Andy Brazelton knows Simply Youth Ministry from the ground up. He started working for the ecommerce retailer in high school in 1998. From packing and shipping boxes, he worked his way up to the top. By 2000, he was running the ecommerce operations, and had his first contact with FastPivot.
“We were looking for an alternative to our .Net system. I looked around at all of the top ecommerce platforms. I came across FastPivot, had a great conversation and was really impressed with their portfolio. Still, I wasn’t convinced that the Yahoo! Stores platform had the features and functionality we needed to grow. I ended up choosing Digital River.”
A Happy Client
Fast forward to 2006. Simply Youth Ministry is now owned by Group Publishing (Group) and Brazelton is again ready to migrate ecommerce platforms. The first call he makes is to FastPivot for advice on selecting a new turnkey platform. A lot has changed in six years. Goodbye Digital River; hello to the new and vastly improved Yahoo! Stores platform on which FastPivot builds an entirely new website from the ground up. Eight years later, Brazelton remains a very happy client.
“From a consulting perspective, FastPivot seem to know what we want even before we ask them. They’re without any doubt the best at what they do in ecommerce. And when it comes to the Yahoo! platform, Fast Pivot is absolutely fantastic. We made a great choice choosing both. For our company and our needs, Yahoo! was and remains the best. The platform never goes down.”
The Best of Yahoo! Merchant Solutions and Drupal
As Youth Ministry Director of Sales and Marketing, Group Publishing, Brazelton now runs three departments; overseeing camps, a huge blog network, and Group’s two online stores.
Brazelton oversees a content rich organization. The location of this content, SimplyYouthMinistry.com, is built on WordPress, while the integrated ecommerce store is built on Yahoo!. According to Brazelton, the thousands of pieces of content his team has produced help generate in-bound traffic to the dot com site, which is then converted into revenue via the ecommerce store. Conversion is key because an important of funding for its camp program is SimplyYouthMinistry.com site revenue.
In 2016,
