Well, we've cut our former selves out, we cut out the agency. This means that an e-commerce project that would have otherwise required weeks worth of project planning, client workshops and design iterations is now available in just three clicks of a button.

Inevitably, the high cost of client management, face-to-face design consultations, usability workshops and overall planning that goes into the development of a bespoke e-commerce solution leads to considerable costs. These are commonly only afforded by established retailers, investment backed start-ups or the big brands. We wanted to take on the challenge of providing the quality of product crafted by the same talent as the $30,000 to $90,000 e-commerce projects and using the same performance led methods as you might expect of a specialist e-commerce digital agency, yet, make our online boutiques available at a fraction of the price. How do we do it?

We figured, that, to be able to offer similar e-commerce opportunities to an audience largely composed of creatives and experimenting entrepreneurs we must analyse the services they require and the respective costs of providing them. This will define what constitutes the most essential e-commerce features that a typical user would fundamentally require to launch their products in the public eye. We would need to streamline the provision of these features and by doing so, be able to offer them at a price that de-risks our customer's decision to make a break for it doing what they love.

SupaDupa's development methodologies and the resulting online boutiques adhere to all the rigor and discipline typical of a custom built online boutique / e-commerce development.

We set out to build the features we defined in our research and prioritised the ones that, in our experience, had proven to be absolutely essential to the success of marketing any product online. This included everything from store functionality to usability and design, SEO and inventory management, fulfilment and content management. The service we intended to provide needed to go from being able to showcase and manage just one product to hundreds and appeal to someone with no experience selling online to those that had an grounded perspective of e-commerce software.

To grasp the challenge we faced it's important to understand how e-commerce websites are made today:
Web agencies are consultancies composed of teams of highly skilled talent including web engineers, graphic artists, usability experts, SEO experts and marketers, not to mention everyone else responsible for managing the agency's infrastructure: project managers, account managers and sales executives drumming up new business.

To initiate a project, a client engages creatively, technically, strategically, directly and indirectly with most of these skill sets and pays for their time. Seeing as each project is different to the next, there are few economies of scale to be gained and therefore costs will always remain high.

* By circumventing traditional methods SupaDupa bypasses the requirement to engage with our clients as a consultancy. Instead we opt to provide some of these services using clever software consisting of an *essential* set of highly developed e-commerce features with every store. These carefully picked features are representative of the broadest common denominator necessitated by specialist online boutiques selling everything from Fashion to Jewellery and Furniture. SupaDupa's e-commerce software also provides the ability to make up your own Custom product that does not necessarily fall into assumed conventions.

* To overcome the costs incurred by account management SupaDupa has been developed as a ready made SAAS e-commerce boutique solution that can be set up independently by the end user in a matter of minutes, not weeks. It uses a versatile subscription based model that allows the user to stay in control of their shop without the need to call on the services of an account manager and an expensive team of people.

* But what about all the e-commerce store front customisations our clients have come to expect?
Well, we built the most critical ones straight in with the software. Every online boutique can be set up based on a selection of classically crafted e-commerce boutique store themes. These can be customised by selecting fonts and colours that match with your brand. The process of doing so is decisively simple to encourage our users to create exactly what they want and feel they are in control the whole way through.

* Lastly, how do we overcome the support our users come to expect of a dedicated account handler?
For starters, we have front loaded the effort to build our software in ways that will empower our users and thereby minimise the number of “how to?” queries a support line typically deals with. This has meant building every part of the system to be just about indestructible, so much so that you simply can't do anything wrong. Usability is at the forefront of any software feature build. Our overarching principle was to make our software so deliberately simple our users would struggle to do anything wrong, a tall order but one we set out in our manifesto.

Many services out there make the same claim but few live up to it. We were well aware of this but we simply could not afford to not live up to the expectation as this would make our business unviable at the price we aimed for. And seeing as all our users run on the same platform, bugs fixes and upgrades can be rolled out collectively sparing the overhead of maintaining multiple applications and their respective code bases.

We are very different in two ways:

1: We Create our Own Designs:
We take great pride in designing our own software and refuse to charge outrageous prices for our stores.

2: You are in control:
Our web-based sales approach allows you to bypass the "Agency" and the high prices they charge.