Just invested a few tenners in Primestox.com , a P2P lending outfit that has trappings of sanity like a nice web site. It has high annual percentage payback rates on very small short-term small investments if all goes well, and next to no references from other web pages. So I decided to invest about £100 yesterday, and write this referring page which I revise now and then. There's also a link to a P2P invoice finance company further down which might interest the same businesses, and a P2P business capital company which is good for secured loans on equipment. I don't know why I wrote "capital" rather than "finance" but I think it looks good for larger amounts.
( Update February 2018 - Every Primestox deal has paid on time or early, one or two have posted freebies, and the system has worked exactly as described. Most of the deals have sold-out within hours, so the rates on offer are dropping. Below 12% it is harder to get P2P lenders interested quickly because sites like Lendy and Fundingsecure offer that much for bridging loans; at the moment Primestox offers are about 18% with free card processing. )
Investors have a right to a parcel of food on default
The firm finances food for investors, and, being a P2P platform, investors own the food. Other P2P systems are a bit theoretical about this, but not Primestox, where it is a point of pride and and spelt-out in some detail, with inevitable gaps. The food is financed over about three months allowing its manufacture, sale to a shop, and payment back to the manufacturer or importer. Each investor owns the right to an individual parcel of food, with free delivery, if the process goes wrong. A pound of flesh for example. The earlier deals have been branded, upmarket, and valued at a near-retail price somewhere like Waitrose. More recently there have been bulk spice imports as well.
There is no link from one lender to one physical piece of food until the parcel is made-up, but it's a safe bet that a food company will have food to spare if not money, and there is a more general link between one batch of loans to the food company and one batch of food produced.
A way of funding food production before it is produced without borrowing
primestox.com/producers/ is the new producer's page or ask producers@...com
+44 (0) 207 846 0153
I'm not a producer and pick this up from examples under each past loan, headed "the proposal". The gist of it is that you pre-sell some of the product before it's cooked - while it is a sack of oats for sale at a supplier's warehouse, worth so much less than the finished product that you can offer a very attractive rate of return to a few investors. These are some notes from a proposal, with the adjectives left-out. Fund the production of ... snacks.
Oat, Almond, Carob, Seed, Apricot, Brazil Nut main ingredients for chewy or chunky squares
Packed in retail cases of 20.
Sogud will produce of 4 varieties x 70 cases (280 total)
Sogud Single Serve Gluten Free Squares (20 per case)
Marketplace
Fife Creamery, TK Maxx
Promoting the food, retail, wholesale, and the brand in the background
P2P finance makes your business public to a few dozen people on each platform who become interested in your brand. A few is better than none. It also allows you to offer a cash-back deal that encourages some lenders to think about buying your food. Some do. Some remember to claim cash back This is a more targeted kind of promotion than a loan raised on Seedrs or Crowdcube, where some of the same food firms have funded production.
If lenders want food instead of repayment on a small loan, better still - Primestox encourages them to email, and will forward requests on to you.
"CrowdCube does a fantastic job of publicising SMEs. But does this always lead to sales? PrimeStox's product focus can boost revenues of our producers. " -primestox.com/comparison
"From the manufacturers perspective this will finance inventory and drive sales to consumers. A positive double whammy! ", - review in Informatia.
Lenders are called "friends". I'm a blogger; I don't know much about human relations, but this doesn't sound quite right.
Even a blogger can sense some connection between an invester and the food. Some lenders may be bloggers or tweeters or chatterboxes or dinner hosts or potential stockists. They might offer the cash-back deal to someone else. They also have an incentive to fund small amounts, simply because of the risk (a theoretical risk so far) of defaulted borrowers' food plonked on their door step, so there are a more plonkees per batch of food than lenders per loan on other P2P sites - it's like crowd funding with extra incentives to buy food.
The link to your brand and sales pitch remains on the Primestox site for as long as they want to show their track record, which is probably a long time.
Formal way for informal contacts to lend
If a food producer has relatives, partners, staff, customers, or any kinds of contacts who want to take a flutter, this provides a formal way that they can do it without having to draw-up a contract. So your 50% partner can put more money into the batch and remain a 50% partner. Paroducers just put-up a poster for Primestox. Contacts sees the url, log-on out of curiosity, and your family or your customer might take a punt. Or take a punt on the next deal if they ever have spare money in the bank.
Promoting the food for clearance wholesale
This is un-tested, but from a food producers' point of view it might be good to be known to a lot of foodies, just in case one of them can offer a price for specialised food near its sell-by date. Maybe another person who puts money in is a shopkeeper who will try selling the stuff and order some more when it runs-out. My search for investers on twitter reveals a physics teacher, a football journalist and a P2P lending enthusiast who likes bitcoin. I am a P2P enthusiast too, but one who advertises a facebook page to vegans for a vegan shoe shop, so I could help try to clear products for the vegan market. I guess that one food industry person tends to attract another over time. Maybe they all live together in a special building somewhere ... or maybe I'm going off the point a bit here.
Incentives to borrowers compared to invoice finance, banks & crowd funding
Security. The name says it. Other lenders start by asking about the business, then very quickly ask for as much security as for a personal loan. If the loan goes bad they can hardly be bothered to think about the value of stock. A personal guarentee can only be given so many times. For example at Investly invoice finance, when either side somehow messes-up - either the shop or the supplier - then the loan is backed by the supplier's personal guarantee. Called-in for payment, this could be a distraction that causes stress and legal costs all round rather than paying-back the lenders or letting the borrower get-on with earning a living, so anyone who is short of credit might use Primestox for all of a loan, while another borrower might use some combination of Primstox and Investly. I don't know the contract, but there is certainly not much stated to investers about personal guarantees. The contract probably evolves from experience over time.
Small loans allowed. The track record says it. The smallest loan on their web site so far is £3,000, while Rebuildingsociety has a minimum loan amount of £25,000. Investly will lend from 1,000 and Marketinvoice has a calculator that starts at £5,000 with a minimum £250 fee to match.
Compared to 1.65-2.6% monthly interest for invoice finance on Investly
Investly is a P2P site where lenders lend the value of an invoice not yet paid.
It doesn't have regular stream of loans for lenders, compared to other P2P sites, but might appeal to the same people who are looking to borrow or pre-sell; the companies that sell food on Primestox.
Investly's site says borrowers pay 1.65-2.6% a month - about 20-35% annually. If the invoice has not yet been agreed, there is no loan; it is only for a month or so between sending an invoice to the shop and getting paid. Assuming the shop doesn't want to pay before production, that leaves a lot of ingredients and work to finance, even before sending the food and the invoice. So invoice finance just competes with the last month or so of the three-month cycle that Primestox typically finances. Primstox' one press mention, in Informita New, December 2016, says that there aren't many stock or inventory finance companies - "there are some out there who have had limited success, but none have hit the market in a bit way", so the niche-within-a-niche of "perishable" could do with a specialist P2P firm. There has also been a shortage of cheap bank loans to smaller firms, allowing P2P markets like Rebuildingsociety to fill the gap and make loans secured on equipment or buildings.
Benefit compared to a bank
It's a kind of civic duty to find alternatives to banks at the moment, but there are financial reasons to avoid them as well. Everybody knows that they have high costs and are short of money.
Our experience tells us that business owners are in distress about having their overdrafts and other bank products pulled with short notice. In fact, research suggests that banks are pulling £5 billion in overdrafts from business in the UK each month! What’s more alarming is that this is not new and has been a trend for almost a decade, since before the financial crisis, and banks are still not lending anywhere near as much as they did prior to 2007.
The alternatives to SME bank lending have all notably moved away from a ‘one size fits all’, ‘computer says no’, ‘box-ticking’, approach, understanding that different businesses have different financial needs at different times. - K Grieff of Rebuildingociety , 7/6/17
The Primestox alternative offers a little very targeted advertising, tempting people to go into shops and buy the food. A better deal than borrowing more money to pay for advertising. Which is presumably why some firms experiment with sites like Indiegogo and Crowdcube to raise cash; Primestox pitches itself in the same producers.
A neat point-by-point comparison chart. - Indiegogo is a donation or investment platform that doesn't necessarily offer rewards to investors. - Crowdcube offers shares as a reward, which pay no dividend and can only be sold at another funding round. There is no other security like security on specific stock or a personal guarantee. - Market Invoice is an invoice finance site, that I don't know about as a lender because they have a very high minimum investment. - Ratesetter is a consumer credit and low-risk lending site.
My first two or three investments...
£30 for 16 x ¼ litre fruit juice, cold-pressed @ £15 a litre.
£20 for 20 x 60g fruit energy bars @ £16.66 a kilo. For comparison, ClearanceXL tries to sell 60g fruit energy bars at a quarter the price - four for a pound plus delivery. If they were buying they'd want to pay - what? - 10p a bar sale or return for some minimum amount?
£20 for 200g of vanilla paste @ £100 a kilo
£25 for 10 x 200g pots of fermented pickle @ £12.50 a kilo. This is usually home-made or sold in wholefood markets apparently.
£20 for 10 x 500g packs of frozen chips, sweet potato, battered @ £4 a kilo. MySupermarket shows a few shops selling sweet potato chips, usually not battered, with the smaller packs or upmarket brands around £4 a kilo while typical prices are £2.60 or less on special offer or under £2 at Aldi. Waitrose sells these battered ones at £5.60 a kilo. The same brand has some crisps at ClearanceXL (see below) but I get this wrong at first glance - they are crisps and not these chips.
If I update this page after any of my loans default, I'll mention it at the top of the page but repeated loans on different deals have all gone well so far.
Incentives for lenders
Cashback
If you buy the food in a shop, borrowers might offer a cashback deal, should you be organised enough to keep the receipt and send it in. Maybe when the payment comes, you could use it to buy a packet of food with the cashback deal. Primestox suggest you email them if you want food instead of interest,
Flutter of excitement - food is delivered to you if the borrower can't pay
For investments of a few tenners, the excitement is in the flutter. A parcel of food might turn-up one day if the payment doesn't. If payment does arrive, you could use it with a cashback scheme to get a packet of food, or put it towards beer and fags and gambling debts, or leave it in the account to spend on the next deal to come-along and watch the money grow.
For investments of two or three hundred pounds at a time, it's trickier. Nobody knows the risk of the borrower not paying - whether one in twenty or one in a hundred. If a borrower can't pay, nobody knows the chance of some compromise offer like selling at clearance prices to Approved Food at a lot less than the price you paid. The bottom of this blog post lists some firms that make offers for wholesale food near its sell-by date. If you have to take delivery of more food than you can eat, there is not much else online to say what you can do with it but you might have some use for bulk food and have all sorts of schemes. Talking of excitement, the hobby of thinking about food might encourage you to curry some over-date veg in the fridge instead of throwing it away, so you save that way as well.
Interest
There is interest of one or two pounds on the sizes of investment I've described and a three month loan, but there is a tick box you can tick to invest a lot more. One or two pounds is a lot of interest on ten or twenty pounds, for a three month loan. The annual percentage rates are at the top end of what investors can get, I think. In comparison Investly invoice finance pays around 10-20% to lenders on an auto-lend system: The loans only last a month or so, but your cash is re-lent automatically to the next one if business picks-up (it's a bit slow as I write) and it costs nothing to sign-up. Other platforms like Rebuildingsociety had high rates of interest on offer when they started, which gradually dropped in an auction system.
the morning after
Rebuildingsociety are good at dealing-with defaults, but still have enough bad debts to take average returns down to the mid-teens. Lenders' experiments with sites like this will loose on a few like Bondora who just shovel-out money like Leaman Brothers and shrug when it doesn't come back. A better investment could be in selling cocaine to the director of Lehman Brothers - pictured - but that's probably illegal and I don't know whether he took decisions and drugs at the same time - it's just the way someone took a photograph that suggests it.
For borrowers and lenders - Default: what next?
This is a hunch. I have never dabbled in commodities trading so I might be quite ignorant about how often it comes to the crunch and commodities get delivered to lenders. And none of this has happened.
If there is a deliberate and very convincing fraud, the producer disappears leaving no commodity. This is a very old problem. Contracts were invented for this kind of situation. Anyway I doubt that a deliberate fraudster would pick such a public way to do it, with so many different people looking at the details, so that's a very tiny chance. Then there are natural disasters, illnesses and the like but I guess that just about every batch of food gets produced, into shops or warehouses and worth a lot more than the original sack of oats.
I guess that food companies want good publicity from their borrowing, and will do a lot to avoid defaulting on the loan if they can pay, but these things happen. "the situation could arise that [they] could not pay. In that case you continue to hold title to the the product until it is sold. You also have the option of requesting that the product be sent to you or a location you specify - at no additional cost. " - FAQ An online vote, run by Primestox.com, allows other investors to out-vote you on the best option, but I guess that a vote would allow some people to take the stock and others to hold-on for repayment or accept an offer if available. If the borrower is still in business and half solvent, I imagine that they want to pay later for the food that will sell, rather than return all of it. There are degrees of mess-up, from late-payment to late payment under legal threat to receivership to wind-up and non-existence, and I suppose that nobody wants to work down the list if they can stay at the first stages. "the producer may experience production issues affecting the quantity or quality they can produce. Alternatively they may have difficulty selling their product in the market. In such cases delays may occur to your payment. However in all cases you continue to hold title to the product until you're repaid in full with profit. If during this time period you wish to receive the product which you paid for, you can request its delivery to any UK address at no additional cost. " Late payment turns into the chance of no payment after a while. Sell-by dates get nearer.
With luck, the borrower might organise an option of very cheap sale and lenders might discuss whether they could do better. Takestock.com allow you to do something similar by opening an account and try to sell surplus food on a free small ad via an 18% escrow service. Takestock's details are further down the page. If 18% for an escrow service sounds high, you can see what other links I have found at the bottom of the page as well. There are loads of them under the heading "selling food from home and on classifieds sites", but none says "we pay near retail price at somewhere like Waitrose for an upmarket brand". They all look a bit clearance-ey.
Getting back to Primstox, their contract does
- not say that Primestox will use their commission money to pay for deliveries
- not say that Primestox invest in every loan so won't flog duds. I imagine that Primestox do invest in loans at this stage, just to try to balance lenders and borrowers, so they will learn from experience what works. Their low-budget way of working suggests that they don't have equity finance people pushing them to make money fast at all costs. There isn't a staff team and an office and a bunch of bills to pay in the short term; they can think in the long-term.
- not say that Primestox will run an eCommerce site or help any lender who does so, selling surplus food to other investers. I imagine that other investors are a sympathetic market for the one or two who have a tonne of soup on the doorstep. So after a default, in the worst case, you have invested far too much, and more food than you want to eat is plonked on your doorstep..
If you have anything to do with catering you might find other uses. If you need contacts in catering, you might use the app that connects restaurants and their surplus food and customers who want cheap deals, you might already have a restaurant contact who might be open to ideas or make a suggestion, but the ones near me are generally bakeries. Anyway, a caterer might offer a dish of the day, or a special offer by the restaurant to bargain-hunters who use the app for that restaurant.
If you have anything to do with food sales, an idea might come to mind like... - special offer food by a shop counter. Maybe your newsagent would borrow some food, and give you a credit note for 50p per jar sold for you to spend on other newsagent stock.
If you have nothing to do with food sales, but want to start, Takestock.com membership is free. - free small ad and escrow service that charges you 18% on any offer you accept
If you plan to eat it the food, freezer space might help -for-sale.co.uk/freezer includes ads on sites like ebay and gumtree. Local searches are most likely and you might even find a free one on Trashnothing, or join the same site to give some food away. An app called Olio comes-up on search engine results, specifically for giving food to neighbours if they happen to have the same app. Maybe someone will offer you an apple crumble two miles away once you subscribe.
I don't know much about those food bank collection points that you see in places like supermarkets. There are a few sites on search engines for locating organisations and collection vans that can use food. I suppose that a one-off donor of a freezer-load needs some scale between the nearest collection-point and the agency that can send a van. This list covers foodbanks, who might help. - theguardian.com/society/datablog/2012/jul/12/food-banks-uk-directory-guardian-readers
Background to the Primestox.com company
There are practically no references to the site on other sources. It looks more polished and sane than some sites that do things like bitcoin lending, or my own shoe shop that you should try, but less referenced from anywhere else. The borrowers are food businesses with web sites linked and which tend to link back.
https://www.check-business.co.uk/business/09915596/primestox-limited is the company. The check-business site would drop a couple of tiny hints from an Equifax report if there was anything to say, but there isn't - the business is too new. The Companies House entry doesn't state much more - just connections to West London from previous employers that are confirmed from the director's Facebook page and choice of software engineer, so the business looks UK-based. Linked-in profiles mention some people related. There are three shareholders and one of them seems busy employed in South Africa; only one is an "officer" on the Companies House form. The postal contact is the first floor above Starbucks in London's Oxford Street, also home to BG Partnership accountants and 23 other companies. There is no mention on P2Pmoney yet; I added a post on P2P independent forum, and P2P money have added this site to their list of P2P lending sites, just as one or two food companies have given the site a mention.
Software
The software looks a like crowd-funding software, which can be had for free. I don't know if it is Selfstarter.us but if there is one free open source piece of software, there will probably be others, cheap or free, and this company has used something similar-looking for the new purpose of P2P lending, which is otherwise expensive to get going, I think, for lack of free software. I don't know if this is unusual - it's good to see that it can be done. The company paid Alex Panichi, user interface web designer who answered an upmarket job ad and "worked to improved various steps in the user journeys. The user interface has been enhanced and refined. There has been lots of sketching, wire framing and hundreds of iterations to de-clutter the interface. In fact, the main challenge was to show the most relevant information to the user at each stage" So, £200 an hour for several evenings and weekends doing iterations on a general theme is a few thousand pounds, but not bad.
Ebay and the mainstream sites tend not to advertise food, but I have a log-on for Takestock.com that allows selling! The site doesn't have a huge amount on it, with a lot of the guide prices well over supermarket basics prices per kilo. People use it to advertise sales to new customers, I guess, rather than for regular turnover. I hope this list helps borrowers to shift surplus stock and repay their loans, but, when they default and can't make a decent offer for the food. maybe someone else among the lenders can use one of these to get something better or maybe it helps if a borrower has to take delivery of too much food to eat.
Buy from their advertisers by signing-up and contacting them. It's a classifieds site for food. A photo and often a minimum order is available for each advert once you sign-up; guide prices are cheeky-high except for the odd overdate thing which is low.
Delivery - postcode or place name on each advert but no map or search-by-distance. Most offer to help with delivery. Some have a place name like "London" which helps searching; a lot are in north england or Norfolk for vegetables. There is a box for questions which is a good place to ask if the seller would use your favourite cheap courier such as Parcel2go's UPS shop-to-shop service for up to something like 20kg for not much money. Parcelmonkey are good for courier quotes too.
Sell to their readers by signing up and advertising - they take the money via their bank account and take ? 18% +VAT if there is no dispute. 8% on fresh food.. The selling page recommends a low minimum order and to offer help with delivery.
Amazon not yet sure
Buy from them - for example https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scarlett-Mustard/b/ref=bl_dp_s_web_5324604031?ie=UTF8&node=5324604031&field-lbr_brands_browse-bin=Scarlett+%26+Mustard
Delivery -
Sell to them - not yet sure if it's possible. Hermes delivery costs are a problem. I don't see a "sell" tag next to the items on Amazon Groceries either, and if the brand isn't already for sale on Amazon, you have to persuade the site to list it.
Amazon is the only classifieds site that comes-up if you search for words like "peas" "biscuits" or "chocolate" on for-sale.co.uk, bar the odd rare add on ebay or gumtree
other home retail
There are ecommerce add-ons for facebook, I think, which might be free. Maybe Paypal links or something specialised. I don't know if facebook contacts would use them, but they might see the page and offer you cash. An idea for someone with a zillion facebook contacts.
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=5232467 mentions facebook selling groups, a gumtree-like thing that I didn't know about
Leaflet a hundred letterboxes with an explanation and half-price offer. Someone might be intrigued enough just to say hullo to a neighbour. Cheapest paper is from Wilko or supermarket basics. Cheapest ink is a CISS system on a printer or Epson Ecotank.
Fly pitching, pop-up stalls, honesty boxes , vending machines... all a bit unfamiliar to buyers I think, who would pass-by to avoid being bothered, or assume the goods second-rate in some way. My aunt - do you know my aunt? - anyway she used to sell potted herbs in a market for the womens' institute. They were cheaper than the garden centre but people were just programmed to buy them from the garden centre. Anyway, if you know my aunt, you are on to something. If you don't know my aunt, you might want to try door-to-door leafleting to advertise an honesty box or a fly-pitch or a ring-the-doorbell-and-ask offer. Ringing other peoples' doorbells doesn't seem worth the hassle to customers, even ignoring the stress to you.
Pop-up restaurants. There is something in this; I am not sure what
Buying from self-employed people like stallholders could be a good habit to get into, in case one of them can suggest something if you are caught with a lot of stock. Easier if they know your face.
Expirybuy.com classifieds - didn't send a login
Buy from their advertisers - it's a paypal system
Delivery - ads say things like "ships to Blackburn"
Sell to them - I've signed up, waiting for confirmation by email. No mention of commission yet. Still waiting for confirmation a few days later.
Gumtree
Buy from their ads - https://www.gumtree.com/search?search_category=all&q=freezer
Delivery - parcel2go or similar
Place an ad - there is only one food ad and two non-food in this category, but it might be free
Merkandi.co.uk classifieds - want £86 sign-up fee
Buy from them - https://merkandi.co.uk/categories/food-beverage/26
Delivery -
Sell to them - same
Stockondeals.com/ - mainly Denmark so crossed out - typically electrical but some food
Buy via their site
Delivery -
Sell via their site - it's EU and Danish state funded, so the commission might be low
Buy from them - http://www.clearancexl.co.uk/epages/es136752.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/es136752/Categories/%22Food%20%26%20Drink%22
Delivery - http://www.clearancexl.co.uk/epages/es136752.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/es136752/Categories/NEW__399_DELIVERY - £5.25 most areas. Free collection by appointment in Sheffield S9
Sell to them - https://www.epayments.co.uk/epages/es136752.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/es136752/Categories/%22ABOUT%20US%22/Supply_SWINCO has the email address
Companyshop.co.uk
Buy from them - membership scheme offered as a staff perk by some employers.
Delivery - sites around the UK. HQ in Yorkshire
Sell to them - they sell surplus food and write about it - not sure if they pay or get donations
Eatbig
Buy from them - http://www.eatbig.co.uk/shop/ - possibly cheaper per kilo on nuts, but usually expensive
Delivery - http://www.eatbig.co.uk/delivery/ - £3-£5 or free over £40
Sell to them? - they tend do sell catering-size packs - not sure how to contact
Factoryfoods
Buy from them - no web shop
Delivery - walk-in at Rotherham or Barnsley http://www.factoryfoods.uk/directions/
Sell to them - http://www.factoryfoods.uk/sell-to-us/
Frugalitis
Buy from them - https://frugalitis.com/ aka Essential Brands Ltd. Also sell to ex-pats.
Delivery -
Sell to them - ? Phone: +44 116 3440001 Address: Online Division, Celandine Road, Hamilton, Leicester, LE5 1SW.
Self Trading
Not quite sure what this one is - it once bought a supermarket's stock. Found by googling "short dated food"
SOS Wholesale
Buy from them - apply for an account or use the Derby cash and carry.
Delivery - apply
Sell to them - http://www.soswholesale.co.uk/residual-stock-management/
Unlikely
This lot are listed to save looking at them again, or just because they looked interesting http://www.londonpopups.com/p/advice-resources.html
Bargain Outlet
Buy - discount shop in Newkey and Weston. Prices from 25p. May be the same as Affordable Foods, who have a franchise system with a branch in north Blurton, Staffordshire.
Delivery - walk in, retail
Sell - "supermarkets get in touch" .... "buys from supermarkets"
Buy - postcodes not given - prices start about £100 for 12 bottles - no licence or business needed. Buyers and sellers both pay 5% + VAT
Delivery - "Please note that the location of each lot is clearly stated; as a Buyer, it is your responsibility to take note of the location prior to bidding as any subsequent transfer/delivery costs are the liability of the Buyer." Clearly stated to people who understand "Location: Octavian: Duty status: Under bond" on the first ad I looked-at.
Sell - wine only - 5% + VAT "As long as your wine has been professionally stored in the UK since its original sale/shipment, you can list your wine on GrapePip. Please note, however, you will be required to provide documentation to confirm original purchase and subsequent storage in a UK warehouse of every lot listed on GrapePip. To find out more about how to sell your wine on GrapePip, please go to our Private Vendor Information Page. If you are a wine merchant looking to sell your wines on GrapePip, please go to our Trade Vendor Information Page." Winebinends is another wine-only firm that works as a broker - charging 30% commission to find a buyer with only one delivery hop to pay-for. They say that other clearance companies that have warehouses charge 70% and two delivery trips.
Buy - "Essentially we are a frozen food broker: purchasing surplus stock from frozen food manufacturers...."
Delivery - can involve storage and repacking in Lancashire
Sell - "... and selling this onto high street retailers and catering companies"
Nifties
Buy - https://www.dontwastethetaste.co.uk/shop aka Nifties, Good for onions at a first look, but the web site is turned-off this February 2018 so you'd have to walk-in.
Delivery - Delivery - https://www.dontwastethetaste.co.uk/ - £7, £2 in Dover or walk-into their Dover shop.
Sell? - probably not for specialised upmarket products by the look of them
This is a note of all the shopping carts that are free & pretty, to install automatically on a site.
A site the uses a database is going to take time to install and backup; it's easier if there is an installer like these. The shopping carts run on Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal, or more simply are called shopping carts and download as a single thing.
- fantastico scroll-down to E-Commerce for a list of shopping carts
- softulicious Softulicious shopping carts
- installatraon Installatron ecommerce and business apps
With luck, a super-fast super-cheap hosting company will have a version of one of these three script installers free for customers to use on its control panel, ready do install shopping-cart software with a single click.
My fast site is on a server chosen from webperf.net and test ones are on hostinger.co.uk or x10hosting.co.uk who allow 2 database sites per account. You can see what I want to change away-from at my shoe shop here. Promising shopping cart software is red. I have 2 F-words & 4 P-words for whittling-down choice.
Free, Fast & Pretty; Postage, Payment, & Product management are essential too.
Product management sub-divides into another five points to whittle-down the shortlist. http://www.shopping-cart-migration.com/images/articles/ecommerce-shopping-carts.jpg puts shopping cats into categories, with this category at the top - known for being free, but without hosting or customer support and known for being harder to set-up than a hosted shopping cart.
There's a separate bit about hosting at the bottom titled "Hosting: Webperf.net"
Free
The cost is hidden in the price of modules. Open-source ought to be cheaper I guess, as well as being a prettier idea to deal with than something corporate. I don't want to pay so-much-a-month for a hosted service like Shopify or Bigcommerce. I haven't read that they're better than self-installed software; the same money could pay for developers to help you install. And if I can't pay bills, then Shopify and Bigcommerce put up a sign saying "closed". Self-hosted software can go on a slow free server like Byethost and leave me with just the cost of the domain to pay-for until business picks-up or the firm is sold or I run the firm down gracefully or my health recovers or I get back out of prison or whatever the next stage might be. (Joke: I am not in prison)
Fast
Not that I know of any measurements, but Magento gets bad reviews for this compared to Prestashop (I haven't googled the others for speed tests recently that I can remember)
Trying to re-check this fact with a quick google in July 2017, the first result puts Magento ahead in the US and Prestashop in Europe.
https://blog.aheadworks.com/fastest-ecommerce-platform/
So the test is not to put two similara set-ups on one server, one using Magento and one Prestashop. It is to test a number of other peoples' shops on whatever server they happen to use, and of course some firms throw money at the problem and have super-fast servers. The second test puts Prestashop behind as well with the same measuring system
https://www.quanta-computing.com/best-e-commerce-platform-performance/
This one is confident that on the same host, Prestashop does better and that it can work better on cheaper hosts; it's less bloated. No facts are quoted to back this up.
https://www.mavenecommerce.com/blog/magento-vs-prestashop/
This review seems pretty sure why PS should be faster, even if it can't explain very well
https://www.go-gulf.ae/blog/magento-prestashop-comparison/
This one says "small e-shops get-on very well with Prestashop" under "performance"
https://community.1and1.com/comparison-of-prestashop-and-magento/
This review puts Prestashop ahead, and rates some paid-for software even faster
https://selfstartr.com/ecommerce-platforms/
There are some videos to check and some reviews mentioning Open Cart alongside.
There is a bit about hosting at the bottom of the page as well.
Pretty
Not that I know of any measurements, but the ones with "specials" on the front page of the demonstration are always ugly for some reason.
Postage = shipping
I want to sell in as many countries of the world as possible with cheap and greenish postage. I don't want software from a developer who says "use the Fedex module, UPS, or role your own with this bit of rubbish I provide. Or search the forum in case another shopkeeper sorted this problem ten years ago for a previous version".
The developers who say this are so over-paid that they don't even use the post office to buy mail-order T shirts in their native USA. Post offices are usually cheaper and greener because they have a delivery round to most letterboxes on a street rather than one in my street and another a few streets or miles away. Post offices are usually public sector and not geared to writing free plugins for Posh-o-cart. So anyone paid under a zillion pounds a year ought to know that plugins for different post offices, or to help shopkeepers write their own plugins for post offices, are essential for promoting shopping cart software.
Royal Mail has 4 postal zones of UK, Europe, Airmail, and Oceana with various different services that change in price. My next post is a guide to Royal Mail's main services for individuals & small-scale e-commrece trading. I want to offer a simplified version that has a basic price per weight or price per weight to each of these zones, or at least to three out of the four. 2nd class to the UK. Probably standard rate to the rest of the world. This should not be much to ask but most shopping cart software fails the test - including all or most of the Wordpress plugins and including the one written in the UK I think. Here is something about Drupal shipping modules and here is something else and another thing. The developers get carried-away thinking about US taxes while ignoring worldwide postage.
Payment.
I want to use paypal for testing and then my merchant service provider - Elavon - for most real orders. If I get enough real orders I hope to shop-around merchcant service providers, but you can't haggle if you don't have the turnover, can you? No. We agree. And I do not want to pay a hundred pounds for the privilage of using the merchant service provider I am already signed-up to. Luckily this is getting a lot easier than it was a few years ago and some shopping carts do fit free Elavon modules.
Products.
If the top few points are OK then I'll play with the site and see if it can tell me things I want to know about stock, like ♦ whether an advert helped a product sell. Remote-hosted checkout forms are bad for this - they confuse the tracking code. ♦ whether a product has run-out.
If my software refuses to sell a sold-out product, then maybe it can automatically charge a customer at each purchase and save me a job. ♦ when to re-order. This can only be a prompt, but still a useful one and I'm not sure how subtle the different stock control systems are or how to use them. Maybe they're add-ons. One version of Prestashop can even remember where a product is usually found in the warehouse and write that on a picking sheet. I don't know if that's the free version. ♦ I'll have to learn the system for attributes = sizes as well. Some programs track a shoe as something that can be adapted to different sizes, as though these were like different sorts of laces. Others track a shoe as a range of several different products, one for each size, but sharing a supplier. I'll learn as I go. Presumably most software offers both options as a shoe in one size definately can't be re-sized to another, even with a broom handle and lots of leverage. ♦ I want to search for products in several ways - whether my shoes are made in a democratic welfare state for example, or how well that country scores on a democracy index. Some shopping carts just have a tag for brand which they mis-label "manufacturer".
Afterthoughts: ♦ I want any blogs and other bits to be part of the same web site if possible, as Drupal allows and possibly carts that can be slotted-in to other sites. Perhaps Cubecart. ♦ I want to have a wholesale shop and maybe some others using the same software and looking different to the end-customer, while a supplier might want to share my shop so it looks the same to the end-customer but stuff is sent from another place. So carts with the word "multi" in them would be good.
Not quite open source?
Paid-for version has a bundle of modules including language translation and a "custom" mobile version.
Abantecart
http://www.abantecart.com/shopping-cart-demo
promising
http://www.abantecart.com/ecommerce-documentation/admin-user-manual/specific-manuals/stock-processing-configurations suggests it can track stock of each variation of a product. My problem is uptdating it. Two trial installations have both got stuck updataing from version X to version X+1.
Allegrocart
Alegrocart.com/demo
Ugly. The developer is also a car and car parts dealer in Canada, so the program should be well set-up for that trade.
Agoracart
Agoracart.com/demos.htm
Unusual in being based on perl rather than php. Long established. Available through one of my web host accounts on a special menu for Perl scripts, but not on the other. Ugly.. Is it fast? I have not tested the thing or installed.
Axis
Part of a hugely corporate suite of programs sold from Amercia. This software is presented as open source. It installs OK from a script installer but I haven't found the admin logon to test it at all. I haven't found a demo site.
CS cart
Cs-cart.com/demo-item.html
Fast and pretty with smooth back-end data for shopkeepers, it says of itself.
One installer doesn't include it.
One installer includes it, but when I try to install I get "licencing mode"; the program doesn't seem to be open source and has a free version or a $385 version.
Cubecart
Cubecart.com/demo
Promising. More to follow. The developer pays UK tax that benefits me, and has no private equity funding, so he probably knows what a post office is. (Amazon and Starbucks are loosing customers in the UK for their failure to pay tax, which is great. Sod them) Getting back to shopping carts, Canadapost and United States Postal Service have free modules. Royal Mail has to be dealt with through the all-in-one module which I have used to set-up zones. vimeo.com/cubecart instructions in 5 short videos.
Nifty but murky system for stock control of products which are sizes or other attrubutes of a type of product. A forum post suggests that the minimum and maximum stock levels show on the front of the site.
I haven't yet found-out how to get a table display of stock of each size of each product. As with most ecommerce systems, the forum has a small membership but can provide good answers.
As I write the new open source version of this product has just been updated to include cache modules for speed of download and so higher search engine rankings and easier buying for visitors. So this is an up-and-coming version of a long established product.
Drupal Commerce
http://demo.commerceguys.com/
You can now install Drupal from something like Installatron and the instructions for adding shopping cart modules are getting better. I tried Ubercart in about 2012.. It needed a shipping module. At that point the developers left, so there is still no shipping module. The developers wrote Drupal Commerce, which has neither a good Royal Mail shipping module nor a way of connecting products on the admin database to products on the front-end. You have to enter them twice or install some kind of module for doing it. I tried it in 2013-14. The customers are exepected to be developers and the support takes the form of videos by people who don't say how they have set-up their demonstration before the video started, so you can follow it to the letter and find that your lack of something-or-other stops it working for you. You can see transcripts of the videos and links to them as earlier posts on this blog. Commerce Guys, developers, have received $7.3bn of private equity finance so they haven't heard of the post office except as a potential client - they haven't heard of it as a place where you post parcels. A pity because at first glance they look good people to write free software. It's just the way they're set-up that doesn't suit open source shopping carts for small business, and not enough people have found a way to jump-in and fill the gap of writing software cheaply or for free to help small shopkeepers on Drupal. My next post https://veg-buildlog.blogspot.com/2015/06/a-tourist-guide-to-royal-mail-and-small.html might encourage.
For all the money spent on this huge bundle of code, I don't see any great ease of use over other similar programs. I tried to train my Magento to recognise shoe sizes in my particular way. I even got hold of a textbook to train me in how to train Magento. On page 72 if gets difficult. I could probably have cracked it in the end and learned how to add my particular attributes to products, but I got bored of page 72 and then read reviews about bloat and slow loading.
Much liked by enthusiasts including me for ten years or so because it is free and stable, but it is also a shopping cart on a remote website that allows you to write order buttons that you can stick on your web site. In other words it is limited. I want to stop using Mal's because I want to link my orders to a stock control system. I also want a stock layout system that shows a shop window of my products with order buttons next to them, in some slick way that also works on mobiles an tablets and any other format that people invent over the years, and has some of the bells and whistles like better tracking of advert performance or slick one-page checkout on the same url. I don't want to loose the ability to rabbit-on like someone who always wanted to be a journalist. This makes my site easier to index. So, ideally, I will be able to keep a lot of text on the new more formatted site.
If there are ways of hosting one or two shopping carts with different urls but access to the same stock, that's unlikely to happen but worth thinking about. Mal's allows me to sell to a trade customer at 50% discount, and we would probably have met and found a way to work-around some of the limitations. It doesn't provide that trade buyer, or me, with a way of knowing what is in stock or anything like that, so it's better suited to goods I make than goods I buy in batches and sell-on.
Did you know that there is a $35 program for making shop sites with stock control out of an Excel spreadsheet? It can use Mal's for checkout. Xlecom.com. Another one called Rapidcart doesn't use Mals.
Opencart
demo.opencart.com
demo.opencart.com/admin/index.php (type "demo" in both boxes to log in)
Promising at first. There is a Royal Mail module free. (post about Royal Mail here)
The installer provides an old version, but a new one can be unzipped on a hard disc, stripped of two files that have "config" in the names, and moved with a file transfer program to my server over the top of the old files.
Much praised by reviewers.
I've had a couple of bad days trying to make it accept stock, mock orders, categories, attributes, or shipping details - anything really. One online suggestion is that installing a module can trigger a loss of editing privilages which can be restored by ticking various boxes. I have done so. No joy.
Googling "Opencart Faults" I find a review on a site called techchattr.com that doesn't like the code. As I know nothing abut code, I rely on the review. Another on a site called websynn.com which likes the code but says it doesn't work for upgrades, which comes to the same thing. I think a free service needs to be solid because of course there's no technical support
This is the one I went with. Search engines will find you comparisons of Thirtybees and Prestashop, and a long list of reasons why you should never stick with Prestashop if you have a choice. They remain open source but the company that employs their 4 developers employs about 180 other people, all funded by flogging modules that you wouldn't need if the thing worked in the first place. Prestashop user forums show threads years-old about problems that could be fixed with a few lines of code. And the latest Prestashop 1.7 charges you $60 for a sitemap module that was included for free in version 1.6. Even 1.6 needed a free module for you to tweak the code - such as the style sheet - from the software's own control panel, or to add blog pages. Free modules were rather hard to find among a cacophony of modules from £44 upwards that they try to flog from your own control screens on the back of the program. From a staff point of view, the main developers have left the organisation and those who still work for it give it bad reviews on glassdoor.
Thirtybees is free, faster than Prestashop, and pretty with its new Niara theme. I might be able to use it without a single paid module, given a lot of style sheet hacks to compact the one page checkout. That's not as hard to do as it sounds; you can see how to do it on their "tips and tricks" page. Installation is easy on Softulicious or Fantastico, but not Installatron; it's worth changing hosts to get Softulicious or Fantastico if you want to experiment and make a lot of fresh installations. The software is slightly too large to install on Byethost and I don't know of free hosting that installs it easily, but it runs well on paid shared hosting that costs me £25 a year.
Stripe and Paypal payment modules are available free.
Countries are zoned, so that you can tell the software by hand that European 2kg parcels cost £10, worldwide £15 and UK (create a zone for it) £3. That's Royal Mail 2kg parcels done, without any extra module.
The future looks promising. Thirtybees is run as a sideline by a few developers who make their living doing-up web sites for Thirtybees and Prestashop customers. Very good developers, you discover if they happen to help on a forum. They aim to fix every reported bug and have worked through dozens left-over from Prestashop. This is a slightly precarious way for something to keep going and they welcome donations of help or money, but it does mean that there's no payroll to fund from up-selling; no loan from venture capitalists who need a return, and it's in Thirtybees' interest to fix problems instead of leaving them broken and selling modules to cover-up the mistake. http://demo.prestashop.com/en/?view=front http://demo.prestashop.com/en/?view=back Promising. Reviews compare it to its rival for most-used shopping cart, Magento, calling it smaller and faster. Works in different languages by default by the look of things. The backend has various mottos for self-employed people and might have a lot of feedback about how products are selling and why; it's well integrated with a tracking system. I haven't tested this carefully but that's my impression. The front end is good looking too. Easy to test on the yourname.pswebshop.com site, but you have to use their expensive Hipay payment system if you do that or pay over £100 to switch to Paypal. (pswebshop Service withdrawn) Compulsory add-ons are expensive - over £100 each - and one review says that Prestashop's source code is written in some complicated way, so that add-ons are hard to write and are likely to remain expensive. My own experience is that they are no needed, or, for the bold, might be findable free on github for example for Worldpay but that's a bit beyond my abilities and needs. There is a free easy module for Stripe, that seems to be about the cheapest easiest card processor at 1.4% for limited companies. Royal Mail postage modules have briefly been introduced and then withdrawn, quoting changes in RM's price data as a reason and with hopes to re-introduce. Version ?7, which I am on, has introduced automatic zoning of countries so it's reasonably quick - less than a day's work - to set up Royal Mail's three zones plus the Channel islands. So far I have got stuck on this. It works in theory but prices all my parcels for delivery to Europe, even though knows they're for the UK. Another module provides access to label printing for RM account holders who send more than 10-12 parcels a day. There's a thread about postage here: https://www.prestashop.com/forums/topic/345084-module-royal-mail-display-real-time-uk-royal-mail-rates-incl-a-product-page-shipping-preview/ without resolution, but I discover a £30 module that allows some kind of table quote by price or weight, so if you have the patience to work through thirty-something European countries and sixty-something zone II countries you can write your own postal rules.
Spree Commerce
https://spreecommerce.com/account
Not on the installer systems for either of my web hosts.
Uses software I'm even less used-to than PHP, called Ruby.
Mentioned here because used by Bonobo - site that sells $100 jeans in the USA - and their main man makes a lot of videos about the how and the why - https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Andy+Dunn%22+Bonobos&tbm=vid - so if you use Spree Commerce you are well-placed to follow his advice about how to get a picture of the product on the shopping cart to reassure the customer or whatever other idea he tells us and his video camera about. He's a bit like a private dentist. He talks in a very relaxed, re-assuring way, and ends by charging $100. I don't know how to install Spree Commerce or want to learn more about software than necessary so I haven't used it.
Tomatocart
Tomatocart.com/products/store-demo.html
Mentioned by reviewers and available on installatron.
Multi-zone table-rate shipping is a freebie with a thread of comments and requests on their forum.
With luck that can be adapted to Royal Mail.
Payment is not available for free via paypal or elavon. The forum has lots of comments about far-eastern payment methods but not about European ones.
Ubercart - the Drupal Add-on
Ubercart.org/demo_livetest non-working demo
...can be installed fairly quickly by someone who is used to cutting-and-pasting the right module links into the module adding bit of a Drupal admin page. A year or so ago, the ubercart site was covered in spam and any attempts to get shipping zones easy to use for the UK looked unlikely. Now the Ubercart site is up to date and there is a Royal Mail zones module, so maybe something will come of this. My first attempt was bogged-down in attempts to classify the whole world into Royal Mail shipping zones, which are described by a different set of country names to the ISO list, on a web table that says "others" are in World Zone 1. There is now a module that claims to classify countries by Royal Mail rules. After installing it and thinking it did not work for a few weeks, I discovered that you have to tick the "User Interface" boxes to enable user interfaces of every likely module. Rules I think is the crucual one. Then a set of extra rules make themselves known when you start trying to define them for other shipping modules, starting with "country is in royal mail zone".
There is also now a global shipping module that allows you to put all the the world's countries into different empires and then set prices to post to each, which is a lot better than things were, but the older tablequote module has been abandoned. As I look at message boards online, I think I may not be the only one to have trouble getting Global Shipping Module to do what I want, but it's hard to pin-down why.
Wordpress
...add-ons were un-finished last time I tried them in about 2014. They were presented as free with the most basic functions like postage modules costing £50 extra, and then card processing £50 extra, and then something else again, with nothing at the end of it beyond what you can get for free on hosted shopping carts: the functions were basic. This is a quote from Jigoshop about their free postage options "allows you to set five levels of weight-based shipping fees for your products. Simply set the upper limit for each required level, with the fee for that weight range, and those fees will then be enabled. If you require more complexity or want to have shipping rates automatically updated in near real time from your shipping provider, please check out our other Jigoshop Shipping extensions." I liked the customers - Wordpress is aimed at part timers - but not the software. I tried the traditional product from Instinct Entertainment - a wonderful name, and a new one based in the UK then woocommrece which is a fork of it. I tried these things about 2014 when there seemed to be too many wordpress shopping carts trying to make a living for too many developers. Things may have moved-on since, and the Jigoshop web site's history page says that it's run by part-timers. In contrast my last cart provideer, Mals-e commerce, provides one living to a developer, no support, no office landlord, and a solid system that doesn't break down.
X-Cart Classic(4.x) http://www.x-cart.com/pricing.html and our new
X-Cart 5 platform http://www.x-cart.com/software_pricing.html are and have always been fully open code. Yes, there are encrypted modules for X-Cart Classic(4.x) created by 3-rd party developers. However for X-Cart 5 we do not accept encrypted modules of any kind to the marketplace.
The core of all X-Cart 5 packages is exactly the same. Higher packages just add extra modules and thus extra features. You can use the Free package for as long as you wish, as it does not have any limitations in terms of the number products, customers or anything else. And you can, of course, add features via stand-alone free and commercial modules http://www.x-cart.com/extensions/addons or create your own: http://kb.x-cart.com/display/XDD/Developer+docs
And speaking about integration with Drupal, we do have the module that lets you insert X-Cart elements straight into Drupal http://www.x-cart.com/extensions/addons/drupal-connector.html That said, with the latest update the module has been deprecated. However if you wish, I suppose we would be able to provide you with the code base to create your own integration.
If you come up with any additional questions I'll be glad to answer them.
I find that X-cart doesn't install automatically on my fast server or my free server. There is a new one click install for my hard disk, but it has crashed two or three times trying to install itself.
On the other hand, Drupal installs automatically and I've done similar installations to X-cart's before, with far worse instructions, so this is worth a try.
Good hosting is another way to speed-up a site. This probably deserves a page to itself, but the only comparison page I could find for web host speed was one sponsored by the top performer that asks the others to pay for inclusion. Webperf.net . Smaller newer hosts tend to do well because they have less customers per rented server, I guess, and then when the web performance goes down they drop-out of the scheme.
I worked down the list from the top, looking for a the first very cheap one. I found LChost at £50 a year plus vat and domain, but they have dropped-off the webperf testing site since. These are some jottings
LChost were three and a bit till November 2016 then kaput . Don't use them for domain hosting as well as web hosting in case they block-out the bit of cpanel that lets you move your domain to another provider. If you get into this situation, Penguin-uk.net are good at extracting the domain name. Fido.net 5/2/5 £59 five and a bit speed recently
Vegan shoes boots belts and jackets mainly made in the UK: not shoe shop shopping cart software, but the shoe shop of someone who wrote this blog because bad at choosing it
John Robertson sells vegan shoes boots belts and jackets online at Veganline.com. Feel free to share with the social sharing buttons below
Cheap paper - Cheap 80gsm A4 paper for UK home users on MySupermarket - £12.50 paper is the price to beat @ £2.50 x 5, or £10.41 + VAT. - Cheap A4 paper special offers - Cheap paper for large organisations, and how DEFRA puts people out of work - recycled paper looks expensive but some of it is free
Cheap 80gsm A4 paper for UK home users on MySupermarket
Cheap paper - Cheap 80gsm A4 paper for UK home users on MySupermarket - £12.50 paper is the price to beat @ £2.50 x 5, or £10.41 + VAT. - Cheap A4 paper special offers - Cheap paper for large organisations, and how DEFRA puts people out of work - recycled paper looks expensive but some of it is free
£12.50 paper is the price to beat @ £2.50 x 5, or £10.41 + VAT.
Cheap paper - Cheap 80gsm A4 paper for UK home users on MySupermarket - £12.50 paper is the price to beat @ £2.50 x 5, or £10.41 + VAT. - Cheap A4 paper special offers - Cheap paper for large organisations, and how DEFRA puts people out of work - recycled paper looks expensive but some of it is free
Cheap A4 paper special offers
Cheap paper - Cheap 80gsm A4 paper for UK home users on MySupermarket - £12.50 paper is the price to beat @ £2.50 x 5, or £10.41 + VAT. - Cheap A4 paper special offers - Cheap paper for large organisations, and how DEFRA puts people out of work - recycled paper looks expensive but some of it is free
Cheap paper for large organisations, and how DEFRA puts people out of work
Cheap paper - Cheap 80gsm A4 paper for UK home users on MySupermarket - £12.50 paper is the price to beat @ £2.50 x 5, or £10.41 + VAT. - Cheap A4 paper special offers - Cheap paper for large organisations, and how DEFRA puts people out of work - recycled paper looks expensive but some of it is free
recycled paper looks expensive but some of it is free
Cheap paper - Cheap 80gsm A4 paper for UK home users on MySupermarket - £12.50 paper is the price to beat @ £2.50 x 5, or £10.41 + VAT. - Cheap A4 paper special offers - Cheap paper for large organisations, and how DEFRA puts people out of work - recycled paper looks expensive but some of it is free
I'm not a producer and pick this up from examples under each past loan, headed "the proposal". The gist of it is that you pre-sell some of the product before it's cooked - while it is a sack of oats for sale at a supplier's warehouse, worth so much less than the finished product that you can offer a very attractive rate of return to a few investors. These are some notes from a proposal, with the adjectives left-out.
