GIFT AND HOME RETAILER NEWS
A Service of GiftsWholesale.Com & OmegaNet Inc.

OmegaNet is 20 Years Old This Month!

A screenshot from the home page of OmegaNetInc.net, the corporate website for OmegaNet Inc.

OmegaNet Incorporated, publisher of this newsletter and developer of the CAMEO EZ^© wholesale ordering platform, turns 20 years old in November of 2017. Founded by Toni Ivey, the company has built hundreds of wholesale, B2B websites for Gift, Home, Garden, Accessories, Apparel, Decor and Toy companies. Millions of dollars in wholesale orders have been placed by tens of thousands of retailers during that time.

"When we began, we looked for an existing software platform we could build our specialized B2B websites on," Ivey recalls, "but nothing was available that met all the requirements of our clients for wholesale ordering, so we built our own."

Ivey had worked as a road rep for a sales rep agency as well as representing imported lines of her own and was at one point doing 20 trade shows per year. After an arduous trade show season, she decided to begin a business utilizing the relatively new "World Wide Web".

OmegaNet Inc. has had two logo designs in its 20-year history. The current design was created in 2010.

It's hard to believe now, but when Ivey bought OmegaNet's first domain name (GiftsWholesale.Com) in November, 1997, Amazon.com was only three years old, it was still year before Google and PayPal would be founded and seven years before Facebook was born. In fact, OmegaNet is almost twice as old as Twitter.

That first website, GiftsWholesale.Com, was at first just an advertising portal, as it is now, where retailers can find real wholesale products. In fact, for a while the company itself was known as GiftsWholesale.Com, Inc. However, vendors who wanted to advertise on GiftsWholesale.com, often didn't have their own websites, so OmegaNet began building websites; some were just information sites, but many wanted a Business-to-Business (B2B) ordering website and that is when CAMEO^© was born. "CAMEO" is an acronym for "Complete Automated Merchant Electronic Ordering".

Pictured are the early logos for CAMEO^© and CAMEO EZ^©.

CAMEO was custom coded from the ground up for OmegaNet to allow for secure registration and log in, first order and reorder minimums, item minimums, volume discounts, case quantities, and more; features the consumer-oriented e-commerce systems of the time didn't have. A simple Content Management System (CMS) was included so OmegaNet clients could have as much control over their website content as possible, without waiting for a webmaster to get around to doing updates.

"Some web companies' business models are built around making it difficult for their clients to do anything without coming back to them for billable work," Ivey says, "but from the beginning, we believed our clients should be able to manage as much as possbile without calling us. After all it is their website." For that reason the system always allowed clients to update their own product data, images, and information pages.

The company first focused on Sales Agency sites, but shortly manufacturers wanted a CAMEO website also, so OmegaNet began doing vendor websites as well. Two of the very earliest vendor clients are still clients of OmegaNet: Bards.com and CrownMullingSpice.com.

Later other portals were added, such as AccessoriesWholesale.Com, ApparelWholesale.biz, DecorWholesale.Com, ToysWholesale.Com, and most recently, USMadeWholesale.Com.

All of the company's portals have recently recieved facelifts with a new, cleaner, mobile-ready design.

All CAMEO EZ^© websites can be seen in the "Directory" on CAMEOEZ.com using a CAMEO EZ^© username and password.

CAMEO became CAMEO EZ^© in 2003, built on a better database and software language platform. Numerous upgrades and improvements have been made in the intervening years and OmegaNet's client base grew.

An important feature was added to the "EZ" version of CAMEO: retail stores could "copy" their registrations from one CAMEO EZ^© site to another without filling out the registration form again. As a result, the thousands of retail stores that registered in the CAMEO EZ^© system, along with the vendors from which they ordered their inventory, began to be called "The CAMEO EZ^© Community". CAMEOEZ.com is now a place where all CAMEO EZ^© websites can be seen in the "Directory" using a CAMEO EZ^© username and password.

The "Community" was so popular among retailers, that, in 2015, a book titled "Real Wholesale Sources" was published by a third party (available in the Amazon Kindle store) that was little more than a guide to the CAMEO EZ Community, giving specific instructions on how to register as a CAMEO EZ customer, how to find inventory and how to place an order on a CAMEO EZ website. A chapter titled "The Sources" listed CAMEO EZ vendors almost exclusively as the best sources for wholesale inventory.

In 2006, the Gift & Home Retailer email newsletter was begun, the first issue appearing in July, for the purpose of communicating to those who had registered in one of the portals to learn of news about vendors and trade shows, as well of general news of interest to the industry. Annual special issues include the "Green" Issue (April), Trade Show Issue (June and December) and the Made-in-USA issue (October).

In 2007, OmegaNet extended it's advertising from "passive" (on the portals), to "active" through email advertising. Today, many thousands of retailers count on receiving email notifications of specials, new products and other offers from CAMEO EZ vendors. Approximately 70,000 retail stores have opted to recieve email messages from OmegaNet. As a result, many vendors who do not have an OmegaNet website take advantage of OmegaNet's email marketing services.

Kiss Me In the Garden, a long-time OmegaNet client, has a redesigned, mobile-friendly, B2B website. The company features Made In USA body and bath products, such as Shea Butter Balms, body lotions, bubble baths and body milk that are Paraben Free, with no animal testing. Collections include the Kiss Collection, the Sea Garden, Grateful Nature, Spa Retreat, Demoiselle, In the Woods, Sea Goddess, Heavenly Garden, For the Men and many more.

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