from Jan Griesel
Christmas is coming up in just a few days! When there's a lot going on, weeks seem to pass by like days. This year was full of excitement and the Christmas shopping season was a big success for our sellers: over 2.75 million sales orders were generated in December alone!
This corresponds to a revenue of 179.64 million Euro and 53% growth compared to last year. The most successful plentymarkets Professional seller received over 41,000 sales orders over the last four weeks. These numbers are more than impressive and I want to personally congratulate you all for your success!
I'm very pleased with how much our sellers have grown. Many of you managed to double your online business again this year or saw growth figures in the high double digit range. Ultimately, your growth is what drives us to continue making plentymarkets even better. We want our new functions and improvements to help you grow even more in the future.
We're also very happy that the major investment we made in the plentyCloud has started to pay off. There were no noticeable problems with your online shops being unavailable in December despite the fact that they had nearly twice as many visitors as in 2011.
We also reached an important technological milestone this year by implementing a new Java based technology in the admin area. We faced a few challenges when introducing version 4.4, but every user should have been able to notice the considerable advantages by the time they started working with version 4.5. In the last few weeks, the statistics module became a perfect example of just how quickly we can develop the software. Thanks to your feedback, we will introduce additional types of statistics in January and will be able to offer you further possibilities for controlling.
During the first quarter of 2013, our focus will be on making further developments to shipping and purchase order management. We will unveil new solutions for both of these areas. These solutions will include even more customizable functions and will allow you to offer an even wider range of shipping processes.
We will roll out plentymarkets 4.501 in January, 2013. In this version, substantial improvements were made to CRM, which allows you to communicate with your customers more easily. The exact starting date will be announced here in the blog.
We hit another very important milestone with the segmentation of our support. Your calls are now taken by employees who were specifically trained to understand and meet the needs of a small, medium or large business. We analyze the number of calls received each day and have noticed a very positive trend: the waiting times are considerably shorter for all support teams than they were in previous months.
Initial skepticism about the segmentation disappeared thanks to the improved availability and quicker reaction times. We received a lot of complements over the last few weeks, as can be seen by the following response:
Finally, I want to say a few words of praise for the new telephone support and complaint management system. Both were wonderfully implemented. This was a very important step for everyone involved.“ (Jan Weber, http://www.andalous-dessous.de/)
On behalf of the entire plentymarkets team, I want to thank you for the trust you put in our product and for all of the lovely gifts and greeting cards!
The card that we received from Microplane made a particularly big impression on us:
Dear plenty team!
With the help of your software & support, I was able to set up our Microplane shop in the blink of an eye. Things rarely seem to be impossible with plentymarkets and it's a lot of fun to work with you and your software. That's why I want to say thank you on behalf of the entire Microplane team and wish you all a merry Christmas and a successful 2013!
Kristina Hinz (text translated by plentymarkets)
Thank you to all of our customers and partners who wished us happy holidays.