Archive: January, 2016

4 Helpful Articles for Your eCommerce Business

  • If you saw a rise fraud attempts this holiday season, you weren’t alone. Check out these findings from ACI Worldwide detailing an increase in eCommerce Transactions and corresponding fraud attempts.
  • Security is a big deal in retail, and hackers know it. Trustwave has advice for holding them at bay.
  • If you use Magento, make sure you address these critical cross-site scripting vulnerabilities.
  • Use these suggestions to recover up to 30% of abandoned carts.
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Use Your ERP Software to Avoid a “Big eCommerce Short”

SmPmtPicThis article compares increasing eCommerce sales to the housing market bubble. It discusses loss of sales in the checkout process that merchants might know about, calling it a new “big short.” The article continues to explain where the sales breakdowns occur, including the checkout process, consumer confidence in the merchant, and how payment declines are handled.

You can use your ERP system to help avoid each of those breakdown points. Using a smart checkout process and your ERP system to its potential, your eCommerce business can provide your customers with a smooth purchase process and the information you need to monitor it. Here are just a few ways to help protect your eCommerce business against abandoned carts:

Checkout process – Keep it simple. Show your shoppers the checkout flow to let them know what to expect. Keep it efficient with as few steps as possible. Giving customers an up-front shipping estimate, or the option to bypass registration (when appropriate) can eliminate some of the breakdown at checkout.

Trust – This is a big deal. Customers don’t want to think about security – they want you to. And if you’re not easy to contact, they may go elsewhere.

It can be complicated for any business to keep up with all the cyber attacks and payment fraud going on around us, but you must be vigilant. Keep up with your PCI DSS requirements, have a security process and an incident response plan, and train your employees on them. A good ERP system can help with features such as fraud scoring, and it will support your PCI DSS efforts to keep your sensitive data safe.

Make sure your customers can reach you immediately with any questions. Display your phone number where it can be easily and quickly seen. If a shopper has a question or problem navigating your site, make sure you can help. Keep Customer Service always at your customers’ fingertips, and make sure your customer service reps can pull up the customer’s shopping cart, edit it, and help the customer get through checkout if necessary.

Payment Declines – This is when knowing your business and your customers is so important. While you can detect patterns that are typical of fraud, you may also be flagging valid transactions, especially if you do business internationally.

Know Your Business – Where are your transactions failing? Put a process in place to check your data regularly, and follow it. Review the tools from your payment gateway(s), Google Analytics, and reports from your ERP system to see what might be causing a problem. And use these suggestions to recover up to 30% of abandoned carts with Email reminders. Use your data to your advantage by making adjustments where they’re needed.

It’s your business; be aware of it. Don’t bet against yourself.

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Increase Sales by Soliciting Customer Feedback

It is important to know what your customers think of your products because then you know how you can improve your offerings, and where you should consider raising or lowering prices. Additionally, reviews can increase sales by steering and bolstering confidence as new shoppers are considering a making a purchase.

InOrder lets you review the reviews, edit them when necessary while saving the original, but most importantly, it gives you a chance to discuss and resolve problems with customers who might not otherwise come back next time due to a misunderstanding or a solvable problem. It also lets your reps see a customer’s past reviews and thank the customer, or use their feedback to help make new recommendations.

Regardless of these conveniences, it is vital to keep customers engaged after a sale because then they are more likely to remember your website the next time they are ready to make their next purchase. A perfect way to seal this deal with busy customers is to send an email that offers a small compensation, such as a $5 coupon for customers who submit their first follow-up review to your site. The coupon code can simply be a key code linked to a promotion that allows one-time customer use.  InOrder will only allow a discount up to the amount of the purchase.

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Sales and Search Results – Opportunities for eCommerce with Responsive Mobile Design

A website with responsive design adjusts to the sizes of all devices shoppers are using, naturally providing optimal presentation. For a web store, the result is a single cart that functions for both PC and mobile, with a similar look and feel, regardless of device size, no longer requiring multiple web sites. This means a better shopping experience for your users, which can translate to more sales and higher search rankings.

The alternatives to responsive design are dynamic serving or maintaining a separate website for mobile shoppers. Dynamic serving uses different HTML for different types of devices, so when users search for information, results for the same site are shared between different versions of HTML. Hopefully, a mobile site using dynamic serving is set up properly; otherwise, Google might not even find the mobile content. Maintaining a separate web store for mobile shoppers is (at least) twice the work as having a single online web store. Each supported device requires a separate web site. Otherwise, it might not display properly to mobile users, increasing the number of people who leave the website after visiting only one page (raising bounce rates), and risking loss of would-be customers to frustration. If your site is awkward for mobile users, you could be decreasing your own search results and sales.

Morse Data InOrder ERP Mobile WebResponsive design eliminates these concerns. It is more cost-effective and easier to manage than maintaining two separate websites, it uses the same HTML for all devices, and it provides a better experience for users who switch between devices and for those who share links to websites. It is also Google’s recommended design for all devices

Google can more efficiently index your website if it uses responsive design, and it isn’t necessary to redirect a URL, which doesn’t increase the time it takes to load your website. In addition, responsive design provides a better experience for all users. Font sizes have a consistent appearance, so users don’t have to work hard to see the content (no double-tapping or pinch-to-zoom necessary), and links are large enough for fingers to use accurately.

There is a lot of research to support the decision for responsive design. According to a survey by Signal, 85% of respondents plan to shop using PCs or laptops, 67% plan to browse more from phones or tablets, and 60% plan to buy more from phones or tablets than they did last year. And according to this article, 75% of adult internet users have two or more devices for online use, and 67% switch between devices them, so responsive design is a sound business decision.

For details about InOrder’s responsive mobile design, or for a demo of InOrder eCommerce, contact Morse Data Corporation.

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