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Background
What
is the company's history?
Who are its investors?
Who is the management team?
What is an E-commerce Service Provider (ESP)?
Customers
What criteria do your customers use when selecting
the Escalate solution?
What are Escalate's target markets?
Why choose Escalate over setting up e-commerce in-house?
Escalate Commerce Network
Why would a manufacturer,
distributor or wholesaler choose to join the Escalate Commerce Network?
What role could a logistics service provider, customer
service provider, or other partner play in the Escalate Internet
Commerce Network?
What is the technology infrastructure of the Escalate
Commerce Network?
Escalate
Merchant Service
What
is the Escalate Merchant Service?
How is Escalate doing transaction processing?
How does Escalate handle fulfillment of orders?
What is Escalate's contextual selling engine?
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Background
What is the company's history?
Escalate was founded with the stealth name "Just Like TV Internet
Inc." in January 1999 by an diverse group of start-up veterans
from Kiva Software/Netscape.
Who are its investors?
Accel Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, The Barksdale Group,
Discovery Ventures, and Angel Investors, LP, who participated in
a $26.5 million financing round in August 1999.
Who is the management team?
Now at 100 employees, Escalate has attracted world-class management,
development, and operations talent from companies such as Microsoft,
Oracle, Informix, Kiva, Netscape, PeopleSoft, and Sun Microsystems,
as well as online marketplaces and portals such as AOL, HearMe,
Chemdex and e-STEEL. Complementing technical and marketplace experts
are authorities in retailing, merchandising, and supply chain from
companies including Bain & Company, Egreetings, Gymboree and
Williams-Sonoma.
What
is an E-commerce Service Provider (ESP)?
An
E-commerce Service Provider delivers e-commerce services from a
centrally-managed facility that enable websites to operate fully-functional,
private label stores on the Internet. Merchant clients of ESPs typically
recognize top-line revenue from sales to end-customers. Full-service
ESPs like Escalate complement end-to-end e-commerce capabilities,
including services to manage customer experience, store configuration,
merchandising, order fulfillment, accounting and supply chain management,
with access to pre-qualified suppliers and service providers for
warehousing, fulfillment and customer service.
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Customers
What criteria do your customers use
when selecting Escalate?
- Time to Market: Escalate provides fast deployment and
maintenance. Businesses do not have to worry about straining engineering
resources to update millions of SKUs of product data, or patching
together their own end-to-end solutions.
- Completeness of Solution: A universal e-commerce network,
the Escalate Commerce Network provides an end-to-end e-commerce
management solution, access to pre-qualified service providers,
and a vast product catalog and supplier network.
- Ability to do Branded Commerce by Customizing Store:
Escalate storefronts are completely customizable by the website
to become an exact match.
- Fraction of Cost to Build and Maintain: Escalate's solution
requires minimal capital expenditures. The pricing model is based
on a combination of monthly fees and transaction charges.
What are Escalate's target markets?
High-traffic websites, retailers, cataloguers, and existing e-commerce
sites that wish to upgrade their existing e-commerce capabilities
can benefit by outsourcing their e-commerce activities to the Escalate
Commerce Network.
Why choose Escalate over setting up
e-commerce in-house?
Setting up commerce in-house is costly, can take up to a year to
implement, drains engineering resources, and may allocate resources
away from the business's core competencies. Moreover, in-house solutions
require businesses to negotiate their own deals with wholesalers
to access products to sell, which is also costly and complex.
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Escalate
Commerce Network
Why would a manufacturer, distributor
or wholesaler choose to join the Escalate Commerce Network?
Suppliers who join the Escalate Commerce Network gain access to
an exciting new sales channel for their products. The cost of joining
the network is free and the resource commitment is minimal. Escalate
is signing up new merchants to the network every week, so the potential
to generate significant incremental sales is high.
What role could a logistics service
provider, customer service provider, or other partner play in the
Escalate Commerce Network?
Any service that expedites a segment of the e-commerce value chain
has a place in the Escalate Commerce Network. Escalate will provide
a simple venue for these providers to set up relationships our merchant
customers and integrate their service into the Escalate Merchant
Service.
What is the technology infrastructure of the
Escalate Commerce Network?
The Escalate Commerce Network is complete, end-to-end e-commerce
outsourcing solution for high-traffic websites. The solution is
based upon a network-ready, enterprise-class suite of e-commerce
applications that implement all the key operational stages of the
e-commerce value chain. The applications are supported by infrastructure
and a service delivery platform designed to support scalability,
reliability, availability, security and performance for e-commerce
services.
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Escalate
Merchant Service
What
is the Escalate Merchant Service?
The Escalate
Merchant Service is a complete, end-to-end e-commerce management
service for companies that wish to become online merchants faster
and with less investment than was previously possible.The Escalate
Merchant Service enables businesses to introduce or enhance their
online stores and merchandising capabilities in as little as three
weeks, at a fraction of the typical cost. With the Escalate Merchant
Service, online merchants can focus on branding and store design,
merchandising and product assortments-creating a superior customer
experience; Escalate takes care of all the rest. The service offers
online merchandising tools, product sourcing, a vast supplier network,
and automated back-office operations such as fulfillment and inventory
management.
How
is Escalate doing transaction processing?
Escalate has
designed and built an industry-leading service delivery platform
capable of supporting the peak loads of hundreds of transaction-intensive
e-commerce environments simultaneously. In addition, Escalate has
integrated its platform with proven third-party service partners
for specific functions such as payment processing and tax calculation
to provide end-to-end e-commerce capabilities for its merchant clients.
How
does Escalate handle fulfillment of orders?
The Escalate
Commerce Network supports both drop-ship and non-drop-ship capable
suppliers. Escalate routes purchase orders directly to drop-ship
capable suppliers, and exchanges information with them for order
status. Escalate arranges for bulk shipments from non-drop-ship
capable suppliers to be delivered to third-party logistics service
providers (LSP) in the network. Escalate routes purchase orders
for these products to the LSPs for fulfillment.
What
is Escalate's contextual selling engine?
Escalate's
contextual selling engine enables personalized selling to each visitor
on the site. It uses context information and business rules to make
product recommendations to visitors at an Escalate merchant site.
Examples of contextual information that can be used include past
sales history, webpage content, click stream analysis, and other
micro-and macro-profile information. The selling engine is used
to power targeted product recommendations through a variety of selling
mechanisms, including Escalate's iPOS (interactive Point-of-Sale)
displays.
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