About Us

As a junior in college, Tommy interned at a shipping supply company in outside sales. As one might expect from watching The Office, the job was boring and required him to hawk boxes and tape to up to 40 businesses a week. While it was a great learning experience, it was also a frustrating process.. always driving around cold calling, having to guess what customers were buying, and haggling back and forth with buyers on pricing. Tommy imagined that his customers were equally frustrated by 'the annoying sales guy' dropping by, lack of choices, and constantly changing prices on items for unexplained reasons.

On one particularly frustrating customer visit, Tommy was turned away from a business with whom he had a scheduled appointment. However, there was a silver lining in this cancellation. The customer apologized for not having time, gave Tommy a competitor's invoice, and said 'Go back to your office and beat these prices, and I will go with you guys.' This was an epiphany for Tommy. It was the easiest sale he had ever made, because it removed all of the stress and waste from the purchasing process. On that day, he knew he needed to create a transparent platform that would bring this improved means of transacting commerce to millions.

Having a great idea and building a great business are two radically different propositions. As such, it took Tommy years to develop the business acumen and web development skills necessary to implement his grand scheme. However, after ten years of learning and improving, he officially launched NickelCommerce in 2017. After several product pivots and hundreds of meetings with small business owners, Tommy finally started to see traction on his site. He called in his old high school buddy Rory to help manage the onslaught of invoices, and they have been steadily building and improving the NickelCommerce platform ever since.