Partners Primary For Kurant StoreSense

"We provide real nice margins" for partners, said Curtis Pierce, CEO and one of three co-founders of the company, based here. "If you're a solution provider for the SMB community, one of the problems you face, invariably, is high turnover," as companies go out of business or their personnel changes, Pierce said. But channel players can reduce customer "churn" by increasing the number of services they provide, he said.

Kurant's StoreSense is designed to maximize upsell opportunities, Pierce said. Version 5.0 includes support for e-catalogs, online shopping carts and transaction processing, and for more complex functions such as inventory and supply chain management.

New features include a Web site building tool, an online billing module and support for PayPal, an e-payment vendor acquired last month by eBay.

"With Kurant, you can do multilevel channel strategies," said Jim Calhoun, vice president of product development at Website Pros, a Jacksonville, Fla.-based Kurant partner.

"A small VAR somewhere could set up Kurant in a way that they could easily go into all the local coffee stores so people could purchase coffee online, then pick it up at the [local store," Calhoun said.

Website Pros licenses StoreSense for use in its own product, which it resells to First Data and other customers.

Homestead, Menlo Park, Calif., also markets its own site-design software, licensing and private-labeling Kurant's technology. "What makes us different is that we bundle the hosting" for SMBs' Web sites, said Michael Geller, vice president of external marketing and business development at the company.