Online Shop Founder’s Terry McGinnis and Siraaj Ahmed Aim to Oversimplify Ecommerce

In a recent article by CEO Weekly, Online Shop’s Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Terry McGinnis noted that the startup’s goal is to “oversimplify” the process of creating and running your very own e-commerce business. Existing platforms such as Shopify, BigCommerce, Cart.com among others put heavy emphasis on existing businesses that have the required resources and capital to design, code and host their own e-commerce solutions with platforms such as Shopify and Cart.com trying to ease the overall process.

As most founders focused on blockchain technologies, NFTs and other hype related ventures both founders, Terry McGinnis and Siraaj Ahmed began work on improving what most thought to be an already solved problem. This idea first started when Terry was living in Japan, according to an interview by Mashable, and had quickly expanded into marketplace territory, incorporating in United Kingdom and growing to have its own 20,000 square foot warehouse and logistics center. This however had proven to be an extremely difficult undertaking, requiring consistent capital and resources to compete with likes of Amazon.

However not all was lost, both founders had realized their talents in the software aspect of the business, managing to build a platform which was celebrated and championed by their sellers and buyers. Improving on all aspects where others had failed and developing several dozen innovations that helped sellers climb top rankings across organic search results, saving them thousands on ad spend.

With Chief Executive Officer, Terry McGinnis being quoted as saying:

This is something we saw a lot of success in, everything that we had developed, we developed with our sellers and users in mind. So what was seen as state of the art, for us at least, was originally built as a way to improve quality of life to our sellers and their buyers.

A lot of our sellers wanted to spend less on biddable campaigns and attract more buyers organically, to make themselves more competitive in the overall landscape for whichever category they were selling products in. We developed tools that would automatically optimize product titles, descriptions and even reduce image size without sacrificing quality. For us these were small additions but for our sellers they were huge innovations.

The overall ecommerce sector was set to increase by 200% Year on Year according to latest study done by Venture Harbour. This would account for around $50 trillion USD in 2022 alone, with the monetary amount set to increase tenfold in the next five years. Huge numbers like these, a constantly growing market and a more connected world means more innovation and competition but according to Chief Technology Officer, Siraaj Ahmed most in the sector focus on already established businesses:

There isn’t a lot of focus on individuals, or smaller businesses. We saw a market opportunity and we took it. We want to enable everyone to have the tools usually reserved for bigger, more knowledgeable and wealthier individuals and businesses, to bridge the gap, where opportunity is provided for everyone and anyone who wants to take it. That’s our ultimate goal, to help as many people as possible. We’re not going for enterprise level accounts, we just want to make the world of e-commerce accessible and affordable.

There currently exists no tailored solutions that focus on oversimplification and with it provide affordability, leaving many would-be customers with no options besides the same ones available to brands that are able to afford both time and money to build a brand online. This want and need has attracted investors such as Robin Vauvelle and researchers such as Dr. Torin Cannings PhD., to join the team in order to deliver on the promises made and goals set.

The company is set to open registrations in January 2023 via its official website onlineshop.com with those wanting to follow latest news and updates being able to do so via LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.