Opportunity LOL's Spotlight Interview: Adam Hendle of Storenvy

I was recently contacted by Adam Hendle of Storenvy alerting us to a very cool new spot for people to purchase toys, their Designer Toys marketplace. I had a fun phone call with Adam and that led to this interview you are reading today. Our friend Benny of Tenacious Toys had a similar talk with Adam and that led to this blog post, which is a well written introduction to Storenvy. If you are an artist with custom toys or just a collector with way too many items in your collection, Storenvy strikes me as a neat way to sell your products. I haven't personally used this website myself, but LIFT, Red Mutuca Studios, southerndrawl, and Mashed Creative all gave Storenvy a shot - which might say something very good! Enough prologue, enjoy the interview!

How was Storenvy started?

Adam Hendle: "Storenvy was started to make online stores more personal and more human. Our founder, Jon Crawford, has been building online stores for people for a few years and realized how much online store software needed to improve in order to catch up to the Social web. Most online store software feels too mechanical and leaves the merchant on his own to promote his store. We solve this by making it free to open a store and start selling, by designing the interface to be very easy and fun, and by creating a global shopping marketplace where users can discover and by your stuff all in one place. Storenvy's goal is to make online stores and shopping easier, more affordable, and more human."

What specifically do you do for Storenvy?

Adam Hendle: "My official title at Storenvy is "Storenvy Special Ops", which probably sounds a little more like I will be in charge of kicking doors in and fighting bad guys. I wear a bunch of different hats for Storenvy so putting one job title on it didn’t really work. As of right now I am in charge of our social media platforms, answering customer support, reaching out to our individual stores for feedback/insight, recruiting new stores to join the site, helping manage and grow the Storenvy community, writing for the blog and handling any special projects that come up."

How do the marketplaces work on Storenvy? Are people properly tagging their products seeing an increase in sales?

Adam Hendle: "The Storenvy Marketplace is really at the center of what makes Storenvy special for both buyers and sellers. The Marketplace allows sellers to list their items and have customers discover their items that may have not found them through their own store. And for shoppers, the Storenvy Marketplace makes it extremely easy and fun for a buyer to find items from sellers that they may have never found on their own. The Marketplace is responsible for a good percentage of sales through Storenvy -- sales that merchants wouldn't have otherwise made on their own.

With respect to tagging items we always encourage our sellers to properly tag their items with keywords that will allow buyers to easily find them while searching. It surprises me when stores don't take advantage of using tags as it really does help customers find their products. Also along the lines of properly tagging items, we also highly recommend that stores take the time to place their products in both the proper category and to join the proper Market (e.g. Singer/Songwriters, For A Cause, Small Business, etc).

We are also always on the lookout for creating Markets for emerging niches. A couple months back we noticed a few webcomic artists opening stores on Storenvy so we opened up a Webcomics Market just for them. More recently we have embraced the vinyl and designer toy market creating a new subcategory for them which has seen some great growth over the past few weeks. We currently have over 300 products listed in the category from vinyl stores such as Lift, Red Mutuca, and Jinxed to name a few."

What differentiates Storenvy from Etsy and Bigcartel?

Adam Hendle: "Storenvy is really the best of those 2 products combined to create something new -- a custom store platform combined with a big marketplace -- with one important difference: Storenvy is completely Free. We believe that opening and operating an online store should be like starting a blog -- free, simple and fun. Our online marketplace drives traffic to store owners and helps with discovery of cool products. We also allow our store owners to completely customize the way their store looks. We make it easy to customize your store by simply changing colors, headers and text through their admin panel and if you are familiar with HTML/CSS you can literally completely transform the way your store looks.

On top of that we also offer our store owners a free Facebook app that allows them to list their products on their Facebook page, a extremely easy to use admin panel and fantastic customer support."

How does Storenvy make $?

Adam Hendle: "As I mentioned, we truly believe that starting your own online store should be free out of the box. With that being said we have a couple of premium features that users can choose to add onto their store that we call Extras. Most recently we released our "Super Discounts" Extra which allows a store owner the ability to offer $-off, %-off, Free Shipping and Buy-X, Get-X promotions for just $2.99 a month. We also allow users the option of using their own Custom URL for their store, if they prefer, for $4.99/mo.  Thankfully, we've been fortunate enough to pair up with some investors that understand our vision and who have put some substantial financial backing into the business, so we're able to focus on building a community and a the best store platform without having to stress out about making money right now. These are the same guys who have funded other web startups like Twitter, Groupon, Tumblr, and even Google."

How can people customize their store?

Adam Hendle: "Basic store customization is extremely simple to do through your Storenvy admin panel. With just a few clicks you can upload a header, change colors, add links and be up and running. For those looking for a completely customized storefront you're free to edit 100% of the HTML and CSS of the storefront. We have seen some store owners take this and really run with it, creating storefronts that literally look nothing like they basic Storenvy template."

What is Storenvy doing to generate interest in their users products?

Adam Hendle: "We really take pride in finding and sharing all the great products on our site. Each day we post featured products to our Facebook and Twitter pages to help bring attention to get merchants some extra attention. We create lists and gift guides highlighting interesting and awesome products from our marketplace. For the holiday season this year we put together ten different gift guides featuring over two-hundred different products which both our shoppers and store owners have really seemed to love. Also, we've got pretty great SEO for the marketplace, so lots of sales happen because we come up fairly high in Google results."

How have the different social media sites helped Storenvy grow?

Adam Hendle: "We absolutely love interacting with our store owners and shoppers. And Facebook and Twitter makes it extremely quick and fun. We want people to know that there are actual people behind this website that care and that are extremely passionate about helping others build their businesses and dreams. We truly believe that the more transparent and approachable we are, the better it is for everyone involved in the community.

Speaking of which, make sure follow us on our Twitter and Facebook!"

After the Regretsy fiasco, can we convince Storenvy to allow merchants the ability to specify which payment processors they would like to use?

Adam Hendle: "The Regretsy story was indeed a fiasco. But the important thing is that we've been watching the sales numbers and haven't seen any dip in sales because of an aversion to PayPal. In fact, the very opposite. November and December were Storenvy's biggest months for merchant sales to date! To a degree, I think the Regretsy story incited a lot of handwaving but didn't actually mean a negative impact for merchants using PayPal as their payment processor.

Here's where Storenvy is 100% PayPal: Our shopping cart is shared across all of the stores. This is important because it lets shoppers buy from more than one merchant and then check out in one easy step paying more than one merchant in one easy transaction. PayPal is the only payment platform that allows this experience to work without a big monthly fee paid by each merchant for a merchant account at a bank. We are always looking for ways to improve the checkout and selling experience, and if a better solution presents itself we will take a long and hard look. Every decision we make is in the best interest of our shoppers and merchants and PayPal is truly the best option for now. If we allowed each merchant to specify his own payment tool, we'd lose the multi-merchant checkout experience."

What can a Storenvy user do to increase sales?

Adam Hendle: "Great question! There are a couple things that I would like to point out for increasing your stores sales. Although Storenvy does drive traffic to your storefront it always helps to do some of your own marketing and promotion. We strongly encourage all of our store owners to use social media and maintain a blog as those are great ways to constantly engage your potential customers.

We also highly recommend offering promotions and discounts to your customers. After rolling out our new "Super Discounts" Extra we noticed that shoppers spend 15% more on their order when they have some more of Discount. Shoppers are always looking for a deal and often times actually spend more when they feel they are getting one."

Is there anything exciting coming soon about Storenvy that you could share with us?

Adam Hendle: "2012 is shaping up to be a very exciting year for Storenvy. We just recently passed our 9,000th active store. Without revealing too much I would have to say just keep an eye out for us next year as we have a lot in store. Just know that our programmers are working around the clock to bang out lots of new things for the coming year."

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