Consumerization of IT: B2B Buyers Edition

More enterprise IT buyers than ever before expect e-commerce to be more consumer like, a new hybris study reveals, and nearly all large companies surveyed said their suppliers needed to make their websites easier and more compelling to use. 

Buyers Want Better Online Experiences

We want our work email to be as easy to use as our gmail, and we want our shopping experiences to be as easy as buying on Amazon, right? Think of the disruption Amazon has caused so many retailers and it's easy to see why so many IT buyers are expecting a similar experience for their businesses. 

In its 2012 State of B2B E-Commerce report, hybris found that while B2B buyers prefer to buy online, the supplier websites they have access to are woefully in need of an upgrade. Fully 71% of respondents said they still work with suppliers who don't offer any online ordering.

That doesn't mean most of those suppliers are doing catalog only offerings, but there clearly are a few. We have to believe those companies are getting an earful from their customers at this point, but even for those who do have e-commerce sites, the experiences offered are apparently a bit behind the times.

E-Commerce Changing Fast

Hybris is a leader in the e-commerce space, according to Forrester, but the landscape is shifting so quickly even its spot on that list is not assured in the near future. The State of B2B E-Commerce report found three distinct benefits of buying online most often cited by the B2B procurement specialists surveyed. These buyers want to be able to place orders when it's most convenient for them. Normal business hours being the limitation there. Respondents also said it was faster and easier to track those orders online.

One of the biggest problems found with existing supplier websites was they were simply cumbersome to navigate. Furthermore, while customers want to be able to buy and browse at their leisure, the study also found they would still be willing to work with a sales rep. This was especially true for those with budgets over US $1 million. 

As a warning to those IT suppliers who have yet to optimize their websites or upgrade at all, the study found two out of five respondents had switched suppliers because it was too hard to find what they wanted. Let us know in the comments if your suppliers have needlessly hapless websites or if you know of one who has recently updated with a better system or service.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

E-Commerce Tracking Tips for Google Analytics Users

Do you have an e-Commerce website? If you do, you're most likely using a web analytics tool to gather actionable insight from your current customers. Beyond straight sales numbers, I use the various e-Commerce reports within the Google Analytics interface to determine where our customers are coming from and what marketing campaigns are paying off. I'm going to go through a method I use to help track these items.

But, first, if you are brand new to the idea of tracking Ecommerce on your website, I highly recommend using Google Analytics. It's free and pretty easy to navigate. The setup can be a little confusing, but Google provides a great help article with all of your instructions.

Campaign Tracking

The first step in successful tracking of what marketing campaigns are driving the most sales is setting up a custom campaign. Basically, you want to tag your links so that we can see which campaigns are bringing your site visitors, and in turn, sales. Google has developed their URL builder, which makes this pretty easy. For example, here is what a URL might look like for a newsletter we're sending out: http://www.webucator.com/go/course-of-the-month/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=webuNewsOct12

Of important note, look at the campaign variable, webuNewsOct12. Now, we can track how many sales were a result of this campaign.

e-Commerce Overview Report

Once logged into your Google Analytics account, you can navigate over to Conversions > Ecommerce > Overview > Source/Medium. As seen on the attached screenshot, you can see that our newsletter campaigns were our fifth biggest source of sales in the given time period. (Please note that most of the information is blurred out for privacy reasons, but you can still see the main point.)

This general report will give you that high-level perspective of which sources/mediums are helping your business grow. And again, tied back to the campaign variables you determined in the step above. Maybe you also see a source/medium you didn't know about? :) 

e-Commerce Product Performance

After viewing the Overview report, you might want to tie specific product sales to specific campaigns you are running. Right underneath that Overview report, you'll see the Product Performance report. Now this report will be tied to how you setup your initial e-Commerce tracking code on your site, and will show specific products that were purchased.

To add in a level of campaigns, head over to the specific category group you're interested in, and then click on the Secondary dimension tab. Under the Advertising group, you'll see your Campaign option. Take a look at the screenshot below:

I sorted the campaigns in alphabetical order and now I can see exactly what products visitors purchased from exactly which campaigns I started. This is a great avenue to see if there are any ways to either optimize current campaigns or start focusing your product messaging on different campaigns!

Campaign Tracking

Lastly, one very quick note on campaigns. If you are ever curious to which campaigns are simply bringing you the most traffic (after you've tagged your links), navigate over to Traffic Sources > Sources > Campaigns. This will give you a combined report of any AdWords campaigns you might be running coupled with any manual campaigns you setup with the URL builder.

And that's a wrap for this article! I hope you learned a few, new actionable steps for your Google Analytics account. If you have any questions on these steps, please leave them in the comments below and I'll get to them. And stay tuned for another Google Analytics blog coming up next month! Happy Analytics!

Editor's Note: Bob provides a great foundation for getting started with Google Analytics in his Google Analytics series.
 

About the Author

Bob Clary has over eight years of marketing experience. He is currently the Marketing Manager and Google Analytics Trainer at Webucator and is a Google Analytics Qualified Individual. Bob has also created Webucator's online Google Analytics courses.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Five Strategies to Increase Product Visibility in an Oversaturated Market

With another holiday shopping season upon us, maximizing product visibility in the e-Commerce market is one of retailers’ biggest hurdles. Keyword-rich product descriptions are important, but that alone won’t be enough to differentiate your product lists from your competition’s this holiday season.

It’s predicted this holiday season’s consumer online shopping spree will be US$ 54.47 billion. To capture a significant chunk of that, retailers must rethink their strategy for pushing their inventory through the digital static to the front of shoppers’ screens.

From ensuring your site is architecturally sound for top search engine rankings, to actively seeking out online customer reviews, retailers can make easy tweaks to their websites to ensure their inventory is in plain view.

Here are five defined strategies retailers can implement to boost their products’ visibility:

1. Have a Clear Website Blueprint

Before pouring time and money into search engine optimization efforts, make sure your website has an SEO-friendly foundation. Every website needs logical site architecture to ensure that search engine crawlers can index each page effectively. Consistency in your naming conventions, sitemaps, header tags, internal links and inbound links provides search engines with a clear blueprint of your site, allowing them to determine which keywords match your offerings.

Create clean informative page titles, metatags and spider friendly URLs. Without a thoughtful structure, search engines are forced to guess your specialty, resulting in unrelated, untargeted traffic onto your site.

2. Avoid Duplicate Content

Few pain points lower a website’s search ranking faster than duplicate content. Google and other search engines refrain from listing substantially similar web pages in search results, pushing websites loaded with redundant content further to the bottom, if not off the first page.

With many e-Commerce retailers battling holiday time constraints, repetitive content becomes a major issue. Too often, online merchants copy and paste manufacturer product descriptions onto their website to save time — that’s missing a unique opportunity to add SEO value. Always rewrite product descriptions to guarantee that they’re tailored to your site, that they speak to your specific audience’s needs and that they are rich with important keywords.

Be careful not to create duplicate content inadvertently by showing the same results on two separate URLs (for example, if the only shoes your website sold were Nike, but clicking on “shoes” or “Nike” yielded different pages with the same products). Avoid these SEO penalties by sketching out a logical taxonomy for your pages, using canonical URLs and having an easy-to-use redirect tool, so you don’t need to be a web programmer to correct the problem.

3. Quality Links Matter

It is no surprise that the Web churns out large amounts of spam; SEOmoz estimates around 60 percent of all web pages fall on the more questionable side of the trustworthy spectrum. In order to provide web users with the highest quality search results, search engines analyze links to gauge a website’s trust and popularity.

Collecting link-backs from popular and highly trusted domains boosts your own site’s credibility, resulting in a significant increase in your SERP ranking. Links from industry-specific websites versus links from general or irrelevant sites speak louder to your own reputation, and boost your site’s placement above the fold. Google also considers internal links when evaluating your page rank, so be sure to incorporate internal links in your overall linking strategy.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

EPiServer Commerce Adds Behavorial Merchandising from Apptus

Behavioral merchandising. That’s a new dimension now available for EPiServer Commerce, thanks to an integration between that company’s platform and Apptus’ technology.

With the Apptus self-learning add-on, product navigation can be automatically generated, personalized recommendations and offers can be provided on an individual basis, and, EPiServer said, retailers can increase customer satisfaction, conversion rates and orders.

Improve Conversion Rates

The EPiServer Commerce platform provides web content management, catalog management and payments for running a full-featured e-shop.

The company said that the plug-and-play add-on, which uses pre-built widgets for quick deployment, offers a method for improving conversion rates without adding more resources. Using auto-generated behavioral merchandising, the idea is to avoid the maintenance otherwise required to manage personalized experiences by building and managing multiple rules and settings.

The add-on provides more relevant searching via auto complete and “did you mean” functions, creates and updates navigation in the most relevant order, and offers such recommendation features as top sellers, recommendations in the cart, product page recommendations and recently viewed.

The primary target for this automatic, targeted marketing are retailers with large numbers of products and customers, such as those with large product catalogs who need help with providing the most relevant search results, offers and product recommendations.

Search and Recommendation Improve As Well

The automatic generation and targeting utilizes an analysis of such data as past purchases, trending top sellers, shopping basket activity and other recent actions. The companies said that Apptus’ technology is the only solution that utilizes the same behavioral software for both search/navigation and recommendation.

Bob Egner, EPiServer vice president of product management, said in a statement that, while personalized shopping experiences are an “essential” part of taking online e-commerce to the next level, “providing a personalized visitor experience based on huge and complex product catalogs can be a real challenge.”

Apptus CEO Michael Mokhberi added that, until now, “solutions with this level of advanced capabilities have only been available to large retailers with multi-million dollar budgets.” 

The addition of this technology goes hand in hand with a number of recent updates by EPiServer recently, including its introduction of a new product information system (PIM) and integration of Google Analytics. The vendor is definitely focused on improving the e-commerce customer experience.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

CloudCraze Brings E-commerce to Salesforce #dreamforce

CloudCraze has released an e-commerce services bundle on the Salesforce platform.

Bill Loumpouridis, founder of CloudCraze and CEO of EDL Consulting, said in an interview with CMSWire that a decade of serving as a Java e-commerce consultant (CloudCraze LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of EDL Consulting) made him realize an opportunity existed to help Salesforce users perform e-commerce.

May Force.com Be With Your E-commerce Efforts

“As Force.com matured, we saw a good opportunity to take our knowledge of e-commerce in the traditional Web environment and apply it on the Force.com platform,” said Loumpouridis. “We created a product so that the entire front office can include online interactions on a single platform.”

According to Loumpouridis, the new CloudCraze Salesforce bundle combines sales, customer service, marketing and e-commerce capabilities. Users from the same organization can all see the same customer, product and pricing data.

“There is no integration and no redundancy of information,” said Loumpouridis. “CloudCraze sits within the Salesforce cloud and has the scalability and elasticity natively inherent to the Salesforce platform.”

During the three years CloudCraze has been offering solutions to Salesforce users, software has been deployed in an “unmanaged” mode, meaning it served as an add-on without official Salesforce involvement. However, CloudCraze is now available to Salesforce users as a “managed package,” meaning CloudCraze is serving as a Salesforce OEM and emulates the benefits of Salesforce’s CRM capabilities in its bundle.

“The customer receives seamless patches and automatic upgrades,” said Loumpouridis. “There are no professional services or coders needed.” The bundle also includes native integration to the Salesforce Chatter tool, and the user interface architecture provides granular control and is divided into five dimensions: style, branding, layout, data controls and navigation.

“Style provides cascading style sheets, while branding is a flexible architecture layer,” explained Loumpouridis. “Layout provides a visual Force.com template and data controls are a traditional CMS. Navigation leverages custom objects from Salesforce, such as menu and category panes.”

In addition, Loumpouridis said CloudCraze offers social media functionality such as the ability to pin any cataloged product on Pinterest and built-in controls for Twitter and Facebook. “The table stakes of social e-commerce are provided,” he stated.

Spinning Off Salesforce

The ubiquity of the Salesforce platform makes it an appealing application for third-party vendors to add functionality to. In expanding Salesforce’s CRM capabilities to encompass full-scale e-commerce, CloudCraze is following in the footsteps of many other IT solution/service providers who have made efforts to let Salesforce users do more without leaving the platform. Most recently Aprimo, a provider of cloud-based automated marketing solutions, released Aprimo Service to Sales, an interactive inbound marketing application that works with Salesforce.com. Aprimo Service to Sales utilizes customer interaction data from the Web, call centers and retail points-of-sale in real-time to provide targeted offers for cross-sell and up-sell programs. The solution is designed to continuously learn and become more intelligent over time as customers respond to customized offers.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Oracle Updates ATG Web Commerce & Endeca Commerce, Business Users a Key Focus

Oracle has been hard at work on the commerce portion of its customer experience portfolio. Today it releases updates to two of its Commerce products and offers a chance to dig into the details at Oracle OpenWorld in San Fransisco the end of this month.

Oracle's Commerce strategy focuses not only on helping deliver great customer experiences, but also ensuring that the business user can easily create and manage these experiences across channels without needing to hold IT's hand. It has also ensured that the commerce platform is the best it can be to support a wide range of scalability and performance requirements.

So what's new and improved?

Oracle ATG Web Commerce

Oracle ATG Web Commerce sat at the top of Gartner's Magic Quadrant for e-commerce last fall after Oracle acquired it in November of 2010. Now at release number 10.1, ATG Web Commerce has a number of updates that support merchants. These include:

• Visual Merchandising: Merchants can now edit content with visual tools that show the shopper's perspective. Tools such as Layout View, Light Table (drag and drop ordering of products) and a contextual menu are new and are meant to reduce the amount of work required to design the shopping experience.
• Editing Multiple Items: Get things done faster by changing a number of items at once.
• Time Based Preview: Want to see what your site looks like at a time in the future? Now you can.
• Mobile and Cross Channel Selling: You can build mobile web sites or iOS web apps using the Commerce Reference Store (a customizable pre-built storefront). Also included are starter applications, best practices examples, and more.
• Global Scalability: There are new business model, performance and international commerce features including a merged B2B and B2C set of capabilities and localized UIs for the business tools. Web Commerce is now integrated with Oracle Coherence (an in-memory data grid solution), and it is certified run on Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle Exadata Database Machine.

Oracle Commerce Reference Store

According to Oracle, recent benchmarking tests showed ATG Web Commerce improved response times by 50% and delivered 3x more page views per second when it was run on Oracle Exalogic compared to a traditional blade system of similar size and configuration.

Oracle Endeca Commerce

Oracle acquired Endeca back in October of 2011. It has worked hard to integrate Endeca Commerce into the overall Oracle platform. The Endeca product line has been combined into two offerings: Oracle Endeca Guided Search and Oracle Endeca Experience Manager, both elements of Oracle Endeca Commerce.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

IBM Improves Customer Experience With Business Intelligence And Smarter Commerce

Without smarter commerce there can be no smarter planet, and IBM is very attached to its smarter planter strategy. While it has done a lot over recent months with analytics and business intelligence to create smart cities, it hasn’t been as vocal with smart commerce releases. So today’s releases for Smarter Commerce are well worth a look.

Big Blue made the announcements at its Smarter Global Summit, which is currently underway in Orlando, and which finishes up tomorrow.

Customer Experience, Business Intelligence

This bunch, IBM says, is specifically for Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Procurement Officers and other top business people that are tasked with producing better and quicker results through better customer experiences across all digital channels.

Just like Smarter Cities, at the heart of IBM-inspired customer experiences are business-intelligence-based software solutions that tap into the buying, spending and shopping preferences of each individual.

All the new solutions in question are cloud-based, which means that companies that decide they need this kind of approach to customer experience can be up and running in a really short period of time.

With today's news, IBM expands its Smarter Commerce initiative with new cloud-based software and services that include:

IBM Marketing Center

This is a SmartCloud solution that combines real-time marketing execution capabilities with analytics in a single solution enabling companies to analyze shopping patterns and develop offers based on business intelligence taken from the client.

According to IBM, once live, enterprise can turn data provided by customers into personalized offers via email or website personalization (including the mobile web), all with a few clicks.

Smarter Commerce Managed Services

These services are being provided by its Global Process Services group, which adds to IBM's software and global business services offerings. Services include full business process and IT managed services that enable businesses to manage all their cross-channel commerce processes.

But it’s not just about software. IBM will also provide human-to-human interaction through these services. IBM says this will simplify the process of interconnecting multiple commerce channels.

Strategic Supply Management

IBM's new Emptoris Strategic Supply Management is available as an on-premises or a cloud solution that speeds-up and improves governance, compliance and risk management for product suppliers. With it enterprises are offered a complete view of spending, contracts, service providers and supplier intelligence and processes.

This too comes with enhanced governance, risk and compliance (GRC) features as well as improved analytics for contract, compliance and improved program accountability.

Finally, IBM has also announced a new asset repository that accelerates the adoption of solutions for Smarter Commerce. IBM Smarter Commerce captures implementation best practices, assets and knowledge that can then be distributed across the enterprise to ensure that any improvements in one part of the enterprise are shared across the board.

There’s another day to go yet for the Smarter Global Summit and it will be interesting to see what else is up IBM’s sleeve. So far, nothing about Smarter Cities, but there’s still time.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Badgeville Releases Its Gamification Platform for Drupal

Drupal, get ready for some fun. Badgeville announced the launch of its gamification and behavior management platform for the open-source content, social and commerce management system.

The integration is designed to simplify the ability to apply what Badgeville calls “engagement mechanics” to websites built and managed with Drupal. It will be offered by Drupal-service provider Acquia to its customers.

Engaging for Rewards

Gamification rewards desired behaviors such as starting discussion forums, commenting and writing and replying to blog posts in order to increase customer loyalty, satisfaction and retention. There are also “anti-gaming mechanics,” which set limits on how many times a behavior can be rewarded.

Badgeville CEO Kris Duggan said in a statement that this is the first integration between an “industry-leading gamification and behavior platform and Drupal.” He added that Badgeville uses Drupal, along with customized functionalities, to manage its own Badgeville Community.

Other current customers who use Badgeville with Drupal include iVillage, Paypay’s X.commerce and PropertyInvesting.com. The company said that its customers typically see increases in user behavior tied to business objectives of between 20 and 200 percent.

Badgeville said that its platform has led to significant increases in customer loyalty and engagement. It cited the example of Mother Nature Network, a site focused on environmental and sustainability news, that uses the Badgeville platform to reward such behaviors as Green Blog posts, reader comments and uploading videos.

Points, Levels, Missions

The gamification platform’s rewards include points, achievements, levels, tracks and missions. Its social gaming techniques include contests, leaderboards and notifications.

For instance, a user is notified that someone has written a review on the site about a new line of sneakers. That user reads the review, writes a comment, and then writes his or her own review. Badgeville’s gamification components can award the user with a Marathon achievement level, which the platform allows to be used for special privileges or discounts.

Based in Menlo Park, California and founded in 2010, Badgeville provides gamification and social engagement solutions to influence and analyze user behavior. 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com