E-commerce Software for Increased Productivity

If you've been running an e-commerce site for awhile and been lucky enough to watch it grow, one of the things you may have noticed is that your workload doesn't stay fixed as sales increase. In fact, there are times when doubling sales may triple (or more!) your workload. This is the time when you should start looking at ways to increase your productivity, or the productivity of your website itself. To that end, here is a list of some of my favorite add-on software that goes beyond the shopping cart. As you review features and costs, consider how much money your time is worth. Can you better spend that time on tasks that can't be as easily improved by software - for example, sales or marketing? If so, these tools may be great investments.

1. Order Management Software - If your sales have grown beyond a few orders a day, or if you have to manage backorders or drop-shipped orders, you may benefit from order management sofware. I covered this briefly back in February in the post titled "Using Order Management Software". Once integrated, this can be one of the easiest ways to stay organized. It also helps with data mining (for example, to see how much you make or lose on shipping costs).

   My favorite? Shipworks by Interapptive is simple and powerful.

   

   Shipworks Main Screen

2. Site Search - No matter how many card sorts and usability studies you perform ("yeah, right?" you might think!), the categorization on your e-commerce site will never been good enough that some customers don't find the need to use your search form to find products. Most shopping cart software packages offer basic search capabilities. But when you need to do more, look outside - to hosted search solutions. They tend to offer more features and do a better job converting sales.

   Read more about Site Search packages in "Hosted Search Solutions for Ecommerce Sites".

   Recommended: SearchSpring for being incredibly feature-rich while remaining reasonably priced. They also offer a 30-day trial.

   

   SearchSpring on PennStateInd.com

3. CRM Software - Getting a new customer is much harder than keeping an existing one. So don't run the risk of ruining your reputation - even among an audience of one - by failing to follow-up on customer service requests. Handling customer service by email can be dangerous. If multiple people handle service requests, they may not know who's covering which problems, or what has been done in the past by a different CSR. Add on a CRM system to handle these issues.

   I offer two recommendations in this category: InverseFlow, a helpdesk ticket system, which I love for its simplicity; and SugarCRM for all of the features it offers.

   

   InverseFlow

4. Email Marketing - Often, email blasts can have a great return on investment, as you have a targeted list of people who are either previous customers, or who have not bought yet but have already shown interest in your site. But it's good practice to outsource this task, not to handle the email distribution in-house. Email marketing companies specialize in using best practices related to email handling, staying on top of important issues such as CAN-SPAM compliance. You also don't want to run the risk of having your own email servers blacklisted if you do something incorrectly when sending out your newsletters.There are a number of hosted solutions for email distribution, at a number of price points.

   The two I've known about the longest are Vertical Response and Constant Contact. However, the ones I've used more recently are actually among my favorites in this section. For lower budgets, I like iContact. It's easy to use, fairly easy to integrate, and reliable. For those who have a larger budget, I recommend Bronto.com for their additional features, particular their reporting and analytics functionality.

   

   Bronto Email Marketing

5. Accounting - Most of us probably started out handling our "books" with nothing more than our checkbook register and Microsoft Excel. But once is enough when you have to prepare your income tax statements based on nothing more than these tools and a box of receipts and statements! This is when it becomes a really good idea to invest in an accounting package (and a file cabinet). For most small businesses, this means Quickbooks. Quickbooks tends to be one of the easier accounting packages to get used to, and because it's so widely used, there are often "connector" software tools that can get data from your shopping cart into Quickbooks. In the software, you can reconcile your accounts, send invoices , issue credit memos, and so on. And come tax time, it makes life so much easier. Businesses that go beyond the "hobby" status - especially if you're looking for investors or want to sell the business down the road - should consider Quickbooks Enterprise due to its audit trail and additional security features.

Fulfillment Companies Ease the Shipping Burden for Ecommerce Companies

Until 2006, Glynn Gallagher's life was "really, really hectic to say the least.". She started work every morning at 8 am, printing out her previous day's orders from her website LockPickShop.com, along with a picklist, and trudged out to the makeshift warehouse building in her backyard. The rest of the day was spent answering customer service calls, packing orders for shipment, and handling returns. She skipped breakfast and allotted herself a 20-minute lunch break. After repeating the process in the afternoon for all the morning orders, she loaded all the boxes in her car and drove to the post office, waited for them to process her orders, and then drove to the UPS Store and did the same thing. She came home and dealt with emails and her website until midnight each night.

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Using Order Management Software

As ecommerce stores grow, the process of filling orders becomes increasingly tedious without software to help. Some shopping carts have some of the features needed to fill orders, such as the ability to print packing slips, track order history as well as packages, and so forth. But bringing an order management package online is often one of the best things a business owner can do to streamline this process.

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Choosing Product Codes or Item Numbers

If you're building your first ecommerce site, the idea of choosing a convention for your product codes may seem like a trivial task. After all, the product code is typically something that is primarily internal to your business, so what difference does the format make to your customers? The answer is, probably none. But it could make a huge difference on how you manage your stock, your customer service, your sales, and your marketing.

One of the first considerations is whether your shopping cart builds URLs based on your product codes. For example, Miva Merchant's default urls to product pages contain the product code as part of the querystring. Consider this example:

Note the last part of the URL - "ABC123". That is the code for our hypothetical product. Now, consider what the URL might look like if you employ URL-rewriting strategies as part of your SEO work:

Although SEO experts still heavily debate the benefit of having keywords in your URLs, you can see how replacing "ABC123" with a keyword-based product code, such as "coiled-garden-hose" could give you a search engine boost!

That's how we started life with our toy store WonderBrains. Our product codes included "4-childrens-card-games","magnetic-poetry-original-kit", and other keyword-based product codes along those same lines. This gave WonderBrains a search engine boost at the time (and I feel they still have some positive effect now). However, we quickly ran up against filename limits. Miva Merchant supports 50 characters for its product codes, but QuickBooks only supports 31. That caused some issues when we tried to synchronize inventory levels between the two systems, because Quickbooks truncated any product codes longer than 31 characters. Later, we introduced Photoshop actions to batch-process images, and discovered a 27-character limit when saving files (until we discovered the value of unchecking the Mac OS compatibility flag).

Another consideration we had was the fact that we wanted to introduce a catalog in 2008. That meant phone orders. It didn't make sense for customers to call in and ask to order item "calico dash critters dash deluxe dash village dash house"! This was another justification for shorter product codes. We decided to go ahead and bite the bullet and change the product codes on over 2000 items.

We settled on a format consisting of a two-letter prefix followed by 6 digits. The two characters uniquely represent a vendor. Putting these first allow us to sort our picklist by product code, and end up with a picklist where items from each vendor are grouped together (based on that 2-letter prefix). Since our warehouse is organized by vendor, that made picking items much quicker - an immediate payoff. The new format also solved the problem of synchronizing inventory levels between Miva Merchant and Quickbooks, and we switched to Easy Inventory Update to make that task go a lot smoother. The new format will also allow customers to more easily order an item by phone when the catalog is released later this year.

Whatever format you choose, there can be a lot of effects down the road among the various systems you will need to run your business. Consider not only your shopping cart, but also your fulfillment software, your CRM package, your customer needs, your warehouse, or anything else that could be affected by the format. It's easiest to get it right the first time, then it is to change it after your catalog has grown to a large size and your site has taken a firm hold in the search engines!