“Once an e-commerce site realizes 100 transactions a day, things start to become unmanageable,” says Brian Strojny, president and partner at Bloomington-based e-commerce consulting company InSite Group. This isn’t the case for huge e-commerce sites, such as those of Amazon, Target, and Best Buy—companies that can manage online retail growth with major technology and staffing investments. But for midsize companies, making a 24-7 high-volume site work efficiently is often elusive; they don’t have and can’t afford the technology and fulfillment capabilities needed to manage it effectively.
Founded in 1998, InSite Group (www.groupinsite.com) has targeted the middle market with a suite of consulting services and software products tailored to streamline order entry, shipping, and fulfillment—and keep those capabilities up-to-date in the competitive online-retail market. The company designs and integrates a site so that each order “speaks” to all of the customer’s inside systems—accounting, billing, shipping, fulfillment, inventory control, and so on. InSite also provides strategic assistance, designing clients’ sites to look and work the way they want them to. InSite Group had nearly $4 million in 2006 sales for its consulting services and software products, and projects $10 million in revenues by 2010.
“InSite is a great partner,” says David Nassif, director of finance for Caldrea, a Minneapolis-based manufacturer of consumer cleaning products and an InSite client for six years. “We were clearly overwhelmed with orders. InSite made each of our functions see and talk to each other—we now look as though we are much larger.” Notes a more recently added client, Mike Sime, president and CEO of Brooklyn Park–based packaging manufacturer Creative Carton, Insite Group’s “holistic approach integrates throughout your entire business, whereas others don’t think past the Web site.” InSite staff, Sime adds, understand that e-commerce “is more than taking an order or putting a brochure on line.”
InSite’s two partners come from very different backgrounds. CFO Linda Taddonio is a software consultant and CPA formerly with Minneapolis-based consulting firm McGladrey & Pullen, while Strojny emerged from 3M’s corporate marketing group. Together, they provide accounting, software, and marketing expertise for mid-market e-commerce firms. Adding to the company’s consulting and its three software products—InSite Commerce, In-Site Intelligence, and InSite Ship—is a new marketing subsidiary, InSite InterActive, aimed at helping InSite’s clients drive customers to their sites.
“Build it, but they don’t necessarily come,” Strojny notes of e-commerce sites. Online retailers, he adds, need to stay up-to-date in technology and attractiveness, particularly in a growing market: “The Web is fast becoming the preferred method of acquiring goods for everyone.”
