Atosho

We are happy to announce that Atosho has raised another 2 mio EUR to support our continuous growth and expansion. Supremum Capital led the round and Managing Partner Denis Shafranik will join our board.

For further information, please contact Anders Ibsen.

Atosho is featured in the August ’12 edition of Mediaworkers’ Webadvisor, a publication primarily for marketers, communication professionals and web editors.

Atosho is presented in an e-commerce feature, under the headline “5 amazing services for your webshop”, among other excellent services.

We are very happy to be featured in this fine publication.

The publication is available as a PDF here.

We heartily congratulate Joe Cohen for making the 2012 Wired 100, in which Wired Magazine honors the most influential and innovative people in technology, design and business in the UK.

Joe Cohen is recognized for his stellar work with Seatwave, of which he is the founder and CEO.

We are very proud and privileged to have Joe on our board of directors, and we congratulate him on this well-deserved recognition.

The list can be found in the July 2012 issue of Wired UK edition. The list is also available here, along with the twitter-handles of the people on the list.

We have just released our Atosho extension for Magento on the Magento Connect marketplace.

The extension makes retailer implementation into the Atosho platform take minutes and require very little effort. Once the extension is installed, the product and order flows are fully automated, and require very little upkeep.

The extension brings the retailers’ product catalog into the Atosho platform via an XML feed, allowing for complete automation of stock, price, description, variants and more.

Orders can be fed directly into the retailers existing system via an API, allowing retailers to process the orders as they would any other.

The extension can be found here.

We urge retailers to download and install the extension, and then prepare to sell more products!

It is with great pleasure that Atosho announces our selection as a finalist for the 2012 Red Herring Europe Award, a prestigious list honoring the year’s most promising private technology ventures from the European business region. Atosho has been selected from a pool of hundreds of companies, who are judged by criteria such as financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, execution of strategy, and integration into their respective industries.

Atosho will be presenting our strategy at the Red Herring Europe Forum in Amsterdam, April 23-25, 2012. The Top 100 winners will be announced at a special awards ceremony the evening of April 25 at the event.

Visionary investors are king. We just closed our A Round financing of €1.3m from a number of business executives and family offices across Europe.

We have been delighted to experience the immense trust and excitement of business partners, investors and clients over the past year. Whenever we have had the opportunity to present the Atosho platform, we have been greeted with enthusiasm and a great desire to form relationships with us. The response to our unique approach to distributed e-commerce, which enables consumers to purchase anything they find interesting at any given time or space, be it online, in print or virtually anywhere else, has been extraordinary. Our approach is entirely new and disruptive, and this has helped us attract very talented and driven people to our organisation, which has been key to our success. We have been developing ground-breaking new technologies and strategic alliances, which are clearly the foundations for a very bright future for Atosho.

During the last 5 months Atosho has established itself in Scandinavia, France, Italy, United Kingdom and have just launched some pilot projects in the US.

Be ready to shop!

Yesterday a board member of Atosho sent me an email with the topic “Check this out” and one line of text in the email saying “the last 45 seconds is describing Atosho”.

This kind of email notoriously strikes my attention and the attention was not limited by the fact that our board member was referring to a TED talk speech given by Roger McNamee, Managing Director of Elevation Partners and one of the first and largest investors in Facebook.

The last 45 seconds literally is the core of what we are doing at Atosho. It might seems simple but it is not. Serving a shop is simple but taking the full logistic system and fulfillment into consideration the complications are significant.

Even though we offer a full API for managing products and orders in Atosho, implementing the API into an existing e-commerce platform can prove difficult, time consuming and expensive. Especially if you don’t have in-house developers.

So we’ve listened to those of our merchants who really want to hook up to our API but don’t have the resources to do so from scratch: We will develop code modules for the most widely used e-commerce platforms and offer them to our merchants for free. Our goal is that these modules can be installed and customized according to the merchant’s requirements within a few hours of development time.

The first released module is for Magento, which is a very popular e-commerce platform among our merchants. This module synchronizes products between Magento and Atosho. You can download it here.

We’ll prioritize the development of new modules according to our merchants’ needs, so if you have any comments to the development pipeline please contact us.

This week we launched the documentation site for our API service at code.atosho.com.

The API enables our merchants to manage their products and orders at Atosho through their own backend systems, and we will constantly release new features.

The decisions and considerations involved in offering the outside world an API are not trivial. Sometimes even naming your API can get you in trouble, which happened recently to the Rdio team when they labelled their API as REST.

There are a lot of arguments to be made in the heated SOAP vs. REST discussion. We’ve chosen a RESTful approach due to the lightweight and simplicity benefits, and all requests are happening through HTTPS for security reasons.

All of our merchants are able to create an API key in their Account Settings in order to get started. Go to code.atosho.com to read more.

P.S. We’ve also launched a bunch of other cool features this week, such as multiple images upload, drag & drop positioning, and product preview in our MicroShops.

During the last month Atosho has been in private alpha mode and we have run some pretty interesting test transactions. The learning we have got is massive and the feedback from users and customers has been valuable.

Today we are out of alpha and enter the beta era, which probably will last a little longer than the month we spend in alpha mode.

New merchant features

The beta version comes with a significant higher amount of features ranging from our new merchant API. This means that merchants can now administrate their online sales in their familiar systems. They can off course still manage their products and order at our website but having 2 systems to maintain is not sustainable for larger operations selling thousands of products every day.

Our product management is also enhanced to support more features. Merchants can now control which areas or regions they want to sell their products. Atosho is doing all the boring stuff as handling VAT for local regions or countries.

New publisher features

This beta launch is also exciting for publishers. They can now sign up online, choose which kind of integrated shops they would like to run at their website. It only takes 5 minutes to get started and you can have an easy overview of your earnings directly from our information dashboard.