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Hosted e-commerce platform provider eCorner has taken possession of the intellectual property (IP) behind the VARCentral platform, once owned by liquidated tech retailer Warehouse1 -- rebranding it as Resellerate in the process.
Warehouse1, which had previously been the parent company of the business operating the VARCentral platform, was liquidated in February owing more than $3 million to its secured creditors.
During the past six years, the VARCentral platform has offered IT resellers in Australia and New Zealand a mix of e-commerce and tailored tools designed to help partners manage margins and automate business processes.
The platform is essentially a pre-stocked online store with automated access to catalogues of more than 200,000 products spanning more than 3,000 categories from 13 distributors including Alloys, Dicker Data, Ingram Micro, Multimedia Technology, Simms and Synnex.
There are also six New Zealand suppliers involved, including Dove Data Products, Exeed, Ingram Micro and Synnex.
eCorner, which is unrelated to Warehouse1 or its subsidiary that had been operating the VARCentral platform, was the original web developer of the platform and provider of the hosting and software.
eCorner general manager, Jae Debrincat, said the company that was running the platform for the past three years was a subsidiary of Warehouse1, and as part of the wind-up, eCorner took possession of all the IP associated with the platform.
He noted that the platform had been neglected during the past 12 to 24 months. He has subsequently started working on upgrading and extending it for current and future merchants.
“We have already invested and upgraded the physical infrastructure and we’ve got a developer on-board that will continue to upgrade its functionality,” he said.
This involves upgrading the supplier data feed options, adding new payment methods such as ZipMoney and eWay Rapid, and enhancing multi-channel features for integration with online selling sites such as eBay, Amazon, Facebook Shop and Google Shopping.
Also being upgraded is the core ePages e-commerce software -- a move to allow for new responsive designs and easier store management.
“IT Resellers need to manage large, complex and constantly changing product catalogues and pricing, often their catalogues exceed 100,000 products across thousands of categories,” Debrincat said. “The platform has helped numerous IT Resellers get a handle on their business processes in a very complex and competitive environment.
“eCorner is focused on ensuring the platform continues to keep pace with changes in the space to keep the merchants using the platform growing and flourishing,” he said.
The new store offerings start at $250 per month (including GST) supporting up to 25,000 products and range up to a package capable of supporting the full catalogues from suppliers like Ingram Micro.
The platform has also been migrated to eCorner’s new Virtual Data Centre (VDC) at Macquarie Cloud Services providing VARCentral merchants with enterprise grade infrastructure, security and connectivity.
The dedicated cloud environment is configured and hardened by eCorner’s security specialists to Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) v3.2 requirements.
Some of the existing VARCentral merchants have transitioned to the Resellerate platform include Nanobyte Solutions, National Systems and IT Checkout.
