What QikCommerce Needs Next: SMS
Take WordPress, the e-commerce plugin WooCommerce, some themes from Obox, shopping comparison, credit card processing and a courier service and you have the all-in-one ‘How To Setup your own South African ecommerce website’ named QikCommerce - without the time and capital investment usually involved with a new online shopping venture. This is for the business owners who wants to move beyond the realm of free Woza Online brochure websites (launched in 2008 as Google Sites and rebranded as Woza Online) and switch to one of the best internet tools (WordPress) currently available.
We could debate wether WordPress is a CMS or not but the writing is on the wall with the communities quick uptake of the many ecommerce plugins currently available. Here is a breakdown of the QikCommerce offering in their own words.
QikCommerce lets you create an online shop in minutes. We make the complicated stuff like payment, delivery and online marketing simple so you can focus on what’s important: setting up your online shop. Make use of our delivery network to make sure your product is shipped quickly and directly to your customers. All your payments are handled through our PayU partners. No high collateral, no expensive technology required. It’s all set up for you. Your shop gets the benefit of our existing marketing network. SEO, SEM, banners, page rankings and pay per clicks… leave it up to us. We make and keep it simple.
In the past we’ve covered customer relationship management utilizing SMS and what Clickatell like to call personalised priority messaging so follow the links if you need to know more about that. What Your Web AddiCT believes QIkCommerce could do with is a little bit of SMS loving. You might be wondering why QikCommerce would need SMS in the wwworld of push notifications, always-on internet connections and a host of social media channels at our disposal to get the message across. My reasoning is simple: We almost always check an SMS notification whenever and wherever receive it so we could immediately know when our parcel, ordered from a QikCommerce powered store, is being shipped. Being interrupted by a (pleasant) SMS could aso serve as a marketing tool. You’re at dinner with someone special and *beep beep*… “Awesome, the item I bought your at Shop XYZ will arrive tomorrow” Big smiles all around and you’ve just told someone about the store your shop online at.
So how would this be possible? Web AddiCT sponsors, Clickatell, have recently released an updated Connect API which gives developers the ability to:
- Register new Clickatell accounts
- Activate accounts
- Register SMS APIs
- Purchase Credits
- Securely log in
All from within their own application. This could be rolled into the QikCommerce signup process and because QikCommerce hooks into WooCommerce their already is an SMS plugin that does the job. This makes sense to me. How about you? If none of what I’ve just written needs explaining or if you have other ideas involving SMS head on over to the Connect API Forum else comment below.