Join us for a Webinar on 12/14/16 with eBridge!

Join us for a Webinar on 12/14/16 with eBridge!

We’re happy to announce an upcoming webinar with our partner eBridge Connections!  The webinar will be Wed, Dec 14, 2016 2:00 PM – 2:30 PM EST.

In the time it takes to watch a rerun of Seinfeld, gain a handful of useful tips to help take your eCommerce strategy to the next level in 2017.

As online shopping becomes old hat, your customers’ expectations are going up (and their attention span is going down).

Join eBridge Connections and Redstage Worldwide for a 30-minute webinar.

We will all explore:
– Delighting your customers with fast and accurate orders
– Common mistakes that are hurting your store’s conversion rate.

The strategy team at Redstage has specialized in conversion audit and enhancement for over 8 years. Redstage will present some of the most common faux pas we find across both SMB and Enterprise sites alike.

Click here to sign up!

 

Top 5 Challenges E-commerce Stores Will Face This Holiday Season and How to Address Them

Top 5 Challenges E-commerce Stores Will Face This Holiday Season and How to Address Them

Top 5 eCommerce Challenges

With every new store display that goes up both in the physical and online stores, we are reminded the holidays are here. Online retailers put in a lot of effort to prepare their store for the holidays because of the potential increase in purchases (especially last-minute). The increase in customer traffic means there are potential increase in challenges; how you effectively deal with these challenges, can either make or break you to cement your online presence. Here are some of the challenges that you may face and how to address them:

#5: Increased website traffic

This is a great part of the holiday season but could have a negative effect on your store. It’s good because increased traffic can convert to increase in sales, however, unpredictable traffic could mean surges which may make your store go offline, something you obviously do NOT want to happen. To avoid this coordinate with your hosting company and your technology partners to ensure your disc space and bandwidth are increased appropriately. There are cloud hosting options and many other solutions to ensure that your store stays up and running during the holiday rush.

#4. Shipping Demand

The last thing your customers’ need to worry about is whether their items will be delivered on time. Not meeting your delivery schedule results in an unhappy customers who could take theirs and other business elsewhere. Evaluate your shipping options to see where it lacks and ensure it meets all potential customer demands. Any and all logistic issues with shipping products also increases your customer service requirements and taxes your staff causing mistakes and furthers the discontent of your customer base.

This doesn’t only effect small or medium sized eCommerce businesses. Just recently, we heard an internal story of a holiday related snafu with regards to Walmart. Their system shipped out a product incorrectly and it took a Redstage staff member 3 lengthy customer service calls to get it sorted out! This type of customer experience is why sites lose customers and what can stifle growth. Make sure your systems are running smoothly and your staff is trained to avoid these types of problems.

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#3. Bad User Experience

Customer expectation for the look and ease of use of your online store can be very high. It is important to exceed this expectation to ensure that the user experience (UX) for the customer is memorable but most of all easy to use. Your products should be easy to find via navigation or search and contain enough product information to convince the customer to complete their purchase. Mobile optimization for your store is especially important in this day and age since a large percentage of shoppers use their mobile devices to shop online. Work closely with your web team’s designers and developers to optimize your store’s UX.

#2. Payment Fraud

The increase in online purchases during the holiday season also means you and your customers are more at risk to be victim to payment fraud. It is important to your customers to know that your website is secure since their card and bank information can be easily stolen if a merchant does not take the proper security measures. According to the National Retailer’s Federation, the average retailer loses 0.68 percent of revenue to fraud. This does not include the cost to you for fees, time and overhead and the loss of customer trust. Customer trust can cascade exponentially to ruin your brand and lose you much more than the industry average over time. To effectively manage this risk ensures that your store is in Payment Card Industry Security Standard Council (PCI) compliance, monitor customer daily transactions to look for any red flags in customer spending, use the address verification system and the Credit Card Verification Value (CVV).

Also, make sure that your software platform is up to date – We’re looking at you Magento 1.7 users! The security issues that can arise from out of date software need to be fixed immediately to protect you and your customers from hacking and fraud.

 

Top 5 eCommerce Challenges

#1. Stock Control

It’s important to have sufficient stock to meet customer demand for the holiday season, it is also just as important to ensure you are not left with a large amount of holiday stock going into the new year. Make sure to monitory inventory ensure you have adequate amounts of stock for potential orders and storage is not an issue. Pull a report on your best-selling items in the last few months to ensure you’ve ordered the appropriate stock levels in time for Christmas. If you’re running any flash sales or pushing deeply discounted loss-leader items, you should have the data to support the inventory levels and not run low or end up with massive overstock.

Overall, these challenges aren’t impossible to overcome. If your company is facing any of these holiday difficulties or in general need any help or support with your store, please get in touch with Redstage anytime. You can reach us at 1-888-335-2747 or email us at info@redstage.com.

UPDATE!

Discover the top trends, insights, and strategies from the 2018 holiday season here!

Apple Pay and Shopify Plus is a Great Combination!

Apple Pay and Shopify Plus is a Great Combination!

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Walking around with a bulky wallet is thing of the past; making payments using apps and cards is now the new normal since customers are looking for an easier way to complete their transactions. This is particularly so with online shopping and Apple has now upped the ante on how your customers can make payments in your physical and online stores using Apple Pay.

As simple as activating Apple Pay in your Shopify Store and leaving the rest to Shopify, gives visitors to your online store a hassle free experience of paying for their items by touching their phones. There is no need to for customers to go through the process of putting in their credit card information every time they buy. Here’s how it works:

  • Customers can add the credit or debit card they wish to use for their purchases to Apple Wallet by entering the security code. They can add as many cards as they wish on their Apple devices using the Wallet App.
  • After adding the card, a unique Device Account Number is assigned to the customer, encrypted and securely stored in the Secure Element, a dedicated chip in Apple devices.
  • Purchases are made by touch ID to scan your fingerprint, simply touch your phone to complete the transaction. When a purchase is made the Device Account Number along with a transaction specific dynamic security code is use to process the payment.

Shopping with Apple Pay provides for safe, secure and simple shopping. Customers’ cards are never stored to their phones or their payment details shared with merchants.

Shopify-powered online stores will be among the first to accept Apple Pay. With Apple Pay, your customers will be able to quickly and securely check out from your online store with their iPhone, iPad, and Mac by simply tapping the Apple Pay button and scanning their fingerprint.

If you have any questions about Apple Pay and Shopify Plus, give us a call! As a Shopify Plus Partner, Redstage can help you with your Shopify needs.

Using Pinterest to Boost Your Store Sales

Using Pinterest to Boost Your Store Sales

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Everyone uses Pinterest, and why not? It’s only the third most popular social media site in the world. Online stores have been taking advantage of its popularity by creating Pinterest accounts where customers can make purchases right in the Pinterest app or on the web without visiting the online store.

Pinterest is reportedly responsible for more than 23 percent of web traffic referred by social media sites according to Covestor. Shopify collaborated with Pinterest to gather data about the use of the Pinterest platform. Their research concluded that Pinterest can be a powerful driver of traffic and big ticket sales.

Why is this so?

Some important facts from the data they gathered answers this question.

Pinners are Shoppers: 2 Million people post product pins per day. That means they will buy it or they have intention of returning to buy. Even if they don’t purchase that product, someone else will see the pin and It will spark an interest for them to.

Average spent per order is more than other social sites: Pinterest has a $50 average order value

96% of product users use Pinterest to gather product information, specifically to see what others are posting about a product they may be interested in.

As mentioned before, everyone is using Pinterest: Originally mostly used by women, new data suggests this is no longer the case. Male users have doubled from 2013 to 2014.  There are 73 Million Pinterest users monthly which is more than the population of the United Kingdom.

How can you use this information to increase your eCommerce conversion rates?

The majority of business pins saved (2/3rds to be precise) are saved directly from a company’s website. You can add the “Pin It” button to your website to make it fast and simple for visitors to save pins to their Pinterest board directly from your website.

Pay Attention to Pinterest Analytics. This information can be used to determine what drives the most traffic and revenue; this information is helpful to you to provide guidance for your presence on Pinterest and how this results in the ROI.

Check out Shopify’s Ultimate Pinterest guide for your online store for help creating your presence on Pinterest to increase your conversion rates.

Shopify Plus has extremely powerful tools you can use to boost your traffic with social media including advanced tools for Pinterest! As a Shopify Plus Partner, Redstage can help you use these tools to increase your sales.

The Incredible Benefits of Magento 2

The Incredible Benefits of Magento 2

 

Magento just took everything to a whole new level with Magento 2.0. Magento 2 offers a superior feature set compared to nearly any other eCommerce platforms but you may ask yourself… What are the real benefits of Magento 2?

Originally, we thought that Magento 2 would simply be a major upgrade from Magento 1, but it’s actually much, much more than that. The file structure, admin panel organization and themeing system are all highly upgraded from the original Magento branch. What we would like to discuss are the major benefits of Magento 2.X and why you should embrace these changes and all of the opportunities for improvement that an upgrade will bring your business. As long time members of the Magento Community, we compiled a list of all the features and changes we love in an attempt to familiarize you with the improvements.

Let’s get started with the basics.

Intuitive Dashboard for User Admin:

The new Magento Admin is intuitive, easy to use, fully mobile responsive and accessible on any device. This update allows you to effortlessly configure your administrative workspace to manage products, process orders, and analyze customer data. You now have the ability to turn on or off any column in your view and drag it into the position of your choosing which allows you to quickly access the information you need when you need it. You can save the specific view and return to it in the future. Multiple admin users can create and edit products without fear of data conflicts. Menu grouping by function- system or eCommerce all modules are more logically organized and user friendly.

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Real Time notifications of Updates

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Data Grid & Keyword Search:

Combine your use of full text searches with keyword searches and SEO for greater customer satisfaction and greater exposure of your products. Omnichannel capabilities allow you to connect your site to other sites such as Ebay in order to increase the exposure of your products and their sales.

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Visual Merchandiser:

You can reduce optimization time with the drag and drop tool and the new automated sorting tool.

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Reporting & Analytics

Built in reporting and support for google analytics and google tag manager.

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More Opportunities for Magento Customization & New Speeds

Magento 2 provides more opportunities for customization without changing core site functionality. It organizes everything under the app structure and allows every module to have its very own directory where you can access all Magento templates, layouts, etc. Setting up new products is a breeze with a guided process that allows you to easily configure your product values such as size, color, and price. The new Magento Attributes give you an opportunity to recreate and better your site and gives you the motivation you need to reevaluate your Magento Performance to make it a better experience for your customers.
Other Magento eCommerce features include its partnership with Varnish Cache, a leading http accelerator technology for fast page loads and server loads which are making Magento sites work much faster than in previous versions. The efficient updates have improved query performance and speed dramatically.

Guided Migration

Magento 2 has a robust a migration tool to help with the data migration between platforms. This assists with store setup, products, customers, orders, and promo rules, but theme and code customizations which includes 3rd party extensions will not be transferable. This is a very interesting tool that we’re excited to see grow into an even more powerful system.

 


At Redstage, we always treat new Magento versions with caution and wait patiently while the new version is tested by the real world and the outstanding Magento community of partners and merchants. Magento 2.0 was released in November of 2015 and it’s truly ready to be your eCommerce platform!