Back to School: Thoughts about our New Location

Bringing E-commerce to the Big Easy

posted on: May 3, 2006

Back to Business
New Orleans is anything but normal. The Solid Cactus team took a two hour cab ride around the city. The devastation was breathtaking and heartbreaking. Eight months later and people are still gasping for breath, stranded. Tourists aren’t coming, most residents haven’t moved back, and those who stayed have more immediate places for their money. We knew we could help. E-commerce is business without borders!

“E-Commerce 101”
Solid Cactus held a series of seminars called “E-Commerce 101.” We built online stores with the ability to function live that day. Yahoo! provided free store accounts and a search marketing budget to help them start advertising. Solid Cactus showed business owners how to set up, get all the product information, shipping rules etc. into the store so they could open for business, and once open, maintain it. Creative Director Andrew Smagin photographed and loaded product images for the sites. We provided dummy products to be replaced by the real thing and showed operators the ropes. It was a crash course and we helped set up more than a hundred sites. We even added a third seminar because the first two were overbooked. What a rush!

Real Life 101
It was wonderful to help, but sobering as well. People either suffered directly from the flood or they suffer now because fewer than 30% remain. There’s no money. But there is compassion, and we were amazed at how unselfish the people were. 75% of the folks we consulted with were trying to help other businesses in hardship. One guy we helped has a POS system used by a series of art shops. This POS system is an online application, so he has all their product data, pricing, and images already. Each art shop will have their own online store, and he will open a directory that aggregates all their products into the directory. He helps. We helped. Little steps on a long journey back.

Sean Gove, Vice President, Sales