A Welcome "Cloud" in Tucson

February 11, 2010 · by Dale Traxler

My wife and I recently returned from a week long business trip to the Tucson Gem & Mineral Shows where we buy new inventory and meet with our major vendors at various venues throughout Tucson. It's a long week of work, many different engagements and conversations, lots of hauling and shipping big boxes of rocks around, and generally exhausting days. After a nice dinner, we returned to the hotel room and deal with the "normal" aspects of running our business - reviewing emails, orders, sales, customer and vendor issues, inventory, etc. We felt like did not miss a beat in our business.

During our first trip to Tucson for this event 8 years ago, we essentially shut down our business other than taking orders online. We could see orders in our Miva Shopping cart, but had no way of really connecting to our back office systems, email was horribly clumsy, we could not address any shipping or inventory questions, etc. Simply finding a place to use your laptop other than your hotel room was nearly impossible. In some ways the trip was more relaxing because there just was not we could do on the road from our hotel.

Things improved year by year, but last week the technological evolution of Cloud Computing and its impact on our business really hit me. Here's a summary of what we were able to do while traveling around for 7 days on with a couple of laptops and an iPhone with access to our "Cloud" of information. I know most of you have some or more capabilities than we do, but it's still fun reflecting on how much chance there has been in a short period of time.

Orders, Sales, Inventory Management, Blogging, & More

A quick background on our business infrastructure. We use Netsuite to run our business. It's a Saas solution offering fully integrated eCommerce, ERP, CRM and Financials. We can access every aspect of our business from a web browser or my iPhone Netsuite app. In addition to our 4 online stores, We use Facebook and Twitter and have a blog call DailyBeadBuzz.com where we post relevant things about our stores and jewelry making.

From a business perspective, I was able to monitor the hourly order flow, review daily sales, receive my email, and generally do the things I usually do using my iPhone as we visited shows. We had printed an inventory report for each of our vendors prior to leaving so we knew our stock, sales, and costs for each item as we were shopping. Occassionally, we needed information we did not have with us and were able to simply logon to Netsuite and access that information with our laptop. If we had a dispute over a price, we were able to end the negotiation quickly by showing a vendor our records.

One morning, I needed to pay some bills and sort through the spending we had done in Tucson. I just set up shop in the hotel room and did on line bill pay and posted all the transactions in our accounts payable just as I would have back in the office.

All in all, I did not feel at all disconnected with our business in any way. In fact, we decided we need to travel more often as sales were awesome last week. Maybe that had something to do with all the blogging and social media stuff we were doing in Tucson?

Speaking of the socal media side, things were very cool. I was able to post a daily blog on DailyBeadBuzz.com about our travels through Tucson for our many customers who wish they could also be there. I also posted status on Facebook which posts automatically on Twitter using my iPhone apps. I used my iPhone to take all the pictures. This was my first attempt at doing something like that. It was fun, and after a few stumbles in using the iPhone apps, pretty easy. I did learn that the iPhone battery is pretty short lived though....

As we wandered through the show tents (as big as 3 or 4 football fields in a couple shows, I would note a prospective vendor or competitor's website in my iPhone notes. Eventually, I just started going to their websites directly while my wife was shopping for gemstones and pearls. I was also able to keep up with my emails for a change (I really don't like these shows at all because I'm not a buyer, just the mule) because it was the most desirable thing I could do much of the time.

Get SaaSy

My parting thought is that every eCommerce business should be using a SaaS platform for as much of their business as is practical. I know many of you have mobile access to the eCommerce part of your business (shopping cart and order management) or use programs like GotoMyPC to access your desktop machines remotely. The added bonus we receive of having access to inventory management, customer and financial records from anywhere at anytime is absolutely invaluable. Issues occur every day that require that information.

Netsuite makes that very easy for us, but every step you take toward "cloud" computing will make mobile eCommerce easier for you.

Category: Evolving eBiz | Tags: Mobile, SaaS, social media