Design & Dev Tools

The PeC Review: StoreSync Lets You Manage Your Ecommerce Business On Your iPhone

Ecommerce can be a 24 hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week business. For many small-to-medium sized merchants, providing great customer service means paying close attention to their businesses, even after normal business hours. A new iPhone application assists with monitoring orders, inventory, and other basic store functions, no matter where you are.

StoreSync allows merchants to access Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce, Volusion, or Interspire store data with an intuitive, fast running, and portable application. StoreSync does not try to emulate everything your store’s dashboard is capable of, but rather it focuses on the most important data. For being fast, innovative, and easy, I am awarding StoreSync four out of a possible five stars in this “The PeC Review.”

The PeC Review, of course, is my weekly column designed to introduce you to the products or services that can improve your ecommerce business. I only review products or services that I believe are worth your interest and investment. Let me explain why I am impressed with StoreSync.

Why You Need StoreSync, A Personal Anecdote

When Matt Newberry of MNDCreative sent me an email about his company’s new iPhone application, StoreSync, it was not just timely, but an uncanny coincidence. Just a few hours before hearing from Mr. Newberry, I was having lunch with a friend who runs a successful ecommerce business. At lunch, my friend had shared a story with me about how he had used his iPhone to exchange emails with a customer while he was shopping at Costco with his wife and son. Ultimately, he had to tell the customer he would get back to him, because my friend could not easily access even basic information about the customer’s order while shopping for bulk groceries.

Turns out that StoreSync would have been just the application for my friend. He could have looked at the customer’s order details and resolved the issue right in the canned-goods aisle, so to speak.

But any merchant that does not spend all day in front of a computer will benefit from having the ability to monitor store activity from just about anywhere.

Monitor and Track Multiple Storefronts

StoreSync is especially good for merchants that operate more than one store on more than one platform. For example, imagine that I have a few online stores. Assume some use the Magento Commerce platform, and other stores were built with Big Commerce.

With StoreSync, I could check orders, get customer data, or receive an inventory alert from multiple storefronts on different ecommerce platforms, all from my iPhone.

Multiple Users

StoreSync also supports multiple users, so that two or three users could access store data from different iPhones simultaneously.

Simple Mobile-Friendly User Interface

Once you have StoreSync running, the application is as simple and intuitive as anyone could hope for. Operating it is fast, easy, and effective. Depending on your pricing plan, the application synchronizes with your store’s API every 15 minutes, 5 minutes, or minute, so that you can really keep your finger on the pulse of your business.

More Than Just an iPhone Application—Coming Soon

StoreSync has just launched, and the company has promised that the service will be more than just an iPhone application. What that means is that desktop, Google Android, and Blackberry versions of the tool are all in the works, according to the company. And the company is clear that StoreSync’s capabilities will be growing.

What I’d Like to See In Future Versions of StoreSync

I have to be careful when I review products, because, like everyone in the ecommerce business, I can have a tendency to try and find one-solution answers to every ecommerce problem. For example, I found myself thinking, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could chat with customers from my iPhone,” and “Wouldn’t it be great if I could manipulate site content or configuration from my iPhone,” and so on.

Four stars Before you know it, “feature creep” takes over and we have an application that not only has a core function, but also makes cappuccino and can help land the Space Shuttle.

Short of the ridiculous, it would be great if I could do more with future version of StoreSync. For example, right now the solution gives me good information, but little opportunity to do anything with that information. I can find customer data, but I cannot adjust it. I believe this sort of functionality could vastly improve StoreSync.

Summing Up

If you are an e-merchant on the go, StoreSync can provide you with critical information in a timely fashion. With the service starting at just $10 per month, it is a real bargain.

Armando Roggio
Armando Roggio
Bio   •   RSS Feed


x