Born in open-source, e-retailer turns to NetSuite because of growth

Five years ago, U.S. Cargo Control launched its e-commerce site business on a whim, selling moving equipment like tie-downs and protective blankets online. They decided on an open source technology platform for the flexibility and low cost it offered. Now they operate several sister sites and want to consolidate them all on one common platform.

They originally used Zen Cart and other integrations like Intuit’s QuickBooks for accounting. Zen Cart offered lots of add-on software modules for a lot of functionality that modern shopping carts today are just start to get: product reviews, cross-selling related items and multiple sizes of product images.

Over the past few years, U.S. Cargo Control – now operating under Clickstop Inc. – has expanded into a network of seven e-commerce sites through acquisitions and migrating them all to a common hosted e-commerce platform from NetSuite Inc. It is part of a software suite that includes warehouse management, accounting, order management and content management, as well as a shopping cart.

The move hasn’t been without its challenges. “We’ve come across plenty of issues with NetSuite, but it’s just a matter of learning how the technology works,” says Shaun Linderbamm, CTO of Clickstop Inc. Luckily, after three tries they were able to find a programmer who quickly learned how to work with NetSuite’s technology and fix things broken by former consultants in areas of content layout and display sale prices.

Time will tell if the overall move to NetSuite will provide ClickStop with the value it expects. Linderbamm figures the NetSuite ERP platform will be able to scale up to support ClickStop’s planned growth up to $50 or $100 million.

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