The thinking goes, that to attract the right interest in a proposition – it must be simple and easily explained – so here it is:
We do all the complex programming, hosting, development, security, automation, monitoring and maintenance – and you do all the creative and brand-specific things you probably prefer doing anyway.
It might be somewhat contrary to the complexity of technology but this is what we see as the important parts of our platform partnership and offering to the world.
If the opinions of your Brandlight platform creators are still too much reading, here’s just the bullet points.
Otherwise, please read on – we hope you find a little inspiration because we won’t “sell” anything to you, we’re all programmers and designers, so we’ll just tell you what we can do, and wait for those that need this approach us.
The Elevator Pitch…
Brandlight is a managed web and mobile ecommerce platform, designed to be faster, simpler and more affordable for international, multi-domain and multi-channel marketing – with in-line documentation, customer communications and task management for every type of user interaction with a brand.
We focus on the structural foundations of brand and business-building to make your website organised by-design and by-example – so everything has a place, and your team is organised through their common tools.
Your team needs and wants to focus on creative product development, expert services and communications, so we focus on making that possible all through one secure website database.
The Brandlight team has already considered the many things that tend to be common in all organisations – all the wheels that don’t need reinventing belong in the platform itself.
We say all this with confidence because we are ecommerce veterans, in this business since the beginnings of the internet in the nineties, with decades of experience, many, many contributors, and millions transactions inspiring the many workflow refinements that we’ve designed for accuracy, time-efficiency and scaleability.
That’s the short version – but let’s see if we can note all our bold claims in this one page, and we’ll let you be the judge as to what makes us different…
We will save you time and money – and we can prove it
Brandlight will save you time and money because it is, quite simply, designed to save everyone from repeating themselves.
Duplication of effort is the number one unnecessary cost in every organisation, and therefore opportunity for efficiency – so we focus on eliminating this time-wastage everywhere.
If you have written something once, it should cover every future need for that same information – until the information changes – and it is updated as part of that change.
We are the sum total of our decisions, so we always promote evidence-based decision-making – and design our systems to gather all the data through its usage, to make the decisions and performance indicators a part of every area of website interaction. Bad decisions often waste time and money, and evidence-based decision, designed into each process, minimise bad decisions.
The primary decisions we encourage anyone reviewing our alternative to consider is, whether you want to start from nothing and learn platform setup and development as well, or start from something already pre-populated, setup and documented – to focus on your unique propositions, and not on duplicating the platform development team, systems and costs that we can already offer you for less.
Your team and partners are also your customers
Everything has multiple audiences – including this article – which is equally addressed to our own growing team too – because we also need a common understanding on what we say we can do, and all the who, where, why and how questions you might expect us to answer.
We analyse, articulate, evolve and repeat – so you always have a platform built by many more people than any one organisation could ever fund alone – and we can help many more brands to mature and be unique, by basing them on our common and experienced foundations.
We always aim to practice what we preach, and publish what we know – so that our brand and your Brandlight platform are continually growing in knowledge and capabilities – and all Brandlight platform users should be able to have many of the same systems, documentation and processes that are normally assumed to only be available to much larger organisations or bigger teams and budgets.
Your website is your brand’s primary representation
We know what it is like to look at many, many web software platforms, read all the claims and then find all the things missing in testing – we’ve been doing that for years.
We have also been customers of many web platforms over the years – and have studied almost all the major players, and many others, in our quest to have a single systems for almost all of our team’s and customer’s information needs.
There are so many separate niche systems being sold now with excessive research time needs, costs, disconnected and duplicated data, integration needs, repeated user management, and workflows for information that very quickly date. We look at all these attractively marketed but disparate systems and see how they can all create as much work, cost, maintenance and distraction as they propose to save – often doing little more than can already be done with well designed spreadsheets.
The pursuit of solving this paradox is called (Organisational) Complexity Theory.
Our solution is to make your brand website the primary central information resource for everyone working with your brand – minimising repeat effort or information – so that it becomes the best possible investment in your brand’s efficiency in being a source of expertise and inspiration to all audiences.
Use less software and get more done
We believe that the less platforms an organisation needs, the more effective everyone can be.
Almost everything an organisation needs can already be done with office software documents, spreadsheets and presentations – and speed needs can be designed into those documents through folder structures, templating and training. Often any new system is just an alternative presentation for that structuring, templating and documentation part of your systems.
We’ve just done all that for everyone with a do-almost-everything website and mobile platform instead, where the structure of all of those common documents, tables and slide-shows is already there, templated and designed to scale.
The Brandlight platform can reduce the number separate software systems you have – therefore, restoring the focus on your brand’s website being the primary source of information for everyone working with your brand, everywhere they are, and on every device.
And you don’t need to migrate everything in one go – we can run in parallel, and your team will naturally migrate their usage to the newer platform as they find each area that is can save time, copying and updating information as they go.
By keeping your website up-to-date and processes compliant, as part of everyone’s regular work, your site and brand evolves through every task completed in delivering your great products, services and messages.
We use and evolve the same systems you do every day
Our business is based on this platform being the last website platform we will ever need, because we can now store all the brand and team information we rely on through our Brandlight login and work with anyone, everywhere.
We offer the same solution to you that we already run many successful ecommerce businesses with, designed for high-volume order and communication processing, and many parallel users working together to service thousands of customers a day.
Most organisations have the same common needs
Brandlight is a central database for your brand’s assets, product information and specialist knowledge, including;
- About Us Information
- Agreements
- Applications
- Amazon Listings & Order Processing
- Automations
- Banners
- Channels
- Comments
- Compliance Rules
- Coupons
- Data Imports & Exports
- Documentation
- Ebay Listings & Order Processing
- Events
- FAQs
- Features
- Forms
- Galleries
- Google Integrations
- Help
- Home Pages
- Media
- Newsletters
- Payment Service Integrations
- Presentations
- Products
- Reports
- Resellers
- Services
- Shopping Lists
- Tasks
- Vacancies
- Users & Roles
- and your very own automatically inter-linked brand Wiki
There’s a place for every type of information your brand needs to distribute – plus, we seed your website with all the common documents, terms, policies, agreements and other data that are common to all organisations – and, this is important to us, you own your data!
Setup and population is the greatest cost in any website and system – we fast-track that based on decades of experience in building our library of common documents for all organisations – so you can focus on what makes your brand unique.
Your website is your brand’s voice
Your team are also customers of the brand you create and your website – they will use, publish, test and provide feedback on it every day – so, growing, evolving and refining your website is growing, evolving and refining your brand and services.
The quality and capability of your systems is one of the most influential factors in your team’s job satisfaction and loyalty – hence we always strive to make sure our team has systems that just do what they need, to free their attention for the creative and human aspects of their work.
The Brandlight platform becomes an integral tool for sharing information between your teams and various audiences and the central view of all your team’s and partner’s latest published information, comments and progress
It should require no more technical capability or training than there would be for using a social media website or smartphone, both of which are designed not to need instructions manuals.
And your site should be a unique projection of your brand’s foresight and inclusive approach to meaningful collaboration, as a simple, fast and standardised web and mobile application.
Making it work everywhere for everyone
The Brandlight website interface is designed for speed in serving common information needs – on all screen sizes; keyboard, mouse and touch-interfaces; for all accessibility needs; and with role-based permissions management for different user’s needs; and privacy of privileged data.
The ecommerce store enables a highly optimised direct-to-consumer, dropshipping, broker and wholesale services for all countries, currencies, languages and channels.
Our compliance rules system monitors all products and data used for all channels – to ensure compliance with all laws, rules and brand policies as part of every publishing and data syndication workflow.
Brands that are successful in one country, often find it difficult to repeat that success in other countries due to the costs of replicating the setup and infrastructure, and many differences in governance, demographics and trends.
We make international replication much easier, cheaper and faster with a platform designed for international trade from the beginning, without duplicating all the data and infrastructure that created the home-market brand.
The move for brands to have direct customer relationships
the more that Amazon, Ebay and Google costs a brand per sale – the more demand and margin recovery opportunity they create for brands to use the Brandlight platform
Every channel and marketplace is charging commission fees to list and sell – plus there are now bidding wars generated for keyword advertising – all this increases costs and diminishing margins for the brand creator’s to research and develop their products and services.
The more commissions, fees, charges and advertising costs the marketplaces create – the more valuable the Brandlight platform becomes as an efficient alternative – by minimising those costs and focusing on building loyal customer relationships.
Quite simply; the more that Amazon, Ebay and Google costs a brand per sale – the more demand and margin recovery opportunity they create for brands to use the Brandlight platform as a more sustainable and predictable alternative.
Direct customer relationships mean; cost, time and commission savings for direct sales, compared to marketplaces; increased order sizes; decreased marketing costs and therefore more budget for loyalty and referral rewards; and higher customer lifetime value through their direct relationship loyalty and referral community.
Brandlight focuses on creating and building loyalty in every area – because the stability and predictability this creates is simply good for everyone – value is trust.
The single source of knowledge
Your Brandlight database is a rich a central database for product data management that can contain all the structure information needs for all other channels – including all the specialist complex data-structures necessary for things like food, nutrition, medicines, electronics, fashion compliance and transparency – that marketplace platforms do not offer through their over-simplified and non-specific interfaces.
Brandlight is also a central documentation system for all departments to communicate a consistent brand message to service all public and private user-types – where documents are set to be public or visible only to users with specific roles assigned to them.
The fastest possible unlimited internationalisation
Brandlight works for every country, currency, language and channel – to be your brand’s international websites for unlimited country domain-aliases – but with just one central database, and with the master-data created and maintained only once in English.
Your local partners can refine any of the machine translations just once anywhere on the site, and the exact same refinement will instantly be used everywhere.
Most internationalisation systems create a vast amount of duplicate data to maintain – we do things differently and have just one central database in English, and then use a translation service layer to make that available in any other language you can imagine just as fast.
We automate translations with almost indistinguishable results to native locals, and the remaining small percentage of refinements being very fast to edit in-line on the website frontend by those users assigned as translators.
Website users and search engines can both see the website in their local language – ensuring full accessibility and visibility in any relevant country or region, and higher ranking in local search engines than non-localised alternatives.
Lead by example
We are a practice-what-we-preach organisation, and encourage you to review the live sites we have already launched on our Clients page to decide for yourself if our pitch matches our work.
Please do share your comments, questions and feedback below, and Contact Us with your background information for where you are now and where you would like to be.
