There’s no more question about ‘if credit cards are safe online,’ now it’s a whole price/performance mix of good price, customer service, timely delivery, and most importantly, brand reliability. What this means is, does your eCommerce site look canned, or look old and outdated (outdated in web terms is 2008)?

How does your shopping cart perform? Does it have a one page checkout? Does the detail page offer enough information without being cluttered or hard to navigate to? Does it take advantage of the little nice features that the newer Ajax technology offer, i.e. quick views, real time stock levels etc?

How visible is your store to the search engines? Does it automatically upload to Yahoo and Google merchant? Are all the product pages “Search Engine Friendly” as well as human friendly?

Does your store also sell on eBay and Amazon, and if so, how easily does it publish products and publish inventory?

Financially, how does your store interface with your accounting systems? Does it plug in directly into Quickbooks or another off the self package?

Badenball.com went through all these questions and more, and in fact has upgraded 3 times over the past 3 years, each time to a better cart technology. Currently it’s built on the Magento eCommerce platform because of it’s superb front end technology and more importantly for any shop owner, the back-end flexibility. In 2007, it cost around $15K to get into some form of a fulfillment and inventory management system.  But for low end systems, while all carts can process orders and ship plugins, there’s still a bit of cut/pasting going on between the entire chain, i.e. from the order, to the shipping warehouse and back to the customer with a tracking numbers. Amazingly today, there’s still relatively few low end systems (i.e. for stores shipping less than 100-200 orders) that are inexpensive and do the entire round trip of fulfillment. But Magento has a couple of inexpensive solutions for fulfillment, and it’s huge advantage is that it has a superb API (Application Programming Interface), which, with a little bit of coding, you can couple just about any fulfillment system into it.

Magento also has several third party modules that save hours and hours of work, like MailChimp’s list synchronizer, Order exporting, and blog integrator plugins to WordPress. This makes Magento a substantial player in the industry for the moment.

By using Magento and several third party plugins, Badenball.com is now almost completely automated from an order processing and fulfillment point of view. Inventory has been outsourced to a third party shipper with modules controlling shipping orders and inventory count.

Fast forward to 2010, and they were exactly right. Without realizing it, you’re probably connected to the web 24/7, via a ubiquitous, persistent and transparent connection. (Short definition:”always present, all the time, and invisible that you don’t have to really do anything to connect to it”) You probably sleep with your mobile phone no more than 1 meter away (don’t worry about 90% of all people do as well.) and you get upset or fidgety if you’re in a waiting room and you can’t get connection to your emails or the web.

As I look around, I see so many kids walking down the street in total oblivion to their surroundings as their heads are stuck in a connected device. I’ve traveled with many kids to exotic places over the past few years and I’m still amazed at the scenery and amazing things they miss because they’re off in another world. Hello?! What’s the point of traveling when you’re not mentally there?

Don’t get me wrong, hey, I’m in the business, and since 1987, I’ve been a firm believer of the old mantra that technology can give us better quality of life, i.e. work less, experience more of life. It can be a great tool for sampling, experiencing, working smarter, and creating. But if not controlled with some honest self-discipline, it can rob your quality of life and put you into the treadmill of faster / more behind mode where you just can’t seem to ever catch up.  One great example is if you get stuck behind a camera on vacation, you tend to only remember your vacation from your photos and not the real thing (i.e. you were too busy taking a photo to enjoy that smoking volcano!)

Firegiants is about creating and implementing quality of life changers, stuff that makes a quality and positive impact on the environment, on organizations, and most importantly, you as a person. It’s about leveraging technology, ubiquitously, persistently and transparently to make things go more efficiently around you, enabling you to disconnect from the technology and let it do it’s thing for you. Giving you time to go smell the roses, anywhere, anytime, anyplace. Give up the cubicle.

If you’ve got a notion of something along these lines, I’d love to hear about it.

Welcome and I hope you enjoy this site.

Scot Refsland, Ph.D.
Founder, Firegiants