The NYU report places luxury retailers in a recessionary conundrum. Associate Professor of Marketing, Scott Galloway states that many high-end brands lack technological sophistication. It seems wise then that they would consult Ecommerce specialists who handle the technology allowing the brand to work on growing their business and increasing revenue. Atlanta Ecommerce solution provider ShopVisible is aware of these market changes and is driven to aid in the economic triumph. When professor Galloway notes that “brands are innovating out of necessity” he is accurate and indeed optimistic I feel. Online merchants big and small, luxury or necessity, are feeling the crunch and need innovative tools like SEO, online CRM/CMS and manageable shipping means to grow their business. People now know that site visitors are good but buying customers online is better. In order to get prepared for this year’s holiday season make sure your provider is ahead of the game.

The NYU report goes on to show that the true Ecommerce innovators were those trenched in technology and electronics. For Galloway, Apple and Sony take the cake. The software savvy they model is what increasingly more and more high-end brands will be doing: expanding their online presence.

Notable Luxury Brands Online:

• -Auto: BMW, Audi, Porsche
• -Fashion: Louis Vuitton, Ralph
• -Hotels: W Hotels
• -Watches/Jewelry: Tag Heuer/Tiffany
• -Beauty: Clinique

Galloway says these type of brands are moving ahead in their respective genres due to digital savvy which often incorporates video and user generated content. Compile social media applications and enhanced SEO tactics and communicative CRM tools and you have what ShopVisible provides.

Checkout recent launch of luxury, modern home and decor from Atlanta’s SwitchKBI:

ShopVisible partners with SwitchModern in luxury online home and decor

ShopVisible is an Atlanta GA Ecommerce solution.

Shoppers want genuine feedback from other consumers about the stuff they’re looking to buy, so even a few not-so-glowing reviews are okay.  The more you get people talking about your products, the better, and you will find that your happy customers will prove to be your best salesmen.  Simply by including a review system on your site, you are creating a more personal shopping experience for your customer base.

Review systems are also great for SEO purposes.  Feeding fresh content to a search engine on a regular basis will help heighten your rankings.  Every time a customer adds a comment about one of your products, you are helping your SEO that same way that blogging on a regular basis increases your relevancy.  ShopVisible recommends including a review section on our client sites as well as a blog for this reason.
Take a look at Case-Mate.com to see a good example of a customer review system.

ShopVisible is an ecommerce solution based in Atlanta, GA.

With fearful shoppers online second guessing offering up their credit card info, it seems more than reasonable for Ecommerce merchants to begin providing alternate payment methods. ShopVisible clients have implemented a number of diverse manners of Ecommerce payment in their online storefronts in addition to various credit cards.

1. -Checkout by Amazon
2. -Google Checkout
3. -PayPal
4. -eBillMe
5. -BillMeLater

The Internet Retailer 2010 Buyers Guide cites a Javelin market research study that projects “only a 5.6% compound annual growth rate for online credit card payments between 2008 and 2013, compared with 14.5%  growth for debit cards, 14.5% for PayPal, 23.5% for private label cards and 22.8% for on-the-spot credit services like Bill Me Later.”

This shift in online consumer behavior is reflected in ShopVisible’s myriad Ecommerce alternate payments methods available to its wide range of online merchants. In sync with IR’s Buyers Guide 2010 that notes that “32% of the 50 largest web merchants were accepting PayPal and Bill Me Later,” ShopVisible clients have been doing the same long before the July 2009 issue even came out.

One of the tenets of the ShopVisible platform is to provide our clients with an immense number of options regarding payment, site design, marketing and more. We are a robust Ecommerce solution and promise e-tailers out there on the web a fully hosted, SaaS or “software as a service” solution.

***more to come on Ecommerce security, SSLs, our use of ControlScan and compliance with PCI***

For the majority of e-tailers pushing products into various channels and online marketplaces, a cohesive OMS is critical for elevating ROI. Janet Sherlock spoke to Internet Retailer in their Buyers Guide 2010 and noted that every  “retailer will need too have the capability of taking orders from anywhere and fulfilling from anywhere, if not now, then at some point down the road…” For ShopVisible Ecommerce engineers, the road is short and the time is now. A hearty OMS is not just needed  now, but more so, it is pivotal, with regards to engaging customers online in an effort to streamline sales and grow your brand.

ShopVisible’s centralized user-interface called the Site Manager gives you complete visibility into your orders.  With the Site Manager, you can quickly and easily access all the information you need to manage orders including customer information, order history, order notes, and more. IR notes that “when retailers combine cross-channel order management with he ability to fulfill orders from any channel, including stores and warehouses dedicated for either stores or web sales, they can better match customer demands with available inventory…”

With the ShopVisible Site Manager, you can engage with a robust OMS in order to do the following:

• View and identify all orders including orders purchased with credit card, check, or money order as well as alternate payment methods such as Amazon Payments, Google Checkout, and PayPal.  Ability to narrow down orders based on each payment method.
• View and identify all orders purchased through channels like Amazon, eBay, and Overstock.  Ability to search for orders from each specific channel.
• Search orders based on order status, payment method, channel, order number, date range, salesperson, or enter keywords for a text search.
• Monitor complete orders, canceled orders, and orders that have been incomplete for 0-10 days, 11-20 days, and over 21 days.
• Manage each order by selecting options from a handy drop down menu.  Options include the ability to credit an order, edit an order, email customer, re-order, view PO time-line, process payment, ship order, check the order history, and view item level status.

Integration with selling channels is one way in which ShopVisible can help promote your company’s brand. Why sit back and wait for online consumers to find your site, when you can be proactive about the process. Reach people in the places where they are shopping and searching online. Let ShopVisible show you your whole business in one screen to make your life easier. Then let us show your brand on the web in the myriad places online consumers are browsing to buy.

ShopVisible is an Atlanta, GA based Ecommerce and SEO provider.

1. ability to list the request date, scheduled date and completeion date of a given email blast
2. a breakdown of the blast sent and total number of emails that successfully reached an inbox, failed to do so, were duplicated or cases where the recipient opted out of the email correspondence
3. the number of emails opened by subscribers and site visits initiated as a result of the original blast
4. the total dollar amount spent on your site as a result of outbound emails

While other Ecommerce providers beef up their email technology and their analytic capacity, ShopVisible furthers it inherent deliverability success rates.While “one focus is on integration with other communication channels that help email marketers extend their reach beyond email, for example, interacting with social marketing and mobile messaging,” ShopVisible has been doing this for clients in a variety of etailing genres.

email marketing: just another ShopVisible benefit for etailing clients

In the past, online merchants who would seek the benefits of proper email marketing had to pay for third party email marketing companies to set up their campaigns, adding costs and extra applications to their Ecommerce business. With ShopVisible, high quality email marketing comes baked into our all-in-one Ecommerce platform, reducing expenses and eliminating superfluous software for our clients.

Some tips: “Email providers can embed a third party provider’s tools into messages; that then allows recipients to post some or all of email content on their pages on dozens of social networks. Social sharing in email is not yet common, but some experts [like ShopVisible] it’s on the way.”

-Track deliverability rates and initial reply rates as well as opt-outs…

-”If a retailer is using ratings and reviews, for example, they can include some of that informaiton in an email message to further inform customers.”

ShopVisible is an Atlanta, GA based Ecommerce solution located @ 1095 Zonolite Road, Suite 100

ShopVisible's Ecommerce Solution

That’s why ShopVisible encourages merchants who are shopping for a new ecommerce platform to ask the tough questions when it comes to shipping.  It is essential to team up with a provider that has the kind of sophisticated shipping technology to make running your business as smooth and efficient as possible.

Here are 10 questions you should ask providers about shipping:

1. Does your solution enable the following shipping features:  multiple types (air, second day, etc), multiple carriers, carrier integration and shipping method restriction (i.e. by PO Box)?

2. Does the platform allow the merchant to provide and manage multiple shipping methods?

3. Can merchant calculate shipping based: per item, per weight, per order shipping charge calculations?

4. Can merchant set up free shipping based on revenue thresholds?

5. Can the merchant set up geographical restrictions at the product line level?

6. Do you support and integrate with freight shippers?

7. Can your solution batch create and print shipping labels from within the platform?  UPS, FedEx, and USPS?

8. Do you support drop-shipping? If so, do you automatically send information to the retailer and supplier from the point of purchase to the time of delivery?

9. Do you support item-specific fulfillment that allows tracking numbers to be sent to the customer based on each item as opposed to an entire order?

Finally, if you are merchant who is happy with your current 3rd party shipping application, but are still looking to switch ecommerce providers…

10. Can you seamlessly integrate my preferred shipping partner with your platform?

When you’re in the market for a new ecommerce provider, it can be hard to differentiate between the competition.  Everyone claims that they are the best, and everyone claims that they have everything. This is not the case.  It’s important to dig deep when researching providers in order to specifically narrow down the ones that are right for your business.

If you found these questions helpful and would like to receive ShopVisible’s free full RFP with a complete list of questions covering all areas of ecommerce, head to the “Request an RFP” section of our website.

ShopVisible is an ecommerce solution headquartered in Atlanta, GA.

PianoWorks live on the ShopVisible Ecommerce platform

Before working with ShopVisible, PianoWorks was intent on developing a CMS to help display their products. While their previous website functioned solely to illustrate their brand, “it didn’t allow us to grow our offerings or interact with customers.” Elements of online business like Ecommerce and SEO were far from priority, but in hopes for wider company visibility, the Bennetts realized that “by bringing people to [their] site to actually buy [piano] related items, they might hang around and look at [the] pianos as well. It’s like being paid to advertise,” notes Sam, “instead of the other way around.”

Thanks to ShopVisible’s SEO inherent platform, PianoWorks excelled from the get-go. Just one week following their launch, the piano sales/restoration experts reaped page 1 SERP results in Google and Yahoo. Inspired by their burgeoning search status, Sam states “I like the tools [ShopVisible] provided and in 6 months, I plan on being page 1 for every search term I really go after. It will be a challenge, but possible. I think that is unique to SV.”

ShopVisible’s etailing solution to the PianoWorks online conundrum opened up doors for both companies. Relying on innovation, bandwidth and expedience, PianoWorks states that “[ShopVisible] listened to my vision and ran with it. They took immediate far reaching strides…I saw proof of loyalty in some trying times and I value that highly.”

At ShopVisible, we know that good business is founded upon great people. For us, our solution is our spirited staff and for Sam Bennett and PianoWorks, SV’s Ecommerce team “has really been excellent…The people of SV are their biggest strength.”

About PianoWorks:

“At PianoWorks, helping musicians and music lovers realize their goals is far more than our family business. It’s our passion reflected in the instruments we represent and by our people. Our business, our passion, and our ultimate commitment is to serve your best interests to the very best of our ability. No sales tactics. No pressure. Just expert, relentlessly objective assistance based on more than a quarter century of experience as a leading restorer of fine pianos.”

-”42% of online shoppers said they had contacted a retailer about an online purchase in the previous six months,” says JupiterResearch as cited in InternetRetailer’s Buyers Guide 2010.

-Last year Forrester noted that “customer experience quality could result in a swing of $184 million for a large Internet retailer,” such as ShopVisible client CaseMate, who is depicted below…

ShopVisible e-tailing client: Case-Mate

In an effort at developing a robust customer service operation for its online merchants, ShopVisible provides them with basic functions like email hosting and liveChat. InternetRetailer notes how “E-mail and chat have become staples of customer service. In a cross-industry survey in December 2008, 84% of sites offered e-mail as a way to contact  customer support…Live chat was offered on 54% of the sites of the 100 largest online retailers,” as presented by the E-tailing Group Inc.

Being equipped with the means to initiate seamlessly coordinated customer service is one thing; implementing and following through with it is another story as ShopVisible client Rob Satran notes. Satran, the VP of Operations for appliance magnate Leiberts Royal Green, is a popular man in both Ecommerce and Ecommerce news. In a past issue of InternetRetailer, Satran was spotlights in a segment called “Hometown Heroes.” The piece touches on the fact that since Satran’s price points average out above $500.00 and the product weights are substantial (refrigerators, ranges, stoves and grills), he must still address tenuous Ecommerce topics like customer service and shipping.

Leiberts Royal Green, a ShopVisible online merchant

Satran states that “We’re selling high-priced items and we want to make sure [customers are] comfortable with what they’re buying and that their expectations are in line with our ability to fulfill them.” IR writes that for Leiberts, “it’s important to call each customer who makes a purchase online to make sure the buyer understands what she is getting and how long it will take for the item to arrive.” Now that is genuine customer service!

Unfortunately however, as the Buyers Guide shows, other “online retailers don’t always live up to expectations…”

• Forrester states while 41% of online consumers expect an email reply within 6 hours, only 36% of e-tailers respond that quickly
• 21% claim to take between 6-24 hours
• 18% “          “1-2 days
• 7%”          “2-3 days
• 4%”          “more than 3 days
• 14% never reply at all

At least the ShopVisible merchants are contacting their customers to ensure sound practices and quality customer satisfaction.

Up next: ShopVisible’s Shipping integrations and choosing an Ecommerce solution provider.

ShopVisible is located at 1095 Zonolite Road, Suite100, Atlanta, GA. 30306.

ShopVisible Ecommerce solution

-Customer Service
-Shipping Integration
-Email Marketing
-OMS
-Security and Payment Processing
-User Generated Content
-SEO
-Social Networking
-Site Analytics

Check back with us soon for the first installment showcasing Ecommerce customer service and the online retail experience.

ShopVisible's Ecommerce Solution

1. Title Tags: Title tags are essential to search.  While SEO experts stress different strategies for choosing your title tag meta data (i.e. focus on brand name) Jackson recommends listing key terms and phrases associated with your products or industry, and we at SV agree.  For each page of your new site, pick around five key terms related to the content specific to that page. Separate words by commas and list in order of importance with the most targeted words towards the front.  The title tag creates the underlined text that appears in search results when an online shopper is looking for the products or services related to your business.  If Google can’t read your title tag well, they won’t be able to find you.

2. Domain Name: Jackson recommends choosing a domain name that serves as a ‘category killer’ or the top key term for your industry.  Generally, older domain names that already contain a number of backlinks are ideal.  Search engines tend to favor domain names who have been around for a number of years.

3. Link Building: Inbound links can strongly affect search ranking.  Creating external blogs that link back to your new site and asking friends to link from their sites to yours are some a couple ways to rack up inbound links.  Remember–not only is the quantity of inbound links important, but the quality helps as well.  You will do better in search if reputable sites with high page ranks (i.e. something like CNN.com) link to your site.  The way search engines see it, if an ‘authority’ in your industry is sending people to your site, you’re likely credible and/or relevant.  Also, Jackson points out that when an outside source links to one of your pages, they should create the hyperlink around key terms related to that page.  For example, if a designer writes about that cool Nooka watch you sell on your site, they should hyperlink “Nooka watch” and send it to your Nooka watch product page.

There is a lot of learn when it comes to SEO, but every bit counts.  Make sure to remember title tags, domain name, and inbound links when launching your new site.  They will make a difference to your business.

ShopVisible is an ecommerce solution headquartered in Atlanta, GA.