Learn more from your analytics

Posted on December 31, 2012 by rebecca

Now that the Holidays are winding down, your mind may be turning to the coming new year, looking ahead to expectations and plans for the next retail season.  There is a lot to be learned from each holiday season and a number of improvements that you may want to make as a result, whether it is modifications to shipping, or adjustments to the store inventory.  However, one of the most important changes retailers can make post holidays is to invest in analytics.

At Upshot Commerce, we offer a variety of comprehensive services that allow our customers to turn basic numbers into something actionable.  From recommendations for site optimizations, to email efficacy reviews and online ad spending recommendations, our technical marketing team can provide valuable insight into often complex data and help you stay well ahead of the competition.

Measuring The Value of a Customer

Being able to determine who your most valuable customers are can help you to market your products and services smartly, to just the audience that will be most receptive.  However, figuring out who exactly these valuable customers are can be a time consuming hassle. What parameters determine who is valuable, and who is not?  How do we compile this information in a way that is easily accessible and actionable?

Luckily, Upshot Commerce can do this work for you.  We compile a number of custom variables to calculate the value of each customer. Then, we can use this information to determine:

  • general and user-specific buying patterns
  • profitability
  • buy vs return of merchandise ratio
  • engagement value (referrals, reviews, etc)

Once calculated, this information can be used to create special targeted promotions for highly valuable customers.

SEO Optimization

Whether or not anyone likes it, getting organic traffic to your site is all about playing by Google’s search engine parameters and requirements.  However, as anyone who has worked in ecommerce for any length of time is well aware, these requirements are constantly changing and being modified.  Search parameters are refined and web crawlers are made more intelligent in order to create better results for users, while site creators are constantly attempting to find ways to optimize their sites to appease the search engine.  The grand hope is that in the end we will all have a better, more refined internet experience that makes it easier and easier for customers and retailers to connect.

However, this is still the free market we are talking about. You don’t just want to be relevant; you want to be the best.  At Upshot Commerce, we work to keep your site always up-to-date, with SEO-optimized URLs and meta-data, semantic and optimized HTML markup, rich snippets, easily crawlable pages, duplicate content prevention, canonicals, minification and minimal page load times.

We also offer consulting services, to help you determine the best structure for site content and keyword optimization. When coupled with an easily navigable site and a constant vigilance towards SEO best practices, this can result in vast improvements in organic search results and increased traffic for your site.

Vanity URLs

Keeping consistent, SEO-friendly URLs on your site is important in maintaining an organized site structure.  It is also one of the easiest ways to increase your ranking in Google search results.  URLs should concisely and predictably indicate in natural language what page they are directing customers towards, in a readable manner that is optimized with SEO-friendly keywords.
However, these requirements don’t always fit with the logical structure of your site, or the manner in which it may have been created.  Furthermore, the standards for what constitutes a truly optimized URL are always changing; what might have been considered best practice five years ago is not necessarily the same today.  How is the intrepid ecommerce store owner supposed to keep up?

With Vanity URLs, of course.  Our system of vanity URLs allows ecommerce owners to easily create SEO-optimized redirected addresses for pages on their site, turning a long cumbersome string of numbers, letters and partial words into a concise phrasing that is optimized for users and search engines.

Integration with Google Analytics

While Google Analytics makes it fairly easily to begin gathering basic analytic data about your website, there is only so much information that it can pull about your site simply by putting a string of code onto a page of your website. All sorts of aspects of website activity, such as newsletter sign ups, shipping costs, abandoned carts and product activity are difficult to track and even more difficult to turn into actionable data.

However, with our Google Analytics Integration Services, we can create custom data feeds that incorporate all the information you need to get a truly accurate analysis of your website activity.  We assist customers in setting up the funnels, goals and tracking that will give the information that they require, providing a collection of insights that go beyond the out-of-the-box standard.
Important daily sales information from Google Analytics is incorporated into the customer’s Upshot Commerce internal system reports, and is also available from the the Google Analytics dashboard, to allow the retailer to view the information in whatever medium is most useful.  This means that data analysis is always right at your fingertips.

Consulting Services

Finally, developing a strategy of accurate reporting and site optimization can be highly daunting for many retailers.  When it comes right down to it, many ecommerce owners simply do not have the time to spend reading up on the current SEO best practices and messing with a lot of reporting tools.  However, most retailers will also acknowledge that these are vitally important aspects to maintaining a growing, healthy site.

Upshot Commerce offers all sorts of different levels of consulting services, depending on what your needs are.  So, whether your marketing manager just wants a little help with SEO, or you are in need a complete analytic overhaul, we have the tools to assist you in achieving your goals. We custom design plans based on the needs of each client, and will work with you to develop a strategy designed to achieve long term growth and success.

Ready to get started?  Contact us today— we will work to develop a technical marketing and analytic strategy to achieve your goals.

 

Posted in Reports and Analytics, SEO and Marketing | Tagged | Comments Off on Learn more from your analytics

Sandy’s Lessons in Scalability

Posted on December 12, 2012 by rebecca

Traffic levels on ecommerce sites vary naturally, by season, week and even day.  As a retailer it’s your job to prepare your site for fluctuations and ensure that no matter the circumstances, your site will remain up and running, ensuring customers can continue to process orders with minimal lag time.

Sometimes variances in traffic are predictable and expected.  Everyone anticipates order volume to increase around Christmas and allocate resources accordingly.  Most ecommerce retailers also learn to get a feel for the unique ordering trends of their industry, as well as what days of the week tend to result in higher order volumes.

However, sometimes the unexpected occurs.  Sometimes, the unexpected is a happy accident — perhaps a promotion you expected to give your site a slight bump in traffic gets picked up by your local news station, causing traffic and product demand to far surpass your expectations.

photo courtesy of the Washington Post

Preparing for the Unthinkable

At other times, unfortunately, the unexpected can be a potential disaster.  When Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast in October of this year, many e-retailers based in the New England region saw their databases and ecommerce platforms put to the test, according to an article by Internet Retailer Assistant Editor, Amy Dusto.  Some sites experienced outages as e-retailers struggled to deal with servers and call centers submerged in water.  While many businesses chose to close their doors for hours or days due to safety concerns, all in all, it must be said that ecommerce bounced back admirably.  Even though the headquarters and main warehouses of e-retailer Fab.com were based within the flood zone, causing them to suspend processing orders temporarily, the site itself remained active, and Fab.com staffers at remote locations continued to field calls and manage the site.

According to Dusto’s article, even though Sandy did manage to knock out one of the servers of display advertiser MyBuys.com, network redundancy with additional servers managed to keep the service up and running without any down times.

A Scalable Business Model

All of these ecommerce merchants managed to meet these challenges while keeping their websites as functional as possible because they were prepared with more than just flood insurance– they were prepared with scalability.

Your site needs to be prepared for whatever variables the world throws at it, whether it is dealing with sudden spikes in traffic or unexpected world disasters.  Here at Upshot Commerce, we offer a cloud-based, fully scalable platform that is made to easily handle growing and expanding convergent commerce enterprises, as well as withstand the hazards of complex retail environments.  This means that even if a server is down, or a sudden spike in traffic occurs, our system is designed to compensate with fault tolerance and a redundant infrastructure.  This allows your website to remain up and running with consistently fast load times, powerful monitoring tools, and low maintenance costs.

As your site grows and expands, this also means that your platform capabilities are able to easily expand to meet the needs of your company, so that success does not mean you outgrow the capabilities of your platform.

Highlights of the Upshot Commerce Platform Include:

  • Automatically scales to handle traffic spikes
  • High availability and fault tolerance
  • Resilient and redundant infrastructure
  • Faster load times, site speed and performance
  • 24/7 security monitoring
  • Lower maintenance and IT costs
  • Faster delivery of features, updates and patches

We also offer a host of tools to keep your site secure, streamlined, and optimized with features designed for the ecommerce experience.  To find out more, contact us today!

 

Posted in Cloud, CDN and Scalability | Tagged | Comments Off on Sandy’s Lessons in Scalability

Get More Out of Social Media

Posted on November 29, 2012 by rebecca

While no one these days would likely doubt the importance of integrating their ecommerce business with the world of social media, there is endless debate over how to turn that involvement into increased ROI.  How do you measure profit through likes, and conversions through followers?

Many retailers, who seem to strive for brand awareness above all else, even question whether ROI is the goal marketers should be after. For a long time, it has been widely accepted that social media is little more than a vehicle of awareness, from which conversions cannot be accurately tracked, and ROI is little more than a broad expanse of good will among the community.

While brand awareness is an important goal and one that social media is well suited to tackle, it is certainly not the the only way that ecommerce businesses can leverage social media to improve the usability of their websites—and yes, even increase conversions.

Here at Upshot Commerce, we’ve created four useful extensions that integrate your website with social media in unique and useful ways that go beyond the standard marketing strategies.

Simplified Sign-Ups

Sure, having followers and likes on your Facebook page is useful, but in order to turn them into customers, they need to become users on your website.  Fortunately, a plug in with Facebook makes that a breeze.  Our Social Log In Extension makes it easy for new users to create accounts with your site by allowing them to sign in using their already existing Facebook username and password. This means there will be less log-ins for your customer to remember, and less lost sales for you due to what we call “sign-up fatigue.”

Social-Driven Pricing

Coming up with new and different ways to engage social media users can be a real challenge.  By Christmas, most online consumers have probably seen just about every coupon and discount out there, so it can sometimes be difficult to create conversions without offering increasingly steep discounts.

How about engaging customers in a different way, turning their interest and excitement in your products directly into deals and discounts?  Our Social Pricing Plug In does just that.  This extension give retailers the ability to tie the price of their product directly to the number of likes it receives on Facebook.  When a predetermined number of likes is achieved, the price of the product automatically falls to the promotional price.  This causes users to feel more engaged in the deal they are attempting to gain, encourages them to share the deal with others, and makes everyone more likely to take advantage of the deal when it becomes available.

Share the Love

After making a purchase with their favorite store, lots of shoppers want to tell the world—why not make it easy for them? Share-a-Sale allows customers to easily share items that they have purchased from your ecommerce store directly with their social media community.  After placing an order with your site, customers are prompted with the option to let others know about the products they purchased via Facebook.  If the customer opts to do so, an easy to post link is created, which displays the product as well as including a link back to your own site.

Boost Your SEO

Many ecommerce retailers have discovered the ease and benefits of using Facebook Social to integrate reviews onto their site.  Users tend to be more familiar with the format, and many find the process much simpler than on-site review interfaces.

However, this is only getting at half of the benefits you can achieve with our Social Comments Extension; it can also be used to help improve your SEO ranking.  Using our Smart API technology, we integrate Facebook Social right into your ecommerce platform, which allows the review content to be indexed and crawlable along with all of your website content. Reviews are full of all sorts of important keywords and content that is important to consumers searching for products online, and even more important to googlebots that crawl websites looking for relevant information to create organic searches. This makes having lots of unique, dynamic product content incredibly important; it can be the difference between putting your site on page five to page one of search results.

All of these extensions make an excellent addition to any retailer’s ecommerce platform. In fact we are so convinced that these extensions will help boost sales on your website that we are offering them for the first time in one discounted social bundle!  The Social Bundle includes:

  • Social Log In Extension
  • Social Pricing Extension
  • Share-a-Sale
  • Social Comments

All of these extensions can be integrated into any Upshot Commerce Platform for just $500 set up and a $150 monthly fee. Don’t wait—start getting more out of social media today!

Posted in Checkout Management, Customer Management, Inventory Management, SEO and Marketing | Tagged | Comments Off on Get More Out of Social Media

Black Friday Breakdown: The New Enterprise Revolution

Posted on November 26, 2012 by rebecca

I am writing this on Black Friday, right in the middle of the busiest day in retail.  It’s around midday, so we’re coming down from perhaps the peak of the insanity, and pundits and polesters are already starting to comment on and speculate over what this shopping weekend has meant and will mean for retail stores and ecommerce retailers in the future.

One trend that we are seeing is a growing realization of the limits of big box ecommerce solutions.  Already, retailers such as Best Buy have experienced extended site delays due to errors and unexpected levels of site traffic. Issues similar to this continue to occur and cost retailers thousands, if not sometimes millions of dollars in lost revenue and karma with frustrated customers.

While errors and miscalculations will always occur at some level, this sort of poorly-timed mishap simply points to the pressing need for responsive and intelligently designed ecommerce solutions that can quickly and efficiently handle all of the complications, variance and unforseen obstacles of online retail.

Many retailers, it seems, are recognizing this need and turning to smaller and more agile enterprise solutions, such as Upshot Commerce, to meet these needs. In a recent article Readwrite Enterprise, Dan Lyons points to what he calls a potential “trillion-dollar transfer of wealth.” According to Lyons;

…If you add up the market valuation of the old-guard companies selling to the enterprise — Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Cisco and so on — you’re looking at about $1 trillion in total. And those companies are about to get hit with a tsunami of competition as smaller, more nimble rivals rush into the market offering solutions that outperform the old guys at a fraction of the price.

It is not enough anymore for ecommerce solutions out there to be the biggest or possess the highest market share; retailers and B2B wholesalers alike are demanding customizable ecommerce solutions that work specifically for their unique business models.  Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all generic platforms with limited features; in order to compete in this economy, you need to be more than average, more than basic; you need to be extraordinary.

Here are Upshot Commerce, there is a reason that we say we are the most customizable, on-demand solution EVER–it’s because it’s true.  We customize each ecommerce site on our platform to meet the needs of our merchants, and work constantly to adapt and improve solutions to create better, more integrated websites that work with your business model and not against it.  Our platform includes tons of features that other ecommerce platforms do not offer, such as;

These are just a few of the features available on our dynamic ecommerce platform, and we are adding new services and integrations constantly.  To find out how we can build you a site custom designed for your business needs, simply contact us.

Posted in Checkout Management, Finance, Tax and ERP Tools, Merchandising Manager, Mobile eCommerce | Tagged | Comments Off on Black Friday Breakdown: The New Enterprise Revolution

Fraud Prevention Meets the Challenges of Mobile e-Commerce

Posted on November 14, 2012 by rebecca

A growing number of Upshot Commerce customers are realizing the importance of the new and expanding mobile commerce market.  However, as this market grows, it is also important for our customers to consider how this new market can influence online security.  ThreatMetrix, a fraud prevention service provider, reported seeing an increase of 591% among its users during last year’s holiday season– and that number is likely to increase this holiday season.  These numbers represent an obvious opportunity for online retailers, but also a new challenge.

“Once they figure mobile commerce out, they need to pretty quickly figure out how to stop money going out the wrong direction,” said ThreatMetrix chief products officer Alisdair Faulkner, in a piece for Internet Retailer.

Essentially, much of fraud prevention is little more than establishing shopper patterns, and flagging orders that deviate too far from the normal realm of shopping behaviors.  However, m-commerce in many ways requires retailers to assess an entirely new set of behaviors.

Separation Between e-Commerce and m-Commerce

Some retailers will chose to run their e-commerce and mobile e-commerce sites as almost separate entities.  While this may make sense for certain business models, it can also lead to retailers adopting different security protocols for each platform.  Many retailers in the past have adopted less stringent security measures for mobile devices, in an effort to become more user-friendly with the platform.  This can lead to mobile sites becoming less secure and easier to perpetuate fraud.

Changing IP Addresses

Using a shopper’s location as a measure of the riskiness of a transaction only applies if a shopper maintains the same IP address. While this is usually the case with desktop users, mobile device users change IP addresses constantly.  Thus, it becomes impossible to determine the validity of a transaction based on geo location alone.

iOS Lock Out

Attempting to track and predict consumer behavior can be a challenge with certain operating systems.  While desktop browsing continues to be dominated by PC users, more and more mobile e-commerce users are in fact operating on Apple’s iOS system, which is standard for all iPhones, iPads and iPods.   In general, Apple’s iOS is built to be more locked down than a PC system, which leads to less information about transactions and browsing behavior.  Apple’s domination of the mobile e-commerce market means less consumer data for security and fraud prevention companies, which may lead to inaccurate assumptions of threat and risk.  While these companies are working to innovate technologies to accommodate the requirements of an iOS heavy mobile market, security measures are by necessity determined differently.

A Platform That Takes Security Seriously

All of these issues are important considerations for retailers in the changing mobile e-commerce market place.  Here at Upshot Commerce, these are also our considerations as well.

Our Security, Fraud and Chargeback Services employ the best of breed technologies and practices in order to keep your site secure–whether for e-commerce or m-commerce.  Just some of our core features include:

  • Firewall protection
  • Daily PCI, Nessus and virus scanning as well as data back ups
  • Real-time intruder detection
  • IP blocking with back office geographical and proximity real-time validations
  • Constant tracking and monitoring of access to network resources and card holder data
  • Secure password restrictions
  • Administrator restricted accounts allow for varying levels of network and back office access within your organization

We also partner with a number of security, fraud and chargeback prevention services in order to give our clients the custom level of protection that they feel is necessary.  These services can be adjusted to different security/risk levels, depending on the needs of your organization.  To find out more, please contact us and let us know a little more about the unique requirements of your site. We are happy to make suggestions and recommendations in order to keep your business secure.

 

Posted in Fraud & Chargeback Prevention, Mobile eCommerce | Tagged | Comments Off on Fraud Prevention Meets the Challenges of Mobile e-Commerce

Essential Features for Black Friday and Cyber Monday: Part II

Posted on November 6, 2012 by rebecca

In our last blog, we discussed how maintaining alternate payment gateways and creating gift registries are essential for ecommerce retailers preparing for the windfall that is Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Today, we will look at two additional aspects that we believe are incredibly significant for these two important days:

Coupons and Discounts

Above all other times of the year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the two days that customers expect deals.  However, there are so many sales, discounts, and special promotions competing for the consumer’s attention they can experience “coupon overload”.

“What is one more 10%-off special or free shipping offer?”  

Ecommerce retailers need to create unique and attention grabbing deals that will attract consumers and bring them to their online store.

To create original promotions for your online store, you need an ecommerce platform that can apply  logic to the coupons you create and automatically award them accordingly.

The Upshot Commerce Coupons and Discount Extension is the most robust and flexible coupon system on the market today.  The extension is rule based, and can create offers based on all sort of variables within your system, including:

  • Free shipping with the purchase of a specific item
  • Discounts on a specific brand
  • FREE items automatically added to shopping cart when a certain value is reached
  • Buy 1 Get 1 Free
  • New Customer Only Discount
  • Discount Based on Customer Classification
  • Discount Based on Amount Spent
  • Discount Based on Payment Method (Visa, MC, AmEx, etc.)
  • Tax Free Coupons

The extension is so flexible that if you can dream up the promotion, we can probably make it happen.

Affiliate Programs

In an earlier blog, we defined what Affiliate programs are, and described how ecommerce retailers can leverage affiliate relationships to help boost sales for their online stores.

While maintaining affiliate relationships is an ongoing practice that is important all year round, it becomes especially important as the holidays approach.  As an ecommerce retailer, you want to cultivate those lucrative high site-traffic affiliates.

You want to make sure that you are coordinating banner ads and other advertising efforts to accurately reflect holiday promotions and sales.

You want to  keep track of click thrus and total sales from banner ads so that you can assess the effectiveness of your marketing strategy, and award high quality affiliates for their marketing efforts in turn.

You need the Affiliate Management Extension.

The Affiliate Management Extension enables you to easily create and track affiliate marketing programs, determining commission structures for affiliates based on key factors that you select.

To track the progress of your program, administration and reporting ecommerce tools allow you to view detailed reports and graphs of activity.  Your affiliates can also view reports as well, so that they too can actively participate in adjusting their marketing strategy as you promote and build your online store.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday can be incredibly lucrative times for ecommerce retailers, if they are prepared and make an effort to really engage customers in creative ways.

If you are looking for more ways that Upshot Commerce can help you to increase sales for your online store, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Posted in Checkout Management, SEO and Marketing | Tagged | Comments Off on Essential Features for Black Friday and Cyber Monday: Part II

Essential Features for Black Friday and Cyber Monday: Part I

Posted on November 5, 2012 by rebecca

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are unique days for the ecommerce retailer.  The normal activity of steadily flowing orders is disrupted by the exhilarating insanity of a single weekend that for many retailers, is the culmination and make-or-break point of an entire year of sales.

While your site might function on a day-to-day basis without problems, the real question is, are you ready for the busiest weekend in retail?  As an ecommerce retailer there are a number of things that you can do to prepare for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Over the next two blogs we examine ways retailers can prepare their sites for these busiest and most lucrative of days.  Today, we look at two topics: Alternative Payment Gateways and Gift Registries.

Alternative Payment Gateways

Sure, your site might function just fine 360 days out of the year with just PayPal as your primary payment option—but what happens if your payment gateway fails on the busiest day of the year?

Payment gateway outages occur periodically every year.  As with any website, occasionally there are site errors or even malicious attacks that cause payment gateways to fail for periods of time.  Just last Wednesday, Paypal customers experienced outages for nearly four hours.  While outages on an October night may not cause a site to go bankrupt, a major failure on the busiest shopping day of the year could.

There are two ways to protect your site from losing sales due to payment gateway outages.  One solution is to give your customers multiple payment gateway options, such as Authorize.net, Litle & Co., Google Checkout or Chase Payment Tech.  Doing so ensures if one payment option is not working, the site will roll over to the next available gateway.  The roll over is transparent to the user and the sale can be completed.

While this is an important first step, many customers will still abandon their carts if a payment gateway fails.  In an earlier blog, we addressed this very issue. Essentially, the problem is that when a payment gateway fails, a customer will often simply receive an error message indicating the payment cannot be processed, without further explanation.  Rather than attempting another form of payment, or contacting customer service to solve the problem many customers will simply abandon their carts and shop elsewhere, assuming some unsolvable technical issue.

At Upshot Commerce, we solve this problem by offering the Rollover Payment Gateway Extension.  With this extension, if a payment gateway fails, the order is automatically bumped to an alternative gateway, without causing a disruption to the ordering process.  This ensures customers are able to complete an order, and thus reduce your abandoned cart rate.

Gift Registries

By the time Black Friday or Cyber Monday rolls around, most customers have already scoped out the items that they intend to purchase for a number of weeks in preparation.  Gift Registries and wishlists allow customers to plan ahead and organize the products they intend to purchase, or might request as gifts from others.  Maintaining your own user-friendly, site-specific gift registries or wishlists not only makes your customers’ lives easier, it also encourages them to shop exclusively with you!

At Upshot Commerce, we offer fully customizable gift registries and wishlists that can be tailored to meet the design and functional needs of any client’s website.  Our wishlists include essential features such as:

  • Customer privacy settings allows for different levels public and private sharing of lists
  • List search allows gift givers to find any friend’s public list
  • Quick and easy purchase of items on list
  • Duplicate purchase settings allows customers to select the exact quantity of an item desired
  • Thank You Reminder – sends the wishlist user a reminder to thank friends for purchasing items on their list, with customizable time frames.

In our next blog, we’ll look at other ways that you can optimize your site for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, including Coupons & Discounts and Affiliate Programs.

Posted in Checkout Management, Order Management, SEO and Marketing | Tagged | Comments Off on Essential Features for Black Friday and Cyber Monday: Part I

Developer Makes the Case for Sub-Niche Websites

Posted on November 3, 2012 by rebecca

Lets imagine a scenario: you’ve got a growing website with a wide variety of products.  You’re looking to expand your customer base and grow revenue.  What do you do?

One option some retailers will employ is dividing their website product up into sub-niche markets by creating multiple store fronts.  Recently, we discussed on the blog how our Multi-Storefront Extension can help you do this (check it out here).  However, this does beg the question—how do you decide whether or not creating multiple store fronts is for you?

Recently I came upon a great article written by developer Michael Stearns on this very issue.  You can find the article on Practical Ecommerce’s website here: The Case for Launching Sub-Niche Websites by Michael Stearns.

In the article, Stearns lays out a process that every ecommerce retailer should go through before they make the leap towards dividing their business.  Some good point include:

  • Don’t be shy on branding–the whole point of dividing your market is to brand each site into the best possible source for your product.
  • Multiple websites = multiple marketing campaigns.  Make sure that you have the time, manpower and drive to invest in promoting your storefronts with as much gusto as your single website.  Take time to build unique content, and you will see the benefits.
  • Have a robust database in place that can handle multiple storefronts (may we suggest perhaps Upshot Commerce’s Multi-Storefront Extension?)

With the right amount of work and planning, creating multiple storefronts can be a great way to expand and grow your business in new directions.  If you would like to know how Upshot Commerce can help you to make this happen, please do not hesitate to contact us!

Posted in Merchandising Manager | Tagged | Comments Off on Developer Makes the Case for Sub-Niche Websites

Extensions Create Better Online Merchandising

Posted on October 31, 2012 by rebecca

Ecommerce enables unique marketing and merchandising opportunities for retailers.  Technologies can be used like never before to specifically market items to select customers, while improvements in search features allow customers to find what they are looking for almost before they have finished spelling it out.

As the holidays approach, it is more important than ever to make sure that you are doing everything you can to effectively market your brand and your products to your customers.  In a recent Practical eCommerce article, writer Armando Roggio points to three easy ways that retailers can improve their online merchandising, titled “3 Tips for Better Online Merchandising”  Roggio’s suggestions include ideas such as:

  • Merchandise within search results
  • Take the opportunity to upsell and cross promote products
  • Use categories effectively and intelligently

To some retailers, Roggio’s suggestions may seem like a complete overhaul of their website layout and structure.  But never fear retailers, it is all more simple than you think.  Merchandising products and upselling to your customers doesn’t have to be difficult or incredibly time consuming.  Neither, in fact does cultivating better and more intelligent search results.

The Upshot Commerce Auto Merchandising Extension uses predictive analytics and data mining to select and display custom product suggestions to each of your customers to encourage higher conversion rates.  The suggestions can be programmed to appear within search results, below product detail pages or even within shopping carts.

Within search results themselves, the extension really goes to work.  Items within search results are sorted and weighted via factors such as number of views, number of buys and how new the product is.  All of these factors add up to give each product a weighted score; the higher the score, the higher relevancy it will have and the higher the item will appear within search results.  This behavior mimics the merchandising efforts that most retailers would employ, if they had the time to individually sort items.  Luckily, with the Auto Merchandising Extension, retailers can let our predictive analytics do the work for them!

For enterprise retailers looking for a more intelligent search solution, Upshot Commerce offers a host of different search options, the two most popular being our Advanced Sphinx Search and Solr Search Integration.  The Advanced Search replaces the standard mySQL search and is custom tailored to fit the needs of your website and customers.  We employ such useful features as Auto Complete, “Did you mean” spelling suggestions and weighted fields allowing you to assigned highest priority to what is most relevant.

While Advanced Search is an ideal solution for growing enterprise retailers, Solr takes searching to the next level.  Employing the popular new method of faceted searching, Solr is a lightning fast search solution, ideally suited for retailers with large and complex catalogs.  To learn more, check out the blog we wrote about it earlier this month.  If you’re wondering which search is the right solution for you, we are always happy to make recommendations.

We believe that robust search capabilities and auto merchandising are both essential for any retailer looking to increase their sales and conversion rates, especially with the holidays approaching.  We believe this so strongly, we want you to let us prove it to you.

Starting November 1st – January 31st, Upshot Commerce retailers will have the opportunity to try out two great extensions that are essential for the holidays at a special reduced price.  For three months only we will be offering the Upshot Commerce Advanced Search with our Auto Merchandising Extension for just $50 a month—that is a full 50% discount off our normal list fee!

Getting set up with these two extensions is fast and easy—give a call today and we’ll let you know what we can do to get you up and running in minutes.

 

Posted in Merchandising Manager | Tagged | Comments Off on Extensions Create Better Online Merchandising

Bringing Life to Apparel Ecommerce

Posted on October 26, 2012 by rebecca

Selling clothing and apparel online is not easy.  Perhaps more so than other types of retailers, the apparel industry has struggled to find ways to sell and market their items effectively into the online environment.  Apparel is what one might call a more tactile industry—sales are driven by how a customer responds to an item through their senses, through experiencing the look, feel and even smell of an item.

Brick and mortar stores present all sorts of opportunities for engaging a customer, through the creation of compelling displays, upselling by tying multiple items together into outfits and the social engagement between salesperson and customer.  However, when many companies attempt to translate a store’s show room floor into the online environment, the results often fall short.

The format of most apparel ecommerce stores can make it difficult for many retailers to represent their items accurately, and even more difficult to create compelling displays that integrate different brand elements together.  Retailers in the fashion and apparel industry need ecommerce stores with the ability to market and display clothing, shoes, bags and other items in an appealing and accessible manner that mimics the interactive experience of a storefront.

In an article on Apparel, an online magazine dedicated to the interests of the clothing and apparel retailer, Michael Harvey of CorraTech addresses the issues apparel retailers face when attempting to migrate to an online platform.  According to Harvey, “creating a seamless and superior online platform is critical to turning a consumer’s private in-store fashion show into online purchases.”

A Custom Solution for Apparel Ecommerce

One method of imitating the  brick an mortar store experience is through ecommerce applications and extensions, such as the Upshot Commerce Look Book.  The Look Book allows retailers to pull together multiple items in their online store into outfits, imitating the physical experience of accessorizing a clothing store mannequin or display.  From the back office, the retailer simply groups product SKUs together into outfits, and then on the online store front, the magic happens.

The Upshot Commerce Look Book is composed of two parts.  First, main images for outfits are group together into a scroll catalog, similar to how one would page through a fashion magazine.

When a customer clicks on an image in the catalog, they are brought to a product detail page for the outfit.  From here, the customer has the ability to purchase the entire outfit, or elements from the outfit, such as the shirt, belt, boots, or any other items the retailer offers.

Though simple and easy to manage for the apparel retailer, the Look Book is anything but a generic ecommerce tool.  Each Look Book is customized by Upshot Commerce to fit the needs of the apparel retailer’s specific business and marketing needs.  No two Look Books are exactly the same, just as clothing lines are unique an original unto themselves.

To find out more about the Look Book as well as other ways we can help bring your brand to the world of apparel ecommerce, contact us today!

Posted in Apparel Ecommerce, Merchandising Manager | Tagged | Comments Off on Bringing Life to Apparel Ecommerce