Small Retailers Jumpstart Their Ecommerce Operations With LightCMS

OKLAHOMA CITY, Jan. 22, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- LightCMS, a NetSuite (NYSE: N) company that provides a powerful yet easy-to-use cloud-based content management system (CMS), today announced continued strong growth in the use of LightCMS by small retailers around the globe seeking a simple, robust and affordable solution to expand their traditional brick and mortar retail sales to ecommerce or who want to switch to a new platform. Expanding into ecommerce has traditionally been a challenge for small retailers, demanding a significant upfront investment and technical skills from businesses that have few available resources. By lowering the barrier to entry and combining content features with a complete online store, LightCMS helps entrepreneurs and established retailers launch attractive, richly functional webstores that can showcase and sell both physical and digital goods across the country and throughout the world. The LightCMS platform gives these retailers what they need to succeed in ecommerce. The platform provides an integrated online shopping cart, checkout and content management system, allowing users with little to no technical skills to easily add product images, adjust pricing and effectively present their goods online.

"Some small businesses have the misconception that launching and maintaining an online store can be confusing and difficult to do on their own," said Justin Cowan, Director of Content Management for LightCMS. "LightCMS has made it amazingly easy for hundreds of small retailers to do business on the web, and we've been helping to launch more and more online stores every month."

Since the introduction of online store capabilities to LightCMS in 2011, retailers like Israel Diamond Supply, selling to the public at wholesale prices, Sugarillashop, a seller of fashion apparel, and Australian-based Mumma Cakes, which offers do-it-yourself cake kits, have adopted the platform to run their online businesses.

LightCMS for small retailers is distinguished by:

Ease of use. With a low learning curve, LightCMS enables non-technical users at small retail organizations to easily add, delete or otherwise modify product images, text, video, navigation and checkout flows.

Simple product management. LightCMS enables users to simply add and configure both physical and digital products without a complex dashboard, offering multiple product sizes, colors and other attributes.

Design flexibility. A range of prebuilt templates lets merchants select a theme that suits their business and customizes colors, fonts, layout and more; advanced users can upload their own designs with full control over HTML, CSS and JavaScript standards, while its built-in capabilities for responsive design enables retail sites to automatically adapt to smartphones and tablets, helping to provide mobile users with the same high-quality shopping experience they're accustomed to over laptops and desktops.

Secure cart and checkout. LightCMS delivers a polished, secure cart and checkout experience that drives shopper satisfaction and integrates seamlessly with leading payment processors such as Authorize.net, Stripe and PayPal.

Order management and shipping. LightCMS enables users to quickly search, find, fulfill, cancel and refund orders from a single screen while speeding fulfillment through prebuilt integration with FedEx, UPS and USPS.

Light inventory management. Retailers can track and manage stock within LightCMS to help ensure optimal quantities, streamline replenishment and avoid costly stockouts and lost sales.

Simple data export. Financial and customer data from online sales can be easily exported into accounting software, marketing applications or spreadsheets to manage the business and build customer relationships.

With LightCMS, retailers are cultivating a brand image through blogs, videos and other content, driving site traffic through built-in search engine optimization (SEO), and offering their local customers a convenient alternative to in-store shopping. With a well-designed and inviting website, including shopping cart functionality, a small retailer with a handful of employees can appear to be much larger. Many small retailers are attracted by LightCMS's affordable pricing, which begins at $19 a month, including free hosting. To learn more about how LightCMS powers online stores, please visit http://www.lightcms.com/store.

Israel Diamond Supply, Mumma Cakes and Sugarillashop are among the hundreds of small retailers running their online business on LightCMS.

Israel Diamond Supply (www.israeldiamond.com), a diamond and jewelry retailer in Tulsa, Okla. that sells at wholesale prices, went live on LightCMS in early 2013 to boost its web visibility and add its first online store capabilities. Founded in 1991 with a physical store in Tulsa, Israel Diamond previously had a limited web presence that linked to product content and images from a supplier. Since going live on LightCMS, Israel Diamond has seen a 30 percent year-over-year increase in revenue, spearheaded by its new ecommerce site, as people found the business online thanks to the SEO capabilities built into LightCMS, and visited the Tulsa store or placed orders over the web or phone. Custom-designed and implemented by the LightCMS services team, the Israel Diamond website reflects elegance while showcasing more than 6,000 rings, bracelets, necklaces, earrings and more, providing an engaging experience for high-consideration purchases. Selected over WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, LightCMS also gives Israel Diamond order management capabilities to easily capture and fulfill online orders, with automated replies to customers. "An online presence is very important in this day and age and LightCMS gives us an easy way to get in touch with our customers and potential customers," said Chris Price, director of ecommerce. "LightCMS is very easy to use without having to worry about code on the back end—pretty much like updating your Facebook. We have complete control of the content on our website so we don't have to rely on third parties to get things done."

Mumma Cakes (www.mummacakes.com.au), a seller of do-it-yourself cake kits in New South Wales, Australia, found an ideal platform to turn a passion for baking into a small online business with LightCMS. Going live in mid-2012 after setup by the Australian consultancy Message Train, the Mumma Cakes website offers easy navigation and a festive theme, showcasing dozens of cake kits for birthdays, weddings, christenings, Easter, Christmas and Valentine's Day for sale and shipment within Australia. With LightCMS's ease of use, Mumma Cakes owner, Nicole Dicker, has steadily expanded her offerings. "I can easily add products and make changes, and if I ever have a question, the LightCMS team is always there with an answer," said Dicker, a former test kitchen professional at Woman's Weekly magazine. With insights into site traffic and conversion from the platform, Mumma Cakes was able to identify that shoppers were abandoning carts once shipping costs were added, and adjusted its pricing accordingly. Mumma Cakes also uses LightCMS's light inventory capabilities to track its stock of cake mixtures, decorations, pans, candles, confections and other items. "I like the design templates available in LightCMS because they suited the style I wanted and the ideas I had," Dicker said. "I think it's a great platform and very user-friendly."

Sugarillashop (www.sugarillashop.com), an online retailer of chic, sophisticated styles from names like Naven, Greylin, Mink Pink and Parker, launched in summer 2013 on LightCMS and has won rave reviews for its beautifully styled website and inviting shopping experience. Before launching their site that features more than 500 SKUs sourced from top designers, the founders of Sugarillashop were first intimidated by the idea of creating and launching a web store. Research revealed that LightCMS offered a simple yet powerful solution that could be easily mastered by non-technical users, while supplying capabilities for order management, light inventory, customer management and a secure shopping cart. An implementation by the LightCMS professional services team helped get Sugarillashop off on the right foot and since then the business team has steadily added products, content and images while optimizing design to set the right vibe. With a solid foundation on LightCMS, the Sugarillashop team is confident that the business can continue to grow. "The hurdle for us was how to build and maintain a website," said Stephanie Gonce, founder and owner of Sugarillashop. "That thought seemed very intimidating and ominous to us until we found LightCMS. LightCMS is very user-friendly and we never feel limited in what we can do. We're not worried about LightCMS's ability to grow with us because it's always on the cutting edge and provides us with everything we need even before we know we need it."

About LightCMS
LightCMS is a NetSuite Inc. company that provides a powerful yet easy-to-use cloud-based platform for creating beautiful websites and online stores. Guided by its philosophy of sophisticated simplicity, LightCMS offers an ideal set of tools for individuals, non-profits and small to medium-sized businesses who want to communicate, conduct business and sell products online. LightCMS is also a leading platform of choice for web designers and creative agencies. With industry-leading design flexibility, LightCMS offers designers and developers the opportunity to create custom websites their clients can easily manage themselves.

For more information about LightCMS, please visit www.lightcms.com
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