Case Study

JoeZee is a member of a popular chilehead forum/community. He grows super-hots and sells them to other community members, in quantities from a couple ounces up to several pounds.
He posts the add in the ‘Marketplace’ section of his forum and people start to post back with their order requirements. JoeZee asks people to Private Message him with their shipping details, paypal email address and shipping method.

Then, when JoeZee is ready to start shipping, he logs into his paypal account and manually enters the address of each of his customers, enters the shipping cost, based on the weight of the order, then sends out a PayPal invoice requesting payment.

When the payment comes in, JoeZee packs the orders, and ships.

The manual work for JoeZee is high. There’s a lot of typing out addresses into paypal, a lot of management time, seeing who has paid and who hasn’t, then time spent creating labels and managing inventory. Not to mention the capacity for mistakes being made when manually entering the information.
This could be multiplied by several hundred, each customer requiring JoeZee to enter all the information by hand.
Oh, and what if JoeZee oversells or undersells his crop – a few angry individuals asking for refunds for product they never received.

Here’s the Hot Sauce Corner way of managing this.

JoeZee creates a Vendor account at www.HotSauceCorner.com (it’s free).
JoeZee adds his products into his webstore, sets his shipping rates, cost per ounce and sets his overall quantity available, in pounds or ounces.

JoeZee then goes to his forum(s) and makes a post letting people know what he has for sale, with a link to his new webstore (www.joezee.hotsaucecorner.com)

People come to JoeZee’s store, place an order, pay via PayPal and JoeZee receives an order confirmation email and an email from PayPal saying the money’s in his account. JoeZee then prints his shipping labels through PayPal and ships out his items.

Simple and effective eCommerce facilities for merchants large and small – that’s what we’re about.

PLUS – when JoeZee creates his webstore, his store is automatically added to our community of stores and our visitors and customers have direct access to JoeZee’s products!

How much did all this cost JoeZee?
Marketing fees?
Setup charges?
Whatever else fees?

None of the above. JoeZee pays the Network only when he makes a sales and pays only a nominal 2.5% of the order value. So if he sells $1000 worth of pods during his season, he pays only $25 to us for handling his transactions. And since JoeZee’s selling season is only July through October, he doesn’t have to worry about monthly fees as his store lays dormant through the off-season, it won’t cost him a penny.