.S. that carries our products (nor would a store be able to maintain such a huge and constantly changing selection).
E-commerce always played a key role at ChinaSprout. When we received our first ShopSite order in 1999, customers could select from nearly 100 different products - today this selection has grown to over 3000 products in more than 150 different shopping categories. One of the unique features of ShopSite is the ability to maintain your entire product inventory outside of ShopSite, using a tool as simple as a spreadsheet to re-arrange and update your products, and then uploading the entire store and generating all pages (in our case over 3000 pages) in a matter of minutes. These rapid publishing cycles kept our content fresh and our customers coming back for more.
Another outstanding feature of ShopSite is the ability to create your own custom templates. We had used this feature early on, designing our store exactly the way we wanted it to look. This feature really helped us distinguish our storefront from generic stores like Yahoo. A single custom template defines the look and feel for more than 3000 pages on our site. You can even swap templates with other custom themes and show Christmas or Chinese New Year themes at the flip of a switch.
A key success factor for your online store is to keep in contact with your customers. ChinaSprout collected newsletter subscribers from day one and sends newsletters on a bi-weekly basis. We have never missed one newsletter since 1999! After we had upgraded our store to ShopSite Pro, we added more promotion tools to the mix, such as the Associate program, OrderAnywhere buttons on partner sites, and Coupons for various online and offline campaigns. ShopSite Pro also introduced the Order API, which is a great way to connect your ordering data to other backend processes. In our case, we linked ShopSite order data to a real-time inventory system (written in PHP) and BlueHornet ASP for our e-mail newsletter campaigns. Best of all, ShopSite has grown alongside ChinaSprout from being a simple ordering tool to a mature e-commerce system with a rich set of merchandizing tools that can match the complex needs of today's online stores.
- Xiaoning Wang, Founder and CEO, ChinaSprout, Inc.
www.chinasprout.com