On-Demand eCommerce Blog | Dynamic Merchandising by OrderDynamics

Implementing eCommerce Personalization is Easier and More Affordable with the Right eCommerce Platform

2009-11-27T11:34:00.012-05:00

A recent Internet Retailer Study published in November revealed the implementation of advanced eCommerce techniques could reach as high as 74% of a retailer's eCommerce technology budget for 2010. Out of the 193 retailers surveyed, 48% are looking to change eCommerce platforms, with over 20% looking at Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) eCommerce solutions.

High on the priority list for spending (37%) is Personalization tactics, including ratings and reviews and other personalization techniques. Other techniques in the study included forms of Content Management, eMail Marketing, and Multi-Channel integration.

With the right eCommerce platform, retailers can implement advanced eCommerce tactics easily and affordably. Here are some examples of how retailers can implement Personalization Techniques on their eStore.

Avoid Overcomplicated Tactics

OrderDynamics is designed for online retailers and wholesalers (B2B & B2C) who have out grown their current eCommerce solution. These businesses enage us because they've "hit the wall" causing growth challenges - either through a lack of adequate frontend features or inability to streamline backend processes involved with high volume websites.

When engaged by OrderDynamics, these businesses are educated on what features will immediately bring the biggest benefit - allowing them to mature into the more sophisticated features over time.

The issue of personalization can quickly become large, complex, and expensive so tackling basic concepts, as described here, is a great way to provide a personalized website experience without breaking the bank.

“Know your client”; Build Around the Little Things they Value

All of the tactics we look at here should be part of any mid-market eCommerce platform and, if implemented correctly, should lead to increased sales through qualified traffic and converting more visitors.

1. Identify Returning Customers

Recognizing a returning shopper will make repeat buying easier and will naturally lead to additional sales. Since these customers are already qualified, you want to make their subsequent purchases hassle free.

Tips include:

• Cart and Wish List Persistence
• Display user name (“Welcome Back: John Smith” – Not you?)
• Provide easy re-order options (hold and present order history)
• Allow for auto-shipping of consumables
• Merchandise based on past purchases
• Merchandise based on recently viewed, search history, and cart contents

2. Invite Customers Back

Online retailers needs to take advantage of the deep business information coming from their website. The leading platforms that include Order Management Systems (OMS) automatically captures key data on each order and everything about that customer. By creating and scheduling targeting eMails (OrderDynamics built-in email marketing engine is called eCast Manager), retailers can create highly relevant messages back to their Clients. These messages should be a mix of customer service and new promotions that motivate them to come back to the website.

Tips include:
• Highly targeted audiences (filter recipients from data in the OMS database)
• Notifications of new lines or product replacements (or categories / brands)
• Offer incentives to return (coupons and other promotions)
• Notice of items in a persistent wish list
• Notice of items in a persistent cart
• Rate and review previous purchases (specify product)
• Notice of related items or accessories related to a purchase
• Recent sign-up but no purchases

3. Navigation Preferences

Nothing is more annoying than a website not saving preferences that you’ve taken the time to set. Since shoppers will likely navigate your eStore uniquely, the ability to store these preferences is important as is the ability for a shopper to clear saved settings.

Tips include:
• Listings per page
• Grid listing formats
• Categories, Brands, Products of interest
• Recently viewed and searched
• Addresses (Billing, Shipping, Multiple)
• Profile Picture

4. Social Network Feeds

When designing a social networking strategy (or “Social Commerce”), it is important to think about what information you can deliver to your target customer that will incent them to 1) pass that information on (concept of "going viral") and/or 2) make them visit your website. Simply creating a Blog, Facebook or Twitter page is not going to result in revenue.

Tips include:
• Build community through blogging or forums
• Create articles of interest or educational value
• Post promotions to Twitter with links back to Products, Category, Brand pages
• Allow shoppers to post purchases to their Facebook wall (notify their friends of purchases)
• Participate in MySpace, Twitter, Facebook of suppliers / manufactures

5. Personalizing Content

Over and above product content, it is important to have a strategy to manage “content areas” across the site. These content areas typically include flash, video, HTML, or images, and have links to promotions, products, categories, search pages, or brand pages. Making these content areas as relevant as possible to your shoppers increases the overall "personal feel" of a site and leads to finding and buying faster.

Tips include:
• Automatic rotation of content areas based on rules
• Thresholds and tracking of impressions and click through rates (CTR)
• Customize content to be as specific as possible
• Content: Products, HTML, Images, Flash, Video
• Rules to rotate content based on:
o Referral URL, Keyword URI, Domain
o Time of day
o Persona definition (example: Consumer, Prosumer, Expert)
o Geo-targeted IP Address
o Logged in user

The Role of Your eCommerce Platform

As retailers build strategies to better connect with their customers using personalization tactics, an evaluation of their eCommerce platform will probably be in order. It is important for retailers to find a platform vendor that can both enable their immediate vision while being proactive in helping them measure outcomes and adjust accordingly.

While we’ve only covered some basic tactics here, advanced personalization techniques can go beyond core eCommerce platform to involve leading third party services for buying recommendation services, site search control, ratings and review content, and more. The eCommerce platform provider must support all of these systems and have a strategy to help retailers successfully execute on their personalization strategy over time.

To Request a Free Assessment, Contact Us!

Congratulations on going live: Health Care Logistics, eMedDecor.com

2009-11-06T10:56:00.015-05:00

www.emeddecor.com Selects OrderDynamics for Growth on On-Demand eCommerce Platform

OrderDynamics, Canada's leading On-Demand eCommerce Solution provider, announces recent customer acquisition, Health Care Logistics, a worldwide provider of medical equipment since 1978.

A recent re-launch of their consumer division, www.eMedDecor.com, Health Care Logistics looked to OrderDynamics for their superior eCommerce technology and services oriented around growing sales.

“OrderDynamics gives us a single, end-to-end technology solution to power our B2C websites. Their SaaS service model emphasizes growth and provides structured processes to manage traffic and conversions” explains Bethany Reid, Brand Manager for eMedDecor. “We simply outgrew our previous eCommerce platform, which didn’t have the features or management capabilities to support our growth” continues Bethany. “OrderDynamics helped us understand a reasonable growth target and works proactively with our marketing team to achieve our goals”.

The new eMedDecor.com website launched on OrderDynamics in 90 days with a broad selection of gifts and accessories and an easy-to-use design. New site features include:

• Shop by Profession – Doctors, Dentists, Nurses, Pharmacy, Veterinarians, & More helps the consumer find products unique to them.
• Gift Services – Wish Lists, Gift Certificates, Gift Messages, Wrapping Services, and Product Personalization make the site great for gift givers.
• Navigation features – – Intuitive product search, user ratings and reviews, guided navigation filters, and express checkout create a fast and fun shopping experience.

“We congratulate the great team at Health Care Logistics and look forward to a long term partnership” says Michael Benadiba, CEO of OrderDynamics.

About eMedDecor & More:
The eMedDecor.com website is a consumer website providing over 2,000 medical related products in categories such as Dental, Doctors, Nursing, Pharmacy, Veterinary and more. eMedDecor.com offers an exciting range of products for Appreciation and Recognition, Books, Cards, and Paper, Clothing, Collectibles, Décor, Office Accessories, Personalized Products, and Tools of the Trade. eMedDecor.com also provides easy shopping options such as Gift Certificates, Gift Wrapping, Gift Messaging, and Personalization.

Scheduling Site Promotions: Easier, Relavent, and Convert Better

2009-09-20T11:29:00.012-04:00

As eCommerce platforms ramp up features to meet the needs of the savvy online buyer, retailers often struggle with effectively maintaining them. To be effective, retailers not only need the latest "frontend" merchandising capabilities, but "backend" systems that allow them to manage, what could be hundreds of promotions at any given time. Retails must have technology that gives their product teams the ability to manage the site proactively and reactively given the buying trends they experience.

To be effective, retailers need the ability to:

1. Launch promotions quickly

2. Time promotions to buying events

3. Measure promotion success

The OrderDynamics On-Demand eCommerce Platform combines the latest frontend merchandising technology with a powerful scheduling engine and management metrics that gives retailers "point-and-click" control over website promotions.

Launch Promotions Fast

It is important the the eCommerce platform technology provides real-time ability to create, stage, test, and launch new promotions. Whether it is, for example, a new sale, bundles, eCast (email) campaigns, shipping discounts, or in-cart promotions, the platform should provide easy-to-use web interfaces designed for a product manager or marketing resource to make website changes easily. The platform should also provide XHTML access and a secure Content Management System (CMS) for advanced levels of access.

For mid-market to enterprise reatilers, the ability to stage these changes and test orders against a test gateway prior to going live (without impacting their timeline) is equally as important. Staging changes also allows marketings teams to pre-provision promotions, but leaving them inactive until needed.

Time Promotions "Scheduling"

To effectively time website changes to buying events, like Thanksgiving for example, retailers need more control than simply being able to launch promotions quickly. They require a sophisticated scheduling "engine" to create and manage hundreds of running promotions at a time, and on a per-website basis.

The scheduling system must allow for multiple website promotions to be running concurrently with status reports. Some of the important scheduling capabilities are: eCast (email) marketing, personalized content areas, site seach controls, product / brand / category content areas, coupons, overrides, free shipping amounts, etc. These scheduling and promotion tools must provide granular control at a per-product / brand / category and per eStore website basis. The system must provide control to activate and deactivate promotions on a particular date/time, date range, recurring date/time, and the ability to chain promotions.

With this level of control, retailers can start marketing to their Clients well before the event, making them more proactive and always on top of the next promotion.

Measure Success

Like any other successful sales and marketing program, eCommerce websites require detailed metrics that allow promotions to be managed effectively. It is important that the marketing team can measure the success of each promotion in-real time, and against other promotions across the website.

This isn't specifically about web analytics (Google, Omniture for example), although they play a role, it is about the metrics provided by the eCommerce platform. It is important the platform itself can produce metrics about the performance of a particular promotion. For example, the ability to track click-throughs and impressions on personalized content areas, tracking delivery and open rates of eCasts (emails) promotions, sales from referring websites, ads, keywords, and ability to trend sales across different promotions; all core requirements of mid-market to enterprise online retailers. And all of these must be viewable against sales / orders across a defined time period.

With the right metrics, retailers will have the business information needed to make decisions about the promotions running on the website.

Look at your eCommerce Platform

For retailers to stand a chance against the ever more savvy online buyer, they must take a close look at their eCommerce platform provider to determine their plans for making site promotions more effective. There many of "add on" services out there, but we feel the platform provider plays a key role in this area and should have, at a minimum, the tools and technologies available in this article for launching and managing promotions.

To learn more, please contact us today!

An Integrated Order Management System (OMS) Key to Avoiding Lost Revenue When Payment Brands Go Down (Paypal, Authorize.NET recently)

2009-08-05T09:32:00.009-04:00

With 2 major payment providers having issues in the past 4 weeks to the day (Authorize.NET July 3rd 2009 and PayPal August 3rd 2009), many online retailers and merchants that rely on these systems were effectively out of business, unable to take orders, and losing revenue.

Although failures like this are considered unacceptable to businesses and executives, there are ways retailers can avoid being impacted by these types of failures. The solution rests in the capabilities of the eCommerce platform and its Order Management System (OMS).

Order Management Systems (OMS) provide software to facilitate the capturing and processing of eCommerce orders. When this system is part of your overall eCommerce platform (same eCommerce vendor platform driving the frontend presentation and backend OMS) you get a very robust and flexible foundation to power almost all online retailing needs. For example, eMail Marketing, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Fulfillment and Inventory Control, and Advanced Merchandising Rules. This type of "end-to-end" solution helps retailers drive more value from their eCommerce investment by reducing complexities, manual tasks, and less systems / vendors to manage. Obviously, we believe an on-demand or SaaS eCommerce platform is the way of the future for most retailers vs. purchasing and customizing software.

In addition, most platform providers (with an integrated backend OMS) will automatically capture order information prior to posting to the payment provider. This allows for steps to occur before fulfillment like address validation and correction, fraud detection, pre-authorization, etc. This also takes care of two critical problems if payment providers fail. 1. The user is oblivious and can place their order on your website 2. Retailers can quickly and easily resume order processing once the gateway has returned to normal.

As is the case with PayPal and Google Checkout, the shopper has to leave the merchant's website in order to complete their purchase - something not required for other alternative payment brands or traditional gateways like Authorize.NET. However, the eCommerce platform should fully capture the order first and provide logic that informs the user of a payment gateway problem then invite them to use an alternative method or be notified once the gateway has returned.

OrderDynamics takes this a step further and automatically creates a Customer Service Case (ticket) for all abandoned PayPal or Google Checkout orders so retailers can proactively follow-up with these shoppers and convert the sale. This process can be tailored to include an email back to the shopper after X hours inviting them to come back and complete their purchase with a coupon or other incentives.

So when you're evaluating a new eCommerce platform provider it is important to look deeper than the frontend design or "flashy websites" and get into the details of how the platform technology itself will enable a robust, scalable, and cost effective environment for years to come.

See related post: Authorize.NET Outage Does Gateway Downtime Equal eCommerce Disaster?
Learn more about: OrderDynamics On-Demand eCommerce Platform

Authorize.NET Outage | Does Gateway Downtime Equal eCommerce Disaster? Not for OrderDynamics

2009-07-03T13:07:00.010-04:00

If you're one of the many online retailers that rely on Authorize.NET as their payment gateway - today may have been a very painful day. I say maybe because if you're one of the websites that cannot take new orders because of this outage - you may want to look into a new eCommerce platform. Some, more sophisticated eCommerce platforms, allow for orders to continue even if the payment gateway is totally down. OrderDynamics retailers have been able to accept orders on their websites even if Authorize.NET is their only payment gateway.

What appears to be the result of a datacenter fire in their Seattle facility (located at Fisher Plaza), Authorize.NET has been down for over 5 hours already on July 3rd 2009. Many are hoping the sales volumes will be lower due to the statutory holiday for tomorrow's July 4th celebration of Independence Day happening today, Friday.

With regular updates coming from their recent twitter account, Authorize.NET is taking responsibility and also claiming their backup datacenter also failed. *At time of writing, Authorize.NET's website was also down - most likely hosted in the same facility. Details are spare as the company is focusing on bringing up their systems.

"An event like today underscores the need for online retailers need to think about their Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans and ensure their eCommerce platform provider can meet these requirements." Says Steven Berkovitz, On-Demand Platform Architect.

An important feature of the OrderDynamics on-demand eCommerce solution is its ability to still capture orders during a gateway failure, making them available for later processing. This allows shoppers to keep buying as normal. "Orders are still captured, shoppers get an order number and confirmation email, then when the gateway is alive, the system will process them automatically." explains Steven. "The last thing you want is to loose the order - this is the equivalent of closing your physical location instead of taking a credit card manually or cash."

"Another feature of our platform is the ability for OrderDynamics to dynamically route orders to different gateways or completely fail-over payment gateways if needed." Continues Steven. "Our platform is integrated with every major payment gateway and over 20 alternative payment brands; allowing for ultimate flexibility and reliability."

OrderDynamics also has redundant datacenters as part of its On-Demand eCommerce SaaS Platform and enhanced service plans that provide up to 99.9% service availability through a fully replicated Disaster Recovery plan to its secondary facility over 75kms away.

Be sure to follow the twitter feed for updates and if you'd like to learn more about how Payment Gateways are used, see this Informed Merchant Article.

The OrderDynamics team was happy to see you at IRCE 2009!

2009-06-18T20:42:00.007-04:00

Dear Customer,

We at OrderDynamics really want to thank you for visiting us this year at the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition 2009. We sincerely enjoyed the opportunity to talk with you and learn more about your business. We’re excited with all that we saw from the exhibitors, and thrilled to see how far the eCommerce industry has come over the past eight years.

We look forward to connecting with you in the coming weeks, in the mean time we invite you to visit our website and learn more about our On-Demand eCommerce Platform.

Sincerely,

The OrderDynamics Team
1 (866) 559-8123
solutions@orderdynamics.com

On-Demad eCommerce Provider OrderDynamics - Off to Boston: Internet Retailer IRCE 2009

2009-06-13T14:17:00.003-04:00

We're off to Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition from June 15th to 18th at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.

Many retailers will be in attendance to learn about a wide variety of technologies and solutions to help them in their eCommerce journey. Despite the economy, IRCE attendance remains strong with over 4,500 people expected. With 91 sessions, 178 speakers, and over 360 exhibiting companies, IRCE is the one-stop-shop for those involved in eCommerce projects this year.

Come see OrderDynamics at booth 1024! - See Booth Floor Plan - we look forward to seeing you there!

Basic SEO Concepts For Online Retailers

2009-06-03T19:40:00.006-04:00

It amazes us how many people we talk to have an "SEO consultant" - generally costing them anywhere from $1,500 to $4,500+ per month in "management fees" - and their eStore websites are not doing some of the basic things needed to rank high in the search engines. This article is meant to provide some basic concepts for online retailers to think about before signing up for SEO services.

First of all, Google is going to drive the bulk of your traffic so focus on getting your eStore optimized for Google first.

Search engines generally work from 2 principles and are tied together - Paid Listings, and Organic Listings. Paid Listings or "Sponsored Ads" require you to bid and pay per click whereas organic results are free. Organic positions take time to build and your goal should be to list on page one of Google for your chosen keywords.

Online retailers must start by determining the search terms (keywords and phrases) they think their target shopper uses to find their products or ones they want to use to compete with others. Google has tools to help them determine closely related search terms and the actual volumes of searching happening for them. Google AdWords Tool for example.

Google will only list up to 2 pages in organic listing per search term (keyword/phrase) in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). Therefore there is no point in optimizing an entire site for the same search terms.

It is important to lay out the pages on your site according to search terms and ensure these HTML pages are optimized for search (title tags, meta description, keywords, anchor text, image alt attribute, etc. ).

The next step is making sure these pages do in fact have content that is relevant to the search terms you believe are important. Simply optimizing the HTML tags is not enough. For retailers, this can be product landing pages or top-level entry pages with dynamic product listings.

You can test the quality of the pages using tools from Google, you should be targeting a 7+ (out of 10). For Paid Search Listings, a high quality score will also help your Pay Per Click costs (keep them down) and ensure your ad is shown.

Once your pages are optimized and have relevant content, the next step is a strong link building strategy. Inbound links build relevance in the eyes of the search engine and also help with your Page Rank, which is part of how Google rates the relevance of a site.

Link building can be done in many ways including press releases, manually listing yourself in high-quality directories, working with industry partners to exchange links, articles/blogs, and social networking. It is important to link from relevant site and hopefully pages with a high page rank. Avoid linking scams or "black hat" techniques that could cause Google to punish your listings in the SERPs.

All of these strategies are centered around 1 website domain name, so if you have more than 1 domain name you have an opportunity to widen the net. Although we recommend focusing on other keywords and phrases on the second site vs. competing with yourself.

Another critical part of an effective SEO strategy is to ensure the HTML code meets the latest XHTML standards, is error free, and the website performs well. Google will not rank websites high that have errors or are slow. Also important is your full URL path (page names, folders, etc.) as a method of capturing keywords and strengthen the results.

For online retailers, it is crucial that the eCommerce platform you select has the tools and expertise to help guide their clients to a successful SEO plan.

The OrderDynamics on-demand eCommerce platform not only provides easy to use SEO tools, our Account Managers and Developers have SEO expertise and help advise our Clients on how to make the most out of their SEO dollars.

On-Demand eCommerce Software Solutions By OrderDynamics Slash Project Lengths In Half

2009-05-14T23:32:00.002-04:00

Leading on-demand eCommerce software provider delivers rapid eStore deployments thanks to SaaS platform and eCommerce web site design separation.

Toronto, ON May 15, 2009 -- OrderDynamics Corporation has observed that many online merchants are struggling with short eCommerce software replatforming timelines as peak shopping periods approach rapidly. Contributing to the tight timelines are delayed budget decisions and managers expecting more from their marketing team with a lot less.
OrderDynamics has designed its new eStore implementation process to reduce time to launch a new Client and is averaging a 15 week schedule from signature to soft launch.

"There are two factors at work here that allow us to roll out so quickly; eCommerce Web Site Design Flexibility and our SaaS Platform"

Explains Michael Benadiba, CEO OrderDynamics Corporation. OrderDynamics entirely separates the eCommerce web site design process from its on-demand platform, allowing this process to start in parallel and be delivered by a third party creative agency or internally.

OrderDynamics makes the eCommerce web site design come to life through a library of web 2.0 and 3.0 front-end web controls such as floating shopping carts, personalization controls, search merchandising, product reviews, and other pre-built controls which focus on enabling an fast, fun, and easy shopping experience. "The design and ease of use of an eStore must match the brand experience you're trying to create and the shopping expectations of your customers" continues Benadiba.

"By removing this hard linkage to the eCommerce platform, our Clients can accelerate design decisions and quickly implement future changes".

The other important time saver is the OrderDynamics eCommerce SaaS platform. eCommerce software as a service (or SaaS), means the software application is already developed and available almost immediately after signing a contract. It also means the SaaS provider takes care of maintaining the software and hosting it as part of a Service Level Agreement (SLA). "Our platform is fully redundant and is engineered for Availability, Performance, and Transaction Integrity - all things we guarantee in our SLA " adds Steve Berkovitz, On-Demand Platform Architect.

OrderDynamics Solves eCommerce Problems | Find out if You're Ready

2009-05-05T09:10:00.007-04:00

We've recently launched our You're Ready Campaign aimed to reach prospective Clients that may be hitting the wall with their current eCommerce solution. Although there are many issues retailers face, we've selected 5 recurring problems that seem to come up regularly in discussions and that we've helped solve for our Clients.

As always, a special thanks goes out to all OrderDynamics Clients who give us valuable feedback and input on what's important to their business so we can shape our solutions.

Infinitely Simple eCommerce
OrderDynamics is a leading provider of on-demand eCommerce solutions designed to help online merchants grow revenues and simplify operations. We allow you to deliver superior shopping experiences through our innovative multi-eStore platform and integrated backend management systems that enable Dynamic Merchandising, Customer Service, Order Management, and Automation. You're Ready is our way of providing you solutions to the common problems that we help our Client's solve every day.

There are hundreds of reasons retailers are choosing OrderDynamics -> Find out if You're Ready

Rich Consumer Experiences | OrderDynamics Tops Practical eCommerce Top 10 List for April 2009

2009-04-21T11:59:00.003-04:00

Practical eCommerce recently asked industry insiders to share a great, innovative idea that could help an eCommerce firm. Here’s what ten of them had to say.

OrderDynamics topped the list with...

Rich Consumer Experiences Dominate

"Focus on immersive branding and marketing techniques that create unexpectedly fast, fun, and easy shopping experiences. Are your budgets caught up on technology or are you investing in creating that visceral connection to the consumer? What amazes us the most is that very few e-stores provide that connection."

Michael Benadiba
CEO
OrderDynamics Corporation

OrderDynamics Launches Support for Amazon Payments: Amazon Simple Pay™

2009-03-27T13:33:00.002-04:00

Canada's leading On-Demand eCommerce platform provides its online retailers support for Amazon's payment solution Amazon Simple Pay™.

Toronto, ON March 26, 2008 -- OrderDynamics Corporation launches support for Amazon Simple Pay™, a set of payment-only products that allows shoppers to use payment information from their Amazon.com accounts as a payment method. By offering Amazon Simple Pay™ to their shoppers, online merchants provide a convenient, trusted, and easy ordering mechanism to tens of millions of Amazon Customers.

"New payment solutions are constantly under evaluation by our product development team, because of the significant positive impact it can have on our Client's sales" explains Michael Benadiba, CEO OrderDynamics Corporation. "We also make the frontend implementation of these payment solutions easy through self service access from our backend management dashboard" continues Benadiba. Amazon Simple Pay™ provides brand recognition, purchase protection, and convenience to online shoppers - all things that can increase the chance of converting a sale.

The OrderDynamics On-Demand eCommerce platform has access to over 20 branded payment methods on their front-end eStores through its partnership with CardinalCommerce such as: Verified by Visa & MasterCard® SecureCode™, Amazon Payments™, Bill Me Later®, Ebates™, eBillme™, eLayaway™, Google™ Checkout, Green Dot® MoneyPak®, MyEcheck, PayPal™, RevolutionCard™, Mazooma™, ClickandBuy®, and more.Learn about how we've helped online merchants grow, Read our Case Studies

OrderDynamics is going to Internet Retailer IRCE 2009

2009-03-06T08:10:00.007-05:00

For the first year, OrderDynamics will be attending the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition from June 15th to 18th at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.

Come see us at booth 1024 - See Booth Floor Plan

The IRCE 2009 Conference Content
IRCE 2009 is a four-day conference featuring 179 speakers in 94 sessions devoted to the strategies and tools that e-retailers can use to thrive in a recession that pulls the rest of retailing down. Hence the theme: Rising Above—Not Just Surviving—the Economic Storm. The agenda, which has fewer general sessions than last year and many more specific breakout sessions and tracks that are targeted to specific e-retailer needs, includes the following:

IRCE 2009 Agenda Summary
Day One (June 15) features two concurrent day-long workshops:

Search Engine Marketing: Strategies for a more competitive market.
Survival Guide for Small E-Retailers.

Day Two (June 16) marks the start of the general conference and features:

General Session (8:30 a.m. to 10:15 a.m.):

State of the Industry: How E-Retailing Can Shine in A Gloomy Economy
Technology Track: Finding Cost-Effective Web Technologies
Retail Chain Track: Making the Web the Driver of the Chain
Web Design & Merchandising Track: Making a Hot Site at a Cool Cost
Small Retailer Track A: How Low-Budget Operators Can Have Big-Time Success

Day Three (June 17) contains a full day of breakout sessions in four tracks

General Sessions (8:30 a.m. to 10:15 a.m.)

Marketing Track: What Marketing Works Best in a Recession.
Operations Track: How to Cut Costs While Increasing Conversions
Measuring Success: How Understanding Web Metrics Creates Online Success
Small Retailer Track B: Efficient Ways to Attract New Web Shoppers

Day Four (June 18) features two concurrent day-long workshops:

Capitalizing on the M-Commerce Boom
Diving Deep Into E-Mail Marketing

The Internet Retailer 2009 Conference & Exhibition is not only the world's largest e-retailing conference, it is one of America's fastest growing conferences. While overall attendance at conferences and trade shows grew at 5% last year, IRCE has grown at a compound annual rate of 86% in its first three years of operation—from 1,178 total attendees in 2005 to 4,087 total attendees last year. Based on last year's turnout and favorable conference evaluations, we project total attendance at IRCE 2009 will reach 5,000.

eCommerce SaaS Platform Enhancement: Fulfillment with ShipWorks

2009-02-25T23:47:00.006-05:00

Part of our last major release in January was a service module to allow our Customers to plug-in to the latest version of ShipWorks. The OrderDynamics integration components will also be rolled into the ShipWorks installer for quick integration to our "One-Click Bill & Print" fulfillment automation system for future Customers.

With this enhancement, we've integrated the OrderDynamics eCommerce back end manager at our dataceter, to the ShipWorks software running on the shipping computer our Customer's site. It handles data linking for Customer Service, Shipping, and Tracking for those using ShipWorks 2.9 to automate shipping activities.

What is ShipWorks?
ShipWorks is for people who sell online. It connects to your online store or seller account. It downloads your orders and makes it easy to create shipping labels, manage customers and emails, and update the online status of each order.

Other options?
OrderDynamics supports a wide range of fulfillment and shipping integration options. To be honest, integration to service providers like ShipWorks is very straight forward thanks to the built-in platform APIs inherent in the OrderDynamics system.

Example Service Providers Supported:

United States Postal Service (USPS)
Canada Post
UPS
FedEx
DHL
Pitney Bowes
Endicia
Professional Distribution
Purolator

So far we've had a great experience working with the ShipWorks development and their leadership team.

Recurring Online Retail Sales Possible with "AUTO SHIP" fulfillment automation by OrderDynamics On-Demand eCommerce Solution

2009-02-19T08:22:00.002-05:00

February 19, 2009

OrderDynamics, Canada's leading On-Demand eCommerce Solution provider enables its merchants to offer a recurring purchase and ship option called "auto ship".

Toronto - OrderDynamics Corporation, Securing repeat business is important in any business especially in times of economic uncertainty. For online retailers it's becoming an essential way not only to survive, but to grow revenues on top of a reliable base. Online retailers are in a unique position to acquire recurring sales through sticky services and providing relevant information after the initial purchase thanks to having detailed customer information in their database.

As part of their new feature release strategy, OrderDynamics performs regular Dynamic Merchandising eCommerce Surveys to capture specific interest areas from its Client base. "We hear consistently from both new and current Clients that recurring purchases is a key part of their sales strategy. This helped us prioritize our AUTO SHIP feature" explains Steven Berkovitz, VP Development. OrderDynamics calls its recurring purchase and shipping feature AUTO SHIP, which is a well known term in the eCommerce community.

AUTO SHIP gives the online merchandiser point and click ease to enable their customers to automatically receive certain products on a regular basis. Merchandisers can offer special discounted pricing for customers that subscribe to AUTO SHIP as well as offer multiple shipment frequencies. Call Center agents are also able to easily up-sell shoppers and subscribe them to AUTO SHIP on their behalf. The OrderDynamics SaaS-based eCommerce solution handles the recurring charges and shipping, and provides key management metrics to the merchant to manage their AUTO SHIP program.

AUTO SHIP seamlessly integrates into existing OrderDynamics fulfillment technology. "Our One-Step Bill & Print concept totally streamlines the fulfillment process for our merchants" explains Michael Benadiba, CEO of OrderDynamics. "With a click of a button, orders are downloaded, matched to shipping manifests, then printed for warehouse staff and uploaded to the shipping company for shoppers to track their orders online. And this can be done anytime throughout the day". This process has been refined over the years specifically to reduce fulfillment errors and handle higher volumes of orders. "AUTO SHIP orders seamlessly integrate into our existing One-Step Bill & Print which makes rolling out this new feature transparent to our customer's fulfillment departments." continues Benadiba.
These enhancements are part of an overall new feature release strategy that OrderDynamics includes as part of their eCommerce solution.

About OrderDynamics Corporation
OrderDynamics Corporation is a privately owned company that provides turn-key eCommerce solutions to businesses looking to grow their online sales. The success of OrderDynamics is highly attributed to its response to real client requirements and Dynamic Merchandising concepts which provide superior control and help drive revenue. The OrderDynamics solution is designed for online merchants and services different business such as retail, manufacturing, business-to-business, complex online retail, and more. OrderDynamics officially launched its solution in 2006 after 2 years of research and development.

Learn how we help online merchants grow eCommerce Case Studies

For more information, please contact:
Michael Benadiba
Chief Executive Officer
OrderDynamics Corporation
1+ (866) 559-8123
news@orderdynamics.com

OrderDynamics Helps Online Retailers Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment and Increase Sales Through Simplified Checkout Option

2009-01-15T20:37:00.004-05:00

January 15th, 2009

Canada's leading On-Demand eCommerce provider builds streamlined shopping cart checkout for online shoppers into SaaS platform.

Toronto, ON (PRWEB) January 15, 2009 -- OrderDynamics Corporation, a Canadian On-Demand eCommerce solution provider, is pleased to announce continued enhancements to its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform in order to solve the real business challenges of online merchants.

OrderDynamics Customers have another powerful eCommerce Shopping Cart feature to streamline the checkout process for their shoppers. Shopping cart abandonment occurs when shoppers leave the checkout process before completing the sale. With the click of a button, online merchants can include shipping options onto the same web form, and remove the final confirmation page, unlocking a single-page checkout while still maintaining brand flexibility, design control, and a standards-based layout.

"It is very important for our Customers to monitor and reduce their shopping cart abandonment. We help them manage this on a number of levels," explains Michael Benadiba, CEO of OrderDynamics Corporation. An On-Demand eCommerce solution provider can aggregate key metrics like shopping cart abandonment across hundreds of eStore websites and verticals and then implement software and services to reduce abandonment.

"Another important component to this strategy is allowing our Customers to maintain their own branding and design during the checkout process and not redirecting their shopper to a different website or URL, as seen with other providers such as NetSuite and Infopia," continues Benadiba. "Our research shows that redirecting someone away from the eStore during the checkout process or having the checkout page designed differently increases abandonment rates."

The OrderDynamics solution includes a powerful backend management console and sales dashboard that gives online merchants complete control of what shopping cart features to present to their shoppers and to closely monitor business metrics.
These enhancements are part of an overall new feature release strategy that OrderDynamics includes as part of their solution and Dynamic Merchandising concepts.

About OrderDynamics Corporation
OrderDynamics Corporation is a privately owned company that has provides turn-key eCommerce solutions to businesses looking to grow their online sales solutions. The success of OrderDynamics is highly attributed to its response to real Client requirements and Dynamic Merchandising concepts which provide superior control and help drive revenue. The OrderDynamics solution is designed for online merchants and services different business such as retail, manufacturing, business-to-business, complex online retail, and more. OrderDynamics officially launched its on-demand eCommerce solution in 2006 after 2 years of research and development.

Learn about how we've helped online merchants grow: OrderDynamics Case Studies

For more information, please contact:
Michael Benadiba
Chief Executive Officer
OrderDynamics Corporation
1+ (866) 559-8123
mailto:559-8123news@orderdynamics.com

Dynamic Merchandising: SEO Checklist for eStore product pages

2009-01-05T09:27:00.002-05:00

If you don't already have a strategy in-place for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), it should be high on your New Year's resolution list.

Online merchants have a great opportunity to leverage the vast SEO tactics for each product page on their eStore website. We're talking about product pages because most purchases start from a search engine. In the highly competitive Internet search world, online merchants are uniquely positioned to drive individual product page search results (page rank) in addition to bringing traffic to their main website.

We've provided a brief list of SEO tactics all online merchants should be doing to increase the likelyhood of a shopper finding their products. It is important to understand that this level of control and flexibility should be put into the hands of the merchandising team (or marketing team) through easy-to-use web interfaces, not having to proxy requests through a web design team.

Be sure to closely examine the Complete Feature List of your eCommerce Shopping Cart Software to look for these built-in SEO control capabilities.

eCommerce Product Page SEO Checklist (used for each product page):

Standards-Based Pages: It is very important build your website following HTML W3C Standards which basically means your eStore will be read properly by a search engine and people browsing your website. A great designer isn't typically a great HTML coder. You really do need to think about the performance of your HTML pages to ensure they're error-free with lowest possible load times and that you aren't violating basic SEO rules. Your eCommerce provider should help you implement your eStore website and maintain the eStore HTML. Typically in an On-Demand eCommerce environment the eStore website branding and design is decoupled from the underlying eCommerce software - this means you can easily change your design & structure quickly and easily. For other tips to create high performance pages see Google Web Master Tools.

Keywords: Start thinking about your keywords right away as this will drive many of the decisions below. Pick keywords and phrases that your target customer will use to find your product. If you're using Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, these keywords and Ads should align. For example: 1960s Rookie Hockey Cards

Page Content: You've probably heard this a million times already but its key to a successful SEO strategy. If your pages do not have relevant content they will not service your Customers and the search engines will not rank your page effectively against your keywords.

Title Tag: This is the title of your page and one of the most important factors in SEO. Page titles should reflect the individual product you're selling. Title tags are shown in the search engine results page. For example: 1968 Rookie Card of John Smith - Millioncards.org.

Page File Name: This is the actual html page name. For example: millioncards.org/rookie-cards/1968-rookie-card-john-smith.html

Meta Keywords Tag: These are the most likely words or phrases that will help a customer find your product and are embedded in the HTML code. For example: Rookie Hockey Cards, John Smith Hockey Cards, 1960s Hockey Cards.

Meta Description Tag: This a description of the Product Page and should be a short, 1-2 sentences (max 200-250 characters) that describes the content on the page. It is also shown in the search engines below the page title. This should briefly describe the product and be unique from the page title. For example: Millioncards provides rare Rookie Hockey Cards for collectors or gifts for hockey fans. This John Smith Rookie Card is in mint condition and includes protective case.

Anchor Text (text links): Anchor text is very important in keyword use. This is the text found on your eStore that appears as a hyperlink. For example, click to learn more about our Enterprise SEO eCommerce Features. You can use Anchor text throughout your eStore to guide shoppers to the product pages, which will also help the search engines understand what the hyperlink is about. Anchor text should be relevant and can be used to link within your eStore to relevant product pages.

Header Tags: Allows you to organize your product page into relevant sections by topic from the H1 Page topic header, H2 main topic, and H3 and sub topics, and so on. Headers give the search engines and understanding of where the important information is on the product page and allow you to utilize your keywords for topic areas that describe the product.

Alt Image Attribute: Alt image attributes should be used for every image on your website. Alt attributes, provide a description to the search engine about what the image is (since search engine robots cannot "see") and displayed to the user prior to loading the image. Keep these short and relevant to what the picture is illustrating.

Online merchants must have this level of SEO control and capability at the hands of their merchandising team. With most product purchases starting from a web search and the highly competitive and fast-moving online sales world, you must be able to move quickly optimizing your product pages, keywords, and advertising campaigns to maximize sales.

For those not well equipped, it will be a painful process working through the web designer and basically impossible to deliver effective search engine optimization and advertising expenditures.

The OrderDynamics Team

Plan your On-Demand eCommerce solution for 2009 Holiday Sales...Happy New Year from OrderDynamics!

2009-01-01T16:41:00.005-05:00

A new year is upon us and we would like to thank our Customers and everyone that has helped make OrderDynamics a leading on-demand eCommerce solution provider.

With an exciting year ahead for online merchants, be sure to start planning your eCommerce platform changes soon and in time for the 2009 holiday sales season. Depending on the size and complexity, an eCommerce website migration can take 45 to 90 business days (or longer) and you'll want to leave plenty of time to test and implement the latest Dynamic Merchandising tactics.

Thank you for making 2008 a wonderful year! Happy New Year!

The OrderDynamics Team

Significant Visitor Growth for Major Online Merchants

2008-12-24T11:34:00.005-05:00

If you don't follow InternetRetailer.com and you're in the eCommerce world at some level, its a good idea to get on their news letter.

Yesterday we were very pleased to read that most major retailers experience significant positive increases in visitor traffic, and most likely sales, this year as compared to previous years.

These quantitatively emphasize that eCommerce is an important part of a retailers multi-channel strategy. Bricks-and-Mortar retailers have a huge advantage over purely online retailers in that they have people walking in and out of their store, giving them a chance to connect and encourage future online shopping.

In addition, many already have customer lists in their CRM or POS system allowing them to immediately market to them using their eCommerce solution.

Some of the statistics we noticed:

Snip from: Among 10 top retail sites, Kohl’s has the sharpest rise in holiday traffic

Following are the 10 sites surveyed by Compete with their year-over-year rise in unique visitors and their total number of visitors (in millions) for the period Nov. 1 through Dec. 13, 2008:

Kohl’s, 53.1%, 38.55
Amazon.com, 48.5%, 382.02
Macys.com, 36.1%, 35.69
Sears, 25.1%, 58.62
Walmart.com, 22.8%, 181.62
ToysRUs.com, 21.7%, 60.04
Target.com, 20.3%, 137.23
JCP.com, 18.2%, 60.04
BestBuy.com, 12.3%, 77.51
Overstock.com, -9.8%, 42.01

The Benefits of eCommerce SaaS: an OrderDynamics comment

2008-12-14T10:09:00.007-05:00

I thought this blog post The Benefits of Software-as-a-Service was a great way to introduce the concept of Software-as-a-Service (or SaaS) and how it is superior over an on-prem solution for many online merchants today and into the future.

In addition to these points, a SaaS or an On-Demand eCommerce solution typically have (or should) a much higher level of security, capacity, and availability capabilities than otherwise possible at the same budget as other implementations. SaaS eCommerce providers generally have highly available server configurations (clustering & redundancies) located in state-of-the-art datacenter facilities. In addition, the software implementation on the servers is highly optimized and controlled by the specialist team that developed it - which yeilds a much higher quality of service over having to manage 3rd party applications and hosting services with in-house resources or a webdesign company.

Lastly, online merchants typically have superior control over their brand and design features in a on-demand / SaaS eCommerce environment. This is because the underlying software that makes up the shopping cart, inventory control, shipping integration, and other management modules are not being coded with the website - they’re already there. This allows merchants to chop and change their eStore or marketing firms as needed without having to rip out the eCommerce solution.

How to buy, evaluate or recommend eCommerce Shopping Cart Software | Selecting the right Partner

2008-12-13T17:01:00.017-05:00

There are many important factors when deciding who will be your eCommerce partner. We use the term "partner" because in many ways, our mutual success is linked together. As a result, online merchants need to think about some key areas as they enter in to what will likely be a multi-year relationship.

The eCommerce Spectrum
We won't go into great detail as this could be a white paper on its own. It is, however, important to understand that you can accomplish an eCommerce website in a few different general ways. They are:

Build software in-house

Purchase software

Host built/purchased software internally or through a 3rd party hosting firm (many levels here)

Find a mass-market hosted frontend shopping cart

Find a backend hosted order processing system to attach to your shopping cart (as you grow)

Partner with an On-Demand eCommerce Solution Provider which normally have front end shopping cart software and backend order processing software, as well as high availability hosting in a turn key solution.

With the capital markets tightening down, its clear that large up-front software and hardware purchasing will not be the first choice for many businesses. Developing your own eCommerce software is almost like building your own word processor or spreadsheet - why re-invent the wheel? On-Demand eCommerce or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution providers offer a powerful core eCommerce platform, on a redundant hosting network payable on a monthly basis. This reduces time-to-sales and allows development budgets to stay focused on creating software and components that enhance the unique value of your business.

Checkmark #1: Ability to Deliver
Lets just start off by saying any company you choose should have a successful track record. Online merchants should probe deeply to get a comfort level on the following from the eCommerce provider:

Operational structure

Technology used and redundancies

Case Studies and Customer References

Company history, values, and where they're headed

You don't need a 50 page document here, but it is important to do your due diligence and ensure the answers to these questions give you a comfort level that your potential new partner is not a fly-by-night operation. If you feel like there may be a fit, before you sign a contract talk to a Customer reference about their journey and experiences so far.

Important things to ask a reference:

Are they responsive to your needs?

Have you ever experienced downtime? if so why, and how often?

What's the one thing that made a huge difference for your business?

If you could improve one thing, what would it be?

References are a great piece of validation, but it should come towards the end of the process when you already know they can meet your needs.

Checkmark #2: Find Alignment with your Company
As with any service provider relationship, it helps to have a company that you can relate to at many levels. Online merchants should consider:

Size of eCommerce provider - 800 pound gorilla vs. start-up, vs. high growth - these details may affect service quality / relationship.

How long they've been in business?

Customer Service Approach - is this important to the provider? Can you pickup the phone and talk to someone that can help you succeed online?

Your growth stage - are you making the leap to a higher-end solution? Do you have high growth expectations? Will the eCommerce solution scale up with your business plans or force you to re-launch and find a new solution in a few years?

Coming to grips with this is important. Your busienss will be more important to one provider than anothers and its critical to establish this alignment.

Checkmark #3: Your Top 3-5 Pain Points
Have you ever seen a typical eCommerce feature list? If the solution is feature rich, you're looking at possibly 500 or 1,000 lines of text. Not a great way to evaluate anything. So start by picking out 3-5 key things that are challenging today and that you want to specifically improve upon the day the new eCommerce solution goes live.

Any effective consultative sales engagement is about mapping "pain points" and business requirements to the solution and communicating this to the Customer. Whenever we do demos, we start off by asking what is most important to you and what would make the biggest positive impact on your business today. Another question we ask is: "What wastes your time the most, or causes you the most grief." Questions like this immediately identify where you need to improve and what tasks need to be delegated to an automated technology solution. If you can identify these key issues, and find a way to eliminate them, then you will have more free time to focus on growing your business.

Some examples we hear often include:

Product Management, Content Management and site updates
Keeping Inventory levels accurate and in sync with other systems such as a POS system
Easy to use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) features
Comprehensive reports including, up to the minute sales figures, inventory levels, advertising performance (PPC, etc.)

A simple way to evaluate a service providers sales process is if they're proactively working to understand your top needs. This will also tell you if they're really listening to you. After the product demo, you should have a good comfort that your immediate needs will be met.

Ultimately the final proposal should be reflective of these points.

Checkmark #4: Your Wish List
By limiting the scope of your immediate needs, you should then build a subsequent list of future plans or areas you would like to know more about. For example, SEO control may not be something that is a huge concern over some immediate challenges but may be a deal breaker if the provider cannot deliver this down the road.

This also gives you the opportunity to understand how the service provider responds to questions you may have. After all, they will be a provider of business-critical services for you - you need to know you can pick up the phone and ask them important questions and expect consultative responses. This process should be collaborative with clarifying questions to make sure they understand your needs prior to delivering you a solution.

What if they don't have the features?
If the feature you need is on your core list, you probably didn't hit check mark #3. However if it is something that you can wait for, then the question is a much larger issue. This is because it starts to push on a fundamental issue faced by many online merchants... future features that you may need to drive business - that's check mark #5.

Checkmark #5: Your Future
eCommerce is accelerating at light speeds and online merchants must be able to exploit all the possibilities the Internet may present over time. This includes things like:

Integration with popular websites and social destinations
Cross selling and distribution to widen your audience
Payment and Authorization services
Marketing and promotions management
Fulfillment and shipping services

This is a moving target so what you want to know here to meet check mark #5 is really some fundamental company values of your service provider:

Do they plan on enhancing their platform? When was the last time? How often? If not, move on.
Flexibility to add new features on-demand - How does this process work? How are they evaluated?
New feature release cycle (standard release cycle) - How many per year?
Service Level Agreement - do they even offer one? How does it align to your business needs?

Your future service provider should have a strategy in place to continuously drive future value to online merchants and their end shoppers. This should be a main part of their website, collateral, philosophy, team structure, and business plan.

If you're not getting the signs and signals that this is a core operating focus, you need to continue looking. We call this Dynamic Merchandising at OrderDynamics and this is reflected in our mission statement.

Mutual Success
Its totally clear that your success is highly underpinned by the eCommerce solution you select. The right partner will recognize that you are very much a key to their success. This "partnership" approach isn't for all online merchants, albeit recommended, and the level of the solution will vary based on where they're at in their eCommerce Journey.

Holiday Tips for Online Merchants

2008-12-09T22:05:00.008-05:00

Since our job is to provide the platforms in which online merchants run their business, we routinely browse eStore websites and speak to our Clients to understand what’s working for them and their challenges. This year we were pleased to see many websites have a plan to make online holiday shopping more engaging. Sepcial events and holidays are a great way for online merchants to drive value to their customers and incent purchase decisions. We've provided a list of things we noticed and that we thought were great ways to service an online shopper during the holiday season.

Create a Holiday Theme
Don't you like how the Google logo changes on certain special events and holidays? Well even if it doesn't make you search more that day, it does remind you of the event and probably makes looking at the search logo a little more interesting that day. It’s the same for online shopping. Most of us shopping for a holiday event enjoy seeing some reflection in the website - and for repeat buyers it offers a unique shopping experience. Online merchants should consider their target audience and build themes to support various holidays.

Obviously this can be a slippery slope as not everyone celebrates the same holidays, so it should be done in a way that does not offend, and let's your shoppers know this is a unique time of year.

Keep it reasonable
Google just changes their logo, maybe that's enough for your eStore. Don't throw off your branding and keep it friendly on the eyes. The intention is to let shoppers know that you are aware of the season and that they'll find specials inside.

If you have the capabilities, build in dynamic content that can adjust the shopping experience based on the customer, originating visitor, or other factors.

Create Purchase Incentives
With the first part done, it is important to provide seasonal incentives to capture sales.
Some key incentives include:

Blow out seasonal stock
Free Shipping
"Stocking Stuffers" (Bonus Items)
Product Bundles
Free Wrapping
One-time seasonal promotions

Will it ship in time?
Worried the gift you bought someone will arrive before the big day? So are your customers. So, take every opportunity to remind shoppers of shipping timelines. You can use cut off times or counters to incent purchase decisions and remind them that the products will arrive prior to the special day.

We caution online merchants on this one. Although the intention is to remove concerns and incent shopping, if you can’t effectively check or anticipate shipping times you are running a risk of having unhappy customers with late gifts.

Chocolate Coins "Old Standard"
There are tons of reasons why people buy the same gifts year after year - not the least of which is the easy factor. With that in mind, online merchants should be extremely proactive during and leading up to the holiday season. Using marketing and promotional tools, you can connect back with past customers looking to purchase for the season. By creating relevant, targeted communications, customers are more likely to purchase the same product again or browse your site for something else.

We recommend targeting customers based on:

Previous products purchase
Geographic location
Buying patterns
Related and similar products

Even better, sign them up for a recurring purchase program that handles purchasing and shipping the same stuff once a year.

The Holiday Time Crunch
Back to the easy factor – time is already tight and the last thing anyone wants to do is shop online for hours upon end. With that in mind, make it easy for shoppers to buy from you quickly. Create custom categories and landing pages that promote products and provide gift ideas in a seasonal context.

Rather than losing the sale because someone can't choose a gift, provide a way for them to still do business with you. Gift cards are a great way to achieve this and should be considered during the holidays.

Another important thing to emphasize is the use of “Wish Lists” and popular product lists. Wish lists will allow gift receivers to browse your site and pick things out they'll enjoy - making it that much easier for the gift buyer. A Popular Products listing also helps reduce time browsing through product categories and searching. We recommend doing this across the board and at the category level.

Lastly, a great stocking stuffer idea: make sure "Also Boughts" (People that bought this also bought that") are being displayed to make it easy for someone to pick up some extra gifts.

Annual Strategy
Although we were pleased so many eStore websites had plans in place this holiday season, there were many that did not. There are many additional ways to create customer value and incent purchasing for special events and holidays, the important part of this is having a plan. Online merchants should plan all the special events in the 2009 calendar year and have a strategy based on several tactics.

Some tactics we didn’t look at here include:

Advertising offsite (pay per click, print, and radio for example)
Search Engine Optimization
New domains or landing pages
Online promotions only (for those with retail stores)
Alternative payment methods

OrderDynamics plans to release a complete Dynamic Merchandising whitepaper next year to cover this topic in more detail. If you have any questions in the mean time, email us at blogs@orderdynamics.com.

On-Demand eCommerce SaaS Platform Upgrade: CardinalCommerce and OrderDynamics Partner

2008-12-03T16:06:00.006-05:00

So we have announced our partnership with CardinalCommerce to expose a massive number of payment brands to our online merchants. The statistics are still on the way in, however immediately after we went live shoppers were processing through different payment options than before.

Since OrderDynamics is an eCommerce Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider (ie On-Demand eCommerce), these types of platform enhancements can be made available to all of our customers while maintaining a high level of security and reliability.

We're very pleased with the overall experience working with CardinalCommerce and would absolutely recommend them. As part of our Dynamic Merchandising strategy, we are constantly enhancing our SaaS platform with key-features that help our Customers drive sales, efficiencies, and Client value through the online shopping experience.

Read our press release at:
Online merchants explode eCommerce sales through over 20 alternative payments brands from partnership between OrderDynamics and CardinalCommerce.

For other great features, have a look at our Complete Feature List

Online merchants explode eCommerce sales through over 20 alternative payments brands from partnership between OrderDynamics and CardinalCommerce

2008-12-03T12:00:00.000-05:00

December 3rd, 2008

Canada's leading on-demand eCommerce provider announces partnership with CardinalCommerce to enable alternative payment brands to its customers.

Toronto, ON - OrderDynamics Corporation, Canada's leading on-demand eCommerce solution provider, is pleased to announce its partnership with CardinalCommerce, the worldwide leading enabler of payment brands. The partnership will leverage CardinalCommerce's universal merchant platform, Cardinal Centinel®, to enable multiple payment brands for the Order Dynamics customer base.

OrderDynamics Customers, through a single integration, can now immediately provide over fifteen branded payment methods on their front-end web eStores. The OrderDynamics platform now maintains a single, secure interface to Cardinal Centinel® to enable payment brands such as: Verified by Visa & MasterCard® SecureCode™, Amazon Payments™, Bill Me Later®, Ebates™, eBillme™, eLayaway™, Google™ Checkout, Green Dot® MoneyPak®, MyEcheck, PayPal™, RevolutionCard™, Mazooma™, ClickandBuy®, and more.

"Our Customers can access these services though their management dashboard and automatically integrate the payment services with their current eCommerce shopping cart solution." explains Steven Berkovitz, VP Development. "Providing alternative payment methods to shoppers is an important way for online merchants to gain new customers, increase sales conversions, and make the eCommerce shopping experience more secure and convenient." Berkovitz continues "Through our Dynamic Merchandising concepts we aim to provide the best eCommerce tactics to help our Customers drive revenues and control costs. This is how we evaluate and prioritize enhancements to our eStore websites, eCommerce shopping cart, Fulfillment & Inventory Control, email Marketing, and all aspects of our on-demand eCommerce platform." The development and integration of the Cardinal Centinel platform is part of an overall new feature release strategy that OrderDynamics maintains as part of their services.

About CardinalCommerce Corporation
CardinalCommerce Corporation is the global leader in enabling authenticated payments, secure transactions, and alternative payment brands for both eCommerce and mobile commerce. Cardinal Centinel® enables payment brands such as Verified by Visa, MasterCard® SecureCode®, PayPal™, eBillme™, Bill Me Later®, Google™ Checkout, MyECheck, NACHA® Secure Vault Payments (SVP), Green Dot® MoneyPak®, Ukash™, eLayaway™, Ebates™, Amazon Payments™, RevolutionCard™, Mazooma™, ClickandBuy®, and more to a network of over 30,000 merchants and merchant service providers. Headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, with facilities in the United States, Europe and Africa, Cardinal services a worldwide customer base.

About OrderDynamics Corporation
OrderDynamics Corporation is a privately owned company that has provides turn-key eCommerce solutions to businesses looking to grow their online sales solutions. The success of OrderDynamics is highly attributed to its response to real Client requirements and Dynamic Merchandising concepts which provide superior control and help drive revenue. The OrderDynamics solution is designed for online merchants and services different business such as retail, manufacturing, business-to-business, complex online retail, and more. OrderDynamics officially launched its on-demand eCommerce solution in 2006 after 2 years of research and development.

Learn about how we've helped online merchants grow

For more information, please contact:

Michael Benadiba
Chief Executive Officer
OrderDynamics Corporation
1+ (866) 559-8123
news@orderdynamics.com

Is eCommerce GREEN? OrderDynamics joins Think Green Alliance

2008-11-28T01:11:00.006-05:00

OrderDynamics has recently joined The Think Green Alliance (TGA)(http://www.thinkgreenalliance.com/), an organization with a mission to promote and showcase green products and services in an effort to develop a green business community. As the 43rd member of the Toronto based TGA, OrderDynamics will actively participate several green initiatives with our member companies over the coming months.

Is SaaS GREEN in nature? Not necessarily, however if the software is engineered correctly, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers can leverage key datacenter assets and manage energy-hungry server resources far more efficiently than in-house IT departments or hosting companies.

OrderDynamics is delivered over the Internet via its on-demand eCommerce SaaS platform, and is focused on delivering value by simplifying the business of eCommerce. Through its single code base and scalable architecture, OrderDynamics is able to leverage economies of scale and deliver maximum efficiencies out of its datacenter resources. Furthermore, by automating key eCommerce business processes (Dynamic Merchandising), our software streamlines time and resource intensive activities for online merchants and consumers. As a result, our Customers spend less energy on order processing, shipping, fulfillment, manual data entry, and managing their business overall.

OrderDynamics sees GREEN technologies and efficient operations as a way towards a cleaner and brighter future.