How MidoCommerce’s Eberths Perozo Paved the Way for Automation in E-Commerce
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The world of e-commerce presents many barriers to entry for aspiring entrepreneurs who have limited capital to begin with. For starters, many big and trusted wholesale suppliers of goods have minimum purchase requirements for those who wish to avail of bulk discounts. These purchase requirements could go as high as $300,000 for certain products — a price tag that could prove to be too hefty for a newbie business owner.
This leaves many beginner shop owners with two equally bad options: filling their online stores with poor quality products, they can get for cheap prices or contracting their profit margins by buying good quality products without the bulk discounts.
MidoCommerce founder Eberths Perozo is very familiar with these struggles and barriers to entry. He and his business partner Andres Corona experienced these same challenges when they were just establishing their e-commerce business in the U.S.
“We had our stores and our systems set up, but we couldn’t make the money we wanted because we didn’t have the capital to buy the products we actually wanted to sell,” says Perozo. “That’s because many brands have a minimum order that we just couldn’t afford with the limited capital we had.”
Born and raised in Venezuela, Eberths Perozo moved to the U.S. to create a better life for himself and his family. Driven by this ambition to secure his and his loved ones’ future, Perozo knew he couldn’t let the birthing pains of starting an e-commerce business derail his plans.
So together, Perozo and his business partner thought of a way to work around the minimum order requirements of the products they wanted to sell in their shop. This signalled the birth of MidoCommerce as it exists today — with the franchise model as its core business framework.
“The idea was to gather money from other shop owners so we could fulfill the minimum order quantities set by wholesalers,” Perozo says. “Say a wholesaler requires a $300,000 minimum purchase. What will happen is we’ll look for two other shop owners who want to order $125,000 worth of goods and then add in $50,000 of our own money to buy some goods for ourselves. Just like that, we’ve hit the minimum order, and everyone benefits.”
Now, not only did this franchise-type business model allow many starting business owners to accelerate the growth of their e-commerce stores, but it also paved the way for introducing automation in the industry, something Eberths Perozo is proud to have pioneered.
“Since Andres and I were coordinating with wholesalers and other retailers who run their own shops on Amazon, we came by this idea of creating ‘automated’ stores,” says Perozo. “In an automated store set up, all our clients have to do is invest capital in setting up their store. Afterward, they would hand the store over to us so we could find suppliers for them, fill their inventories for them, set their final prices, and come back to them with their profits.”
Perozo’s first client for his automated store idea was a student he mentored while trading stocks and cryptocurrency. Since this person has known and trusted his business acumen since 2012, Eberths Perozo didn’t have any trouble convincing him that his automated store idea was a great one, even though it was such a novel concept back then.
And with the success of Perozo’s first automated store, word spread fast about MidoCommerce’s services. Today, they have more than 100 clients. Perozo admits things can get pretty hectic at times, fixing problems for hundreds of stores, talking to dozens of suppliers at once, and being responsible for the success of many other dreamers like himself.
Yet, Eberths Perozo says all the stress could not compare to the joy he feels when watching the people he’s helped succeed in their paths.
“Apart from our clients, we’re also helping people in the U.S. by creating jobs for Americans and immigrants alike,” says Perozo. “It’s great to see people who come from places like Venezuela, Mexico, and El Salvador achieve their American dream. We’re creating a good community. We’re creating good jobs, and we’re creating a good environment. We are just helping people, and they’re happy because they now know something that they didn’t even know existed. We are helping them create a legacy. It’s a great feeling knowing that people will always remember us as good people who took care of their clients and their workers.”