I’ve been ask numerous times about the Free Oddity Web Store Program. Where it came from, why do we do it and does it really work? So I thought I would give you a brief history and hopefully answer some of your questions.

How did the Free Oddity Web Store program come about?

Like most things, it was created to solve a problem. Even though Oddity is a wholesale company, we constantly get calls and emails from consumers asking where they can find this or that Oddity product.

When they call, we look up Oddity retailer customers that are near them in our system and give them a few choices. When they email, we direct them to the section of our web site that features a retailer look up and links to retailer web sites.

Sometimes this works for them, and unfortunately, sometimes it doesn’t. You see, we have no way of knowing what products our customers have in stock at any given time. That’s the problem we were facing!

What do we do about it?

Well, we looked around to see what everyone else in the industry was doing.
Most have a corporate web site that sells directly to consumers at retail. Simple enough, we’ll just build a corporate website like everyone else and direct consumers there to by our products. Problem solved!

So we did some research and purchased some software. We registered oddityinc.com and secured hosting services, we purchased the required security certificates, set up payment processing and went to work building our e-commerce site.

It was a big undertaking, we have a lot of products! The product photographs had to be modified for the web, descriptions written, retail pricing researched, packs changed, the list goes on and on.

Finally, after months of work, we had the whole thing built and tested we were ready to go live!

But wait, something is just not right!

It all works great, the photos are good the information is accurate the site is quick and responsive, we’ve tested and tested! We’re ready!

But, wait a minute, something just doesn’t “feel” right. We’re a wholesale company. We were built by servicing our retail customers. Customers who have been loyal to us. Customers who have grown “with us”. Without our loyal customers we wouldn’t even be here!

We were about to launch an e-commerce site that, while solving our consumer problem is going to compete with the very customers we try so hard to service. The customers that helped to build Oddity. No way! Pull the plug! I don’t care if the rest of the industry is doing it!

There’s got to be a better way!

How can we service these consumers without doing a disservice to our customers? There has to be a way. We thought about and thought about it, and finally it hit!
We’ll build stores for our customers! The consumer gets their product, the retailer makes money, we solve our problem. Win, Win, Win!

How we did it.

I went to our IT staff with the concept. We will take care of all the technical stuff. We will maintain the stores. We will process the orders and payments. We will drop ship to the consumer. We will take care of inquires and customer service.

All the things we were going to do for our corporate store, We’ll just do for our customer stores. The retailer gets the sale, the consumer gets the product and we solve our problem!

Our IT staff got to work modifying our software so that instead of one corporate store we could have multiple customer stores all tied into our inventory and fulfillment systems.

The software would also track the sales back to the retailer and generates a commission payment. And of course, customer service functions would have to be built.

It has been a big undertaking, but in the end we think it was the right thing to do. Hopefully our customers think so too, and will remember us when stocking their physical stores.

We have been very fortunate over the years to have a loyal customer base of small retailers. We continually look for ways to better service them and help them survive in todays marketplace.

While retail sales have seen very little growth and even decline in areas, web based retail sales continue to grow. It is our goal to help our customers participate in this growth area. We think we can achieve this goal through our Free Oddity Web Store Program.

If you haven’t registered for your Oddity Web Store, I urge you to do it, It only takes a few minuets. Many of our customers are already receiving commission payments and we hope to send out many, many more in the future!

All My Best,

Scott Williams
President
Oddity, Inc.

P.S. If you don’t have a web site, we can help you! Read about our Web Site Design & Host Service in the customer section of our corporate web site at www.oddity.biz.

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