Unfortunately, eCongo is no longer in business.

eCongo Free Commerce
http://www.econgo.com
162 Knowles Drive
Los Gatos, CA 95032

eCongo.com was the first company to offer "free" e-commerce, and though they have a number of competitors today, they offer a simple, easy-to-set-up online store with some very powerful features.

This week eCongo.com upgraded its merchant interface and store design options, making it a more usable and attractive. The interface guides new merchants along the store-building process through five steps: (1) build your store, (2) set money options, (3) set shipping options, (4) customize your store, and (5)your store. At any point the merchant can view Store Overview, which shows the elements of the store that are complete and items which are missing information.

Edit Storefront

When you begin, you are asked for basic information about your store: a name, short and long descriptions, and some keywords. Then contact addresses and phone numbers. You can add a store logo and a photo to the front page. Now you move to set up the page template that will surround each of your store's webpages. You select from 11 styles: classic, fun, classy, elegant, conservative, high tech, computer, gallery, auto-industrial, pet store, and toy store. Most of these styles allow a choice of several color combinations and headline fonts: Times Roman, Arial, Verdana, and Sans Serif. There's a lot more choice than the previous version. You can also select a special style for the homepage.

Add/Edit Catalog

The catalog section consists of department pages, category pages, and item or product pages. Let's say you had 6 departments, each with 3 categories of products. On the category pages you would show a thumbnail, short description, and link to 6 to 10 products. eCongo could easily handle hundreds of products. One eCongo store, Reptile City http://reptilecity.econgo.com/ markets thousands of items to customers. The downside, however, is that since there is no bulk database upload feature, each and every product must be entered through a web browser interface, and every photo uploaded one at a time. While there's no theoretical limit to the number of products, it would be pretty time-consuming to maintain more than a few hundred using the browser interface.

Department and category pages include these fields: name, short description, long description, image, plus the ability to select a different layout for each page. Item pages include more fields: catalog part number, item name/title, enabled, manufacturer, manufacturer's part number, item description short, item description long, numerical sort order, price, suggested retail price, taxable, package description, number of items per package, shipping amount, special promotion, store special, dept. special, category special, advertise this item, promotional title, item color scheme, thumbnail image, medium image, large image. Fortunately, the new version only shows you the most important information needed for each product, which speeds the construction of simpler catalogs, saving less-used fields for subpages. eCongo allows you to set up various attributes for your products, such as color, size, etc. You can assemble a whole attribute library of sizes or colors which can then be applied to any product in the store.

For nearly any field or description you can use standard HTML. This gives you a great deal of control over the look and feel of the site. If you need more pictures than the one allowed for each product, you could display it using HTML code in the description field.

Edit Special Pages

eCongo provides for several special types of pages: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), Help, and a Return Policy, though no special guidance is given for the content of these pages. You can also create custom pages for other information you may want to include in your store. These pages are designed to be prepared using a word processor or webpage editor, and then have the HTML code pasted into the box in the web browser interface. The space is too small to edit these in the web browser interface.

Store Setup

The store setup section leads the merchant through identifying the type of goods sold and e-mail forwarding addresses. eCongo's new version allows the user to configure for one of five currencies: US, UK, Canada, Australia, the Euro, or unspecified. You can set the weight and length units for either Imperial (inches or feet, lbs.) or metric (meters or cm, kg) and the site language to US or UK English. Currently only the US tax model is allowed, with a percentage set for each state in which the merchant needs to collect taxes, though it looks like other tax models are in the works. You set up payment types, which can include: a mailed check, phone orders, and COD. If you sign up for their Merchant Credit Card Account, you can also accept credit cards. There are many shipping options you can offer, but instead of setting up a table based on weight, each shipping method only allows a single default shipping dollar amount per item. This can be overridden for specific products, but eCongo has no provision for weight-based shipping, an unfortunate omission.

Order and Payments

When a customer is shopping in your store, the number of items in the shopping cart and the total amount are continually displayed at the top of the page to remind her. Near the top of every page also are buttons for Favorites, Shopping Cart, and Checkout. Unfortunately, this is the only indication to remind a shopper to check out. I'm afraid that too many shoppers will forget and should be reminded more clearly.

The manage orders section of the store allows you to administer order fulfillment. When an order is first made, its status is "" Each day you would ask eCongo to show you all theorders, and you would process each, changing its status to ship order, decline, backorder, or void. When products are shipped, you can indicate the actual shipper, UPS tracking number, actual shipping charges, and actual sales taxes. Shipped orders are marked "closed." When orders are shipped, the customer is sent an e-mail that includes the UPS tracking number and a link to that number on the UPS site. The merchant can reference orders -- closed, backordered, etc. -- through searching by order number, name, credit card number, address, date, order status, etc. The system is not designed to make partial shipments. The merchant also receives a daily e-mail informing him of the number of orders in each status category. All in all, this is a powerful order management system, especially for merchants using UPS as their main shipper.

Customers are able to review the status of their orders online at the Earth2Go! Shopping Network site -- a rather high end feature for a free e-commerce system.

Accepting Credit Cards

At present, if you want to accept credit cards, you need to set up a Merchant Credit Card Account through NTB Merchant Services and First Data Corp., who also provide a secure payment gateway to transfer credit card information to the processor for authorization. Fortunately, the terms for setting up the Merchant Account are quite favorable. Prior to September 15 there is no setup fee, nor is there any termination fee if the merchant's business fails and he needs to close the account. Accounts are subject to monthly fees of $19 for processing and $10 for the payment gateway. In addition, merchants are charged a reasonable 2.49% discount rate and 30 cents per transaction. Transaction fees must reach a $15 minimum each month to avoid paying an extra fee. Unfortunately, at present merchants are required to have a corporate presence in US, an account at a US bank, and a federal tax ID, which effectively excludes most foreign merchants.

Marketing the Store

eCongo has a feature that submits the store URL to several search engines: Lycos, Excite, AltaVista, WebCrawler, and MSN -- helpful, but not very impressive. Merchants can also place their own scrolling ads at the top of each page of their site, or, if they desire, trade advertising with other eCongo merchants. Stores are categorized for future inclusion in an eCongo mall. eCongo's own marketing messages scroll through at the top left of merchant's pages, too, though most of their branding is with a logo, link, and name at the bottom of each page.

But it is in marketing the merchant's store that eCongo's offer begins to suffer. eCongo insists that merchants use a URL such as http://storename.econgo.com. Since eCongo doesn't allow a merchant to use his own URL, this means that any marketing the merchant does to bring traffic to his eCongo store ties him that much closer to eCongo in the future, since any links to his store would be obsolete if he were to leave eCongo. The safest way for merchants to market is to make their eCongo store an adjunct to their own existing webpages -- not a standalone site, but one with links from the merchant's main site.

A second marketing problem results from eCongo placing the store contents in HTML frames. Only the front page of the site is designed to be marketed and spidered by search engines. It is possible, I found, to link directly to a product page -- and soon, eCongo discovers the naked page and surrounds with an appropriate frame anyway. Using direct product links would be important for merchants trying to drive traffic to particular products.

Revenue Model

When someone offers a continuing service as "free," you always wonder how they expect to stay in business. In eCongo's case, their business plan includes income from credit card transaction revenue sharing, along with premium services offered by other business partners. In addition, the new merchant interface constantly pushes banner ads before the merchant, providing eCongo with advertising revenue.

Conclusion

I think that eCongo offers the small merchant a surprisingly robust e-commerce interface. eCongo provides a clear path for novices to quickly build an attractive and serviceable store, and its partnership with NTB and First Data provides well-priced credit card services. It has a strong order management system, and an order tracking interface for customers that is unique in the "free" category.

However, without a bulk upload system for databases and product photos, eCongo will be used mainly by merchants with small catalogs. And since eCongo prohibits merchants from setting up a store with the merchant's own URL, some forward-looking merchants will hesitate to tie their businesses that strongly to eCongo.

For novice merchants seeking to try out e-commerce and siteowners wanting to add e-commerce to an existing website, eCongo provides a strong product with some very attractive features.

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