Over the past few years, bloggers and "tastemakers" have been developing their brands on their own websites, blogs and social profiles. Vendr allows the owners of these personal brands to take advantage of their existing online presence and integrate a store right into their own website without adding the clutter or brand deflation that usually accompanies existing e-commerce tools. Vendr is clean, simple and pure, and will not overcrowd their personal brand or lead visitors away from where the core message is — on their website or blog.

But what is Vendr?

Vendr is a website overlay widget that allows you to build an online store WITHIN your own website in 15 minutes flat! And no, you do not need to be a design or code guru. After setting up your products through an intuitive control panel, you simply paste a few lines of code into your website or blog template and your store is up and running. Others have claimed to provide easy e-commerce solutions, but this is truly the utmost in simplicity! Vendr supports both physical and digital products.

What else can Vendr do?

Even though it has been built with simplicity as its main goal, Vendr still manages to cover all the features needed to transform any site into a fully-functional online store front with multiple pictures per product, categories and product options. Its extensive backend dashboard allows you to be in control of your store in real time. You can accept payments with your Paypal and Google Checkout accounts, track inventory and receive alerts on low merchandise. It is easy to manage all of your orders, report on sales data and customer information, offer discount codes, and even run your own affiliate program!

Why are you telling me this?

Right all off the above is copy pasted from an email I received during the week from Zenna @ Vendr. I don’t usually review software, especially for no dosh.. But call it nice timing or what you will, I was in the middle of piles of code playing around with a Prestashop installation. They could not have picked a better time to email me talking about a SIMPLE webstore with ZERO code!

Of course, for my project Vendr wouldn’t be a good fit, I’m sure I could make it work somehow but that would be making more work for myself and I can’t be doing that now! However for future projects, especially for people with existing websites, Vendr seems like a really good choice to go with. Most web stores are bloated, your bringing your customer off to another page / sometimes even domain, and its hard to keep branding between two different web applications. Vendr seems to fill that void, a simple widget overlay with all the features you would look for in a web store. Simplicity is really the key word here, I think boxador have done well with this one.

There’s three examples of Vendr currently online,

Boxador
This is an example on how Vendr works on a corporate website using a custom owned domain. This is a demo store, so feel free to browse and go through the checkout process.

Blogspot Example
Blogspot is very commonly used by bloggers, this is an example of a blog that talks about fonts and typography and can now sell fonts to its followers. a cool demonstration on how a downloadable item is sold through Vendr.

Viviti
Here we demonstrate how a blog about baby products can benefit from selling some of the products they talk about. Again this is a demo blog and store.

Within all three of these examples you can see what I am talking about, the design is simple and your on the same branded page the whole time.

Pricing

Always the kicker, pricing starts from FREE [Max 5 Products] right up to LARGE [Max 250 Products] for $29.95 p/m . See more of the pricing here.

Beta Codes

Vendr is currently in a closed beta, but for the first 100 readers, use the invitation code MVHAL6RMTC to sign up to any of the packages during the closed beta! The closed beta is going to be over in early July so get your accounts quick! I believe they are planning on an August release.

The latest version of the software, available here [just click Free Version –> Desktop] even supports delivery reports, and support is very good, I’ve noticed it not working maybe twice in the last year[due to o2 redesigning their website], both times the issues where fixed and an automatic update was out within two days. They also now have an android and iPhone app, for anyone in possession of those luxuries!

A brilliant graph of where time is taken up in web design. Scarily true as well!

Thanks to poisonedminds.com