Appliances and Bibles - More Elastic Path-Powered Sites in the News

Like many companies, at Elastic Path, we keep an eye on what our customers are up to. How are they using Elastic Path? Which features are they using/not using? How are they finding success? What features can Elastic Path add-in to help them maximize their efforts?

Occasionally, we come across customers “in the wild” and sometimes through press releases, analyst reports and public relations blurbs making their way around the web.

Household Goods Retailer Grows up Big and Strong

Internet Retailer magazine (9/19/06) ran an article about Electric Shopping’s success using Elastic Path. We keep an eye on this UK-based retailer as an example or “test case” for measuring the benefits companies can reap when using EP. Indeed, as a mid-sized online retailer selling a selection of household goods direct to consumer, they are right in our target market.

Like many growing companies, they seek to maximize their limited resources to efficiently process orders accurately and they seem to have succeeded, as the article points out,

“Within eight months of implementing the new platform, ElectricShopping.com increased order accuracy by 150% and is now processing about 200-300 online orders per day, a 200% increase from its maximum daily order processing capability on the former platform. The new software-based platform also has afforded the retailer the ability to track, segment and reward repeat customers, while adding the ability to scale technology as operational requirements dictate.”

Their site is quick and nice to look at with a bevy of compelling products (I saw several espresso machines which would look great in our office ;-)).

In terms of improvement, I’d put forth that using EP’s SEO technology to make “clean” URLs would help generate increased organic search results. Perhaps we’ll head to England to lend a hand!

Who Loves Web 2.0?

I tend to avoid politics and religion as blog topics but this one is more about marketing and community building. So, … Redherring.com ran an article (9/18/06) called “Religion Sites Embrace Web 2.0” with the cheeky subtitle, “God might not have a MySpace, but He’s got the web’s attention.”

The article discussed several sites as examples of religious organization using technology to bridge the vast desert which exists between churches and 20-somethings. As such, churches are adding “web 2.0 style” online community building to their traditional marketing programs.

This isn’t a huge surprise as tech-savvy church devotees are often early adopters of new technology, e.g. Nederlander Catholic Priest Father Roderick and the infamous Hare Krishnas were among the earliest podcasters, plus TV is filled with religious programming beyond the cliche’d (to paraphrase Jimmy Buffet) “television preachers with bad hair and dimples” as churches pull out all the stops to attract youthful members to keep the doors open with slick production quality, guitar music and youthful hosts with trendy haircuts.

Anyhow, the interesting (albeit self-aggrandizing) part of the article is the mention of eBible.com as their new Elastic Path-powered site launched earlier this month. At their slickly-designed website - complete with oversized search boxes, tag clouds and blogged passages with comments - you can buy “Jesus Loves Web 2.0″ t-shirts and interact with other God-sters with your shared bookmarks and choose between the free and paid accounts.

In general, eBible’s getting a bit of attention with a well-Dugg write up by the (also infamous) Michael Arrington in Tech Crunch along with dozens of bloggers (ebible on Technorati) including some who posted pics wearing their free eBible t-shirts.