Sophio has been building websites for auto part sellers since the early 2000's. Some of our clients have literally NEVER updated their sites design, or catalog, or store configuration. Some clients tell us 'We thought you did that automatically' or 'We did not know we had to update it.' Sophio is constantly updating its own internal systems such as the shipping, taxation, payment processing, anti-fraud features and marketplace integrations, but we do not change clients websites unless we are asked. Since all of our clients are selling auto parts and compete with our other clients we are not regularly broadcasting or soliciting our clients to make changes. So, the long story short, is YOUR SITE NEEDS TO BE UPDATED if you want to keep up with the times. There have been a number of changes and features that every Sophio seller should be considering which will cost money to implement.
1. Your catalog should be using our 'faceted' catalog. The faceted catalog is SEO friendly which means you will get more pages indexed by the search engines. This will not guarantee sales, but it will drive more traffic to your site which could / should increase sales long term. The faceted catalog also has what is known as FBS built in. FBS also known as 'Fulfillment by Sophio' is a special order solution that allows you to sell over 750,000 items at your website that Sophio will get drop shipped to your customer. There is no cost for this service, Sophio buys the part from suppliers and marks it up a few points to cover the cost of facilitating the sale. You can read more about FBS in our FBS article section. Yes - you can prioritize your own inventory over the FBS inventory.
2. We allow our clients to self host their site on their own cloud server. This will make your site faster and more secure. The cost for this upgrade starts at $150 per month
3. Your site needs to be mobile friendly as half the traffic that hits our servers comes from a phone. To get our mobile friendly version, you need to have a 'bootstrap' enabled design. If you have not heard of bootstrap, you probably do not have a bootstrap enabled site. We have 'free' bootstrap templates that you can use or we can custom build you one. The cost for a custom bootstrap design is between 5-10 hours at $100 per hour to start.
4. Your site needs its own SSL certificate to be 'secure'. To get an SSL cert we need to create you what is called a CSR. We do have a $50 one time charge to create the CSR and install your GoDaddy SSL certificate. The cost for the certificate can be discovered at GoDaddy.com
