'Net Features : E-Commerce

Next-Gen Mobile Site Pushes Usable Local Content

Administrator — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 16:00:00 GMT

Branded, personalized content seems to be the name of the game in this user-centric world we’re all living (and working) in and service providers that help brands deliver this content – wherever a user may be accessing the information from – are posed to lead the digital way.

So, when Fleur du Mal, a high-end lingerie and ready-to-wear brand that mixes e-commerce with editorial content, wanted to create a mobile identity that enables its customers to have a great relationship with its brand, it turned to Usablenet to drive engagement on its customers’ most personal device: their mobile phones.

Fleur du Mal leveraged Usablenet’s U-Experience platform to create a personalized mobile Web experience and Usablenet’s U-Control content decision tool to manage the content, promotions and messaging delivered via the mobile browser, which includes a mobile pop-up store functionality.

“One of the most engaging features of next-gen mobile sites is the ability to publish local content on mobile,” said Usablenet Chief Marketing Officer Carin van Vuuren. “With U-Control, our Content Control and Publishing tool, the Fleur du Mal client can create content on their mobile site to support pop-up events anywhere in the world.

“The mobile pop-up store functionality is triggered by using location triggers within U-Control. Users attending a local event can access content specific to that event on their mobile phone. The mobile pop-up store feature gives clients the flexibility to plan, manage and execute integrated marketing promotions using the mobile site as the cornerstone.”

See Fleur du Mal’s new mobile experience below:

10 Reputation-Monitoring Tools for Merchants

Allison Howen — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 20:00:00 GMT

As the ’Net continues to become more and more social, there is a vast amount of digital destinations where customers can leave feedback about their positive and negative brand experiences.

Keeping track of this feedback, however, can be overwhelming for merchants. It is time-consuming to monitor feedback on one website, let alone on all the popular social networks and on the rest of the Web. Luckily, numerous tools make tracking conversations around a brand a more productive and actionable task, like these 10 reputation-monitoring tools for merchants.

BrandsEye

Where is my online conversation coming from? Has my marketing campaign been effective? These are just two of the many questions that BrandsEye can answer for retailers, because users can choose from a wide range of metrics for their reporting needs (e.g. volume, sentiment, author credibility, etc.). Merchants can also define the conversation topics that they are interested in listening to.

Trackur

With Trackur, users simply indicate what keywords they would like to monitor and the platform allows them to not only see the conversation, but also insights into who is behind the conversation. The platform scours millions of sources on the ’Net, including forums, blogs and a large variety of social networks to pass along that vital information. Merchants may also be happy to know that Trackur is fully brandable, meaning they can white label their social media monitoring dashboard (with select plans).

Yext

In addition to being able to manage local listings across the Web, this location-based platform provides a review-tracking feature for businesses. This function allows merchants to monitor the ratings and reviews that customers post within online listing sites. By having this data in one spot, merchants can decide if they need to take action to fix an issue, as well as compare their reviews with years past.

Chatmeter

This local brand management platform provides chains and franchises with tools and analytics for understanding and improving a brand at the local level. Chatmeter comes with location-based analytics and competitive benchmarking so merchants can see how their brand compares with their competitors on the national, regional or store location level. Chatmeter also enables merchants to monitor and respond to customer reviews in one location, as well as understand the overall attitude of customer reviews with sentiment analysis.

Reputation.com

More than 1 million people use Reputation.com to manage their online presence, including within the search results and online directories and reviews. Other key features of Reputation.com include the ability to learn what customers are saying about each individual location, and companies can get insights into what customers are saying about their competition.

IFTTT

While this isn’t necessarily a reputation management platform, online retailers can create recipes to manage their online presence. For example, merchants can connect the feed channel to their inbox, and set a rule that requires IFTT to send an email alert every time a specific keyword mention happens on Twitter. This alert feature can quickly flood a user’s inbox, however, so use it judiciously.

LocalVox

LocalVox is a local online marketing provider that can be leveraged to manage a business’s local marketing channels. Aside from helping users communicate with customers through email, social and mobile, the platform also automatically monitors a user’s social reputation. In fact, the platform makes it easy for merchants to monitor online chatter as users receive an email from LocalVox every time they need to respond to a Yelp or Citysearch review, Facebook comment or Twitter reply.

Google Alerts

This free tool is simple to use, and while it may not be as robust as some of the aforementioned platforms, it can definitely be useful for monitoring online conversations about a brand, competitor or industry. Users simply need to type in a keyword or phrase into the search query box and filter the result preferences. Then, all alerts will be sent to the user’s email address so they can stay up to date with all related Web activity regarding a specific topic.

Brandwatch

Does more, to give you less is the idea behind Brandwatch. Retailers can build customized queries, so there is more relevance to the results they receive. Brandwatch crawls and stores Web data itself and uses multiple layers of spam filtering to ensure clean, high-quality data.

Tweetbeep

TweetBeep alerts companies when someone else is talking about them on Twitter, from the use of specific keywords, such as words related to a brand, product or competition. The platform provides users with hourly email updates, and can even be used to track replies and mentions. Tweetbeep is free, however, users can also purchase the premium version, which has no advertisements and provides a 15-minute alert option.

These are far from the only reputation monitoring platforms available on the 'Net. Share your brand's favorite reputation monitoring tools in the comments section below.

Merchants Fight for Protection from Fraudulent Chargebacks

Michael Garrity — Mon, 06 May 2013 16:15:00 GMT

Chargebacks were initially introduced to protect credit card-holding consumers in the United States, allowing them to receive a return of funds from an issuing bank and reverse an outbound transfer from their credit/debits cards.

However, over the years, a few rogue consumers have been using chargebacks to cheat merchants out of goods, and according to former online retailer Monica Eaton-Cardone, it is widespread ignorance about chargebacks, particularly on the part of merchants, that is contributing to this growing problem today.

Although stolen credit cards and identity theft were rampant problems in the Internet marketplace just five years ago, comprising almost 30 percent of all chargebacks, online retailers these days experience actual incidents like these less than five percent of the time. This is largely thanks to credit card companies, particularly Visa and MasterCard, issuing banks and authorities taking significant measures to ensure this doesn’t happen.

Now, more consumers are aware of the availability of chargebacks, and the process of filing one has been dramatically streamlined by most banks, as they now provide automated online features for filing chargebacks with the click of a button. This has led to a number of consumers engaging the practice of filing fraudulent chargebacks for products they have purchased online and already received, meaning they get something for literally nothing, in many cases.

After dealing with this issue for years now, Eaton-Cardone founded Chargebacks911, a company that aims to help merchants and financial institutions, alike, better understand and eventually revise the chargeback system, as well as educate consumers about the negative impacts or the current system.

Chargebacks911 aims to service merchants and banking institutions with chargeback solutions, including helping merchants take the offensive and confront unjust disputes, encouraging banks that provide credit cards to weigh the cases between cardholders and merchants before assigning guilt to merchants and issuing instantaneous chargebacks and informing consumers about the fact that too many chargeback fees will eventually result in higher rates and product prices.

Q1 Jobs Report Documents the Rise of E-Commerce

Michael Garrity — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:30:00 GMT

Last week, Freelancer.com revealed the figures for what it found to be the 50 fastest growing online jobs for the first quarter of 2013. What the global outsourcing marketplace found was that the e-commerce industry continues to grow at an impressive rate, Android is starting to catch up with Apple, marketers are returning to the loving embrace of email over Twitter and Facebook and much more.

By analyzing 283,490 jobs during the quarter, Freelancer.com found that e-commerce is steadily dominating the “consumer retail landscape,” as other retail outlets with a brick-and-mortar presence are having trouble adjusting to a consumer base that is “no longer geographically captive.”

The e-commerce industry netted an impressive 19 percent increase in online jobs in Q1 2013, and as a result, e-commerce technologies have also been bringing in more employees. For example, shopping cart solution providers have increased jobs by 18 percent, while Magento, specifically, saw a 14 percent lift.

This has also spurred interest in Core Web 2.0 technologies, with an increased demand in jobs based around HTML5 (up 20 percent), CSS (15 percent), PHP (nine percent), jQuery (seven percent), MySQL (three percent) and WordPress (20 percent), largely because they allow e-commerce companies of all shapes and sizes to create mature, scalable online stores that “have all the feature of a massive retailer like Amazon” for a low price.

Elsewhere, in the mobile technology sector, Android jobs have gone up by over 20 percent, while iPad and iPhone-centric jobs only rose by 11 and five percent, respectively. This is primarily because Apple has had trouble penetrating the market in developing nations, which account for approximately 85 percent of the world’s population.

When it comes to social, Twitter has seen a nice boom, with jobs growing by 18 percent; this is significantly better than Facebook, for which jobs actually fell by four percent. However, both social networks have been taking a backseat when it comes to online marketers, who have been returning to email marketing as the primary way to drive customers to their websites. Email marketing jobs actually went up by 21 percent during the first quarter of this year.

On top of that, SEO jobs have been recovering from the industry's three percent slip in the fourth quarter of 2012, with SEO jobs rising by eight percent, and content based jobs like article submission or technical writing seeing increases of 54 and 26 percent, respectively.

Plus, 3D design jobs have been increasing steadily thanks to the introduction of 3D printers into the mainstream. 3D modeling jobs are up 21 percent, while 3D rendering jobs are up 13 percent and the 3D animation industry saw six percent growth.

Finally, back-office business process outsourcing (BPO) jobs saw a huge 113 percent increase in Q1, as small and enterprise-level companies, alike, have been outsourcing simple (and affordable) work to get ahead of the competition.

2Checkout Breaks out with Release of Direct Checkout

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 18:55:00 GMT

Online payment solutions provider 2Checkout today announced the release of Direct Checkout, a customizable, cloud-based online payment technology that provides digital enterprises the functionality they need to accept customer payments from their websites in an alternative way.

What makes Direct Checkout so interesting is that it works as an overlay that collects a limited amount of payment information - while allowing the user to remain on the page they were visiting during the checkout process.

A less bulky/cumbersome checkout process will be appealing to merchants seeming a more seamless buying experience. The product is offered in 15 different languages and supports 26 currencies and eight payment methods.

Online Shopping Gets Collaborative

Michael Garrity — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 18:35:00 GMT

Since the rise of e-commerce, shopping has become more and more of a solo experience over the last couple of years. But the e-commerce technology company BevyUp has been trying to change that, and its announcement of a new cloud-delivered collaborative shopping service moves that goal many steps forward.

This new technology will allow retailers to add real-time and offline collaborative shopping capabilities to their e-commerce stores, meaning two or more people can shop “together” with the addition of co-browsing, communication (via Facebook, text or email invites, text chat and/or video chat) and sentiment tagging collaboration capabilities that ca be added to any only store.

Plus, BevyUp will even offer actionable intelligence on a shopper’s product sentiments and preferences that help retailers convert sales and capture add-on and up-sell opportunities.

By adding a layer of collaborative social functionality to an e-commerce store, retailers will be able to better serve online purchases that require more than one decision maker, such as apparel, travel, bridal, jewelry, real estate and others, when those decision makers are all in different cities, state or even countries.

“Shoppers that want to browse and buy online with their friends and family are currently resorting to tools that were not designed for shopping – like Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, etc. – to try to make multiparty purchasing decisions,” explained BevyUp CEO Mauricio Cuevas. “The BevyUp service provides online marketers a unified platform that enables, captures and monetizes social interactions on their site.”

In addition, BevyUp will also provide “actionable business intelligence on sentiments behind purchase decisions that would otherwise remain locked up on social media sites and in email exchanges and phone conversations.”

Unleash the Power of In-Image Commerce with Stipple Shopping

Michael Garrity — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 17:25:00 GMT

With image-based content becoming one of the staple’s of a good Web marketing strategy these days, publishers and merchants, alike, have been looking for new ways to monetize their pictures.

The popular image tagging service Stipple has launched a new service that takes image monetization to the next level by allowing customers to make purchases from directly within an image with the Stipple Shopping enhancement. Now, customers can comparison shop and purchase products in-image, which saves consumers from having to discontinue their purchases or conduct laborious tasks like opening another window or re-directing.

By making it possible for shoppers to explore, compare and purchase products on social media sites and elsewhere across the Web, Stipple Shopping allows merchants to offer up a holistic experience that brings “key components of online shopping” into images and in-stream on sites like Twitter, Facebook and other leading online publishers.

Most importantly, though, is that Stipple Shopping will give consumers the chance to explore multiple product views, colors, demo videos and more. Plus, they can look at similar and suggested products and conduct purchase transactions all from within a tagged image.

Brands can leverage Stipple’s technology to share “an array of interactive content” in their relevant images. This can include real-time pricing and product information, videos and photos, among many other things. Merchants can also regularly update information by adding new videos that will be updated online everywhere the photo exists.

Stipple Shopping even allows brands to retain full control of the payment process to help make shoppers feel more secure when making purchases.

WorldPay Integration Extends Intershop's Payment Processing Options

Michael Garrity — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 19:00:00 GMT

Payment processing solution provider WorldPay and e-commerce solution provider Intershop have joined forces to offer a robust e-commerce platform with more extensive payment processing capabilities, global customer reach and greater risk functionality. In other words, they may have just found the solution that many online merchants have been looking for.

Both WorldPay’s payment gateway and its RiskGuardian risk management service are now going to be integrated into the Intershop 7 e-commerce platform, meaning they’ll be available for all Intershop customers. This integration is supposed to help merchants maximize their transaction success and implement “cross-border strategies” that give their customers access to locally preferred payment methods through WorldPay’s over 200 alternative payment types.

According to the Global Online Shopper Report from WorldPay, 61 percent of online shoppers have “greater confidence” in a website if it offers a choice of payment methods.

“Following WorldPay’s integration with Intershop’s platform, merchants can now benefit from a comprehensive e-commerce solution that delivers unrivalled payment processing, risk and alternative payment capabilities,” said the Chief Commercial Officer of WorldPay’s E-Commerce Division, Shane Happach. “This integration places emphasis on the importance of the availability of preferred payment types to enable merchants to operate e-commerce globally through a single interface.”

In addition to adding a wide array of payment processing options and risk management services to the Intershop platform, this partnership also allows Intershop merchants to optimize their revenue streams by capturing payments from various touch points, such as online, mobile and MOTO channels.

The CRM Starter Guide for Merchants

Michael Garrity — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 19:30:00 GMT

Web professionals really love their customer relationship management (CRM) software, as it allows them to compile all of the information they gather about customers and/or leads in a single platform that will organize, automate and synchronize various aspects of their business operations.

For the most part, it is an enterprise's sales team that utilizes CRM software like SugarCRM, Salesforce, Zoho or one of the many other solutions available to manage the various leads they accrue over time. However, many of the same principles can be applied to online merchants, a group that (traditionally) isn’t as familiar with the benefits of a CRM solution.

By using CRM software to collect and manage information about their customers from their websites and accounting systems, merchants can maintain a single database that allows them to make rapid updates to their CRM, accounting systems and websites in one fell swoop. In this regard, everything from a customer’s address to the price of a product can be altered across systems instantaneously.

Moreover, CRM solutions allow online retailers to offer more personalized site experiences for each of their returning customers based on information like their purchase or account histories, allowing the merchants to offer supplementary products, special deals or discounts for future purchases. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the ability of a CRM solution to help bridge the gap between a merchant’s brick-and-mortar stores with their e-commerce websites.

Manage the Customer Experience
For merchants, the primary purpose of using a CRM tool should be to learn more about the customer experience and use that information to improve it for all of their customers. In particular, integrating a CRM system with an e-commerce solution can provide detailed and actionable information about customer behavior on a site; this information is what allows merchants to personalize the shopping experience for each of their customers over time.

Important Information (or What to Look For)
No matter how powerful a CRM system may be, it’s going to be kind of useless if an online retailer isn’t gathering the right kind of information about his or her customers. Of course, it should go without saying that they will want to get all of the essential bits of information about the customers, such as their names, addresses, email addresses and other contact information, as well as things like their job titles and the organizations they work for, especially if this data affects the way that you will market to them.

However, between a CRM system and e-commerce solution, merchants should also gather crucial behavioral data about each of their customers, such as their buying habits (e.g. the types of products they tend to buy), payment methods and shopping cart abandonment rates. Using this data allows merchants to make certain adjustments to their site as a whole that will improve the experience for all customers.

Gathering the Data
There are many ways to go about getting customers' crucial contact information that can be inserted into a CRM system. For retailers with a brick-and-mortar location, they can gather the information from customers as they’re checking out, or offer a form for them to fill out in the store (maybe for some sort of discount or coupon in return). When it comes to online customers, forms also typically work best, and merchants can simply integrate free HTML form builders like JotForm, reformed or Accessify into their websites to collect information from their visitors. In addition, they can also include some sort of form section as part of their checkout process (although this doesn’t work with a guest checkout option), which will also collect any information that the merchants deem “necessary” when a customer registers with the site and signs up for an account.

Additional Benefits
While the biggest perk for merchants using CRM systems is the ability to optimize the customer experience and provide personalized options for individual customers, they can also take advantage of the more traditional uses of CRM solutions, including the ability to automate and streamline everyday business processes, such as quote and order management, pricing and contracts. CRM solutions will also (usually) provide detailed analytics with insights into business trends and general customer behaviors, and social CRM tools allow merchants to keep an eye on what their customers are saying about them, and turn that information into actionable strategies that will improve the overall customer experience.

Bigcommerce Gets Funded, Adds Apps

Michael Garrity — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:34:00 GMT

The e-commerce software provider Bigcommerce recently announced the results of a $2 million integration fund it launched for developers in early 2012.

A plethora of developers came out to utilize the Bigcommerce API to build a variety of new integrations and applications for the e-commerce platform, which are now available in the Bigcommerce app directory. In fact, 500-plus developers originally applied to receive part of the fund, and of those applications that the company decided to endow with capital, the majority focused on providing marketing services; this is largely because Bigcommerce realized that this is the area that most of its small businesses clients had the hardest time with.

“We know that our clients want more than just a pretty online store,” said Co-CEO Eddie Machaalani. “They want traffic, orders and repeat customers. The range of apps built as a result of our integration fund not only extend on our 25 built-in marketing tools, but make it even easier for our clients to drive a stampede of targeted traffic to their Bigcommerce stores.”

Overall, 577 developers applied for funding and 31 different apps ended up being funded. The monetary funding range for individual apps started at $1,250 and went all the way to a whopping $20,000. And, following the influx of new applications as a result of the integration funding, the Bicommerce app store now has 105 total apps.

“The applications we selected are truly best-of-breed integrations that meet significant needs for our clients,” explains the other CEO, Mitchell Harper. “Using our extensive API, market-leading apps like HubSpot, MailChimp and Zendesk, as well as up-and-coming developers like Stitch Labs, are building on top of our platform and generating serious revenue.”

He adds that this is “a win-win situation for Bigcommerce, developers and, most importantly, our clients, who get to extend the functionality of their Bigcommerce stores in a nearly unlimited number of ways.”

Even though integration funding is over, the company is still encouraging developers to submit their app applications at developer.bigcommerce.com.

CVS iPad App Gives Shoppers a Virtual Storefront Experience

Michael Garrity — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 18:45:00 GMT

Earlier this week, CVS launched an innovative new iPad application for online shoppers that provides them with a detailed, virtual 3D e-commerce experience in the palms of their hands.

With the app, customers can explore a digital version of a CVS/pharmacy store to shop for products or access services from the Pharmacy, ExtraCare, Photo Center or MinuteClinic departments. This interactive pathway provides customers with a personalized shopping experience and brings the virtual drugstore to life, so that they can access it on-the-go, or from the comfort of their own homes.

Some of the features in the app include: enhanced prescription management, access to weekly ads, an online and mobile Photo Center and a catalog-style shopping experience.

“The new CVS iPad app provides the millions of customers who visit CVS.com on a tablet device each month with a virtual feeling of visiting their neighborhood CVS/pharmacy from their homes or on-the-go,” said the company’s Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer, Brian Tilzer.

The development of this new e-commerce application marks one of the first times that a major retail brand has released a virtual 3D store for a mobile device. But as mobile shopping, particularly on tablets, continues to rapidly gain popularity among consumers, it seems safe to expect to see these kinds of digital storefronts proliferate, especially from major large-scale retailers that have the technology and development teams to create them.

What do you think about virtual storefronts? Would you like to see them become more commonplace in mobile e-commerce? Let us know in the replies!

5 Tips for Optimizing Product Listing Ads

Michael Garrity — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 19:15:00 GMT

Since Google introduced Product Listing Ads (PLAs) as part of its Google Shopping initiative last year, Internet advertisers and online merchants have been working hard to find the best possible ways to optimize the performance of their PLAs.

These product-specific and information-rich advertisements are displayed when consumers conduct product-related searches and are visible in a sponsored section on the SERPs. So far, they can increase click-through rates by as much as 73 percent, conversion rates by 35 percent and provide a 46 percent higher return on ad spend for merchants.

However, in order to get numbers like those (or even better), it’s important to clean up your product feeds (where Google pulls the information for each individual product from) and carefully set up your PLA campaigns.

Here are five things you can do to improve the overall performance of your Google PLAs:

Title Specs

What’s in a name? Well, for busy consumers, it can be a lot, especially because titles will indicate the queries that you’re likely to show up for. That’s why you should be thoughtful when giving your products a title in your product feed. For starters, be sure that it is no longer than 70 characters; otherwise, Google will truncate parts of the title. In addition, be sure to put the most important (read: significant for keyword-based searches) information at the front of the title, since Google will only show the first couple of words in the SERPs.

Information and Descriptions

While both product titles and descriptions should include essential keywords for the searches that you want those specific products to appear on, they shouldn’t be overstuffed with keywords. In other words, ensure that they include necessary information while also being readable and interesting for consumers. Also, don't worry where you place your keywords in the descriptions, since they don’t actually show up in the PLAs; they’re really there so that Google can more easily separate similar products.

Price Products Accurately

Google will almost certainly penalize any PLAs that inaccurately list the price of the product in question. Keep in mind that if you have package pricing, you will have to include the lowest possible price that someone can add items into their cart for. For instance, if customers must buy a minimum of 20 products for $2 each, the price should be listed as $40, not $2.

Ad Groups

One way to gain greater control over the bidding, offer copy and targeting of each product is to create a separate ad group for each product category. When you do this, you can either use the product categories Google uses for Google Shopping, or customize your own parameters to categorize groups of products in the most relevant way possible. In addition, you should be careful when putting bids on a catch-all ad group, as Google will serve the PLA from the ad group with the highest bid, ignoring all of the others. That being said, you can also optimize your best-selling ad group and make it more visible by giving them higher bids.

Testing Ad Groups

When you set up your ad groups, you should create custom targets that will focus on the first targeting option and your individual product IDs. This allows you to see what queries each of your products are showing up for and provide more visibility into which of your products are converting well. The reports you glean from this testing will show you which of your feed’s copy listings are most effective, and which products you can increase your bids on due to their higher conversion rates. You should also monitor the average position for you groups that usually perform well, and if you see that your average position changes when you haven’t done anything, it’s probably because other merchants (e.g. your competitors) are increasing their bids; you’ll need to do the same in order to stay competitive.

Chirpify Brings In-Stream Commerce to Facebook

Michael Garrity — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 21:00:00 GMT

For in-stream commerce platform provider Chirpify, it’s time to leave the nest and venture out into the great, big world of social media. That’s right, it’s finally bringing its service to Facebook, so now users can buy products on the world’s largest social network with just one comment.

Until now, Chirpify was only available on Twitter and Instagram, but by inserting its social commerce product into the Facebook news feed, it has brought its capabilities to an average of more than 618 million daily active users. Now, businesses, non-profits and consumers can buy, sell, donate or raise funds from within their news feeds without ever having to leave Facebook.

This could be beneficial, of course, to some of the nearly 80 percent of American businesses that have a presence on the social network, especially if they have an active and engaged collection of “fans” on the website.

To use Chirpify on Facebook, a customer simply has to create a listing in the Chirpify dashboard and include various important details, such as item, dollar amount, shipping time and price, as well as indicating whether the product is digital or physical. Once that’s done, they simply need to click on the “Facebook” button to turn the listing live. From there, the post will show up (and work) in both consumer and brand page news feeds.

Consumers will then buy, donate or enter a giveaway on a posted listing by commenting with either “buy,” “donate” or “gimme,” respectively. From there, Chirpify takes over and makes a payment happen automatically, before sending the consumer a secure download or receipt via email. Chirpify customers can manage all transactions and data from their Chirpify dashboards.

An Unordinary Bakery, E-Commerce Store

Amberly Dressler — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 16:00:00 GMT

Imagine your site goes down for a few days. Panic, right? What if you shut it down on purpose?

In anticipation for its relaunch, that’s exactly what independent fashion retailer Johnny Cupcakes decided to do.

“It was a scary suggestion,” said Johnny Cupcakes Business Director, Lucas Dunn. “But it was an operational help, and it was part of treating the website as if we were launching a new store, which we hype up for weeks and months in advance to get a big line of customers waiting for the store to open. It definitely enhanced the launch.”

This tactic, along with all other business decisions, works in tandem with the three, interdependent pillars that define the Johnny Cupcakes brand: personality, exclusivity and community.

For the unfamiliar, Johnny Cupcakes is a clothing line that uses cupcakes as the prominent design for its merchandise. The company does not sell real cupcakes; however, they do provide them to its customers at special events and sometimes in its brick-and-mortar locations. Its products are highly limited, with many of its T-shirts (the company’s main attraction), printed in the hundreds, if not lower.

Since these feelings of exclusivity and community are so inherent to Johnny Cupcakes, customers not only camp out in front of stores, but also engage with each other online – many times in third-party message boards, they create.

“Community is the most important part of our brand, and everything we do is dedicated to creating a personal experience that hopefully makes people smile and laugh,” said Johnny Earle, Head Baker and CEO for Johnny Cupcakes in a statement. “While many brands struggle to engage customers, our community and social interactions have been at the heart of our brand from the start, and we’re leveraging these core values in exciting new ways online.”

One of the ways the company did this was by providing fans with a platform to share photos of themselves wearing their favorite Johnny Cupcakes items via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And, almost instantly they become the featured website model (as pictured).

Johnny Cupcakes calls itself “An Unordinary Bakery,” and its e-commerce presence is definitely unordinary as well. For example, the home page feels less like an e-commerce store and more like a blog.

“The setup on the new site is actually a bit more of a traditional blend than what used to be there,” said Dunn. “The old website was entirely blog focused. It was an unengaging blog format, and it didn’t give a sense of variety in terms of product, content and people and places and experience.”

“We are never going to have the shop be the first thing that people will see,” Dunn continued. “We don’t see that as the natural progression for people who want to buy our products. We want them to understand what goes into the product and what makes the brand itself unique. We knew that the blog would be an essential feature of the landing page, and we wanted to bring in social media and with that top header, sliding image, give a variety of what’s new throughout the site. We consider it the dashboard for the Johnny Cupcakes’ experience. We have content that is relevant to existing and prospective customers.”

Other features of the new website include a “Family” section, which puts a larger face on the brand by highlighting around 60-80 people that really make the brand possible. JohnnyCupcakes.com will also feature online events, such as secret collections and pop-up shops that exist only online.

Manage Those Pesky Consumer Use Taxes More Effectively

Michael Garrity — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 12:55:00 GMT

Running an e-commerce business can be taxing (literally), but the sales tax and compliance automation service provider Avalara wants to help lessen the burden with the release of a new, completely automated consumer use tax management solution known as AvaTax Consumer Use.

The new solution will work with hundreds of different billing systems, financial applications and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to ensure that it can serve businesses of all shapes and sizes by integrating seamlessly into their accounting systems.

Unlike Avalara’s older tailored consumer use tax service, this new solution provides a simple and affordable product to companies of all shapes and sizes that leverages Avalara’s powerful, accurate tax decision engine. In fact, AvaTax Consumer Use was built with a focus on small and medium-sized businesses.

In the past, consumer use tax management has been, at best, minimally supported by accounting software and ERP solutions, making the whole process not only time-consuming and complicated, but also costly. This added a substantial burden to SMB owners, as those who didn’t take consumer use tax management seriously were at a great risk, as underreported or misreported consumer use taxes “create a fertile ground for audits and penalties.”

With this new solution, tax calculations can be arranged to fit a company’s filing schedule and processed by just clicking a button; after that, all tax data will be automatically available to AvaTax Returns to further streamline the tax management process, (mercifully) eliminating complexity and saving a lot of time.

Microsoft Dynamics users will be the first to get a chance to try out Avatax Consumer Use, as the product for the Dynamics AX, GP and NAV today at Convergence 2013.