On Demand Publishing and e-Commerce

After the release of our second podcast episode (On Demand CD/DVD Production), a common question we’ve received from our customers and listeners has been, “I there a way I can handle my own On Demand orders by adding e-commerce components to my website for a store?” We have CD and DVD authoring customers that range from film makers and musicians to content producers such as photographers, authors or trainers.

The On Demand concept is a system allowing the production and manufacturing of CDs and DVD duplication on an as needed basis, which allows you to sell your products one at a time and ship worldwide. It helps protect your cash flow too because we don’t bill until the end of the month. Now it is much easier to integrate a full-featured online storefront and order processing, which allows creative folks to be creative and produce as opposed to worrying about their e-commerce functionality.

Is an online store something you can set up and manage by yourself? Absolutely. But it is not easy. That's why last year we choose to do a strategic partnership with a company called Kagi, who is now Acutrack’s preferred provider of online store solutions. Frank Patchel is the president of Kagi, who knows what the challenges in this business, and it’s not as simple as it seems.

As he said, there are a number of layers of complexity involved in e-commerce, from the web design aspects, to branding the online storefront, choosing and adding shopping cart functionality, merchant account creation for MasterCard and Visa or others, content protection, privacy and security issues of both your content and the customers’ privacy, managing the downloads, backend software integration, database management, selling and then fulfillment and delivery, plus keeping track of accounting, taxes and orders processing. And this does not even include the set up for international orders where laws, languages and foreign currencies are involved.

In the end it is much easier to go with a solution like our On Demand e-commerce solution with Kagi, which is a fully hosted online storefront solution. A store wizard makes it easy to set up and maintain. Kagi offers fraud protection, buyer care, and marketing tools, such as affiliate responders that help manage customers so they will find and also come back to your store. The Internet offers a great landscape for opportunity but with that comes more competition, so it’s important to make sure that customers will find your online store in the first place, and Kagi's solution helps provide search engine optimization for that purpose.

The result of the integrated solutions of Kagi's online store for e-commerce and Acutrack's On Demand DVD authoring production and distribution will mean no-hassle e-commerce and an easy way to make your business more profitable.