It’s nearly two months since FOG completed its acquisition of the Volo Commerce ‘Origin’ team and platform, the platform used by hundreds of sellers since 2006 to sell products on their website, marketplaces like eBay and Amazon, and other web shop platforms like Magento.
It’s also less than two months until Christmas, typically the two most critical months of online trading for many of our customers. We’re coming into the season of good cheer, so what reasons to be cheerful do Volo customers, partners and prospective customers have in this latest era of the Volo Origin platform? Here are 3 reasons, all of which are the ‘F-Factor’ for online selling success this year and beyond.
Farrelly
Chris Farrelly, the founder and architect of the Volo Origin platform, is back at the technical helm. Chris takes up the story: “I was away from the business for 2 years, during which time Volo moved in a different direction. I’m delighted to be back. I’m back to develop the existing platform and concentrate on our existing customers, many of whom I’ve worked with personally from the earliest days of eSellerPro, and who have grown their business into big business with Volo.
The staff we have servicing the Origin platform have 100% buy-in, support and resources to help customers. They care deeply about making our customers successful. Our management team is closely connected to the reasons why our customers bought from us in the first place: a single, end-to-end platform that adds value at every step from buying in goods to delivering them to consumers; development and support that was responsive to the ways customers wanted to work; robustness to deal with huge SKU numbers, variations and product bundling; great reporting and analytical insight into what’s working well and where sellers are making money.
“At the heart of my return to Volo Commerce is that we simply don’t want to let customers down. We suffer when sellers suffer, and we grow when they grow. We genuinely want to see sellers succeed. So, we’ve spent the last few weeks getting round to as many customers as we can, fixing some urgent issues with the platform, and now I’m looking at our program of enhancements for the post-peak trading period.”
Focus
Volo is back in business, and back focused on its traditional strength: medium-to-large multichannel sellers on marketplace and web. We realise that in the past couple of years our direction has wavered. We’ve corrected our course back to where our customers want us to focus and we’re doing all we can to make our customers aware of the parts of the Origin platform and Vision reporting they’re not using to improve their success.
Our number 1 priority is the happiness and success of our current customers. Our efforts in the first few weeks of this new Volo era are already bearing fruit, since in the third quarter of 2019 our customers gave us a customer satisfaction score of 98% on average, up from 92.6% the previous quarter.
We’ve always been very strong in certain sectors, sectors where the Volo origin platform outperforms the competition, like Electronics/Tech, Fashion, Home & Garden, and Motors. These are the areas where we’ll continue to focus our efforts, as they deliver the best value for our sellers and ultimately their customers.
Volo staff are committed to your success and are in it for the long term. It’s down to our staff that we have our current customers. The average tenure of every member of the Volo team is 5 years, which is almost unheard of for a company in the ecommerce business. Our staff are extremely knowledgeable on ecommerce and the Origin platform, and above all they want to see you do well. So why should you believe us? What’s the difference?
FOG
Because of FOG. FOG Software Group is the new owner of Volo Commerce and the Volo Origin platform. FOG’s corporate parent is the publicly traded Constellation Software, a publicly-traded international provider of market leading software and services to a select number of industries, both in the public and private sectors.
The FOG mission is to acquire, manage and build market-leading software businesses that develop specialised, mission-critical software solutions to address the specific needs of its particular industries. This is a company with a very strong track record, and to date there are over 400 companies within the Constellation portfolio. It gives the new owners of Volo access to the funding and resources required to properly enable Volo staff to serve the long term interests of our customers.
And the key words here are ‘long term’. The FOG ethos is not to flip companies they’ve acquired in the shortest possible time. They want to build companies for the long haul. Here’s an excerpt from the press release on 4th September. “”The discovery of Origin’s broad feature set initially attracted us to this opportunity and having met the team and seen their passion to support both customer growth and product development, we’re really excited about the future of the business,” noted Sandy Scott, Portfolio Manager, Retail, Textile, and Apparel Tech at FOG and now CEO at Volo Commerce.” If you’ve not had the chance to meet Sandy yet, we’ll soon be sharing his thoughts on the business in more detail.
The discovery of Origin’s broad feature set initially attracted us to this opportunity and having met the team and seen their passion to support both customer growth and product development, we’re really excited about the future of the business,” noted Sandy Scott, Portfolio Manager, Retail, Textile, and Apparel Tech at FOG and now CEO at Volo Commerce.’ If you’ve not had the chance to meet Sandy yet, we’ll soon be sharing his thoughts on the business in more detail.
So, reasons to be cheerful about the Volo platform in quarter 4 are 3, all of them beginning with the letter F.
We wish all of our customers and partners a very successful Halloween, 5th November, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Small Business Saturday, Free Shipping Day and holiday season.
To open the F-Factor conversation with us, please do get in touch.
