Small-time e-commerce is big business at Stone Edge
A Plymouth Meeting firm keeps small businesses doing e-commerce by replacing costly mainframe outsourcing with specialized software
Barney Stone took issue with some of the things I quoted GCI Commerce founder Michael G. Rubin saying in my column last month, about consolidation among the big operators in the e-commerce business (second item, "Online scale") .
For every big firm like Hershey that can no longer afford to run its own online sales operations, there's lots of small firms now buying affordable software to set up their own, says Stone, owner-operator of Stone Edge Technologies Inc.
"We've been selling the Stone Edge Order Manager for almost 10 years," Stone told me. "We recently sold to our 2,500th merchant, which gives us one of the largest largest installed bases" in the industry. Most use Stone Edge to fill a modest 10 to 500 orders a day, but Stone also counts 11 customers among the Internet Retailer Top 500 list, moving thousands of items daily. He's got 17 fulltime workers at his Plymouth Meeting office.
Who buys Stone Edge? Stone sent me a list of customers, including Direct Brands, which operates Columbia House, Book of the Month Club and other brands from its office in Toronto.
"We're moving off a mainframe computer system, using the Stone system," Ken Rumohr, manager of business development, told me. "We've got 400,000 members across Canada. That's 1,200 orders a day. "Did everything we looked for," said Carol Good, Direct's operations manager. "And he was willing to customize," which some other vendors wouldn't.
"It's a reasonable price," Rumohr said. "It was costing us $1 million a year to run sequential servers. Versus less than $20,000 a year for Stone Edge, after an initial set up that cost us less than $100,000."
Stone's career reads like a history of everything current in America since he graduated Central High School in the yeasty year 1967. In the late 60s he ran a coffeehouse in Germantown - Hecate's Circle. He started Barney Stone Video, "a pioneer in law-firm videotaping" in the 1970s. A computer hobbyist on the side - "I used to solder PCs together" - he college-hopped to Berkeley for a semester in 1977, paying his way with a job at a Computerland store, "where I met Andy Hertzfeld, (Main Line native and co-designer) of Apple Mac, and Steve Wozniak," the Apple founder who "collected one of everything, software, accessories, etc., for the Apple ][." That's how Stone "got into software - I coauthored DB Master for the Apple 2."
That led, more or less inevitably, to "e-commerce," and to Stone Edge. "We started with printing invoices and packing slips. We worked up to the whole back-end order-management system. We help small to medium-sized e-commerce merchants manage all their day-to-day operations." Stone links them to Yahoo, Amazon, Magento, osCommerce - "40 shopping cart systems" in all. "Orders, customer support, warehousing, pack-and-ship, scan a bar code of the order number, the program lists everything. You can eliminate packing errors." Which is especially helpful in the holiday season, when firms rely on seasonal and temporary labor to get everything out where it has to go.