This week’s Startup of the Week features an interview with Dries Droesbeke & Joris Hens, founders of SolidShops, a hosted ecommerce software for web designers and their clients.
SolidShops is an online service that allows you to create your own e-commerce store without having to worry about hosting, security or backups. They host everything themselves but still allow you to fully custimize your store using their own templating language together with HTML and CSS. webgeekly is offering you three whole months for free (instead of the one they offer) – Go to the end of the interview below to find out how to sign up.
Here’s the interview:
Founders: Dries Droesbeke & Joris Hens
SolidShops is a hosted ecommerce solution focused on web designers that want to build better stores for their clients.
Joris runs his own web design studio and clients would often come to him with requests to build professional online stores. Users didn’t like the proposed solutions such as Magento because often they were too complex and expensive to implement.
That’s why we created SolidShops so that web designers don’t need to worry about hosting, backups or even security updates. We take care of all that while their clients can manage their store with our extremely user friendly backend system.
By the way, we met each other years ago when we were both working on a summer job as students in a liquor store. We found out we were both passionate about working on the web and have done project together ever since.
SolidShops is much more user friendly than many of the competitors around. We focus on simplicity while maintaining 100% design flexibility for web designers. We do that by providing a custom but very easy to use templating system that allows web designers to build unique stores for their clients.
Both are possible really. Some web designers choose SolidShops to integrate into an existing web site while others use SolidShops to create a complete store with other pages on the side to create a full blown website with ecommerce capabilities.
Since there is no limit on the number of web pages you integrate with SolidShops, you can go nuts and build out a complete web site around your store as well.
We’ve got a number of great features planned for the near future that will enable web designers to build even better stores for their clients. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook or on our blog to stay up to date with our latest features. We deploy an update of our application every two weeks based on our users’ feedback.
Our long term goal is to be the most flexible, most easy to use tool for building online stores. We never want to be the most complex tool out there like many of our competitors.
Keep things simple, keep things enjoyable while maintaining flexibility, that’s our clear focus.
Words mean little, if there is no great product to back them up.
How about we give away a discount coupon that allows you to try out our service for free during 3 months: use the code “webgeekly” during signup and we’ll automatically activate your store for three months.
Enjoy the app everyone and hurry up to get your three months free.
A big thanks to Dries & Joris from SolidShops who took the time to complete this interview. They offer packages starting from $29 monthly all the way up to $299 monthly, allowing you to have up to 10,000 products. Don’t forget – You can use the “webgeekly” promo code during signup and they will automatically activate your store for three months.
What do you guys think of SolidShops?
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