'Net Features : zendesk

The Top 15 Apps E-Commerce Websites Can’t Do Without

Administrator — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 19:50:00 GMT

:: By Mitchell Harper and Eddie Machaalani,Co-founders and Co-CEOs, Bigcommerce ::

Statistics show that online shopping is growing rapidly — a trend that presents both opportunities and challenges for entrepreneurs selling via websites.

First, some numbers. According to Forrester Research, online shoppers in the United States will spend $327 billion in 2016, up 62 percent from $202 billion in 2011. By 2016, Forrester adds, e-retail will account for 9 percent of total retail sales. Growth in the number of online consumers will climb 15 percent, up to 192 million in the U.S. from 167 million last year. And each buyer will spend more on average — up 44 percent to $1,738 from $1,207 in 2012.

Good news and Bad News

On one hand, this rapid growth presents a lucrative market of potential prospects. On the other hand, the proliferation of online shopping outlets means that small- and medium-sized businesses have more competition than ever before. A good inventory and well-built website will only get you halfway to success in this competitive market — if that.

Online retailers have several obstacles to overcome on their way to success. Among those is conversion — that is, converting visitors to customers. By some estimates, the average conversion rate in Internet retail is only 3 percent.

Another obstacle is shopping cart abandonment — when prospects add products to a cart but leave without checking out. Baymard Institute compared 18 separate studies on shopping cart abandonment, concluding that 67 percent of e-commerce transactions are abandoned on average.

Internet retail success demands that entrepreneurs learn how to keep their sites “sticky” — offering expert customer service, a robust shopping cart experience, customer-written product reviews, and any other means at their disposal to keep a prospective customer on their site hitting the “buy now” button (instead of wavering or going elsewhere for more information and a better deal).

Fortunately, there is now a wide array of applications designed specifically to overcome obstacles to Internet retail success for small- and medium-sized businesses. Software for email marketing, lead generation, customer service and support (including live chat), and streamlining accounts payable/receivable are all available — as are applications for revenue monitoring and inventory management, drop-shipping, order processing, retargeting and even buyer incentive and referral programs.

The Must-Have Applications for Internet Success

Let’s take a quick look at the software and services no fledgling Internet entrepreneur can live without.

HubSpot. When it comes to automated customer segmentation, this is the app. Users can sync their store data to one of the world’s leading marketing automation platforms, making email marketing and lead nurturing much easier.

MailChimp. Customer data seamlessly syncs with MailChimp for easy email marketing, newsletters, list management and measurement.

Zendesk. The leading cloud-based customer service software can pull in relevant customer data and display it right on the support tickets a company uses to track issues — leading to quicker support resolution and happier customers.

Webgility eCC. A powerful solution for connecting a store to any version of QuickBooks, as well as shipping processors and payment gateways — all streamlined and automated to save time and prevent errors.

Ordoro. This comprehensive shipping platform improves shipping times, reduces labor, decreases costs and gives them access to powerful drop-shipping capabilities.

Stitch Labs. Merchants today sell in a wide variety of ways, and StitchLabs pulls all those together into one order management tool. Whether orders are taken online, via phone or fax, or at events and trade shows, inventory is automatically synced across channels.

ShipStation. Merchants can integrate their stores with ShipStation’s sophisticated, easy to use solution to save time and money on shipping through automated order processing and batch shipping label creation.

Lexity Retargeting. Retargeting — once a weapon in the arsenal of only major companies— comes to small businesses with this Lexity app. By retargeting shoppers with professional, personalized display ads on other sites, this dynamic piece of software helps bring back some of the 98 percent of shoppers who don’t buy on their first visit.

Olark. Live chat and support have long been the linchpins for success among major players like Zappos and Apple. Olark gives merchants of almost any size the benefits of talking directly to their customers, including the ability to view cart contents for each visitor and offer upsells and special offers based on what they’re buying.

71lbs. Late UPS and FedEx shipments account for nearly 6 percent of all shipments. And what most merchants don’t know is that they are owed a full refund on orders that arrive late. When a merchant uses 71lbs, all their shipments are monitored for late orders, and refunds are automatically claimed and credited back to them.

SumAll. This is an incredibly powerful analytics tool that retailers can use to monitor all their revenue data in real time, including sales and discounts, allowing them to see which products and marketing efforts are worth investing in.

Yotpo. Internet retailers who install Yotpo on their stores get access to an easy-to-use, fully customizable review platform that allows customers to review products and share those reviews on social media, driving traffic and engagement.

RetailTower. With RetailTower, businesses can automatically submit their products into 15 shopping comparison engines, including Google Shopping, Amazon, Bing, SortPrice and more. Submission to these popular channels increases reach and drives sales.

Lexity Live. This app lets merchants track visitors on their site in real time, seeing which pages they view, which products they add to cart, and where they drop off. Lexity Live users can also chat with shoppers to close sales and get actionable marketing insights.

ReferralCandy. By using ReferralCandy, merchants can incentivize buyers to refer friends to their store by emailing them a shareable coupon after purchase.

As Internet sales continue to boom, it will take sophisticated tools and analytics to rise above the noise. Even the newest Internet entrepreneurs can enhance their websites — and their revenue figures — by taking advantage of applications and analytical capabilities previously reserved for only the largest, most popular online brands.

About the Authors

Mitchell Harper and Eddie Machaalani are the co-founders and co-CEOs of Bigcommerce, the world's fastest-growing SaaS e-commerce platform that helps power over 30,000 small businesses online. Contact Mitchell mitchell.harper@bigcommerce.com, Twitter handle @mitchellharper. Contact Eddie at eddie.machaalani@bigcommerce.com, Twitter handle @eddiemachaalani.

10 Gallantly Green Websites to Envy

Amberly Dressler — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 19:30:00 GMT

Color usage plays a tremendous role in a website’s ability to evoke emotion and ultimately action from its audience. People tend to gravitate toward blue and green as their favorite colors, but it’s the meanings behind colors that designers must recognize when choosing a color scheme.

For example, what’s the first word that comes to mind when you think of the color green? For most it’s money. Others relate sustainability, health and safety to the color. Companies in all industries utilize green to communicate their brand’s message. Here are 10 gallantly green websites to envy.

1. 3 Sided Cube

2. The Green House

3. Evernote

4. Amy's

5. Zendesk

6. SproutBox

7. Sprout Social

8. Nature Valley

9. Go Glamping

10. The Holiday Inn

Is Real-Time Framework on Your “Radar?”

Amberly Dressler — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 18:00:00 GMT

The ability to simplify the development of real-time Web applications, not only saves development teams time and money, but also helps businesses offer the customer support features that online consumers are, increasingly, coming to expect.

Radar, the newest push notification framework from Zendesk, simplifies the development of real-time Web functionality such as live chat, presence detection and data change notifications.

"For the past year, we’ve worked hard to integrate Radar into our infrastructure as an extensible back-end to support push messaging and other real-time functionality,” said Morten Primdahl, Zendesk CTO. “In addition to supporting chat applications, Radar also exposes an elegant API for building apps that use messaging, data change notifications, and user presence.”

Radar facilitates real-time requests through Node.js and a real-time transport library (engine.io) to service requests.

According to DeVaris Brown, technology evangelist at Zendesk, Radar's main point is that it adds a lot of functionality that is necessary for building typical real time features into an existing application.

“It is easy to integrate into an existing application by provisioning Radar servers and then using the Javascript client library to add user-facing features,” said Brown.

The presence detection and data change notifications that are present in Radar aid in a business’s customer service on the Web in the following ways (according to Brown):

Presence detection helps with writing social features, where it is important to know if a customer service agent is online, or a customer is available for chatting. At Zendesk, Radar's presence features are used for tracking things such as agents available for chats and agents available to receive phone calls, as well as what tickets an agent is looking at or working on.

Data change notifications help with all kinds of features, where someone in an organization makes a change - such as a ticket update, or a setting change - and other people need to be quickly notified of this. For example, when multiple people are looking at a customer service ticket and one of them posts an update, the other customer service agents receive a notification about this.

In regard to using this framework to increase ROI, Brown said, “This comes down to being able to benefit from the higher level API that allows a business to write new real-time functionality faster, and from the scalability features that Radar supports which enable the business to grow their real-time messaging capacity quickly. In addition to saving engineering and infrastructure effort in building these features, consumers expect elegant interactions with products and services that deliver timely and relevant information. Using a framework such as Radar is not only a smart technology choice, but it enables the development of features that would not be possible otherwise.”

Single-Page Design, New Face of Customer Support

Amberly Dressler — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 16:30:00 GMT

The sleek interface synonymous with some of the best social media and consumer applications has come to customer service software. Zendesk, Web-based help desk and support ticket software, recently announced its biggest redesign in the company’s history. The simplicity of the revamp is one others might want to consider.

“The primary benefit of single-page design is performance,” said Adrian McDermott, Zendesk’s Senior VP of Engineering and Product Development. “There is a significant decrease in the number of pages and information that needs to be loaded from the server as the user navigates the application. The entire page isn't refreshing, only the most relevant pieces of information is. This enables a snappy experience as agents navigate through their workflow.”

Zendesk’s redesign has been in the works for two years, with the focus on keeping things simple by reducing the number of menus and clickable options available to the user at any given moment. However, customer service agents are in control of how many tasks they want open, enabling them to view several service inquiries at once. They can also flip back and forth between the a number of different pieces of information, such as the history of customer's issue, the details of a customer's organization, all of which can be updated while the inquiry is still active and appearing in the current view.

“A customer service agent can keep flipping tabs and looking at a specific inquiry and have more information at their fingertips, in-context,” said McDermott. “The tools we are giving an agent enhances their ability to provide customer service with great context about the customer, in real-time.”

With Zendesk’s redesign, the five-year-old company also announced the completion of $60 million of new financing, which was led by Redpoint Ventures with participation by Index Ventures, GGV Capital, Goldman Sachs, Silicon Valley Bank and the company’s existing venture capital investors including Charles River Ventures, Benchmark Capital and Matrix Partners.

“We believe Zendesk is one of the most innovative SaaS companies in the industry,” said Satish Dharmaraj, General Partner with Redpoint Ventures. “The enterprise software industry is seeing a huge shift to the cloud. Zendesk has proven itself as a leader in this transition, with stellar performance in the customer service sector and they are poised for phenomenal growth.”

The $60 million should definitely help Zendesk meet that prediction.

Email Marketing Management within Zendesk

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 16:30:00 GMT

Web-based support desk solution Zendesk, fresh off the release of its new search analytics feature, announced an integration with email service provider MailChimp to aid marketing teams in managing and tracking email recipients that have interacted with a message.

The widget provides marketers the ability to view all email campaign activities from MailChimp that a Zendesk ticket requester has been sent, to view details about those recipients' specific actions, and to manage a ticket requester's mailing list subscriptions from within Zendesk.

A view of how a customer profile looks within Zendesk, when the Mailchimp widget is active:

Zendesk Gives a Voice to Silent Customers

Michael Garrity — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 18:00:00 GMT

Cloud-based help desk software provider Zendesk wants to help businesses dig deeper into their analytics, specifically by targeting "silent" customers who use self-service content to solve issues without the help of customer service representatives.

The company launched a new Search Analytics feature to provide its users with insights about how their customers are using self-service content. Search Analytics will be visible to users in the Zendesk Reporting Dashboard, which is responsible for delivering organizations key metrics to tweak and improve the customer service experience.

The new feature provides measurable data with regards to whether or not these silent customers are effectively finding answers to their questions via self-service content, closely monitoring where they run into problems and when in the process they give up. Zendesk expects this information to give businesses the insights necessary to optimize their self-service content offerings.

Social Smarts and Hootsuite

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 13:54:00 GMT

Social media dashboard Hootsuite unveiled some smarter, more social tools which aim to satisfy the blurred lines between marketing, support and technical messaging as Web users increasingly conduct their interactions across multiple channels.

HootSuite users now have a social CRM system at their disposal with the update. Followers can be filtered by both influence and keywords - perfect for tracking topics and identifying those with the widest reach to help in message dissemination.

The platform now also provides insights about followers via the 'Insights' tab, providing publicly available links to social profiles.

Perhaps one of the most interesting updates of the platform is that Hootsuite can now create trackable tickets from Twitter updates for Zendesk users. HootSuite also released an update for its Team Collaboration tools which shows contacts on each social network.

Eight Great API’s For Your Next Website or Application

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 20:56:00 GMT

What a Web you work on! Technology from a wide variety of companies and industries is freely available for you, a designer/developer, to capture and leverage for your own or your clients benefit.

If you’re a company considering publishing an API, taking a look at the successes of others might encourage you to complete that project. iContact for example just announced the winners of its API Challenge, a content for partners and customers that asked them to build an integration between third party apps and iContact. The result, in addition to greater exposure for their service, was a lot of new mashup technology that can be used by the greater Web community (not just iContact clients).

Let’s review a few other great API’s for your next website or application now:

NameCheap Website Management Tools: The API for NameCheap, which offers a domain name registration, enables developers to build web or desktop apps that integrate with their NameCheap account. Users can access account data from NameCheap.com and offers features like domain check, registrations and renewals from within applications.

Hexillion Whois Query Service: Another from the domain name category, the Hexillion Whois API provides a programmable interface to the Whois system, automatically querying the correct Whois server, and breaking the Whois record details out into separate fields. The API, which returns XML, is built for higher volume use.

CheddarGetter Subscription Payment and Management Service: The API from online billing and subscription management system CheddarGetter makes it possible to accept and track payments and integrate the service into their website or app.

Spreedly Subscription Payment Service: The API from Spreedly gives web apps a way to handle subscription-based services. The service works through many payment gateways, including PayPal and SagePay, to complete transactions.

Zendesk Help Desk Service: Help desk system Zendesk’s API allows developers to hook into Zendesk and connect it to third-party applications. Whether you're writing a plugin for an application or planning on hooking some internal application into Zendesk, the API can do it for you.

Amplify Content Analysis Service: Amplify is a web service that brings “human understanding” to content. Using its patented Natural Language Processing technology, Amplify reads and understands words used in text, identifying the significant topics, brands, people, perspectives, emotions, actions and timescales and presents the findings in an actionable XML structure.

Klout Social Metrics Service API: Klout allows for impact tracking of opinions, links and recommendations across a social graph, by collecting data about the content created and how people interact with that content (as well as the size and composition of the network).

Proximic Content Advertising Service API for Publishers: The Proximic API allows publishers to display ad units and track the performances of their pages against days, URL referrers, ad unit formats, or ad groups. The Proximic web service also gives software developers direct access to the basic and extended functions needed for contextual advertisement publishing and reporting purposes.

Stay up to date on the latest Internet trends:
Request a professional subscription to Website Magazine,
the most popular print publication on Web success.