April 10 2008

IR Profile –Total Commerce Management’s Steve Willock

Steve Willock’s IT website IT247 exceeded all expectations, now he’s taking the innovative retail software to the market to see if it can be as successful for non-IT retailers.

A couple of years ago I was introduced to Steve Willock, MD of website IT247, a successful IT retail website that had won a few awards and was achieving phenomenal growth. From the outside IT247 looked nothing special, however beneath the surface there was a very interesting piece of software.

IT247 was essentially a showcase for an ecommerce software suite named IntoScape that Willock and colleague Andrew Senior had developed, and it was a piece of software that really impressed me. Here was a bit of software that could not only do ecommerce – the easy part – it could also replace a team of buyers by juggling tens of thousands of SKUs in just a matter of minutes.

To date most ecommerce packages are complicated to produce and maintain, and the larger the business the more complicated the update process gets. So with tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of SKUs you end up having to employ teams of specialist product managers, who spend all their life sourcing products, calculating margin, deciding prices, and fighting amongst themselves about what goes on the front page.

IntoScape effectively automates the product update and pricing process on minute by minute basis. Willock nicknames it the “all seeing oracle of your business.”

In IntoScape the update pricing process works like this, first IntoScape grabs the prices from all the various distributors, either in XML feeds or on Excel spreadsheets, then it takes the list of available products and stock information and goes out on to the web and grabs the prices for all of the products from competing websites. The next stage is to compare the distributors prices and the competitors prices, and using a set of user-driven rules, so it will create a price that can either be set to a certain margin, or it can be the cheapest price plus a certain margin, or it can be set to match the cheapest price as long as there’s a positive margin, or you can elect to set a price that always beats one competitor but not another, or any number of other combinations. Once the price is set it then places the product on the page and grabs product details from an external source – CNET in IT247’s case. Additionally it will also automatically place the products into categories and will automatically select things like “a deal of the week” not only for the site but for all the different sub-categories, all 380 of them in IT247’s case.

While the product sounds fantastic it hasn’t had quite the trajectory Willock initially planned. The first time we talked to Willock, they had plans to sell IntoScape into just a few non-conflicting retailers, however the plans have now changed and so have circumstances.

The problem for Willock was IT247 was too successful and it was expanding too quickly, he admits to not being a retailer “I’m in web development and marketing, IT247 was all about creating a demonstration that showed how retailers could do their job more efficiently. It was only supposed to be a demonstration, not a business that was taking £1.3 million of orders every month after 13 months, and £6 million turnover in the first year and 40 plus staff.” In the end Willock sold IT247 to IT distributor SCC in October of last year and is now concentrating on selling IntoScape, but IT247 is still using IntoScape and SCC are now a business partner.

The key for Willock to IntoScape is the ability to free the buyer from the day to day updating. “If you have someone on a £25k salary the last thing you want them to spend their time on is sorting out pricing on a low-value item like a £1.50 USB cable with IntoScape one skilled individual can handling everything a team of people can do, from sourcing to selling on the web”

Willock claims that IntoScape still hasn’t been fully proved. While IT247 was up to around 50K SKUs Willock claims that the software actually monitors around 300K products, but only selects 50K of them and only monitors half of the potential companies on the supplier list.

IntoScape from Total Commerce Management http://www.intoscape.com/

by Marcus Austin (Web Editor)