It's a fact of business that the money you spend is either an expense or an investment, and often it's difficult to tell which is which until after you've spent the dough. That was the dilemma facing Jimmy Weng of ePartyUnlimited.com, a web site for novelty items of all persuasions. As part of a planned redesign earlier this year, Jimmy added Cactus Complete Commerce powered by OrderMotion. It wasn't cheap. But was it expensive? You decide.

Commerce in, Commerce out...

"For us holiday season Mondays are the craziest," says Jimmy Weng. "Last year two people working our warehouse could fill 90 orders a day between them. This year, because of the Solid Cactus redesign our business is way up. Now we have four people working the warehouse, but because of Cactus Complete Commerce we're able to fill 330 orders per day. Our old order fulfillment was 30 seconds per order, now we're down to 10 seconds per order. We've cut our processing time on the back end by two-thirds."

What's Good for the Customer...

ePartyUnlimited.com also saw a genuine value at the front end, where it shows. "Having Cactus Complete Commerce helps our customer experience," says Weng. "Our automated responses keep us in touch with our customers faster, and we have different templates to better customize our responses. Also, the email confirmation is now much more detailed in terms of contents, units, deliveries, etc., and more information for the consumer usually leads to a better shopping experience."

Communication never hurt...

Cactus Complete Commerce has helped the internal communication at ePartyUnlimited.com. It's provided a centralized place where all the employees can log on and be up to date in moments. "It's a tremendous help to our internal communications," says Weng. "The fact that everything is posted in real time tells everyone where they are with respect to everyone else."

Run Ahead or Fall Behind...

For Jimmy Weng of ePartyUnlimted.com innovation is crucial to ecommerce survival. "The Internet is changing," he says. "Customers are more knowledgeable and as a result they're more demanding. I recommend a web site redesign every two to three years." It's what ePartyUnlimited.com did 2 years ago, and it was an investment that paid off. "Our business was flat for two years, then we had Solid Cactus redesign our site and business has grown by 50% per year ever since. Because our web site looks better we've gotten press coverage. Free advertising!! ePartyUnlimited.com is taking every opportunity to make our business better. After all, it's what our customers expect."