Howdy e-Commerce fans,

Last month’s meetup was a real blast. Dave McLaughlin dropped in to speak about Vsnap, a platform that allows salespeople to engage with customers via one-to-one video messages. This method that’s been shown to boost sales as much as 34%.

In addition to Vsnap, Dave discussed his previous experiences in the film industry, where he worked as a screenwriter. After working on a film which he claimed to have later disliked, he realized that Hollywood may not have been the right environment for him.

“I think that technology startups are just a more creative place to be than the film business,” he said. “Some people are surprised by that. But in the film business you’re really in boxes in terms of what you can do.”

Now, after only a few years of working in tech, Dave is far from an outsider. He’s done all of his research on Vsnap’s competitors, and is constantly brushing up on his knowledge of social media in order to better assess how he’s going to work with them.

Dave said that the key to success is to work in an area that you’re interested in, and that sometimes it could take a while to realize what that is—in his case, it certainly took a few years to realize that he didn’t want to be a filmmaker.

We had a lot of very interesting people who came up to the meetup, who asked very engaging questions that Dave provided very quick to answer to. We’re really grateful that we have so many talented and ambitious people who support our meetups, and we’re hoping that all of you guys will come to our next event, ‘Driving eCommerce Sales with Social Media Marketing,’ which will take place on Wednesday, December 10, at 31 W 34th Street on the 7th floor.

Hello e-Commerce fans,

We recently had an e-commerce meet up on October 29, which focused on the back-end of running e-commernce. Since there were many High Holidays, we decided to push the date back to accommodate. As always, we had plenty of food and drinks for everyone!

Once again for this e-commerce meet up, we moved the location to another Jay Suites location on 34th street. We had an amazing conference room with a beautiful terrace view of the Empire State Building. There was just enough space for all of our guests.

Key Point from Our E-Commerce Meet Up

Ali Hodroj, Director of Solution Architecture and Technology Evangelist for Gigaspace, spoke about scaling e-commerce with in-memory computing. The company works with small and large organizations within financial services, retail, telecommunications, and internet media on Cloud Computing, In-Memory Computing and Scalability use cases.

When businesses get over loaded with customers, like on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, it’s generally because their websites are unable to hold the capacity needed. Gigaspaces help turn traffic into buying customers at a much quicker rate. They also help the webpage expand their capacity to handle the excessive traffic.

Gigaspace helps by controlling and optimizing the Omni-Channel. That way, different interfaces, like smart phones and tablets, are accounted for when moderating traffic. They streamline content and data to ensure fast check out speeds, especially during holiday seasons.

Gigaspace also focuses on personalization and analytics to improve your business and check out speeds. Most importantly, businesses can focus on their legacy integration to help their business grow.

Many times businesses will loose money because their website can’t handle high traffic and crash. Gigaspace helps reduce cost by keeping website functioning and helping consumers quickly check out.

You can watch the entire presentation on our YouTube page.

Overall, this was a very insightful and engaging e-commerce meet up. Hopefully you are aware of your upcoming e-commerce meet up on wednesday, November 12th. If you haven’t given us your rsvp, please sign up on our page on Meetup.com.

E-commerce Meetup BAMs and Dr Jays Review September 2014

Hello E-commerce fans,

As some of you might already be aware, we have an e-commerce meetup coming up on October 29th. So as the protocol goes every month, let’s go back in time for just a bit and review our last e-commerce meetup on payment processes with Tom Waters and Mauricio Rubio.

We had a slight change of location for our last e-commerce metup. Instead of scheduling a get-together in our usual spot (the conference room next to where we work—I know, quite the commute…) we decided to head to the fabulous Brokers Heaven Loft Space, located at 333 Park Avenue South.

This turned out to be a wonderful location, with a wealth of modern artworks scattered rampantly all over the walls. One of our copywriters even took his time to goof around when he was supposed to be signing in the guests.

Can you guess which one of our employees stepped in to ruin this picture?

Mauricio Rubio, who works as the Director of Business Development at Dr. Jays, started off the event with a slideshow presentation on international payment methods, PCI compliance and tokenization, and domestic versus global platforms.

One of his key points dealt with the steps that are taken to prevent fraud for whenever a user has to make a payment (a reassuring note for many of the attendees, who usually come to each e-commerce meetup equipped with many concerns about security and privacy).

After Mauricio, Tom Waters from BAMs stepped in to offer a very animated presentation on various Magento features, and then explained the benefits of payment aggregators such as PayPal, Stripe, and Square versus the traditional credit card processors.

For much of the talk, he seemed to be in favor of Paypal, but endorsed Stripe for international payments. After his presentation, the conversation focused largely on international payments, which seemed to be a concern for many of our attendees in the same way that security was a primary concern for Mauricio’s presentation.

As always, there were plenty of chips and drinks to keep everyone comfortable. Our head of Business Development, Sam Baron, also had to leave early for a Goruck event, which left a depressing ambiance in the air for all who were present (particularly the ladies).

But overall, this was a very kickass event, and we look forward to matching it with our next e-commerce meetup, coming this October 29th—so mark your calendars!

Thank you all for contributing to our last New York eCommerce Meetup – we had a great turnout and we’re just as excited for the next one! Before that, we wanted to review some of the highlights from May’s Meetup.

We were fortunate to have Lior Itzhak from the Forest Hills Financial Group (FHFG) serve as one of our speakers. At FHFG, Lior strives to protect his clients’ assets for retirement and also develop their wealth in creative ways.

“Our role as a financial advisor in the Meetup was to help these businesses plan ahead to be protected against future and unforeseen financial disasters,” said Lior, “our role was also to offer guidance on protecting the entity’s interests when taking on new investors, members or shareholders. We were able to communicate the importance of having well prepared and thoroughly reviewed agreements, including subscription agreements, buy-sell agreements and even shareholder and operating agreements.”

Lior also spoke about the encouraging entrepreneurial spirit that the New York eCommerce Group Meetup fosters. “Anyone looking to start a new business or taking their existing business to the next level would benefit from attending the e-commerce Meetup,” said Lior, “the Meetup can educate you on what you need for your business including the best type of corporate structure. It can also teach you how to obtain the financing needed for the business as well as how to maximize your budget, including the best way to spend the money you have.”

“The Meetup will also teach you the best way to optimize your business through e-commerce, including integrating your site with others. The advantage of this particular Meetup is the diversity of the participants including attendees from Amazon, various e-commerce retailers and online start-ups.”

FGFH is an authorized user of The Living Balance Sheet ®. This platform is a powerful tool for businesses, which gives you a wide-angle view of clients’ financial worlds and will enable you to stress test their current financial approach. With The Living Balance Sheet, you can securely organize and analyze client data, improve client management efficiency and communication, and so much more. Check out an introductory video at: http://www.livingbalancesheet.net/client/ForestHills_Web/Business_webHi.htm.

Please feel free to comment on your experience at our Meetup or ask any questions about e-commerce, entrepreneurship, wealth management, or any other topics from this Meetup! Hara Partners would be happy to answer any questions you have.

We hope to see you at the next one!

And just like that, the Imagine E-commerce Magento Conference is sold out. For the third year running, enthusiastic response has snapped up all available tickets. But all is not lost! If, for whatever reason, you find yourself in need of tickets at the eleventh hour, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We’ll get in touch with Magento and see what we can do for you—we can’t guarantee that they’ll bend over backwards, but we do have their ear, and we’re willing to make the case for a worthy cause.

While it may seem like a long ways away, it is never too early to begin planning for the upcoming Holiday 2011 shopping season.

Holiday season spending is making a grand rebound from the 2008 – 2009 recessions.  Last year, comScore reported this past year’s e-commerce spending in the November – December 2010 holiday season reached $32.6 billion, a twelve-percent increase from the previous year.  One of the leading factors of this phenomenal increase is the online shopping holiday Cyber Monday (similar to Black Friday).    Cyber Monday this past year was the first billion-dollar online spending day in history, and was the top online spending day of the season.

With great anticipation, this upcoming holiday season should hold similar outcomes.  Take the time to prepare your company for the high demands shoppers during the holidays hold (hint: free shipping deals are a big hit) so that that this year will roll by with ease.