Both the CloudRadial and Adaptive Catalog technical teams have been hard at work collaborating on and preparing the new Storefront product for launch.
Our aim: provide our clients’ end users with a truly Amazon-like experience.
From the CloudRadial portal, we wanted MSP users to seamlessly add products from your PSAs along with live distributor data (from Pax8, Ingram Micro, TD Synnex, and more) to display appropriate products with up-to-date availability and pricing.
From there, we wanted to let them enter their shipping details and “check out” – either resulting in a completed and very detailed PSA quote, or all the way through with all their payment information via Stripe checkout.
Again, very much like an Amazon-like shopping experience. Except you get the money.
Before the public release, we took a handful of our clients and ran them through a Beta run to get their feedback. These are their first impressions.
Steve is an MSP in the midwest and was one of the first in line for the Storefront Beta.
He wanted to offer a Storefront to all his clients, but he particularly wanted to offer a customized storefront to his biggest client: a dental office with multiple local branches.
He needed a way to put a customized store in front of them with their specific hardware that differed from his other clients, largely for compliance and standardization reasons. He was able to spin up a new store for them in five minutes and populate it with all their specific items, directly from TD Synnex (his primary distributor).
He also customized it to match their colors and branding, which adds to his white-glove service approach that he’s been offering them.
– Carlos M.
Yes, it sounds like a backhanded compliment — but Carlos explained why he initially approached Storefront with skepticism.
There are currently a few different ways to put a storefront in front of clients, but the issue with 99% of them is that they rely on horrendously outdated indexing.
As a user trying to use the systems, that means searching for “laptop” and getting 12,000 results back — and going through the checkout process only to find out that the one you wanted is no longer in stock. Or, that the price isn’t even what you initially saw.
With our Storefront, that’s not the case. End users get a reasonable search for products that’s quick, accurate, and always up to date.
CloudRadial can’t claim credit for that, though. The secret sauce behind the indexing and inventory system is brought to us by Adaptive Catalog. Together, we prioritized the user experience so that it looks something like this:
Once there, they can quickly and easily search for an MSP-vetted list of products that are constantly updated with availability and pricing. They add them to their cart, and they’re good to go.
– Jasmine A.
Jasmine A. runs the sales and account management team at her MSP.
She looked at this as a part of the onboarding experience for clients. We helped her tie the Storefront to her processes for QBRs and general ticket requests for hardware and software procurement.
In the end, she was left with a passive way to generate dollars for the MSP through simply reinforcing end users to go through the portal to self-service their needs.
That fit the bill from the sales side, but it also solved another challenge for her – getting portal adoption. While she has yet to fully roll the Storefront out to all her customers, she sees it as a great reason for them to access the portal more often.
– Jeremy P.
Jeremy didn’t actually say “friggin”, but we’re obliged to keep this blog PG-rated.
Either way, we appreciate and share the sentiment. Thanks, Jeremy.
We hope that all our Partners find the Storefront as useful and as interesting as our Beta guinea pigs Partners did. Learn more about Storefront here.