“Stores will never buy products on the Internet.”
These were some of the words of skeptics that greeted Toni Ivey when she began trying to sell the Gift & Home industry on Business-to-Business (B2B) ecommerce websites in the late 1990s. Yet, 25 years later, retail stores have demonstrated that they will order inventory on the Internet.
OmegaNet Inc. has had two logo designs in its 25-year history. The current design was created in 2010.
OmegaNet Incorporated, publisher of this newsletter and developer of the CAMEO EZ© wholesale ordering platform, turns 25 years old in November of 2022. Founded by Toni Ivey in the Atlanta, Georgia area, 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. Several OmegaNet wholesale-vendor clients have been with OmegaNet for 15, 20, and even the entire 25 years! New vendors are being added all the time, but two of the very earliest vendor clients are still clients of OmegaNet: Bards.com and CrownSpices.com.
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 and EBay.com was just two years old. Google and PayPal would not be founded for another year. In fact, OmegaNet is seven years older than Facebook and almost ten years older than Twitter.
On the occasion of the company’s 10-year anniversary in 2007, OmegaNet Inc. president Toni Ivey (right) and vice president Gary Ivey served birthday cake to more than 100 GHTA conference attendees.
Later other portals were added, such as AccessoriesWholesale.Com, ApparelWholesale.biz, DecorWholesale.Com, ToysWholesale.Com, and most recently, USMadeWholesale.Com.
That first website, GiftsWholesale.Com, was an advertising portal, where retailers can find real wholesale products. 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”.
OmegaNetInc.net Home Page.
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.
Since 2003, OmegaNet’s wholesale websites have been built on the “CAMEO EZ©” platform, a proprietary software system built from the ground-up for the Gift & Home industry and the special needs of wholesale ordering. Numerous upgrades and improvements have been made in the intervening years as OmegaNet’s client base grew.
Pictured are the early logos for CAMEO© and CAMEO EZ©.
“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.
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 Ryan Reger (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. OmegaNet is also mentioned as one “of the biggest players” in the B2B space in the 2020 book “The COMPLETE BOOK of Product Design, Development, Manufacturing, and Sales” by Steven Selikoff, also available on Amazon.com.
All CAMEO EZ© websites can be seen in the “Directory” on CAMEOEZ.com using a CAMEO EZ© username and password.
OmegaNet’s tagline is “Building Brands, Boosting Sales.” 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 80,000 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.
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).
