At the beginning of March 2019, IAI S.A., the portfolio company of MCI.EuroVentures fund and a well-known supplier of solutions for operating online stores for medium and large companies, will introduce a subscription plan which will make similar functionalities also available to small companies.
IAI S.A. has been developing faster than the market for many years now, and through the support of the MCI fund, its development plans may be accomplished on an even greater scale and at a quicker pace. The latest Smart CLOUD subscription plan is, on one side, a natural direction in the company’s business development, but also a way to respond to the expectations of the smallest entrepreneurs who, in addition to the convenience of operating their e-stores, also want to minimise costs.
The entry into a new market segment is an important event for IAI. Until now, IdoSell Shop, the company’s flagship product has been associated in Poland exclusively with its offer for medium and large online stores. The system is very advanced, offering many possibilities for independent reconfiguration and the operation of several stores in one system, including different markets, retail and wholesale (B2B). It also has a built-in Marketing Automation system and a recommendation system. One distinguishing feature is, for instance, the built-in WMS, the part of the system which is responsible for warehouse control, issue of sales documents and the process of packing, verification and dispatch of parcels. Now IAI also has the opportunity to successfully enter the smaller start-up segment.
According to Paweł Fornalski, the founder and CEO of IAI S.A.:
‘Thanks to our ambitious plans and the support of the MCI Fund, we can think about serving many more customers by also reaching small online stores. Until today, the owner of such a store had been forced to consider whether he/she had the potential to immediately pay a little more for the online store system, considering that, for example, within two years the business would grow on such a large scale that the systems dedicated to small online stores would no longer be sufficient, and a subsequent migration would be costly and troublesome. In terms of SME development, Poland is a giant on the European scale and additionally, in some respects, the smallest businesses in Poland may feel excluded and deprived of the same opportunities as medium and large companies. At IAI, we want to use this potential and provide everybody a solution which will facilitate doing business on the internet without any excessive budget strain. Therefore, we want to offer a comprehensive solution for operating a small online store at an attractive price. Then when a store grows, it will not have to migrate to a new system. From the micro-scale to the huge store, it will continue to employ one single solution, which will be tailored to its current needs. We really and realistically want to help Polish companies to sell’.
The new IAI tool will be very price-competitive, and in many respects its cost for the entrepreneur will be lower than in the case of free open source solutions. The reason is that the cost of a store in Smart CLOUD starts from PLN 25 per month with an unlimited number of goods and full functionality, as in the previous CLOUD plan for medium online stores. The latest service will be available from 1 March 2019.
‘The company’s latest project enables us to address the needs of the very promising segment of small entrepreneurs and increases its potential for further growth in the scale of operations. We firmly believe that the financial support of MCI, in addition to our know-how, will help IAI not only to strengthen its position in the national market for SaaS solutions for business, but also to successfully implement its expansion in the region of Central and Eastern Europe’, said Łukasz Wierdak from MCI.EuroVentures.