Last week I was invited to the Outdoor Retailer Show here in Salt Lake City, Utah by a company called Hotcakes.
This was my first time attending the trade show, and I must say it was a very cool experience. There were around 900 exhibiting companies at the Salt Palace Convention Center and more than 20,000 visitors… and this year thanks to the folks at Hotcakes, I was one of them.
I arrived at the Hotcakes booth (pictured) and had a nice chat with the CEO of Hotcakes Robert Wright. He took me on a guided tour of their new Hotcakes platform, and I must say I was impressed with what they have going on.
So what is Hotcakes? Well, after walking away from the booth, and talking to a few other folks at the show, I deemed this platform to be a “Reseller Locator’s System for Manufactures on Steroids”!
The Hotcakes system starts by adding their reseller locator’s code to a product manufacturer website.. and when a customer clicks on the where to buy button Hotcakes takes over like a charm.
The system now shows a list of dealers that has also hooked into the Hotcakes platform showing all the products that they carry from that particular manufacturer. The best part is that the reseller did not have to go and add product information such as item photos, descriptions and/or videos to their professionally designed Hotcakes reseller website, instead it’s all done from the manufacturers instance of Hotcakes and pushed to the reseller site automatically! From there the reseller can decide what products they want to show and adjust product pricing etc. Sweet right?
Once on a selected reseller site, customers can see what what products they carry from the specific manufacturer that linked them there. Customers can also see any deals they have on the products as well as the ability to print a shopping list or coupons to be taken into the resellers location. What store owner would not be thrilled to see their website actually working and sending customers through the door with a pre-determined shopping list and coupon? Not to mention, once the customer is in the store. good salesmanship can hopefully get additional sales via upgrades or additional products!
Robert and I talked about one of the main goals of the Hotcakes platform is to help brick and mortar resellers get foot traffic into their location. As an avid online surfer and Internet marketer, I tend to think towards online shopping carts and being able to buy online. I really do appreciate what they are doing here with these features as there are many shops that are losing business to online competitors where people just go and price shop and click purchase.
What I like about Hotcakes:
- Ease of use
- Drag and Drop functionality on the front end of the reseller sites
- The push they are making to help businesses not only get an online presence (if they do not already have a website)
- Helping resellers get great qualified traffic to their Hotcakes site via manufacturer links that actually work and show off a professional design and imagery on a reseller Hotcakes site
- Promoting foot traffic to the physical store of the reseller
- Affordability – $200/mo as a manufacturer and only $20/mo as a reseller
I think back to when we still had our distribution company, and how many manufactures we purchased from and all those SKU’s and I remember selling products online and having to update and add each and every SKU, image, and description to the site and wishing there was an easier way to do it. Well, that was almost 10 years ago and the Internet sure has come a long way since then… and after seeing what Hotcakes has to offer the manufacture as well as resellers I am happy to report that Hotcakes really is a sweeter way to sell online!
I look forward to following this company and seeing what else they come up with down the road. We discussed some of the upcoming features, but I will leave that information to them to distribute.
For more information about Hotcakes, you can visit their site at http://www.hotcakes.com and you can also follow them on Twitter @Go_Hotcakes
Until next time,
Doc
Note: This is not a sponsored post in any way shape or form. I was asked to come to the Outdoor Retailers show by Hotcakes, Demo the platform and ask the CEO some questions. That is what I did, and this is an honest review. Enjoy!
Nice. I gotta talk to you more about this. Glad to see you’re Blogging more… Now I gotta get my Blog back into gear!
Will, thanks for the comment! Let me know when you would like to chat!