Here we profile a number of smaller companies that have set up specialist ecommerce facilities using BT's StoreCentre offering. StoreCentre offers online catalogue facilities for up to 3000 items, shopping trolley and secure payment facilities. Most of these businesses chose StoreCentre at least a year ago when there were fewer comparable offerings. All cited the low cost of the BT option at that time as a significant factor in their choice. They also said StoreCentre offers them the flexibility and simplicity they needed.

Red Shark
Red Shark was launched 18 months ago as a specialist printer cartridges supplier. The company, which now operates internationally, was conceived when founder Neil Davidson discovered a dearth of printer cartridge suppliers in his local Northumberland market. He realised that there would be a market for a printer cartridge supplier which could supply to more remote locations as well as the urban areas.

Davidson moved into the US market about a year ago. "Our statistics then showed a tremendous number of hits but not that many sales," he says. "We realised that many of the enquiries were coming from the US and we decided to move into that market." He believes that in the niche of printer cartridge supply, the US market does not have the headstart it is perceived to have in other internet-related areas.

In the first month Davidson sold six cartridges, and by the third he was getting more than 100,000 hits a week. Now Red Shark does £100,000 worth of business every month. At present, 65 per cent of that business is done in pounds to the UK and European market; 35 per cent are dollar sales to the US market. Red Shark has recently seen an upsurge of interest from the European market - only two months ago the majority of its sales were done in the US.

Davidson did not raise any funding for the site. "We built it out of our own resources. I had no other job at the time, which tends to focus your mind, especially when you have a young family," he says. "The company itself is very focused. We are concentrating on just cartridges, not CDs or the printers themselves." The web design was done in-house. "I did the web design, on the grounds that I had no money! It doesn't need to be that flash," says Davidson.

One of the key reasons he selected BT StoreCentre is that it supports Switch card payments. He says this is how the majority of UK customers buy goods from the site. "I believe that this may be because the average value of each sale is less than £30," he says. He adds that he was able to get the we site up and running in one day, with little technical knowledge.

Davidson feels strongly that delivery is key to the success of ecommerce. Red Shark uses the international couriers UPS. "They have been good to us," he says. UPS offers order tracking of Red Shark orders through its own website.

To promote Red Shark, Davidson registered an information website with every major search engine using Broadcaster Gold, a BT service that registers a site with more than 40 search engines for £45 a year.

iwantoneofthose.com
iwantoneofthose.com is very much a dotcom success story. The site sells "stuff you don't need, but you really, really want".

It was the brainchild of engineer Mike Morrison and photographer Tim Booth. The idea for the site came after a conversation in a truckers' cafe. Booth was toying with his micro torch, when a trucker said: "Hey, I want one of those. Where can I get one?".

The founders left their jobs, and five months later, in January 2000, iwantoneofthose.com went live. Now iwantoneofthose.com receives 1.8 million hits a month and has customers in 22 countries. Five in every 100 visitors buy; the average purchase is £52.

The site was totally self-funded. "We weren't able to spend £15,000 on an all-singing, all-dancing site," says Booth. "We needed it to be affordable yet provide the maximum information, otherwise the net is just a jumped-up interactive mail order system."

In the year that has elapsed since iwantoneofthose.com chose StoreCentre, the number of ecommerce solutions available has proliferated. "I still believe that this is an affordable, reliable solution which is far in advance of a lot of off-the-shelf packages that you can buy for around £170 now," says Booth. "We did all the web design ourselves and tweaked StoreCentre a little to make it look more as we wanted."

The merchant facilities for credit card payments bundled with StoreCentre were a major factor in the days when it was harder to get merchant status. "In those days if you said you were a dotcom, nobody took you seriously," says Booth.

The founders took the business very seriously indeed and went for the big bang, rather than the toe in the water, approach. Booth says: "The model was really only sustainable if we were really looking after our customers. We needed proper computers, a proper phone system and we needed to be able to track enquiries without being snowed under. A company lives and dies by this - people think how hard can it be? But if they are under staffed it won't work."

Booth says the company mainly uses PR to drive people to the site. "There have been a lot of articles published about us. We haven't gone for advertising in magazines. The number of returns is so small. There has been a tremendous amount of word of mouth, much to my surprise. We seem to have achieved a cult status. We don't take any banner ads for the site; we are trying to keep it uncommercial-looking."

iwantoneofthose.com is working on a complete redesign to be launched in about four weeks. "The idea is to make the visuals better and bigger, the shopping experience easier and simpler. We will have far more products, too," says Booth. He comments that the redesign will take account of the fact that people are increasingly using higher screen resolutions and larger size screens.

Feedmark
Feedmark has been supplying horse feed supplements to 70,000 customers for more than 20 years. It opened its ecommerce website in April this year to satisfy demand from a number of customers who had been enquiring about the possibility of ordering online. As Feedmark was an established business, and not a startup, it was essential that the ecommerce site worked well from day one, so as not to alienate loyal customers.

Christopher Townsend, Feedmark managing director, says: "Incorporating the internet into our business makes a lot of sense. It gives our customers more flexibility as they can place orders 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And, although we will continue to allow customers to order by fax or phone, receiving orders online makes processing them more efficient. Our sales team receives orders emailed directly from the customer, which takes less time than chatting to them on the phone and there is less room for error."

For now, however, the company continues to do the majority of its business over the telephone. One reason for this is that customers often wish to discuss nutritional matters before placing an order. However, there are plans to add general horse nutritional information to the site once a full time web developer has been taken on.

David Reynolds was brought in to manage the ebusiness. "We chose BT because it was simple to use and simple to edit, and easy to integrate into the basic site we already had," he says.

Hybridmarine.com
Hybridmarine.com was launched on 9 January, selling marine chandlery. Business operations director Clare Hassall was running management consultancy firm services and sailing as a hobby, when she spotted the gap in the market for marine chandlery. "I didn't want have to go searching everywhere for the equipment I needed," she says.

Now the site offers a catalogue of 500 products, which costs it £500 per quarter in StoreCentre running fees. "This is not the cheapest option. At the time there were not many companies that did it - but it is the best value for money and the most flexible," says Hassall.

"We looked at other companies, but most wanted to sell us an expensive solution which included them acting as our 'credit card merchant acquirer bank'. As we already had NatWest as our internet merchant acquirer this was not necessary. BT, on the other hand, gave us several alternatives."

Hassall had managed to set up an account with NatWest for the site. "The bank that I had been with weren't easy going and NatWest were very good - I was a new internet startup after all," she says.

At present, Hybridmarine.com caters for the small boat market, specifically racing or sailing boats, and offers everything that enthusiasts need, concentrating on top brands. Hassall promotes the business by advertising the web address on boats that are actually on the water.

Hybridmarine.com now employs two full-time and one part-time staff and is recruiting more. "We know we cannot stand still as we are using the internet to compete with established yachting chandler companies," says Hassall. "By spotting an opportunity in the market, by realising that people wanted to get the best brands easily and at lower cost, we have caught a favourable wind. We are looking to expand to include other classes of boats."