Best Practices Blog

The Bundle feature is a feature central to Adrecom's E-commerce Suite that allows an e-catalog owner to display products that are comprised of several products from the existing catalog.

 

Bundles

The standard e-catalog product is an individual product. However, in almost every industry it is possible to purchase a series of related products in one complete package, known as a Bundle. Bundles are created based on thoroughly-researched and well-documented shopping patterns and customer preferences.

Bundles are a group of products in your catalog sold together as one item. Like with Related Products, these products are clearly related to one another and complement or enhance usage of the base product. The difference is that they are purchased as one unit together. For example, Lobster's Elite Grand V LE is a bundle made of several products, all listed in tandem.

 

There are several ways to organize your bundles in the Back Office and present them in the Front Office, or front end. One way is to utilize the Bundles application in the back end to create and describe bundles, which is done almost exactly like creating products, i.e., naming the title and providing basic and required information. You can then select any number of products you want (typically done within reason and including 3 or 4 products) to comprise that bundle. After making the bundle(s) you can decide whether you want them to be contained throughout your e-catalog along with all products by assigning them to existing product categories, or conversely you can create a specific category for bundles only. Depending on your goals, this can be a wise alternative; some products are understood as inherently including several products in one and might not necessarily be seen as a bundle. However, if you want to advertise a bundle as such in terms of a promotion or discount, it’s wise to create a category for bundles.

Consider, for a moment, that an e-catalog is a popular way to make the shopping experience very easy for customers. Online shopping has certain perks that shopping at brick-and-mortar stores does not have, such as 24/7 availability and readily-provided information about all topics in the content management system. However, in order to overcome the lack of physical access to tangible items — i.e., the useful tendency of picking up an item and looking at it from all angles — webstores need to make optimal usage of high quality product imagery and other media elements, such as video and flash. This blog post discusses how images and video create are a necessary element of a successful e-commerce product catalog.

Images

First things first, images are the simplest and most basic way to let your customers see how a product looks and the first step in creating an authentic shopping experience, more than a visit to a site. Images need to be consistently structured in a template, juxtaposed logically to product descriptions and should be high quality shots that are easy on the eye, such as photos taken against a white backdrop.

Another wise way to utilize imagery is to provide several pictures of one product taken from different angles, which is as close you can get to letting users to feel as if they are picking up the product and examining it. Even slight variations in the images, such as in the following example from Eve Pearl, a website with an e-catalog containing beauty products, can do the trick.

 

 

You can also display images, such as printers, with a shelf open or in an open position for further clarity. Including images of a product being used, or worn (if clothing or jewelry) is another way to add realism to your product representation.

In addition to providing good quality shots of your products, consider implementing a light box effect, which displays a larger and higher quality image in the center of the screen when a user clicks on the product. Such an image can be high enough quality as to show some of the texture of the product.

Depending on the product and motif of the website, creative, out-of-the-box e-catalogs might be useful, such as those with thematic backgrounds versus a single and subdued color.

Video

Video more than supersedes a 3-dimensional aspect to your catalog, it as well incorporates a large amount of useful information about the product or services advertised in the e-catalog. Video can be used in a variety of ways:

• To display the product being used and to show it from all angles
• To provide instruction on how to use a product
• To provide information about a product or event in a form other than written communication
• To include customer testimonials about your product or service

Each of these uses provides an interactive experience for the customer visiting your site. Furthermore, you can place videos on Youtube and other social media, which allows people to get the word out on your product on your behalf!

All-in-all, the combined usage of images and videos integrated into your product catalog add a level of sophistication and dynamism that webstores without them lack.

At Adrecom, we service a variety of customers in both the B2C (standard business-to-customer model) and B2B (business-to-business) categories. We have carefully and specifically developed the features and applications found in our Back Office to satisfy the business needs of both types of customers. What is largely true about B2B transactions, however, is that their orders and purchases typically involve a larger amount of raw materials. Such companies can make ideal use of our distributor and wholesaler portal, which comes with a tiered pricing model so we have designed our system to make such tiered pricing models and other essential B2B applications plainly visible on the front end as areas of focus.

For example, Safety Idesco provides locks and lock-related items, but one of its areas of focus is its safety signs. This is a great example of the type of B2B transactions that Adrecom facilitates because, generally speaking, safety signs are sold from business to business and in relatively large quantities. Tiered pricing allows business interested in making sign purchases what quantity discounts are available for them.

In the image to the left, Caution: Trip Hazard (With Symbol) Safety Idesco’s sign is set at a base price of $9.50 between 1 and 5 items, and at $7.25 for 25 signs and above. Furthermore, Safety Idesco has an e-catalog containing an order of 2,000 products, the majority of which are set with tiered pricing quantity discounts. On the back end, our user platform is as well equipped with bulk export and import capabilities for quick and easy manipulation of large amounts of information at virtually the same time.

The goal is to create a viable and working bridge between the Back End and the Front End. Adrecom integrates a high level of quote management capability that allows sales representatives and dealers to establish pricing quotes and store them in the Back Office while making them visible to customers who sign in to their accounts or contact the company directly. For example, Safety Idesco’s Best Sellers product category contains a relatively large quantity of products whose prices are only available for members who directly contact the company through the provided number. Such a setting is available through the Back End and template configurations.

Another example is Quality Scrub Sets’ shipping calculator, located conveniently on the product purchase page. Other promotions, such as coupon code discounts, can be made available on this and other pages as well.

Our goal is to give your site a solid and powerful web presence when it comes to B2B. To this end we make the final step of the business administrator’s transaction, the purchase, as quick and easy as possible. We provide out-of-the-box virtual POS capability designed to make your entire purchasing experience hassle-free.

1. Bulk Exports/Imports
2. Images Associated with Products
3. Related Products
4. Videos

---

Product catalog management is a multi-tiered process that allows you to store, administer and add, edit and delete new and existing items to and from your e-catalog. Using the Adrecom CMS Suite you can manage your media assets by simultaneously exporting and import multiple catalogs in bulk for backup and storage. Since there are a variety of different elements that can be exported and imported, suffice it to say that the process for each is slightly different for each application. This post will provide the conceptual model to understand how each application is exported from and imported to the back office. While this post delineates the conceptual model by which exports and imports are carried out, it does not itself instruct you how to perform exports and imports. Since the process is somewhat complex, we have written a series of manuals describing how to perform exports and imports rather than creating video tutorials.

Bulk Exports/Imports

The Adrecom Back Office is equipped with the ability to house a large quantity of products, and some of our websites, such as ID Security Online, currently contain an e-catalog housing more than 3,000 items. Most e-catalogs are updated on a semi-regular basis, which usually involves adding new products. When updating the e-catalog requires adding a large order of products it becomes necessary to upload a large number of products simultaneously. Without such a feature the process of updating the e-catalog could potentially be quite time-consuming and inefficient.

For this reason Adrecom has developed a sophisticated method by which products (and categories) can be uploaded to the database at once. The user platform, or Back Office, stores a record of all products manually or automatically uploaded (in bulk), and a user can import and export products using an Excel spreadsheet.

We can illustrate this process in brief by contrasting with what happens in the Back Office when a product is saved manually, or individually and not in bulk. When a user creates, or adds, a product, he is required to fill out certain pieces of information about the product, such as its SKU, Title, Price, etc, and each piece of information is filled out in a field, clicking on a checkbox, or in some other manner. After having filled out the fields and saving the product, the user can export an Excel sheet from the Back Office that displays all the information entered for any and all products saved. In the Excel sheet, each field or checkbox on that product’s page corresponds to a column, and each row corresponds to a product.

For example, the following image is a screenshot of the basic information belonging to the product assigned the SKU S2304. This particular product corresponds to a specific row in the exported Excel file, and each field on this page corresponds to a specific column.

Image A — Columns A - D

Image B — Product S2304 in Row 1214

To illustrate this, notice that Row 1214 in ImageA corresponds to the product in the Image B. In Image A, Column A and Column B display the product’s category and index respectively, which are displayed elsewhere in the Back Office. However, note that Column C and Column D display information that is located in the above image. Column C, the SKU column, displays an identical number to the one populating the SKU field, and Column D, the SEO Title column, displays identical information to that placed in the SEO Title field. Each field in the above image corresponds to a column in the Excel spreadsheet.

In other words, Columns A - D respectively correspond to the Category, Index, SKU and SEO Title fields. Rows 1213 - 1221 in Image A correspond to a set of 9 products that exist in the Back Office. The entire e-catalog is stored in the Back Office in this way and product information can be edited by changing the information in the Excel file and importing it into the Back Office.

Note: You cannot delete products by deleting them from the Excel sheet and then reimporting it. The Back Office remembers which products have already been imported by bulk, so if you delete a product from an Excel sheet and reimport it, you will find that it still exists in the Back Office. This protects against deleting a product from the database in the case that you accidentally delete it from the Excel sheet and import it.

The Adrecom Solution

To illustrate a practical example of how the bulk product import feature is used, ID Security Online, an e-commerce printer site, has an e-catalog of approximately 3,000 products. The majority of these products were entered into the Back Office by means of bulk product import. In short, the bulk export/import feature is a superb way to create a large number of products at once.

Back to Top

---

Images Associated with Products

Just as you can upload products in bulk to the Back Office, you can also upload images in bulk, although the process is slightly different.

Let’s say, for example, that your e-catalog contains an order of some 3,000 products, and each one needs an image. One way of assigning an image to each product is to manually insert an image into each product. While this method is the recommended one for inserting images into a relatively small amount of products, such as 5 or 10, there is another, more efficient method for inserting images into a large number of products, such as 20, 50, 100 or 1000.

The Adrecom CMS media assets management system provides its users with an interactive web-based bulk upload feature. Rather than manually inserting an image saved on your hard drive into the product page, which will take a relatively large amount of time for more than 10 products, or even 5, you have the ability to upload many images at once. Without going into instructional details of how to do this, which will be covered in another page on the website, we will instead give you a conceptual model of how this is accomplished. The Back Office is designed to hold a large number of image files (.jpg). In order to assign each product with an image, a user uploads all of the image files into the Back Office image library. Once having done this, the user exports the file of all the relevant products (those which need images) and associates the product with the image via the image’s extension. After having imported the Excel file back into the Back Office, each product then appears on the front end with the image associated with it.

The Adrecom Solution

When Safety Idesco needed to attach images to each of its products, it made use of Adrecom’s image upload feature. Safety Idesco is a perfect example of the express purpose of Adrecom’s bulk image upload feature since Safety Idesco contains almost 2,000 products. Suffice it to say that our team used the bulk image upload feature to attach images to each product on the Safety Idesco site.

Back to Top

---

Related Products

Upsales and Cross Sales are two terms that sound a lot alike, and in truth are similar, but nevertheless contain relevant and significant differences. What they share in common is that they are both widely-used marketing strategies; what distinguishes between them is as to the specific nature of the marketing strategy in the first place.

Upsales

Upsales refers to offering a customer a more expensive item, one that is higher quality or better in some way, or simply offers more features. For example, a customer might be upsold a dual-side printer versus a single-side printer on the grounds that a dual-sided printer prints on both sides of the card. Given this feature, someone using the printer can create more professional cards or can save the time it takes to pass a stack of cards back through the printer to create an image on the opposing side. Depending on the customer’s needs it might be worth the extra money spent on a superior item or one with more capabilities.

Cross-Sales

A cross-sale refers to offering a customer additional or supplementary items along with the original product he intended to buy. For example, a customer shopping for an ID card printer might be interested in purchasing a printer cleaning kit, an additional color ribbon to anticipate the time when his ceases to function, or a software program to enhance user operability. The additional items he purchases cost more money now, but might save him money in the long run. Both the company and the customer benefit from upsales and cross-sales: the company benefits for the obvious reason that cross-sales mean increased revenue, and the customer saves money by acquiring items that lengthen the lifespan of his original purchase.

While these marketing strategies are the cornerstone of brick-and-mortar shops, they also play an important role in e-commerce sales. Cross-selling online increases company revenues on a yearly basis for a large portion of e-commerce merchants.

The Adrecom Solution

The Zoe B and ID Security Online websites are two sites that make ample use of the Related Products feature. Each site uses this feature to associate products in its e-catalog with other products located in the e-catalog. The related products are displayed on a specific product page. How the related products are displayed on product zoom pages, which is the page belonging to an individual product, depends on your template settings and configurations. For example, ID Security Online displays supplies associated with specific printers in a tab on the product zoom page, in this case, Card Printer Supplies (the third tab in the window beneath the printer image).

Back to Top

---

Videos

By now the conceptual model is clear; importing any element into the Back Office, be they images, products or related products is the same — each column in the imported Excel spreadsheet corresponds with and represents a piece of information that is otherwise manually entered and saved in the Back Office. The same is therefore true of videos. All exported video spreadsheet contain a basic set of rows containing information such as: categories, index, source type, video file name, 3^rd party website code and tag. Depending on if a site administrator has added any custom fields, the spreadsheet can also contain additional columns.

To illustrate this point, Image A, a snapshot of an Excel spreadsheet of ID Security Online’s video’s, corresponds to Image B, ID Security Online’s front end video page.

Image A — Snapshot of Excel Spreadsheet of ID Security Online’s Video Page

Image B — Four Video’s from ID Security Online’s Video Page

The Adrecom Solution

ID Security Online currently displays 13 video’s on its video page, and all of these were imported into the Back Office through a bulk import, not manually.


Back to Top

---

Just as you can upload products in bulk to the Back Office, you can also upload images in bulk, although the process is slightly different.

Let’s say, for example, that your e-catalog contains an order of some 3,000 products, and each one needs an image. One way of assigning an image to each product is to manually insert an image into each product. While this method is the recommended one for inserting images into a relatively small amount of products, such as 5 or 10, there is another, more efficient method for inserting images into a large number of products, such as 20, 50, 100 or 1000.

The Adrecom CMS media assets management system provides its users with an interactive web-based bulk upload feature. Rather than manually inserting an image saved on your hard drive into the product page, which will take an enormous amount of time for more than 10 products, or even 5, you have the ability to upload many images at once. Without going into instructional details of how to do this, which will be covered in another page on the website, we will instead give you a conceptual model of how this is accomplished. The Back Office is designed to hold a large number of image files (.jpg). In order to assign each product with an image, a user uploads all of the image files into the Back Office image library. Once having done this, the user exports the file of all the relevant products (those which need images) and associates the product with the image via the image’s extension. After having imported the Excel file back into the Back Office, each product then appears on the front end with the image associated with it.

When Safety Idesco needed to attach images to each of its products, it made use of Adrecom’s image upload feature. Safety Idesco is a perfect example of the express purpose of Adrecom’s bulk image upload feature since Safety Idesco contains almost 2,000 products. Suffice it to say that our team used the bulk image upload feature to attach images to each product on the Safety Idesco site.

A popular demand for many websites is to display a specified page designated for images. This is especially relevant for image-heavy websites, and for such sites it is beneficial to contain all their images in a gallery versus on individual pages. If a site contains a high volume of images, the image pages can number in the 100’s or even higher. A better alternative is to create a gallery, in which each page displays thumbnails of each of the relevant or desired images. When the user clicks on or hovers the cursor over the image, a larger version of that image is displayed in a separate window. This methodology achieves the desired result of displaying a high volume of images while avoiding a high number of image pages.

This methodology is perfectly suited for a website that wants to showcase a particular event or series of events that they hosted or attended. It can also be used just to draw attention to a certain press release or media coverage reported by a major media outlet or news station. For example, Zoe B, a company that sells 14 karat gold and sterling silver pieces and fine jewelry with genuine gemstones and pearls, advertises its media presence using Adrecom’s gallery feature.

Creating a reputation for your company as a leader in a particular field or industry depends in large part on the ability to creatively apply technological outlets to all the available media forms. Adrecom’s Content Management System (CMS) is compatible with static images, videos, flash files and podcasts, enabling you to advertise your enterprise in a dynamic, impactful and creative manner. The process of streamlining content, tagging, publishing and managing approval messages is further made easy via Adrecom’s Content Management Suite and single user interface.

Fortunately, usage of this feature is not limited only to publicizing a certain event – it is also ideal for including images in a written piece, such as in an article, news story or blog. The Global Thoughts website, which serves as a sophisticated travel log, notebook and photo collection of the author’s journeys and thoughts, makes exemplary use of this feature on a number of its articles. Depending on their size, individually inserting images into a written piece might require resizing and formatting them appropriately so that they are all flush and are positioned properly within the text. Using the gallery feature creates a thumbnail version of all the images placed in the gallery and positions them at the top and/or bottom of the page in an organized fashion. This feature has been optimized so that you can easily associate a gallery with its respective article and once having created the galleries you can as well associate several with one article, creating for dynamic and highly controllable image management. When you click on each thumbnail, a larger version of the image is displayed individually without taking you to a new page. The gallery feature is a perfect solution when you don’t need the pictures to be juxtaposed within the text itself, but just in case you do, you can combine both image functionalities by inserting some into the text in the traditional manner and others into the gallery – the choice is up to you.

Summary

The Adrecom bulk image upload feature allows you to:

• Publicize hosted or attended events
• Upload content in bulk using an intuitive web-based functionality
• Share, upload and modify permission settings
• Exercise high control over gallery creation and image placement
• Perform advanced searches across a broad spectrum of media
• Import and export meta data using Excel spreadsheets

While coupon usage make up a fundamental part-and-parcel of traditional commerce, it is also true that e-tailers have much to gain from making use of promotions and coupons. This post contains a summary of wise and unwise discount practices and how coupons and promotions are used (and should be) in the world of e-commerce.

Wise Practices

Broad Application

One of the best practices to adopt with regards to e-tailer promotional coupons and discounts is to set up coupons so that they are applicable to a relatively large number of items or item categories. By casting a wider net you create more opportunities for customers to save on your products, which raises the probability that they will spend money on them. If you exclude a large number of products from the discounts available with a coupon or set of coupons, you might also exclude customers.

The Choice: Dollar Amount or Percent Savings?

A good practice when establishing discounts is to fluctuate between fixed dollar amount and percentage savings based on the price of the sale. For example, it is better to use dollar amount discounts for relatively low purchases, such as those less than $100, and to use percentage savings for purchases higher than that. For example, a fixed coupon, such as one offering $25 off any purchase lower than $100, creates a substantial saving and is generally preferred by most customers. However, the same discount applied to more expensive purchases generate less clicks and it is better to go with a discount that increases along with total purchase price.

Free Shipping

It would be a slight misnomer to suggest that free shipping is a perk when in fact (according to Forrester Research, a global research and advisory firm) free product shipping will either make or break the deal. According to a 2008 finding by the Conference Board, as high as %90 of consumers say that free shipping would persuade them to make larger online purchases.

Shifting between Automatic and Manual

It’s smart to make it as easy as possible for a customer to utilize a coupon. While one way of doing this is to issue relatively short coupon codes, no longer than 10 digits, but preferably shorter, another way is to automate coupon code entry by installing a coupon button that automatically enters and applies the coupon. Customers will sense that the company is trying to make their shopping experience easier and more streamlined, and they would be right. Customers also appreciate seeing their discount applied and displayed on the screen once having clicked the coupon button.

Unwise Practices

Coupon Complexity

One of the worst practices to adopt with regards to e-tailer promotional coupons and discounts is to set up coupons with unnecessarily long coupon codes. Left to human error, which is common enough given that many customers manually jot down coupon codes, a coupon is rendered unusable. Best practices suggest to avoid using codes with strings of 15 or more digits, but rather to limit yourself to no more than 10, and preferably less.

Greed

If you’ve found a goose that lays a golden egg, keep it alive. In other words, avoid the temptation to raise the minimum sale amount necessary in order to receive a discount, which just might kill the sale in the first place. For example, if you find that most customers tend to purchase two products for a $50 total, it might not be the wisest practice to raise the $10 discount minimum purchase to $75. The additional $25 might not be worth the $10 savings. This is largely a case-by-case principle and should be handled individually.

Ignoring New Customers

While it’s important to keep your fan base happy, it’s also important to reach out to newcomers, who generally speaking have larger orders than regular customers. New customers as well appreciate larger discounts as a way of showing them that their business is appreciated. Offering higher discounts for new customers is a good way of turning them into repeat customers.

Navigation Confusion

One way to shortchange conversion rates is to design a confusing navigational structure. For example, customers appreciate it when clicking on a coupon link directs them to the landing page of the discounted item, not to a more general category page. Even better than directing the customer to the product page, create a coupon landing page for all the coupons on the site.

When Globalthoughts.com contacted Adrecom they needed to refurbish their entire blog, which contained a large amount of narrative and pictorial records of the author's travels to over 30 countries worldwide. With more than 400 articles spread over 7 distinct categories, a concentrated effort had to be placed into transferring the content into the new CMS. Using its A+ Content Migration Methodology, Adrecom was able to expediently and smoothly migrate all of his site content while preserving the pre-existing logical structure, links to various forms of media and textual formatting.

Had it not been for Adrecom’s professionally-designed content management system, categorizing the large quantity of articles into the original site’s pre-existing category blueprint would have been a formidable and time-consuming task. Using Adrecom’s logical and effective architectural system and Back Office expertise, they were able to systematically identify each article’s appropriate category and assign them accordingly.

One of the central tasks during the transfer process was to ensure that all pre-existing relationships were maintained, namely links to various forms of media, such as PDF documents, images and videos. One way of accomplishing this task was to apply redirects to URL’s, while another way was to restructure the URL’s themselves using an automated process.

Additionally, Adrecom’s web design team designed an entirely new, sleek and neat Front End layout making site navigation superbly easy while creating the worldly, thoughtful and comfortable motif the site owner was looking for. Several capabilities were incorporated into the site’s layout, such as a featured article section allowing the site owner to select which articles to display on the Home Page. Sections were as well created to display most recently posted articles and photos, giving the site a sense of dynamism accurately representing the owner’s goals.

The original site contained a score of images located in a specific image category. While this structure was maintained, the Content Management System introduced its photo gallery feature useful for organizing and categorizing a high volume of images.

Perhaps one of the most important tasks in the Global Thoughts project was to accurately index the articles, which make up the body of the site. The author titled the majority of his written pieces by date, which were included in the article title. While it was possible to manually re-order the large body of articles manually by date, a script was written in order to automate the indexing process to avoid this time-consuming and error-prone task.

All-in-all, the Global Thoughts project was a success. After the completion of the legacy transfer process, the Adrecom team provided the site owner with the guidance and instruction needed to independently and regularly update his site.

RainbowBroadband.com contacted Adrecom in 2012 with one major goal in mind: transferring a large set of content from its old CMS to a new and more highly configurable content management system.

Founded in 2005 as collaborative services broadband provider to the media industry, Rainbow Broadband provides broadband access to the Manhattan commercial district utilizing its proprietary Hybrid Fiber Microwave Network. Businesses in the district directly benefit from their installed iPhone and Android device access points, which free up the congested cellular networks in the region. Rainbow Broadband also provides last mile connectivity to carriers, and several major media companies used their services, such Disney, Columbia Pictures and Blip TV.

Looking for a software platform and development team capable of transferring their content and maximizing their web presence, they chose Adrecom’s CMS Suite. Adrecom was able to easily and fully transfer Rainbow Broadband’s large and varied body of content, including images, diagrams, PDF’s and other media while preserving its existing structure. Adrecom also refurbished Rainbow Broadband’s information architecture by configuring an easy-to-use navigation structure and integrating intuitive information request and contact forms.

Adrecom’s user platform system enables internal staff to affect regular informational updates, such as newsletters and press releases and to inform front end users of upcoming special events, as well as images, videos and podcasts. The Press page is professionally built with press coverage categorized at the top of the page by year starting with 2004. Site administrators can also update specifically configured sections, such as their Client page displaying all of Rainbow Broadband’s clients with an accompanying business logo. Other optional features include a rotating company logo image at the bottom of each page.

Rainbow Broadband is social media-enabled to integrate with Facebook, Twitter and Blogger RSS and contains an interactive Google Map location page for finding directions from anywhere in the United States. With its newly-organized informational structure and advanced and easily-manageable back-end capabilities, Rainbow Broadband can focus its energies on extending its network to the media industry.

B2B, or business-to-business, refers to purchase transactions taking place between two or more companies or businesses, usually on a large scale. B2B is different from other forms of transaction types, such as B2C, which is the standard business-to-customer model, or B2G, business-to-government. The main activity of B2B is to provide other companies with the items and parts that they will use on the retailer end. For this reason, the raw amount of materials sold between businesses is greater than those sold within B2C. For example, a retailer sells a finished product combined of several items, all of which were purchased either from one or more vendors. In the last decade, business has taken a considerable turn from brick-and-mortar shops to online transactions, a prominent subset of B2B sometimes known as E-B2B. Business-to-business itself is comprised of several subcategories which will be discussed in this post.

Company Websites

Company websites serve as online warehouses, are largely designed to advertise products in bulk or services to other companies and/or create a company’s online presence. An example of such a relationship is a printer manufacturer that purchases card hoppers, printheads and print ribbons in order to produce the final product of a printer. The printer manufacturer buys these parts directly from the manufacturer or through a dealership site, which is the topic of the next section.

Dealership Websites

Dealership Websites act as intercessors between companies seeking to purchase specific products or services and between the companies that provide them. A good model to understand the seller-dealer-manufacturer relationship is a real estate agent, who actively seeks out potential home renters or buyers and puts them in contact with those renting, leasing or selling their homes. The benefit of using the help of a dealership is that they are often well-versed in the specific industry and provide competitive prices.

Procurement Websites

Procurement websites allow companies to interact with a vendor in a more detailed fashion, allowing them to make requests and bids on a vendor site. Procurement sites typically specialize either a specific market or in a range of industries.

Gateways

Gateways are websites that act as their own self-contained internets,” providing businesses with an array of information such as chat functionality, discussion forums and product listings. Some gateways allow visitors to buy and sell as well.

Informational Websites

Informational websites are designed to provide businesses with a specific set of information relevant to the industry at hand and can take the form of blogs or news release pages but also include specialized search sites.

The Adrecom Solution

The last decade has seen considerable success for B2B with statistical studies published as early as 2000 showing that B2B exceeded internet retailing (or e-tailing) by ten times. Adrecom facilitates the growth of your business by providing specific key features with a track record of bringing success to businesses. We offer distributors and wholesalers a self-service portal with tiered pricing and quick payment orders and high profile manageability to create and maintain sub-accounts.

Other Key Features Include:

• Profile management ability to create and maintain sub-accounts with master user functionality.
• B2B buyer's registrations, approval and accounts settings with personalized confirmations.
• Quote Management capability for dealers and sales representatives to create quotes, store them in the back end system and make them accessible for customers through their accounts.
• Customer Shipping Configurations such as flat rate shipping, free shipping, or table-based rate schedules.
• Out-of-the-box virtual POS capability and phone ordering automations.
• Automatic orders and customer account synchronization with Intuit QuickBooks and Sage Act accounting systems.
• Ready-to-go-web services and EDI-based integration with orders fulfillment, ERP and CRM systems.

What is Good Quality Writing?

There are several aspects to good quality writing and a well-developed blog post takes all of them into account. Reputation, charisma and appearance are important ingredients in the success of any company and they can take you a long way. However, for writing intensive websites, such as those which inform readers about a plethora of topics, the internal aspects need to be thoroughly developed as well. At the end of the day there just is no way to avoid presenting good quality written material that focuses directly on the subject at hand and conveys information in a skillful manner. Information-heavy sites do not have the luxury of not becoming, if they aren’t already, sources of expertise in a particular field or area or writing engaging blog posts.

Relevance

Arguably the most important ingredient in good quality writing is relevance – the written material must focus on the main topic of interest and relate it in readily understandable and practical terms to the reader. The reader should be able to understand the relevance of the topic early on in the post. In relation to thematic blogs, such as those revolving around a particular field or industry, some of the work has already been done for the author. Nominally speaking, only people interested in printers and the related field will visit a website dedicated to selling and informing readers about printer-related topics. In such cases the author does not need to persuade the reader of the relevance of the post because the reader has actively sought out such an information source.

However, the material must convey to the reader relevant aspects relating to the topic. For example, a potential buyer might visit an online printer store with the intent of purchasing a printer. A well-written blog post might bring important facets of choosing a printer to the reader’s attention, such as how to clean and maintain a printer properly or how to acquire the appropriate printer ribbons or other parts. Even a knowledgeable reader must be given a level of practical direction when it comes to the given topic. The author’s assumption should be that no reader knows everything about the topic.

Grammar and Spelling

Grammar is to language as a storefront is to a store – the store might contain the best items on the market, but if the storefront is disorganized or messy nobody will take a step inside. Good grammar encourages the reader to continue reading and makes the written material pleasant to read and easy to understand, while good spelling helps the company's image. This is especially true in light of the information at hand not being communicated verbally; the reader relies on grammatical cues to parse the written material appropriately and does not have the luxury of hearing inflections in speech.

Although there is no inherent relationship between an online store’s product quality and its writing quality, there is no way for a potential buyer to avoid making the connection between the two. The fact is that writing quality reflects on the comprehensive image of the company as a whole. Well-written information about industry-relevant topics, or written material in general for that matter, convey to the reader/potential buyer that the company is run by people who know what they’re doing. In effect, written material itself becomes one of the company’s products, even if the company is not an information-heavy site or does not have a blog.

Logic

The logical arrangement of written material is the key to producing good quality and easily decipherable blog posts. A written piece typically starts by conveying general and introductory information to the reader and then moves on into more complex, secondary and peripheral topics. The basic theme is stated early on during the post and is then supplemented by additional information, with each separate concept being relegated to its own paragraph or paragraphs. The goal is to walk the reader through a virtual tour of the concept at hand so that he can get a thorough, yet simple, if possible, understanding of the topic and how it relates to him.

Reference Information

A good blog post as well seeks to make the process of collecting information as easy as possible. This often includes creating links for the reader that will direct him, or give him the option to, visit other pages on the site in relation to his needs. This involves considering his motives for visiting the site and then guiding him appropriately through the information in the site. It is also important not to inundate him with options, but rather to expand his search.


Recap of the main points discussed in this post:

• Relevance
• Grammar and Spelling
• Logic
• Reference Information
  

The Adrecom Solution

Adrecom's Enterprise Blogging Suite offers your company CMS Enterprise Blogging, providing you with high quality content supplemented by all the tools need to create attractive, content-rich blogs in an easy-to-use platform.

Back to Top

The purpose of a blog, amongst many, is to provide an interesting informational platform about one or a variety of related topics. Regardless of what you use your blog for, there is one rule that seems to apply universally across the board regardless of what type of blog you actually have — let’s call it one of the blogging constants.

The Pre-scheduling Benefit

Providing a steady flow of information is a good practice when attempting to create a stable blog. The reason for this is the psychological and emotional effect of a consistently-updated blog on the reading public. After seeing that a certain blog is consistently updated readers will come to trust its author’s posting dependability, which leads to repeated visits. Repeated visits to a blog lead to the establishment of a growing fan base, at first with a few committed repeat visitors that steadily grows into a readership. Word of mouth plays a large role in the expansion of a readership as well, but there is no avoiding the importance of the availability of content. In theory, the more is available for people to read, the more they will find, which is why pre-scheduled posting is key to expanding your reader base.

The Mechanics of Pre-scheduling

Life doesn’t always allow the time or inspiration to write a consistently-updated blog, which is why it is wise to pre-schedule your blog posts. It is best to section off a few hours a week, or on a particular day when you have the time and the ideas, for writing a few good posts. You can then set them apart at any interval you want, such as every few days or on a weekly basis. Your readership will see that you have both the knowledge about your topic and interest to consistently provide material to your blog and will keep readers coming back. Further, the sheer availability of posts increases the chance of a user finding your blog through Google searches or other means.

Another benefit of pre-scheduling is that it avails you time to write more posts. For example, let’s say that you’ve pre-scheduled your posts to be published on a weekly basis and you’ve prepared material for the next three weeks. You now have three weeks until the next time you need to publish a post, which gives you ample time to think of a topic and prepare your material. The more time you have, the more likely it is that you can thoroughly research your topic and present quality content.

If your blog is comment-enabled, the chance that people will begin responding to the information in your blog is high, which generates conversation about the topic. This is also good for traffic purposes since people will repeatedly revisit your blog to see if someone, or you, has responded to their posts. It can also potentially increase the quality of your blog since readers might leave links to further reading, which can further generate more conversation.

Discretion

One thing to consider when pre-scheduling blog posts is to anticipate the response dynamic. There is often some overlap time between a reader’s comment and your next published post. A reader might think that a particular post is a response to their comment when in fact it was pre-set to be published on a certain date. Most readers understand in advance that writers pre-schedule their posts, but including a brief disclaimer that you use this feature is a good idea. All-in-all, pre-scheduling is a good method to establish a posting rhythm and is likely to increase your readership, and therefore your sales.

The Adrecom Solution

Adrecom is familiar with the best blogging practices accepted as standard norms in the blogosphere. Blog authors using the Adrecom editing tools can set their posts to display any date they wish using the calendar option. For information on how to post a blog, please visit our blog posting tutorial.

Back to Top

What is Order Abandonment?

Order Abandonment, sometimes known as Shopping Card Abandonment, is when a customer spends time on an e-commerce website, looks around, begins making a purchase and then abandons it at the last minute. It is not absolutely clear that shopping card abandonment suggests loss of orders because there are other factors that can drive a customer to discontinue the action. What is somewhat ambiguous, and therefore potentially frustrating, is that the cause of the abandonment is not always 100% clear. In such cases a company must carry out an investigation of sorts to uncover the reasons for order abandonment.

What is encouraging is that numerous studies have been carried out which attempt to catalog customer behavior and reasons for abandoning orders. This blog post will enumerate some of the major reasons behind order abandonment and discuss Adrecom’s solutions to such problems.

Why do Customers Abandon Orders?

The first thing to realize is that dissatisfaction with a product is not always the reason for abandoned orders; often times a customer will feel insecure, for a variety of reasons, when it comes to making purchase. As neutral as such behavior is it nevertheless suggests that a company must take certain actions in order to avoid it in the future.

Insecurity

One cause of order abandonment is related to SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and it is important to test run your checkout process in both Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers before going live, which handle security issues differently. For example, Internet Explorer might not recognize certain elements that are not referenced through an https: address. When IE doesn’t recognize, for example, something as innocent as an image, it will display a message that one or more of that page’s elements are not secure. Since a customer has come to the site in order make a purchase, such a message might very well push him away and cause him to discontinue his order. A great way to increase customer security during the purchasing process is by utilizing third party verification and to use a secure connection (SSL).

Order forms that request too much information might as well discourage a potential customer from making a purchase. Adrecom respects this concern and uses only uses order forms that request basic and standard information relevant for the creation of an order. If further information is required, consider placing a small message on the page for the customer to see.

Comparison Shopping

According to a study carried out by Web Surveyor Services in 2006, approximately 30% of e-commerce consumers discontinued their purchase due to comparison shopping. A relatively common practice is for a customer to complete every step in the purchasing process right up to the checkout stage in order to get a true picture of their cost after taxes and shipping. A customer might also repeat this procedure for several products until either making a purchase or leaving the site altogether, with every discontinued purchase registered as an abandoned order.

The Reports section of the Adrecom Back Office records certain information, such as date of use, product being viewed and the customer’s stage in the purchasing process, to help you understand customer behavior. An analysis based on these reports can lead your company to developing a stronger marketing strategy.

Distraction

A customer may find himself distracted by the amount of options offered to him on a webpage, or to a particularly distracting layout. An unclear or straightforward layout might also confuse the customer as to how the purchase process actually works or whether there are added costs. A good way to deal with this is to design a neat and organized layout whereby the customer’s eye can easily navigate around the page, making it easy to distinguish between and identify all elements. It is also wise to not bog the customer down with too much information — this can easily be avoided by creating individual pages for information that deserves its own attention.

Adrecom’s management and web design team are fully aware of this element and pay special attention to constructing web layouts that help the customer focus and easily navigate the site. Our customers appreciate the easy-to-use website designs generated by our graphic design team.

Overly High Shipping Cost

According to the Web Surveyor Services study, around 27% of customers abandon an order due to the shipping cost being too high or will choose another website with a lower one. One of the options available with us is that you can set free shipping as one of your options for your e-commerce products.

The Adrecom Method

The list of reasons leading customers to abandoning orders is more extensive than one mentioned in this blog post, and Adrecom gives special attention and consultation to customers, as laid down in our 3-D Implementation Program, in order to adopt and adapt the best strategies for dealing with such issues in a calm, clear and confident manner.

Knowledge management is the process of gathering and administrating information already in the possession of a customer or organization and incorporating new information as it comes. Inadequate organization or the loss of knowledge due to a key employee’s departure from the business can have serious adverse effects on a company’s knowledge management. On the other hand, systematic knowledge acquisition, organization and retention can reduce expenses and even increase profits. Adrecom has developed a specific knowledge management system comprised of four basic stages to best extract and gather as of yet uncollected information and to administer existing information.

The Back Office was designed in order to allow your company to carry out this four-stage process. We will first start by briefly describing the stages behind this process and then how the Adrecom portal system can be used to implement it.

A Four-Stage Process

The Knowledge Management (KM) process consists of four stages: Knowledge Creation, Knowledge Organization, Knowledge Reporting and Knowledge Utilization and are each described in this post.

Knowledge Creation

If your information hasn’t already been to put to paper in an organized fashion you need to find out where it’s located. Most often than not, key information for the running of a system or organization is located within employee knowledge, or in other words, in the minds of your employees. Since you can’t manage information until its put to paper you have to first find out how to collect the information that employees know. This process is called Knowledge Creation and is completed in three steps.

Capture

The Capture step is where employees manually gather all of their knowledge in the form of raw data using forms, prompts, or bulk information feeds from a variety of sources. Generally speaking, there is little effort at this point to organize the information in any significant way, which is completed at a later stage. The key here is to put everything on the table.

Discovery

The Capture process helps in the Discovery step, which is where information that unknowingly already exists within your organization is discovered. The purpose of this step is not to begin organizing the information, but rather to make sure that all of it present before beginning to do so. This step also prevents the need to spend the time, effort and money relocating or recreating pertinent pieces of information; much less time is spent on discovering information now than on reinventing the wheel later.

Development

Employees begin the Development step by building upon information that they’ve manually gathered and discovered. This is achieved by looking through the information and adding anything to it that was missed in the initial capture step. The result is a thorough and comprehensive knowledge base that’s ready to be organized.

Knowledge Organization

The key to any KM system is the ability to organize created knowledge within a usable format. The next stage in Adrecom’s KM system is to verify all the knowledge brought forth by employees and to categorize and catalog it appropriately. Regular updates in the knowledge base helps build up the information in an accurate way while avoiding the need to repeat the Capture process. Conversely, information is entered into the knowledge base as it comes into being, thus contributing to an organized and wide knowledge base.

Knowledge Reporting

You cannot use the knowledge you’ve collected and organized without rendering it into an accessible format, which is why effective reporting methods are central to Adrecom’s KM system. Gathered knowledge can be stored and converted into any number of formats to facilitate intra-company communication. The type or types of formats used is largely dependent on the company’s choice.

All gathered knowledge may be filtered, converted to various formats and reported in various ways. This helps facilitate intra-company communications, as well as providing management with the data it needs to make informed business decisions.

Knowledge Utilization

All applications used in Adrecom’s KM system are custom fit for your organization’s specific needs. Whatever those needs may be, Adrecom produces system outputs and has designed applications and modules that can be used by your company to implement your goals.

Implementation

The Knowledge Creation step is usually carried out by your company on the premises. Once having “gone live” and completing the creation process, Adrecom helps give you a sense of comprehension when it comes to understanding how the information on your site is constructed and how to manage it. The Adrecom Back Office was made to store and classify virtually all forms of information your company might use. Specific sections were designed to house various forms of content, and sections exist to manage other administrative areas, such as event planning, marketing methods, resource collection and report creation. In other words, our portal solutions system serves as an organizational template for the data identified and converted into information via the Knowledge Management process. Once the conversion process is completed you can easily add information to your knowledge base, avoiding the need for any major overhauls in the future.

Back to Top

Our professional team at Adrecom manages a variety of roles.

• Graphic Design
• Research and Development
• Software Deployment
• Content Migration
• Content Management

Graphic Design

Our graphic design department is responsible for determining the visual layout of a site going through a legacy transformation. Its function is to communicate with customers to identify the look and feel and the general goals that the customers want to achieve from the website’s design.

Research and Development

Adrecom’s Research and Development department largely deals with software development and customization, but as well integrates with a variety of other industries, such as shipping companies, payment gateways, call centers, accounting firms and online inventory tracking companies.

Software Deployment

Our Software Deployment department installs and activates, updates and adapts System Architecture and User Interface Design in accordance with the need of the customer. This set of tasks also includes version tracking.

Content Migration

Content Migration refers to the task entailing collecting and preparing information for legacy transfer and all associated tasks, such as creating redirects and formatting HTML.

Content Management

We as well manage your content in the best possible way, whether this involves adding, updating, moving or removing products from the e-catalog (for e-commerce sites), or posting new information, such as blogs or articles.