What is the Pakk Commerce Platform?
If you need your website to tell a story, Pakk is probably not a good fit for you. If you need to sell products efficiently, it definitely is.
An e-commerce presence is not just a website
An e-commerce presence should not be just a ‘website’, it should be a sophisticated yet simple-to-use ordering tool that implements commerce best practices from start to finish. It should be modern, clear, fast and easy to use — like the best mobile and desktop apps to which we’ve become accustomed.
Such a tool won’t be for every company though. We’ve had to make some very specific decisions when architecting Pakk which mean it’s not suitable for all companies that want a web presence. It’s not a good fit for service providers, consultants, travel agents, luxury brands, experience providers and digital-goods sellers. It’s specifically architected for sellers of simple, physical goods. Companies that sell ‘stuff’, lots of ‘stuff’, to a wide range of customers, both wholesale and retail, over the web, over the phone and in person. Manufacturers, importers, distributors, wholesalers and retailers. If you need your website to tell a story, Pakk is probably not a good fit for you. If you need to sell products efficiently, it definitely is.
Pakk expects to be the source of truth
Pakk expects to be the ‘source of truth’ for a large chunk of your business operations, particularly those centered around order management and the coming and going of stock. This line is the absolute hardest to draw in the whole of e-commerce and ERP technology, but it has to be drawn somewhere and we’ve made a very deliberate choice, after much energetic debate and consultation, on where to draw it. That’s what the rest of this article is about — I hope it helps you in your research, even if it turns out that Pakk is not for you.
For an e-commerce ordering portal to be truly functional, it needs to know as much as possible about the context in which it is operating:
- Who is this customer?
- When did they last buy from us?
- What have they bought before?
- What do they buy regularly?
- What’s in their cart? What’s in the favourites list?
- Do we have stock of what they are looking for?
- If not, when is it due in? Is it already committed to other customers?
- What payment methods and shipping methods are available to them?
- What discounts can they get? Does it matter if they order over the phone or web? Will those be the same?
- When will their order be despatched? How long will it take to get to them?
- Has this customer complained? Returned a product? Asked a question? Started a chat?
We considered many options regarding ‘where to draw the line’. We considered integrating with separate inventory software, accounting software, ERP software, operations management software etc, but always came to the same conclusion: we want all the key data, always available, and in a single place (the source of truth). That place had to be Pakk. You use Pakk to centralise and expedite your orders on a day-to-day basis, you use Pakk to track and replenish inventory and you use Pakk to manage and help your customers. There are no integrations with the ensuing synchronisation spaghetti, all the data is in one place, always. It’s like having a state-of-the-art webstore deeply integrated into enterprise ERP with all the unnecessary cruft stripped out and without the enterprise price tag.
We want all the key data, always available, and in a single place
If you’re familiar with the potential depth and breadth of enterprise resource planning, this may sound crazy: how can one platform attempt to provide all this functionality? In fact, I’ve already hinted at the answer. Pakk isn’t for everyone. We don’t include project management, time tracking, payroll, warehouse management, employee expense management, customs clearance, sales pipeline, lead tracking or any number of other features that can be found in large ERP systems. Pakk is only interested in core e-commerce activities, not those that are ancilliary. By sticking closely to the orders/inventory/customer trinity, we avoid a lot of the ballooning complexity that can come from trying to include every feature possible, and by focusing on a well defined target market (see above; in summary, customers selling “stuff”), we avoid demands for features that would be useful to only a fraction of customers.
And that leads me to my final point: we aim to develop a core set of features that are useful to most, if not all, of our customers. If most people won’t use it, we won’t develop it. That’s why we’re 100% committed to an open-development roadmap and a continuous feedback cycle with our customers: you get to influence the development of Pakk from day one of your involvement in the project. If your business fits the ‘Pakk profile’, the product will grow up around your needs, not the needs of a blogger, a chemicals plant or a stock photography reseller.
If you think Pakk might be the missing e-commerce platform you’ve been looking for, we’d love to hear from you and show you a demo of the product.
