Moonfruit Lounge

24th January, London – Moonfruit.com, the UK’s largest DIY website builder, is one of the first businesses selected to take part in a major new campaign by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills. The campaign is aimed at inspiring people to start or grow their own business. Based on the concept that there is "a business in everyone" and that all businesses can realise their ambitions, the campaign, launched by the Prime Minister in Yorkshire yesterday, sees the Government and the private sector coming together to highlight the support available to small firms and budding entrepreneurs.

The campaign partners will be providing free services such as workshops, web-based seminars and video tutorials on issues like finance, as well as providing mentoring and access to face-to-face consultancy sessions.

Throughout 2012, the “Business in You” initiative will showcase Moonfruit and other real-life small and growth stage business owner case studies, rolled-out using a nationwide advertising campaign, to ensure maximum visibility to small businesses who stand to benefit most from the initiative.

As a growth stage business itself, Moonfruit.com was selected as one of three businesses headlining the campaign on billboards and digital media - http://businessinyou.bis.gov.uk/casestudies/wendy-tan-white/ .

Moonfruit is well placed to support this initiative as the company is passionate about democratising the web for SMBs and entrepreneurs. It gives them the tools to build their business and promote it via the web, mobile and Facebook, allowing them to reach a global audience.

Since its inception, Moonfruit has enabled people to build more than four million websites worldwide and hosts hundreds of thousands of UK business websites enabling them to trade and win business online.

Wendy Tan-White, Moonfruit’s CEO and co-founder states, “The campaign encourages people to start and grow their own businesses, thereby boosting the UK economy, it’s very much part of Moonfruit’s DNA. We feel touched to be part of the BIS, Startup Britain campaign and very much support it.”

She continues, “Political cynicism aside, chatting to the Prime Minister yesterday was inspiring. Watching him take the time to talk to small business owners, students and staff makes you realise the steps we all take as individuals will make the difference in shifting the economy. We need to create a collaborative eco-system here in the UK where large corporations partner and support SMBs, consumers support small and local businesses and more serial entrepreneurs share their wisdom with new and growth businesses. Rather than being cynical when we see people trying out new business ideas, let’s support them. I mentioned to the Prime Minister yesterday it’s Chinese New Year, Year of the Dragon, auspicious for business and brings either great success or failure. We’re all gunning for the former.”

At the launch, David Cameron said, "Small businesses and entrepreneurs are the lifeblood of the British economy and I am determined that we, working with the private sector, do everything we can to help them to start up and to grow in 2012. I want to encourage people to go for it and make this the year of enterprise – whether that is fulfilling their dream of starting a new business or taking the leap to grow their business, to employ more staff, or to start exporting."

In further action to help small businesses get off the ground, the Prime Minister will also announce plans to make empty and under-used Government offices available to small businesses so that they can start up and grow. With over 300 buildings currently in the central Government estate with vacant space available in England, the Government will offer as much of this space as possible to small businesses, giving them space to grow at a low cost.

Joe White writes: As the web continues to evolve, smart businesses look to use its new features in ways that can help them expand, compete and remain profitable - even at a time when the economic outlook seems bleak. This is particularly true when the web gives us opportunities to make money.

When Moonfruit.com was created, its aim was to allow anyone - from individuals through to small business owners and beyond - to control, maintain and customise their online identities, without needing big budgets or technical expertise. Together with the proliferation of social media platforms, this created a more equal playing field for people vying for online exposure.

Since then, people's online priorities have progressed from controlling their presence to boosting their sales. Online platforms use a number of methods to focus on money-making: traditional ecommerce, where people can buy products or services online using electronic payment; ad-supported platforms, which offer a service or content funded by commercial advertising; and paywalls and micropayments, which allow sites to monetise individual units of content.

What's new in ecommerce?

So why has ecommerce been so important for smaller businesses with a mandate to grow? Since launching our ShopBuilder tool - which allows people to publish online shops across a number of platforms, including their own site, Facebook and mobile - we have seen some innovative ways to make money using ecommerce functions. Some of these go way beyond simply selling products for payment.

Our customer Yoga Bellies, a pre- and post-natal yoga class that takes place across the UK, has done something very interesting with ShopBuilder. Its online shop function collects customers' payments for classes that take place offline. Similarly, the King's College London Symphony Orchestra is using ShopBuilder to allow people to purchase concert tickets in advance of the event.

While this isn't new in itself (most people have purchased tickets for a concert or holiday online), Yoga Bellies and King's College are integrating ecommerce into real life without using the complex online registration or billing systems required by tour operators and ticket vendors. This is hugely significant for small businesses and micro-traders because it removes some of barriers that may have inhibited growth in the past: customers not carrying the right cash, for example, or not possessing a chequebook.

Ecommerce vs. social commerce

Social commerce is a concept that builds on ecommerce by adding interactivity and sharebility to the traditional buy/sell structure. A number of studies have shown that people trust the recommendations made by their family and friends online more than they trust other types of promotion. It makes sense: Why would you trust an advert or even a third-party endorsement when you can access unbiased advice from the people you know in real life?

Facebook is a particularly fertile platform for social commerce not only because it has so many users, but also because ecommerce functions have started to be integrated with company pages. It's powerful because it allows people to buy within their own network without needing to visit other websites - and because they can engage with the brand in ways their friends and network can see. This process introduces a viral effect into the selling chain, and enables smaller businesses to grow organically using popular platforms such as Facebook.

We originally launched ShopBuilder to allow site owners to set up shop wherever their customers wanted to buy, and to fill a gap in the ecommerce market. So it's interesting to see that our users are most excited about one specific ShopBuilder feature, and that's Facebook integration! Thousands of our shops are already using this feature to publish their whole product catalogue into the social network to allow buying and selling inside Facebook itself. It will be even more interesting to see how they innovate with social and ecommerce in the future.

See the original article here

As many of you will have noticed, we launched the long awaited ShopBuilder about a month ago and as promised we're going to have a continuous stream of new shop features coming as quickly as we can bake them in the Moonfruit oven. (We don't really bake our software, but you get the idea).

We've had a great response to the shop launch with over 45,000 shops having been built in the last month. And we've also had a lot of feedback from you about the additional features you'd like us to build as quickly as possible. We love the feedback, so keep it coming.

So first out of the oven is the new Category feature. Many of you were asking for it, so here it is.

Shop homepage with Category links

Categories allow you to create groupings for your products and have different ways of ordering and arranging them to suit the different audiences you may be addressing or targeting. In the shop manager you can now add categories and assign products to categories. One product can be in more than one category and the list order of products in each category can be different.

Category editor

Categories have their own URL so you can link directly to a category sub heading. We've also created a new link type on the link tab in the Editor so that any image or link can link to a category allowing you to construct your own navigation. You can add category links direct from the menu of your site too, so that your normal site menu can offer different category pages.

Link editor with new category link type

And if that wasn't enough, there is also a new category link widget in the File Manager which automatically creates a list of all your categories and links to each of them. You can customise the style of this category link widget and change the button style, font and colours.

Category list widget on right

The mobile and Facebook views have also been updated to incorporate the category view. So if you have more than two categories, your Facebook shop will show the category names and images, which link through to the category product lists. And on the mobile view you can navigate to the category types from the drop down at the top of the page.

Facebook shop with categories


Mobile shop with categories

So that's about it for now. All these images are taken from our shopdemo.moonfruit.com website, so feel free to have a look and a play there.

So what's next?

We're working on some improvements to the shipping options and the ability to change the quantities of items on the checkout page - so your customers can buy multiple numbers of an item more easily. These should be out before the end of the year (testing permitting). Then early next year we will bring out product variants, and after that basic stock control and discount/coupon options. After that? Well, some more stuff - helped by the feedback we get from you guys.

We are thrilled to have made it through to one of the 24 finalists in the Good Web Guide's 'website of the year' awards from a strong field.

The winner will be announced by Jo Malone at the awards reception to be held on Wednesday 16th November at the Royal Institution.

Details about all the shortlisted sites can be found here.

There is also a second category called 'The People's Vote'. The organisers believe it will be a good test of which site is the most proactive on the social media front. The winner of the People's Vote will be announced at the reception as well.

If you click on the following link, you will be taken to a page where your vote will automatically be taken, click here. Visitors can only vote once.

Please help us to do well in (or win!) the People's Vote – and of course, we'll keep you posted about our success in the main event.

Joe White is COO of Moonfruit.com. He wrote the blog (below) for Reuters' The Great Debate UK series.

All this week Seedcamp, a UK-based internet startup accelerator, has been running its headline annual event Seedcamp Week in London.

As an accelerator, Seedcamp has mimicked a successful process established in the U.S. by Y Combinator, Techstars and others of taking early stage internet entrepreneurs and running them through an intense programme of mentoring and business development. Mentors are laid on from different disciplines and work with the entrepreneurs each day. They cover founders, product experts, venture capitalists, marketing specialists and more. The best ideas at the end of the programme get funding to get started. Seedcamp Week brings the best of the best from the Seedcamps throughout the year and around the world for a final London mentor and pitch feast.

Seedcamp has grown its fund to €5m this year and made some other announcements to bolster its success. There’s no doubt that a tie-up with Dave McClures’s 500 Startups will boost Seedcamp’s profile (disclosure: Dave McClure is also a Moonfruit investor).

But there are two questions that have plagued internet tech financing in recent months: Can Europe produce internet companies that rival their U.S. cousins in terms of success and influence? And are we in a tech bubble?

Let’s deal with Europe first. Seedcamp Week ends today – start-ups this time ranged from grabcad.com and farmeron.com, bringing the internet to engineers and farmers, to compilr.com and transferwise.com hoping to disrupt the software compiling and foreign exchange transfer markets respectively.

In my mind, for the UK to really produce world beaters with $1bn plus valuations, we need to have start-ups that play to our strengths. The UK and London in particular have strong industries in finance, design, music, and the marketing and creative industries. Some of these talent pools should help a great deal in the 2.0 world of slick UI and simplified design. NYC has done well to distinguish itself from the Valley based on a similar city profile to London, with companies like tumblr, foursquare and etsy.

Mint.com (started in 2006 in the US and acquired for $170m in 2009) was complimented for being a design-led site that happened to sell personal finance software. Wonga.com, which provides short term loans, is a UK champion in this ilk. It has similarly great, simplified design, is based in financial services, and with £73m revenues in 2010 and strong growth a high value IPO may be on the cards. Also in this vein is betfair.com, sourced from our national love of gambling, and zopa.com, providing peer-to-peer lending, sourced from the UK’s love of fairness and new found suspicion of banks. Successes like moo.com, last.fm and spotify.com show the influence of the design and music industries.

And now to the bubble. There’s been a lot of talk of tech bubbles, Angel bubbles and accelerator bubbles. Marc Andreessen says we’re not in a bubble and public tech multiples are too low, while Steve Blank says we are in a bubble, particularly at the Angel end which is playing out “by the book”.

The first Internet bubble took a long time to build, from the Netscape IPO in 1995 to the Nasdaq peak in March 2000 and subsequent crash. The U.S. was buzzing for a few years before the money, buzz and funding started to flow and build in Europe. New players piled in and more money chased fewer opportunities. Investors went further afield to chase them.

Moonfruit and I lived through that crash. We took VC funding in January 2000, and launched our business. We had no idea how close to the crash we were, and I don’t think we appreciated how long the boom had already been going when we joined the party. We have a post-crash happy ending, but this is not common. More and more of the U.S. VCs closed their European funds after the crash and many have not come back.

So what does that mean for Seedcamp and 500 Startups? Is this tie-up a sign that Europe is heating up? Is too much money chasing too few opportunities in the Valley? Too many accelerators? Are we beginning the last hurrah? I hope not.

As Mike Butcher from Techcrunch said in a recent interview, Seedcamp’s example spawning more accelerators in Europe could be a case of “a rising tide lifting all boats”. But even if the tide goes out those funds will have been injected into the economy and we’ll be left with more experience and knowledge.

For the original article, click here.