Why Ocoos?

If you are selling commodity products, the internet has a lot of solutions starting with ebay/amazon. If you want to integrate a shopping cart into your website, there are a large number of choices such as shopify/squarespace and others. However, if you are in the services business or selling complex products, Ocoos is the killer solution for you. Why?

1. Technology Platform: Our technology platform takes care of hosting, scaling, security, browser and device compatibility. On other solutions, you are responsible.
2. Extended Marketing Capability: Our system provides a much richer capability to describe your product/service vs a shopping cart.
3. Extensive Engagement Models: Scheduling, Quotes, digital signatures for liability and work completion agreements, surveys, and more.
4. Built-in CRM/Sales Tracking: Critical for customer support and optimizing scheduling.
5. Marketing Automation: Advertising, Review, and Referral optimization is built into the system.

Because of the power of the platform, we can offer the above capability with concierge enabling services at a very affordable price. This is in remarkable contrast to custom web developers who build solutions on open source platforms such as wordpress. Their solutions are often quite expensive to build and maintain, and of course, what does one do if they go out of business or go to college?

Ocoos is a technology platform upon which we offer enabling concierge services. This means we can offer an enormous amount of value for a very reasonable price. Custom developers can be good or very bad..it all depends on who you get. There is no regulation in the field, so the quality of the product/customer service and even competence can be quite variable. Of course, the good developers are very expensive, and affordability can be an issue.

Our own experience is that it is a very rare developer who is good at all aspects of building an online solution (design, ecommerce, security, server scaling, etc). Thus, we find many situations where a developer has used open-source software to build a solution which has been hijacked by hackers.

DIY is the rage right now with companies such as Wix, Web.com, and Godaddy advertising like crazy on TV/radio. However, for most business owners, the reality is that DIY is not a viable option because:

1. They are not experts in design and user behavior.
2. They do not have the time to pull together a professional website and even more importantly maintain it.
3. DIY is not free... it wiil cost you time and they will charge you real dollars eventually (like when you are trapped in their system).

Beyond the engagement issues, most DIY systems are limited to just providing a digital sign or simple ecommerce.

In contrast, Ocoos is a technology platform which enables concierge services. This means we can give the customer an enormous amount of value at a fraction of the price of alternatives. The solution itself is well beyond a digital sign with capabilities around customer engagement as well as marketing automation.

Ocoos is a large platform with extensive engagement and marketing automation. If you already have a design you like and it was built in something like Wordpress, we can connect to your design and enable the power of the Ocoos platform with our Ocoos Upgrade service.

No. Ocoos is a technology provider. We do not get involved in any promotion (digital advertising, social media content generation, blog writing etc). We have partners which can help with this work.

Facebook business pages are great (as are linkedin and others). However, they are missing a great deal of functionality which is critical for most businesses:

1. Design Flexibility: You get a main page, but do not have much flexibility for marketing your products/services.
2. Commerce: There is no ecommerce in facebook right now. Even if they provided it, it is likely to be for simple commodity products.
3. CRM: No way to track customers.
4. Built-in CRM/Sales Tracking: Critical for customer support and optimizing scheduling
5. Marketing Automation: no data mining, advertising optimization, review management, etc.

Overall, facebook is an ok digital sign, but not much more... that's why they are called "fan pages."

Overall, the most powerful general distributors are search engines (google, bing, yahoo)... they hold 99% of the search market (YP marketshare is very small) Beyond that, the core capabilities of these directories are limited. Issues include:

1. Design Flexibility: You get a main page, but do not have much flexibility for marketing your products/services.
2. Commerce: There is no ecommerce in facebook right now. Even if they provided it, it is likely to be for simple commodity products.
3. CRM: No way to track customers.
4. Built-in CRM/Sales Tracking: Critical for customer support and optimizing scheduling
5. Marketing Automation: no data mining, advertising optimization, review management, etc.

Overall, generic directories are an okay solution, but not much more. Beyond YP, we do not recommend the time/effort to list on others.

For specific directories (Angieslist, airbnb, tripadvisor etc), there is certainly some value from a lead generation point-of-view. However, it is useful to remember that most of these situations involve royalties (sometimes significant). Thus, if you can get more of your business through your own website, you get to keep more of the money.

Ocoos offers a consultative approach to building your online solution. Our typical process is:

1. A demo meeting where we understand your business and we explain our platform/service. Here we are looking for a good fit. In most cases, we have already built solutions in the field and thus can offer true guidance on the recommended solution. These are the so called optimized solutions.
2. Assuming the customer wants to go forward, a formal proposal is built and sent to customer. The proposal consists of a build fee and a maintenance fee, both of which are fixed price. The amount of the fees is a function of the customer needs. Connected with the proposal is a request for payment for the build fee.
3. Once the customer accepts/pays the build fee, a build team is reserved for the customer for 6 weeks (design, build, server). The team has significant milestones in 2 weeks (initial straw man), customer/ocoos iterations (2-3 weeks), and final closure in 5-6 weeks. After this point, the customer moves to a concierge status.
4. In the concierge state, customer is trained to updated the website themselves while Ocoos provides expertise in background. Of course, we can jump in to help anytime as well.

Ocoos is a technology platform upon which we offer enabling concierge services. This means we can offer an enormous amount of value for a very reasonable price. With this model, we believe we are much less expensive than all other alternatives. Compared to custom developers, the costs will be 3-4X lower and the solution will be much more secure/scalable. Compared to DIY solutions, the time investment will be 10X lower... what is your time worth?

Ocoos has deep experience in building online infrastructure. In the process, Ocoos built a large knowledge base on the needs of various professionals. Optimized solutions are simply the package of solutions which we have found work best for the field. In our interactions, customers appreciate the knowledge base to provide solutions for problems which they themselves may not have even considered.