Yes, I’m talking about the same Staples that you buy pens and copy paper from. About a month ago, Staples announced the launch of the Staples App Center, an innovative online marketplace for cloud-based business applications. The App Center makes it easy for small businesses to purchase and manage business apps all in one place. The center offers a growing selection of the business apps, an administrative console and one consolidated across all apps purchased.
Last week, Andrew and I had an opportunity to chat with the Staples team regarding this new announcement and I must say – what a great idea! Many small businesses today find themselves searching the web for the best online backup product, the best email marketing tool or the best office productivity product – otherwise called cloud-based business apps. The official description of a business app from Staples is:
“Apps are cloud-based services hosted by an offsite provider and available over the Internet. That means you can access these apps 24/7, wherever you are, with any web-connected device. Most apps have free trials, require no additional hardware or software and are paid for with monthly or annual subscriptions”
Some examples of the apps offered via the Staples App Center are Google Apps (office productivity), Box (collaboration), Carbonite (online backup), Mozy (online backup), Symantec (security), McAfee (security), and OmniJoin (web & video conferencing).
With the above in mind, it’s clear that Staples’ strategy behind the App Center is to capture a large portion of this growing market, especially the small business segment. Staples does have a great advantage in this market and that is its very large and loyal small business customer base. Staples has been working on this offering for some time now and listening to the needs of their customers and here are some key differentiators and value propositions that make this offering unique for the small business segment.
- Broad coverage – To best serve small business, Staples wanted the categories of cloud based apps it offers offering to be broad and comprehensive, enabling their customers to learn from them and better understand which business app they should take advantage of. Customers get an online-shopping experience for business apps, with reviews and detailed descriptions of what the app does, how much it costs, free-trials, etc.
- Best app – In order to provide customers with additional value, Staples does a significant amount of vetting, research and testing on various different products within a specific category with the aim being to offer customers a short-list of the best apps. For example, there are many online backup products available in the market. Staples researched the various products and ended up selecting two to offer its customers – Carbonite and Mozy.
- Try before you buy – Staples offers free-trials for most of the business apps within the App Center and monthly plans so customers don’t have to commit to long term contracts if they don’t want to..
- One login, one dashboard, one bill – With this feature, customers can use their Staples App Center login credentials for any business app that is purchased via Staples. The single dashboard allows users to complete quick administrative tasks across all apps that they subscribe to (e.g, add a user, upgrade, or view invoicing history). The dashboard also has a newsfeed that displays various activity that is taking place across all of the users apps. Additionally, Staples App Center customers only receive one consolidated bill per month for all business app subscriptions, as opposed to various monthly charges at various times on a credit card.
So, overall I think the Staples App Center is a great idea for small businesses. It really looks to solve many of the challenges that small businesses face with cloud-based applications from sourcing the right ones to managing them and paying for them.
