E-Commerce Consulting & Execution

We provide cloud-based e-commerce solutions that enable retailers and manufacturers to increase the scale and profitability of their sales through strict conformance with Internet Retailer 500 standards, superior SEO/SEM techniques, and feeds to dozens of marketplaces including Amazon, Google, Jet, Sears, Newegg, eBay, Facebook and more. There are few other firms in Northern New England that have as rich an experience in commerce as Dirigo — we support most popular platforms. and have worked with more 20+ systems (e.g. our most resent installs include Magento 2.0, Siriusware integrations, NopCommerce, Prestashop, Squarespace, and EPiServer).

Our E-Commerce Roots

All three Dirigo partners have formative e-commerce experiences and several of our developers also come from e-commerce concerns. We prefer the .NET technology stack, but, we've done plenty of work the common platforms.

David Addison, Partner

It all began so long ago, ancient history by web standards. Our Managing Partner, David Addison, in 1997 built his first e-commerce site using a product feed from Ingram Micro (the world’s largest wholesale technology distributor — a Fortune 100 company) that had over 700,000 products. At the time, access to the feed cost $30k/year. Way back then David generated $11MM in revenue on his own website. These were the hey-days. It was so easy.

By 1999 David was selling ecommerce solutions online, pre-Dirigo. That same year he built commerce sites for www.planetdog.com and then www.focusfactor.com (they’ve since gone retail) – www.alwaysyoung.com followed. Then came work on www.dunkindonuts.com, www.thosmoser.com, www.womentowomen.com... www.victormfg.com, www.fwwebb.com, and www.johnnyseeds.com. Over the years David has acquired ownership/partnership interest in several e-com firms. David continues to run his own seperate e-commerce site and is active with all the major marketplaces as a side project. Between 2003 to 2012 he personal invested more than 17,000 hours into www.womentowomen.com (now www.womenshealthnetwork.com) — ranked among the Top 50 Health & Medical > Information sites in the world by Experian Hitwise. Women to Women was the only site in the Top 50 supported solely by product sales. David is a partner/owner in Concordia Partners LLC.

Jamie Ippolito, Partner

Jamie Ippolito has similar e-commerce experience. He too knows what it takes to generate more than $30MM in online revenue from 170,000 customers in the cataloger space. Jamie spent more than five years planning and executing www.fetchdog.com. Earlier in his career as the Manager of Interactive Services at American Skiing Company he oversaw $20MM in e-commerce sales. Before that he managed $2MM in e-commerce revenue as Online Marketing Manager for Sunday River. For his herculean efforts Jamie too acquire ownership in several enterprises.

Throughout 2016-17 Jamie led Dirigo's effort to build-out Dirigo Ecommerce Services — a standalone enterprise grade season pass, dated ticket, and event e-commerce system for the ski and the hospitality markets. This is a special SaaS commerce platform that addresses unique industry needs. Dirigo Ecommerce Services extends e-commerce into any website and works especially well with DirigoEdge and Konvey (our CMS and Messaging Platform).

Victoria Kuhn, Partner

Victoria Kuhn led our www.fwwebb.com and www.johnnyseeds.com projects which started as branding, feasibility, marketing and best practice bodies of work. She also the Managing Partner of www.pmscomfort.com (and its marketplaces), her own e-commerce company.

We've Done It for 20 Years

The net-net is over a billion dollars in e-commerce sales. We’ve built solutions for as little as $3,500 and as high at $1.7MM. We know what it takes to build a 50-seat call center and ship 5,500 orders a day. We also know how to build ecommerce solutions for 30 orders a day managed by a single proprietor working from home. We know how to interface with CRMs, shipping systems, and telephone systems. We’ve managed e-commerce budgets from $50,000 to $7MM a year.

E-commerce comes in many sizes and shapes. Solutions differ for web-only merchants (pure-play), chain retailers, catalog companies, and consumer brand manufacturers. The best shopping carts are usually custom solutions. If you know that you’re going to be successful with your e-commerce play, you’d be well suited to build your solution from scratch. If you’re just starting out and have a limited budget it is worth considering Magento, Shoppify, Volusion, Bigcommerce. We also have experience with ASPDotNetStorefront, eOne Commerce, ZenCart, and others.

Whether it’s a custom solution or the latest software-as-a-service (SaaS) application, all web retailers have an e-commerce platform that includes a product catalog, rich content, site search and a shopping cart. Whether you are selling one product or thousands, we have a solution for you. Small e-commerce web sites can be up and running in a matter of weeks. Larger installations can take a year or more of relentless development.

We have the expertise to help e-commerce businesses perform competitive intelligence, define winning strategies, establish requirements, build platforms, establish benchmarks, and to leverage best practices. Any e-tailer considering a platform should undertake a careful process of due diligence and really understand what they need and what they're buying.

Dirigo Can Help You:

• Determine what you need and where to get it
• Create strategic objectives
• Define detailed functional and technical requirements
• Assess your e-commerce strategies and gaps
• Design wireframes and site navigation
• Benchmark against IR500 best practices
• Acquire more sales, margin, leads...
• Write an effective e-commerce RFP and analyze responses
• Find the e-commerce best fit for your needs
• Ask and answer the right questions and stretch your thinking

A Short List of What we've Done

• A/B split testing
• Accuracy that incorporates frauds, cancels, returns, offline conversions and lead valuation
• Affiliate programs
• Banner advertising
• Call center build-out
• Communities and member areas
• Competitive intelligence
• Content delivery networks (Akami, EC2, CloudFiles)
• Contextual advertising
• Conversion optimization
• Credit card gateway integration (plus PayPal & Google Checkout)
• Customer relationship management (CRM) system implementation
• Customer retention and loyalty programs
• Customer reviews and rating systems
• Database development
• Disaster recovery planning
• E-commerce analytics
• E-commerce content management systems
• E-commerce hosting
• E-commerce inventory systems, carts and checkout systems
• E-commerce strategy
• E-mail deliverability optimization
• E-mail reputation management
• E-mail response management systems
• Enterprise e-mail ESP services
• Fraud prevention
• GeoIP (location) product offerings, inventory, pricing, syndication, up-sells
• Integrated Blogs
• International e-commerce
• Intrusion detection systems (IDS)
• Live chat/click-to-call
• Marketplace management (Amazon, eBay, Buy, Sears, and Newegg)
• Mobile (m-Commerce)
• Multi-channel software solutions
• Offline media campaigns (catalog, print, radio and television)
• Order management and fulfillment
• Paid search and attribution managment
• PCI compliance
• Product configurators
• Product Personalization
• Responsive web development (RWD) for e-commerce
• Search engine marketing (SEM)
• Security
• Shopping Engine Integrators (Mercent and Channel Advisor)
• Shopping Engines (Google, Price Grabber, Shopzilla, Shopping.com, Nextag, and Become)
• Site search (Google, Endeca, and nXn)
• Social media promotion
• Variation by season, promotion, sale, time of day or day of week

E-Commerce Growth Rate in 2012

How does your e-commerce growth rate compare with the industry average? The only thing constant in e-business is change. Oh, and the group with the best strategy and cleanest execution usually wins. Yesterday’s best practice is today's old news. Today's nice to have is tomorrow's can't live without. Right now the industry is adapting to smartphone use, higher bandwidth availability, innovative payment products, and social media.

Let us Help you Achieve Your Goals

We can do a website e-commerce critique and then provide you with detailed recommendations on exactly how to inplement improvements that will help you to meet or exceed industry norms. If you would like to discuss an engagement, please give us a call .