We’ve discussed before how one of the best ways that smaller retailers can distinguish themselves from big box stores and ecommerce giants is by offering superior services.  Enterprise retailers may not be able to afford to offer product discounts at a loss, but what they can offer is a better user experience, and more personal customer service options.

Think customer service doesn’t matter that much? Famed shoe seller and customer service trendsetter Zappos.com certainly does, and cites it as a key reason to their success and continuing motivator.  Apple, notably has similar policies aimed at customer satisfaction and superior IT services.  Not only do these companies believe that good customer service is key to their success, customers also frequently cite positive company interactions as a reason for their continued patronage.

Fortunately, good customer service isn’t something that requires huge investments in warehouse machinery or website overhaul.  Often, it just requires a few dedicated, knowledgeable representatives, and a basic infrastructure of policy and systems to support them effectively.

Fast response times

Even if you can’t afford a 24/7 call center, small ecommerce businesses can still strive to maintain consistently responsive customer service.  Answer every email and determine what a fast response time means to your company—perhaps 5 minutes, perhaps an hour.  And then make sure that you are sticking to it!

No Hassle Returns

In the ecommerce environment, returns are nearly inevitable.  For this reason, it is important that your customer service department maintains a clear and hassle-free policy that will allow customers to buy with confidence, and encourage them to continue to patronize your business, even if the first purchase may not have been their cup of tea.  Offering free shipping on future purchases, store credit, or simply a fast, efficient return process can go a long way.

Reward loyal customers

Everyone appreciates being treated well, and customers are more likely to continue shopping with you if they are rewarded for their loyalty.  This can be done with exclusive sales, rewards programs, and even occasional shipping upgrades.

A robust, integrated help desk

Understandably, dealing with a wide variety of customer service issues in a fast, effective and also personal manner can often be very challenging.  For this reason, good customer service is about more than good policy, it is also about maintaining a system that works with representatives to maintain best practices.

This is where a system like the new Upshot Commerce Help Desk comes in.  Designed with your business infrastructure in mind, the application is fully integrated into the Upshot Commerce platform, allowing you to easily create help tickets that are connected into your database of customers, orders, and products.  Because all of your information is in one place, this means that issues are easier to resolve and easier track, ensuring that problems are followed through until they reach a resolution— and beyond!

We’re very excited to unveil this new, and fully integrated Upshot Commerce extension to our ecommerce retailers.  To find out more about the Help Desk Extension and how it can be customized to work with your platform, just contact us!

Despite how many years Upshot Commerce has been in the business of online retail, it is still a relatively new economy.  As such, the rules that govern and define it have been fluctuating and changing since we very first began this business in 1994.  We’ve had the pleasure of witnessing many of these changes, including technological advances, expanding definitions of intellectual property, and increasingly novel ways of marketing products and services in an online environment.

One particular shift that we’ve been following for at least the past 10 years is the growing concern over the taxation of online goods.  The online environment has long enjoyed the unique position of advancing technologies ahead of the progress of regulations; no advance has possibly been more lucrative than the head start may ecommerce retailers have enjoyed ahead of tax policy.

As all retailers will certainly be aware, the sale of online goods has long been exempt from sales tax.  As online sales have come to dominate the retail market more and more over the years, states have increasingly been looking for ways to effectively tax this marketplace.

The most recent movement in this arena is the Marketplace Fairness Act.  The main purpose of this bill is to allow states to collect sales tax from more online retailers than is currently required— and the bill is up for a vote in the Senate and House of Representatives very soon.

The bill will not come as a surprise for most online retailers, but it does present many logistical challenges, especially for smaller retailers and start ups.  As Bill McClellan of the Electronic Retailing Association said in a recent article for NPR, “There are 9,600 taxing jurisdictions in the country and for a small remote retailer to go out and be responsible to collect and remit sales tax is an administrative nightmare.”

Fortunately even in this instance, technology wins again and is one step ahead of tax policy once more. Upshot Commerce offers a number of different tax management integration services that are designed to help you stay in compliance with current tax codes, no matter how complicated. Our most popular options include:

Zip2Tax

An affordable and streamlined service that is integrated with your shopping cart to always charge the appropriate sales tax for every transaction.  The Zip2Tax system constantly monitors tax codes and updates accordingly to ensure that you always in adherence. Also highly configurable, Zip2Tax integrates with most ERPs

SpeedTax

A great tax management solution for small and medium sized retailers.  This solution is design to work seamlessly with any accounting solution, from shopping carts to POS systems. Tax calculations as well as automatic filing and remittance included!

Avalara

An easy to use and elegant solution for higher volume retailers. Includes real-time sales tax calculations for each transaction as well as automatic filing and remittance of sales tax returns and accessible storage of exemption certificates.  Also works with most ERPs.

Both of these options are easily integrated with the Upshot Commerce shopping cart to ensure that ecommerce retailers are prepared to address the constantly fluctuating nature of tax law, no matter how varied and contradictory.  To find out more about how you can take advantage of our tax management services, and to discover what options are right for your ecommerce site, simply contact us.

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.

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!

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!

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;

• A robust Coupon and Discount Extension that can be configured based on hundreds of different rule based parameters
• Ability to support multiple online storefronts from one back office
• Mobile Commerce services, including mobile-optimized websites and custom mobile application design and development
• Integration capabilities with numerous major ERP systems including Sage MAS 90, BlueCherry, and Epicor

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.

“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.

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

• Dynamic Coupons and Discounts
• Robust Affiliate Program.

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.

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.

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!