eCommerce in a Small Town

See: http://www.tyhgaccents.com

How does a small town business compete with big-box retailers?

One of the best answers these days is to put your store on-line, open your inventory up to the entire world where the shape and size of your bricks and mortar don't matter. And where an increasingly web-savvy public is willing to search for the perfect do-dad and doesn't mind buying from a store half a world away.

That was exactly the thinking of Dana and Kathy at Tastefully Yours Home and Garden Accents. Located in Downtown Newberg, OR it's not a simple matter to reach a client base wide enough to support a modern retailer, particularly when mass-retailers like WalMart and Costco call sell home furnishings so inexpensively. By creating an on-line catalog that includes most every product on their shelves, they create a very cost-effective way to expose their entire inventory to the entire wired world.

In addition to the database driven dynamic catalog, Tastefully Yours also makes use of a fairly new product offering from Adobe/Macromedia - Contribute. Contribute acts much like any other web-browser, but when properly configured with an existing website it also allows users the ability to edit their own website without needing to generate service calls to web-development firms...like Code-Monkeys.

"It's true that Contribute tends to take a certain amount of work out of our pipeline.", said Chris Skaggs of Code-Monkeys. "But we find the arrangement very pleasing to our customers. They may not need us for day-to-day maintenance anymore, but they still come to us with the more significant projects like expansion and upgrades. That's really where we bring the most value to the table and where our core competency is anyway." In other words, it's win-win for everybody.