5701 Lonetree Blvd.
Rocklin, CA 95765
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(916) 920-4730 |
Most off-the-shelf e-commerce solution start with a Web product catalog and end with a checked out cart, which leaves back-office operations, customer service, CRM, warehouse and supply-chain management in the dark. Using your work-flow, we can automate all that together to create a full service e-commerce solution.
Only the inexperienced think e-commerce is simple: just throw your catalog on the Web and stick a Buy button next to each widget you sell and voilà! They (consumers) will flock to the site and buy like mad. E-commerce is now both science and art. Consumers have many choices and they are getting smarter and smarter every day as they do more and more online shopping. Just having a Web catalog with a shopping cart is simply not going to cut it anymore.
Let us ask you a few questions. If you answer yes to any, we can help you.
Amazon.com is the poster-child of online commerce — e-commerce. Its vision, growth and profitability are simply beyond amazing. From the early days, they focused on using technology to innovate, automate, integrate as many processes as possible. They believed in user generated content to get them unbelievable review traffic.
They invented and (sadly) patented the one-click purchase process and developed the most resilient networking infrastructure in the planet. They believed in user generated content from the early days and now built an unbelievable review traffic that is unmatched by anything else on the Internet. If anyone is buying anything online worth more than a few bucks, they are checking out Amazon user reviews to see what others think. By combining innovative process automation, the Internet’s natural laws and keeping user interface reasonably simple, they have built the most trusted online brand in the world.
We have taken small companies from shared hosted e-commerce sites that produced 6% sales to 90% sales on dozens of online order processing servers in the span of just a few years.
Granted, Amazon has all the money it needs to invent whatever technology they need to make themselves the cutting-edge of e-commerce. You need not be discouraged that your budget might be insignificant compared to Amazon.com. What you need is a clear vision and a technology partner that can align the technology to meet your vision.
If your e-commerce site is still using traditional product catalogs to showcase your widgets, you are missing the boat by a big load.
Today’s e-commerce is driven by user generated content and social interaction.
If your best customers are not promoting your business online, you are missing the biggest marketing opportunity. User feedback, user blogs and social interaction on sites like Facebook is the next generation of advertising and promotion.
Empower the user with tools and rewards so that they are promoting you. Remember, if you service 100 consumers and only one of them is dissatisfied, s/he can post one bad review and tarnish your success with the rest of the 99 who are often silent. Without creating incentives, rewards and a loyalty program that your best customers can participate in, you are gambling with the most important aspect of your business.
Do you get daily reports that tell you what products are best sellers, which are your best customers, where they come form, what there demographics are, what most customers complain about, what your customer service reps spend most of their time explaining and dealing with, what slows your sales process down, what email message get most responses, how many customers used their online coupons, how many customers abandoned their shopping, how many customers returned for repeat purchases, what chews up your bottom line, etc?
You need to use your own data to create good information that gives you great decision making power. By incorporating a custom decision support component to your e-commerce, we can help you SEE YOUR BUSINESS in different angles that were not possible before.
The customer facing modules of an e-commerce system is critical for making the sale. If the Web front end is designed poorly or does not perform well under peek load, customers will abandon the order process and go elsewhere. This is why the Web front end needs to be finely tuned to match the widgets you sell. For example, if you are selling airline tickets, your customers are not expecting to click on a Add to Cart button to purchase the tickets from you.
However, if you are selling a piece of jewelry, customers are expecting to have access to multiple photos of different sizes to make up their mind before clicking on the Add to Cart button. The sales completion process needs to be extremely streamlined for each product or service.
The shopping cart is the critical element of an e-commerce system. It needs to be efficient and simple to use. Shopping cart design needs to take into account that some customers shop at ease and some rush to complete the purchase. By giving both ability to choose their route is key to avoiding loss of potential sales. In addition, shopping carts need to be equipped with a cross-sale — recommendation engine — to allow customers to purchase additional item or service options that increases the average ticket price and thus your bottom line.
Today’s online shoppers are not looking for just a tidbit product info in a catalog. They are looking for engaging content that entices them to purchase. By incorporating video, social networking, and rating and user feedback, it is possible to create a successful catalog using a customized content management system.
When considering online vs off-line shopping, potential customers worry about shipping costs. Often, potential customer will decide to purchase a product from a local or even a regional store just to avoid shipping cost. Therefore, being creative and transparent about shipping cost is extremely important for e-tailers. If your average customer purchases multiple products at a time, it is likely a good business practice to develop a smart shipping module that figures out optimal shipping packages and gets real-time price quotations from UPS, USPS, etc. to offer customer a realistic cost-estimate instead of poorly configured default fees. If the customer ever feels that you are using shipping cost as a profit-margin, chances are high that you will lose the sale.
Using real-time quotes and smart calculations based on your specific business, it is possible to create a trusted, fair shipping module that customers can rely on and complete the sales with satisfaction that you are doing best to take care of them.
Credit card fraud is rampant online. Even though most credit card companies go a long way to protect consumers online by passing on the fraud liability to the merchants, consumers have got a perception that credit card use is dangerous. By demonstrating that you are fully PCI compliant and have extensive security measures and exceed the requirements of the major card companies, you would be able to help consumers overcome the fear of an online purchase.
We have worked with all major credit card processors and thus have extensive expertise in implementing card holder data security to ensure that your customers are going to trust your Web site for repeat purchases.
When you sell physical widgets, you have a substantial back-office operation involving warehouse, inventory, supply-chain and customer service. Without incorporating the back-office operations to run efficiently with the Web site is likely to cost you many sales as inefficiencies in tracking an order inside your offices, warehouses and fulfillment centers would leave potentially bad-taste on enough customers. In today’s social network enabled world, a bad reputation spreads like a wild fire and you cannot afford to lose control of your in-house order tracking and processing to remain competitive and attractive to your future customers.
By developing tracking, automation and integration modules to work with your existing back-office systems, we can bring a great deal of visibility to you and your customers, which will truly be a big win for you and earn you customer loyalty.
An online e-tailer’s customer service needs to be he super savvy in assisting online customers. They need to be able to take-over an order to assist troubled customer find his or her way back in the checkout step. We can help you build a cart assist process that works for your specific needs.
Depending on the demographics that you sell your products to, it might be important to develop a virtual point-of-sale (POS) tool for your staff to take off-line (phone, fax, etc.) orders and convert them into Web orders via an internal virtual Web-based POS system. This will keep your entire order entry process streamlined to Web and reduce paper work, order loss and increase visibility and accountability throughout your organization.
We can assist you by developing custom modules that take a Web order and go as far as print a pick up slip for the order in your warehouse printer! Yes, by incorporating your warehouse or fulfillment services with a clear and simple order processing system, you can achieve great deal of efficiencies of scale taking your business to its true potential.
When you run an e-commerce system, you own a data mine! Yes, your data needs to be transformed into useful information and using the information you need to make intelligent and market-savvy decisions. Unfortunately, most off-the-shelf online e-commerce systems stop at showing you how many orders you generated this minute, day, week, month, year to date. What you really need is the data insights that goes beyond order count and product stats.
You need to know who is buying what. You data needs to tell you if your next email campaign should be sent on the Wednesday or Friday or some other day. Your data needs to guide you create cross sales and other marketing opportunities beyond your competitors grasp. By incorporating data mining, forecasting and custom business logic driven decision support system on top of your database, we can give you the insights you need to have the best competitive advantages money can buy.
