Retail Software

Talented Estonia

Estonia has established itself in our eyes as a firm hotspot for incredible talent ever since we first encountered Erply in 2009. Since then, this view has been further strengthened by a number of other awesome teams that have joined the family: GrabCAD, Sportlyzer, Campalyst, Qminder, TransferWise and, most recently, Pult.

As a country with a population of 1.34 million, it’s one of the least populous members of Europe; yet it has a phenomenal pool of talent. The Seedcamp Team will be packing their bags and we’re super excited about exploring the startup community in Tallinn further on April 18.

Partners and Sponsors

Estonia IT College has very kindly offered us its premises to host Seedcamp Tallinn. They pave the way in connecting academic knowledge with the commercial world. An impressive one-third of all their lectures come from IT firms and companies, making them a perfect partner for us. We are also very proud that Skype – one of Europe’s most successful startups ever – is sponsoring the event alongside our original Estonian investee, Erply. In addition to their support, we are happy to announce Enterprise Estonia as a major partner. Their mantra is: “the more startup entrepreneurs there are, the higher the survival rate of their companies and the greater the number of fast-growing enterprises will be.” This is obviously very much in line with Seedcamp’s core belief that Europe needs to work together to support and accelerate our fantastic startup talent.

By Kirsten Campbell,

Read full story in seedcamp.com

If you’re new to the exciting world of running your own business, you might find it a challenge just to tackle the everyday things. It’s understandable; running a company – even if it’s just a few people – means spending considerable time for what sometimes seems trivial.

Say, for example, you have a shop selling gifts and small decorative items you either resell from suppliers or that make yourself from materials you buy. This could be just a simple one man shop but we’re already talking about tracking products, materials and two types of suppliers while at the same time there are your customers and their orders of course, your collaborators, your accounting and so on. And that’s all assuming everything is under the same roof – not always the case if you have a warehouse or a shop in another city.

You could try to keep track of everything using pen and paper or a spreadsheet or a combination of the two but ultimately you’ll find that that system doesn’t scale. You have to be professional about it and get yourself a proper solution.

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Retail’s BIG Show
Convention: January 15-18, 2012
EXPO: January 16-17, 2012

“There is no place like New York and that’s why we’ll be back in 2012 for the NRF 101st Annual Convention & EXPO. Join us to be inspired, to connect with your colleagues, and discover new solutions to better your business.”

Come visit Erply at NRF Booth # 1783!

Click here for more info

Love Lane Market in Mattituck N.Y. Author: Progressive Grocer

As if it weren’t enough running a restaurant and sourcing products from all over the world, Avella is also the entire IT staff for Love Lane Market, taking advantage of his former IT career on Wall Street. His music and POS information is all run from servers in an office above the restaurant, and piped across into the market from below ground. The store’s music can additionally be controlled by Avella’s iPhone, through which he can also make store announcements.

Avella’s POS system is a Web-based solution from New York-based Erply that he found ideal for a small market like his, at a price he couldn’t beat: just $900 per point-of-sale station for hardware, and $99 per month for hosting and maintaining the POS software.

Indeed, wearing so many hats keeps Avella busy most of the time, and he admits to working seven days a week for much of the year. But for him, it is truly a labor of love, which after all, is quite fitting for a man with two businesses on Mattituck’s Love Lane.

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By providing companies with niche software via the Internet cloud, a group of NY startups is expanding, according to Xconomy. Technology companies are leveraging the lower cost of offering Web-based software in order to reel-in new business customers.

GramercyOne recently closed $14.5 million in a recent funding round, as the capital is intended for technology developments and new hires. GramercyOne, as well as other cloud-based software providers such as Profitably and Erply, are expanding their businesses by offering flexibility to their clients.

Erply, another provider of point-of-sale software and inventory management via the cloud, is also burgeoning. The company, whose subsidiary Point of Sale is based in NY, raised $2 million in March 2010 from a multitude of investors. “People do not like to be 100 percent Web-dependent at the register.” Robert Jacob, the US vice president of sales with Point of Sales, told Xconomy. “[For some] it is too big of a risk to have registers go down for 20 minutes.” Erply has released a Windows-based application that lets merchants operate sans an Internet connection and then update sales and inventory when a connection is reestablished, in addition to providing software from the cloud.

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ERPLY, AN ESTONIAN company, has created an innovative ecommerce solution for big box retailers as well as medium and small retailers. “Our background is in building RP (retail payment) systems for enterprise level businesses,” says Robert Jacob, Erply’s U.S. vice president of sales. “In 2009 we decided to develop an out-of-the-box solution. It just made sense that we should take the tools we customized for the big guys and revamp them for the small to mid-sized retailers.”

Using an app for the iPad, Erply’s ecommerce solution transforms the tablet computer into a cash register. An additional $50 card swiper that fits on the side of the tablet allows the retailer to use the iPad to take cradit card sales. While competing with companies such as Square and Verifone, Erply’s solution offer significant advantages over other POS systems on the market.

Erply’s system runs off an Internet “cloud,” or a collection of remote servers, not requiring the retailer to have an investment in hardware. “There’s no need for a server in the back,” Jacob says, explaining that Erply hosts the back end systems. “No information is stored on the register,” he adds. “If the iPad or cash register goes downm everyting is being pushed to the cloud, so you can pop up a browser on a computer and keep going.” The second system advantage is the robust design, which includes a complete ERP solution for big retailers. “We have a powerful suite of tools that is much deeper than the point of sale. In the web-based space, there are not amany provers who are taking it to that level,” Jacob notes. “Our back end is much more complex, including inventory management, customer databases and reports that are all combined into one and hosted in the cloud,” he adds.

See pages 40 to 44 for the full article. WebWholesaler October 2011 Edition