'Net Features : 382011

BuySafe and Merchant Conversions

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 02:00:00 GMT

In the seemingly never ending quest to increase website conversions, Internet professionals routinely explore ways to build trust with their users – a rather rewarding technique particularly over time.

buySAFE and AspDotNetStorefront today announced a partnership to integrate the buySAFE Guaranteed seal into the ML8 and Multistore platforms, providing AspDotNetStorefront customers with simple (one-click) implementation and discounted pricing. The offering from buySAFE and AspDotNetStorefront will be available in Q2 2011 and can be activated from within AspDotNetStorefront’s Admin Console at that time.

Whether through the introduction of higher quality content, a greater presence in social networking channels, a well thought out and compelling site design or simply better product development, merchants (internet retailers) are often at the forefront of adoption when it comes to integrating the most effective solutions to increase conversion. Following the lead of e-commerce professionals often yields good results when it comes to conversion which is why this announcement caught our attention. Expect more e-commerce platforms and shopping carts to begin integrating with third-party services to help their merchants increase conversion.

“The AspDotNetStorefront platform absolutely offers the most features for the money and we incorporate new technology and innovative solutions like buySAFE to help our merchants grow,” said Dana Greaves, CEO of Vortx Inc, makers of AspDotNetStorefront. “Adding buySAFE’s auto-activation functionality into our platform leverages the latest available technology to enable merchants to add buySAFE with 1-click and immediately improve their cart conversion rates.”

Evolving the Publishing Industry

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 01:00:00 GMT

Traditional publishing models are gone. That means content creators have more options, more control, and more power than ever before. In the world of traditional publishing you either evolve or devolve and some companies see the opportunities clearly in this new landscape.

Today’s news that open-publishing platform Lulu has partnered with e-commerce platform Elastic Path indicates this trend well. Through the partnership, content publishers will have new capabilities such as merchandising and custom sales campaigns, that will expand “creative control and freedom over their works” according to the announcement. For users of the often clunky, never clear Lulu system, a partnership on this level is way overdue.

“The Lulu Marketplace requires an ecommerce system capable of handling complex interactions like revenue tracking, partner commissions, easy discoverability, and customized storefronts,” says Bob Young, CEO and Founder of Lulu. “As Lulu and Elastic Path work together, we will create a new model of ecommerce for the publishing industry to follow as we help a new generation of creators sell more content to more readers more profitably than ever before.”

Site Downtime and Twitter Response

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT

How would you react to an outage, an interruption in service, or unscheduled downtime on your favorite site? Now imagine that downtime or outage is on your website. As you might imagine, how you react says a lot about your company and its future.

A recently released collaborative study by Microsoft Learning and Psychster examined how companies should use Twitter to address sitewide problems like downtime. The results suggested that:

- Acknowledging the outage on Twitter reduces negative feelings and increases the perception that the responsible company cares.

- Giving an explanation for the outage in the tweet reduces users’ likelihood to contact customer support – but only when the tweets are made by an employee rather than the company or its executives.

"Companies are often encouraged to ‘join the conversation’ on Twitter, but there is still very little guidance as to what they should say.” said Tom Moran, Director of Microsoft Operations Customer & Partner Experience. “The Psychster study will help us stay connected with our customers and partners by acknowledging their experience, reassuring them, and informing them what their options are in the most relevant and useful way."

Additional results and the full methodology are available from the whitepaper (PDF).

SortPrice is F-Commerce Unstoppable

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 23:00:00 GMT

SortPrice has released some impressive statistics on the growth in retailers using its store application on Facebook.

"Last year, retailers across the board began to realize the importance of hopping on the social shopping bandwagon," said Asaf Klibansky, SortPrice's co-founder and CTO. "And as they have since 2008 when we introduced the Store Application, more merchants turned to SortPrice.com than anyone else to help them tap into the enormous audiences available to them on Facebook."

Nothing is more important than the actual performance metrics and those from Sortprice are quite interesting:

- More than $3.78 billion worth of merchandise was on SortPrice-built Facebook storefronts throughout 2010.

- More than 7.6 million were products on SortPrice merchants Facebook storefronts in 2010, 60 percent more total products than in 2009.

The top industry categories for merchants using the shopping application are apparel, womens jewely, home and garden, gifts and flowers, and computers.