Enabling e-commerce

By Kristi Albertson

The Daily Inter Lake

The holiday shopping season is gaining momentum, and many Americans intend to do their buying from the comfort of their own homes.

Market research group Jupiter Research estimates consumers will spend about $32 billion shopping online this holiday season. Total annual online retail sales could grow from $81 billion in 2005 to $144 billion by 2010.

With so many online shoppers, businesses must have an eye-catching, functional, easy-to-navigate Web site. That's where the e-commerce consultants at the ZaneRay Group in Whitefish come in. The company does everything from designing Web sites to programming systems to offering consultant services - everything a small business or multimillion-dollar corporation needs to run a successful e-commerce business.

"There's very little we can't do regarding e-commerce work on the Internet," said Penny Porterfield, director of operations and business development.

ZaneRay handles a number of high-profile customers, including Patagonia and Nixon Watches. The company also has many local clients and does business with customers across the state.

"It's a pretty wide gamut of businesses that we support, but we do most of the heavy lifting for Patagonia and Nixon," Porterfield said.

"Heavy lifting" primarily refers to the complex programming required to run a major Web site, she explained. These sites must be able to handle high traffic from customers all over the world.

ZaneRay recently converted Patagonia's site to serve Japanese customers, Porterfield said. Two weeks ago, the company launched Patagonia Europe, which serves 15 countries, four currencies and two languages.

All of Patagonia's sites run off the same database, for which ZaneRay did most of the programming.

Patagonia was ZaneRay's first customer. Founder and president Reed Gregerson worked for the company before moving to Kalispell in 1994. Even after the move, Gregerson still did some technical work for Patagonia. By 1995, when the Internet boom began, Patagonia's needs increased, and the company was born.

By 1999, Gregerson had partnered with Henry Roberts, now the company's senior interface designer, and Dean Hamilton, senior programmer/analyst. Today, the company has nine employees, a number Porterfield expects to increase in the near future.

"We're just now expanding, and we're going to be adding a few more staff this year," she said.

All of the employees have years, sometimes decades, of computer programming experience, she added. "It's a very senior, experienced team."

Many of the clients have been around nearly as long, and new ones tend to be the result of client referrals.

"We rarely have lost any customers at all," she said. "Most of our customers have been with us since they came to us."

PATAGONIA IS still its largest customer, but regardless of size, ZaneRay helps clients create clean-looking, user-friendly sites that stand out from the millions of other sites online.

"Our customers generally are not the kind that are basic, mainstream Web sites," Porterfield said. "They have an interest in being unique and cutting-edge, so it's our job to stay up to date on that."

To do this, ZaneRay works closely with its customers to learn exactly what their needs are. The company also attends conferences and stays current on trends in e-commerce business.

In such a rapidly changing industry, it's not always an easy task.

"It can be quite a challenge to make sure we put in place the right technology that's going to grow along with their business," Porterfield said. "Part of our job is to look five years down the road. When we program or build any foundation with our individual customers, we keep an eye on growth and make sure anything we put in place will grow accordingly."

One of the biggest areas of growth is in search engines. An entire arm of the business is dedicated to maintaining and improving search engines for some of ZaneRay's biggest customers, Porterfield said.

"It's become a science all unto itself. It poses a real challenge for most customers," she said.

SEARCH ENGINES aren't the only tools the company builds, however.

"One of our top success stories is Competitive Cyclist," Porterfield said.

The company was a small bike shop in Little Rock, Ark., when owner Brendan Quirk approached ZaneRay.

"They said, 'We want to build the best, the nicest online bike shop on the Internet,' and we said, 'sure,'" Gregerson said.

Competitive Cyclist's budget was considerably less than rival bike shops, but ZaneRay was able to build a site that was almost immediately successful.

"I think within a year of when we launched, the business had grown 600 percent, all Internet," Gregerson said.

To date, the bike company has close to 30 employees, a warehouse and is growing between 30 and 50 percent a year, he added. "And we're just trying to keep up with them."

Part of the business' success has been due to tools ZaneRay designed for the site. Competitive Cyclist's customers are serious bikers looking for high-end merchandise for road races, mountain-bike races or triathlons.

To help these customers meet their very specific needs, ZaneRay designed calculators to help them figure out the exact size a bike should be to fit their frames.

Another tool allows a shopper to swipe out parts to get the bike's weight down to the exact ounce desired.

It's sophisticated tools like these that turn browsers into buyers, Porterfield said. It helped Competitive Cyclist become "one of the top bike businesses online today."

"He went from being a very, very small business to where he is today,

which is quite successful. He had a vision for the Internet, to get into selling a lot of these things online," she said. "He spends an enormous amount of money on his imagery."

That's played an important role in his success, she said.

"The Internet is very visual, and if you don't take the time to really invest in your imagery, it doesn't pay off as well," she said. "The challenge for most of our businesses is to present their products in a way that sets them apart from other businesses."

ZaneRay is also learning the how-tos of running an online business by trying it themselves.

"Almost every one of our clients has become fairly successful, if not wildly successful," Gregerson said. "We thought, can we do it too?"

About a year ago, the company partnered with California-based Juice Beauty, which sells organic skin-care and beauty products. Juice Beauty supplies and ships the goods, and ZaneRay maintains the company's Web site. For that service, ZaneRay gets a percentage of Juice Beauty's online sales.

It's still in the "experimental stage," Gregerson said, but the results have been encouraging.

"After about a year now, we're starting to see that it could be worth doing with someone else," he said.

It could very well be a profitable venture, considering e-commerce's anticipated increase. Internet shopping is convenient, and with some stores creating virtual tours, customers can experience a store's atmosphere without setting foot inside it.

Other emerging technologies involve the way people pay online. Soon, the idea of having separate accounts for individual stores may be obsolete.

"Companies like Google are trying to make it easy for you to have an account to pay for all of these things that is universal," Porterfield said. "It will be interesting to see if those are adapted quickly by consumers or not."

Regardless of the direction Internet shopping takes, there's little doubt that it will grow.

"I think it's going to continue to be a growth area for any business that's taking e-commerce seriously," she said.

On the Net: http://www.zaneray.com

Reporter Kristi Albertson may be reached at 758-4438 or by e-mail at kalbertson@dailyinterlake.com