Today's Featured Member: Fleapay is small business ecommerce made simple.

Today's featured member, Fleapay, is a simple shopping cart system that works with your existing website.

Fleapay aims to provide an easy ecommerce to companies who are processing credit cards by enabling them to streamline their flow of monies into one place. To do this, Fleapay offers an easy cart solution that piggybacks off your existing merchant account.

Our customers kept asking for e-commerce solutions. Unfortunately, many of them didn’t have the big budgets required to implement full ecommerce storefronts. The open source solutions (i.e. free) that are available and can be implemented into a website require custom configurations, design or even programming. This cost money, regardless how FREE the software is. Web developers and consultants require time, energy and expertise to implement these solutions.

A light bulb went off.

We thought let’s streamline the ecommerce request from our customers into a solution that fit the masses. Thus, Fleapay was born.

Tell us something unique about you and your co-founder(s)?
Fred Simmons (@fsimmons), co-founder, is an avid Detroit Sports fan. Fred has a penchant for decorating with figurines. His collection ranges from Lord Stanley to Charles Woodson to Domo. Fred is also a photography hobbyist. Fred is going to become a father at the end of May. 

Zach Wilson (@zwilson), co-founder, is a exercise enthusiast, specifically swimming, biking and running. He has completed 3 Ironman triathlons and will be competing in his 4th this fall in Louisville.

What problem does your product or service solve? 
Fleapay is:
1. faster than installing, configuring and designing cart software,
2. puts money directly in companies’ bank account,
3. makes it easy and affordable for anybody to add ecommerce to their website,
4. provides a simple and clean checkout for users,
5. is a great do-it-yourself solution for ecommerce.
 

What are your startup's three biggest challenges to growth?
Marketing. Our biggest struggle has been getting our name out there. We have been trying to do it through organic search. We're finding the ecommerce space is a very competitive one and thus very expensive to do paid search.

What Startup America Resources have you used?
We have taken advantage of a few of the services in the startup Success Kit. Namely, we're working with SeoMoz's tool to help us work on our SEO, organic ranking and site copy. We've also participated in a few events in the learning series.

How will Startup America help you overcome these challenges and help your startup grow?
For us, any opportunity for people to learn whom we are and what we're trying to do is a great opportunity for us. From what we saw on the s.co website, we thought this would be right up our alley! Look mom, now we're now a featured company!

What is the startup culture like in your City/State?
We're based in Chicago. The Chicago community has been rapidly growing over the last few years. A few big names (feedburner, okcupid, 37signals, threadless) act as great cornerstones for Chicagoans. Knowing these guys had success without being in the bay area has enabled many local companies to stay in the Midwest. People now recognize you do not have to pack up and go west to make your business viable. It can be done right here at home. If you're seeking capital, there are now great mentors, angels, VCs, and incubators locally to help push startups forward.

More about Fleapay:
Startup America Member Since March 2012
Region: Illinois
Web: http://www.fleapay.com/
Twitter: @fleapayapp
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Fleapay

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