In an era of fast, reliable Internet connections and vendors that host e-commerce technology, online retailing sites can emerge quickly. UWantSavings.com, a deal-of-the-day site that launched in November, is a case in point.
It was a concept that emerged out of a class Eric Wasowicz helped teach at Northern Illinois University. Wasowicz, who founded and later sold IT consulting firm Greenbrier & Russell, and a friend, Rob Nardick, who owns merchandise liquidator The Bazaar Inc., had been discussing how to sell Nardick’s inventory on the web. Some of the Northern Illinois students put together a business plan for such a project; Wasowicz and former colleague Jeff Anderson reworked the plan and began implementing it in July.
Four months later, UWantSavings.com went live. The site is owned by RJE Group, a holding company whose initials come from the first names of the three principals.
The site features one-day-only sales of housewares divided into nine categories related to the various rooms in a home depicted on the site’s home page, such as living room, kids’ bedroom and garage. A lighthearted blog on the home page tells the story of the family that lives in the home, and pitches current deals. It’s shamelessly modeled after Woot.com, Wasowicz admits, except that Woot.com only offers one item each day and UWantSavings plans to offer three to nine items per day.
“Woot did about $130 million in sales last year,” Wasowicz says. “They validated what we’re trying to do.”
He says the site can sell items at 40-80% below big retail chains like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. And, to keep it simple for consumers, it charges a flat shipping charge of $5 for the first item and $3 on each subsequent item. Traffic is building every day, but it’s too soon to report sales or traffic figures, Anderson says.
Nardick’s company, The Bazaar, which has been buying closeout merchandise from housewares manufacturers since 1960, supplies the items for sale on UWantSavings.com from its 400,000-square-foot warehouse in the Chicago suburb of River Grove, IL. Besides selling products like vaporizers and hair dryers, the company packages excess items, such as miscellaneous children’s books that become a “mystery box” of books, for sale on the site.
While Nardick supplies the merchandise, Wasowicz and Anderson provide the technical expertise. They decided to outsource the e-commerce technology to such vendors as OrderMotion for order management, Authorize.net for payment card processing and BeanBasket for the front-end shopping application. Those vendors host the software and UWantSavings.com connects to it via the Internet, a technology delivery model known as software as a service.
Because the company did not have to buy expensive computers or software, the startup costs were only about $100,000. “If we didn’t do software as a service, it would have been at least double that,” Anderson says. RJE pays monthly fees to the vendors.
Such an operation would not have been possible five years ago, Wasowicz and Anderson say. “But now you can get stable Internet lines and it's possible to run a business over the Internet full-time,” Anderson says. “And there are vendors who are stable. We can pin the business on them.”
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