Anything related to wine is special and needs extra-ordinary treatment. Like their customers’ aristocratic natures and ultra-sensitive taste buds, winery-owners often need specialized equipments and in modern days, customized software solution. LAN Services, the maker of 24SevenCart online shopping cart solution, is introducing a host of new features in the shopping cart system to meet certain specific needs online wine retailers.

“Our winery solution goes far beyond the regular process of integrating Dynamics RMS with the online store. These new features are the fruits of our months of business analysis exercises to find the pain-areas in the online wine retailing business”, Mr. Anil Jindal, CEO of LAN Services pointed out. “We know how to present your wines, how a buyer searches, what you need to bring them back; we have covered everything in our winery solution”, he added.

The winery solution powered by 24SevenCart offers various wine industry-specific features. For example, the front-end website is equipped with a collection of filters and sort mechanisms that help the buyer find the exact wine based on price range, grape varietal or location. There are options to add additional filters or customize the sorting mechanism. The solution also offers an extensive module to manage wine club members’ portfolios, their purchases, friend list and so on. Since wine is considered an excellent gift for all occasions, 24sevencart powered winery store solution gives adequate option to manage and send gifts to multiple recipients too. Furthermore, Winelink (the application that integrates Dynamics RMS with the online store) synchronizes every customer’s details from the web store to the POS in the physical location.

Mr. Jindal also added, “The best part of our solution is – it’s truly affordable and 100% customizable; the winery solution can be integrated with various other third-party applications.” Some leading industry experts and marketers confirmed that the very flexibility in the entire solution makes it distinct from various other similar solutions available in the market today and this approach alone make a major difference when the retailer will sell his wines using 24SevenCart winery solution powered by Winelink.

A study by the leading business analyst group Nielsenwire has revealed some startling facts about the American web surfers. The study shows that 23% of an American’s time used online, is spent on social media websites. As for online search, they spent only 3.5% of their time. The growth in affinity for social media has increased by 43%, whereas time spent on emailing has declined by 29%. Instant messaging which was a must-do for everyone using the Internet even a few years back, has only 4% of share in the whole pie which is steadily declining.

These facts and others point to only one thing – social media rules; at least for the time being. Naturally, the most likely places where you can find people (read customers) are social media networks. Being an online retailer now is the time for you to focus on social media and make your presence felt there.

Here are a few tips to make your online ecommerce store visible in social media:

• It is important that your shopping cart software display icons that links to your accounts – put the icons for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn etc. in one place and give proper visibility.
• While socializing, people are mostly in joyous mood. Entice them by running games or lucky-draws; give away a few prizes (Why – use your least sold products!). This will give people a chance to visit your online store – even if they don’t play or win. Chances are that 4 out of 10 visitors will return.
• Update your social media site regularly. This is very important, as your followers will always get the latest info; otherwise they would conveniently walk to the next ecommerce shopping cart.
• Don’t ‘push’ your products; rather try helping your followers. Don’t portray yourself always as a business person who is after profit. Instead, be a friend first, people will automatically follow. Do not go gaga about “what you have”, tell people “what you can give”.
• Use shopping cart software that offers interface to link products directly to your favorite social media site.  For example, there are ecommerce store providers who can help you to take your products directly into the Fan pages of your Facebook account. Your Facebook fans can see all the latest products from your online store from inside their Facebook accounts only.

Interacting with your fans/followers/customers is the key to spread your brand’s value in social media. Search engine optimization techniques are good for enhancing your search ranking. However, to be known in the social media front, you need to a have different strategy in place. You must give your followers the freedom to judge your products, comment on them and compare. On your part, you will need to analyze people’s views, follow trends, and implement changes and so on.

Social media networks have immense potentiality to expose your products sold through your ecommerce shopping store to new customers. Furthermore, it’s the perfect platform to help you retaining customers and build a sustainable relationship with new ones. So, when the social media rules, you can take your online ecommerce shopping cart to new heights, if you closely follow the rules of the game!

The retail business you run is no longer the same as it was 10 years back. Business is now driven by three paradigms:

• Competitive advantage
• After-sales service and
• Marketing.

If you sell a quality product at a reasonable price (which most of us do) and give good customer care or technical support, you will cover the first two paradigms. But, what makes the difference between profitable retailing and the not-so-profitable one is how you market your retail store. Your marketing strategy in the most decisive point in your retail business and a number of retailers pay a fortune for it.
People say marketing is a one-way outlet that drains out your revenue – perhaps they are right! Even if you keep aside the salary of your well-spoken, neatly dressed marketing people, you have a fat bill to pay for your ad campaigns alone. Recently I had a discussion with a retailer friend based in California on ad-expenses of retailers in general.

Frankly, I didn’t believe him when he told me the figures and I went ahead to check it out with an outdoor advertising agency. What I found was astonishing (being a retailer, this may be normal to you) – the cost of a normal billboard in shopping malls or in the highways in the California bay area would cost you anywhere between $600 to $2,500! Multiply it by 5 for display in five different areas – the cost is a whopping $10,000 per month. Even those innocent looking and hardly noticeable angular ads on shopping mall stairways and escalators may cost you anything from $200 to $500 a month!

I don’t deny the fact that the marketing expense on these ads are good. They help you to spread the awareness about your business. But, as I have deduced you may belong to either of the two groups; those who are running such ads for their business incurring an enormous expense and those who cannot even think of putting such an ad simply because – he/she cannot afford! However, for both these groups of retailers – there is ONLY one cost-effective solution! A solution that would reduce your marketing budget by one-tenth and at the same time, increase your visibility 50 times to a far larger audience. That is – online retail store!

A web store not only takes your retail business to your customer where they can easily purchase at will, but it can be the ideal solution to reduce your marketing expense and increase your retail business’s visibility also. A recent survey says that globally 450 million people bought something from online retail stores during the past 12 months. Even more, a whopping 39% Americans shop online! Even 78% of all retail consumers first research online before buying a new product from any retail store! Now compare this – the cost you incur on an online shopping cart in a year is equal to a week’s expenditure on outdoor ads!

An online store can bring completeness to your retail business. Through your online shopping cart, you can both mobilize your physical marketing resources to promote your retail business and streamline how your customers interact with you to purchase the product. However, the mindset of the customer becomes entirely different when it comes to purchase something over the web.  In his sub-conscious mind, the customer usually looks for a better deal as his physical movement is confined (his shopping notions are somewhat ‘pre-programmed’ when he visits the online store).  Naturally, as an online retail store owner, onus is on you to present things in your store as per your customers’ psychological orientations.

A few things that govern customers’ psychology when it comes to online shopping and where you as an online retailer can take benefits are:

1. Neuromarketing techniques – Brain-research studies show that online shopper are greatly influenced by the color of the background, location of the product on the screen, display of pricing etc. The shopper’s decision to buy a product or his spending limit is determined by these factors. For example, researchers suggests that a greenish pattern in the background of a product in an online store selling furniture, may help in firing the online customers neurons in a way that would make them sensitive to the price of the item.  On the other hand, a blue-colored pattern may help in stimulating the online shopper’s neurons towards the comfort-angle of the product. In simpler words, for a low-priced product keep a green background and highlight the “low price”, similarly, if your product is highly-priced, use a blue background and highlight the “comfort features”.

2. Affinity for free-shipping – The phrase “free-shipping” is one of most sought-after characteristics of a any product sold online; at least a large section of the online shoppers just run for it! Consumers prefers free-shipping offers as they compare it to the shopping experience in the physical store; you take out your car, drive to the store, burn gas, buy the item, burn gas again, move through traffic, reach home, park your car and finally open the box on your living room table – well, the retailers mind compares all these with the phrase “free-shipping”. Even a $20 discount weighs less than a $10 waiver in the name of free-shipping. Discount? “Well, it’s ok; everybody gives.”  Free-shipping? “Why, I will buy it!” This is the psychology of major chunk of online shoppers.

3. Comparative pricing of products – Online shoppers’ psycho-analysis report shows that most buyers give precedence to mid-range comparative pricing of a group of similar product.  For instance, if you place two similar items on the category page of your store (showing brief details of both), one priced at $100, and the other at $150, most customers will purchase the cheaper one. Now, add a third item priced at say, $200 (the one that you are not even interested in selling); you will be amazed to see that most people will purchase the item selling for $150! Moral of the story – always give your buyers something to compare!

Online shoppers also prefer the pricing in their local currencies (if you are selling globally) and they have a great love for coupons also. Moreover, the buying pattern also varies with various demographic parameters like age-group, income-group, sex, education, community and so on. So, while you sell – observe and know your customers!

Bill Clinton once commented – “the single most important factor in your retail business is – your customers”. Whether online or offline, your customers are the main driving factor behind the success or failure of your business. You must always remain on your toes to serve your customers with whatever best possible thing you can manage.

Now, if you are using Microsoft RMS (Retail Management System), you are actually a few steps ahead of your competitors in wooing customers. Microsoft RMS (Retail Management System) gives some unique features to manage and control discounts and other sales offers that keep you stay in touch with your customers at all time. Let see how a few simple tricks can do wonders for your Online Retail Business!

• Putting items on sale:  Being a retailer, you must make both your retail and the web store a ‘happening place’ for your shoppers. There should be one or the other promotional activity running on your online web store. A group of your customers should always be looking for the next sales day or promotion activity. You can name a sale-campaign as “customer appreciation day“, “Value Return week”, “Stock clearance sales”, “Weekender Specials” and what not? Now, in all cases, you can set the sale prices in your Microsoft RMS in advance. Before you specify the sales prices of your products, you can specify start and end dates or the campaign or make it a weekly schedule (put some items on sale on Saturday’s and Sunday’s) in your RMS Microsoft. When a customer buys an item on sale, Microsoft Dynamics RMS will automatically take the sale price. When the campaign ends, Microsoft RMS will convert the sale price to the regular price.

  You can set sales-schedule in your store from the store operations manager in Microsoft Dynamics RMS. If you are using Retail Management System Shopping Cart Software, you can take this complete sales-schedule to your online store and avail these offers for online store demo and free trial to your online shoppers.

• Provide a gift with a purchase: In your Microsoft Dynamics RMS, you can assign a promotional or gift item (called a “tag along” item) with every item in the database. Thus, when a shopper buys a particular item, Microsoft RMS will automatically include the gift item in the sale. Even more, you can also specify the quantity of the gift item you want to provide with the purchase. Before you give a gift for a purchase, you will need to specify an item as gift and place it as a “tag along” item to the item you wish. For example, let us consider that you want to give a skating board to the customer who purchases an item that priced at more than $300.00; you will need to assign the skating board as tag along item to each item whose price is more than $300.00. If you have a RMS Microsoft – Shopping Cart Software that integrates with the Retail Management System, these gift details can be synchronize with the web store for your online customers.

• Setting up discount schedules: Microsoft RMS offers two wonderful types of discounting mechanisms; the mix and match – where a customer gets a discount when he/she buys a certain quantity of similar items. The second one is “Buy X, Get Y for Z”, in which the customer gets a certain number of items free or at a discount when he buys a certain quantity of those items at the normal price. In both the options, when a discount is set for an item, the item’s price is automatically reduced as that item is added to a sales transaction (or to the Shopping Cart in case of the Dynamics RMS for Microsoft Shopping Cart Software) and discount conditions are met.

The success of an online shopping store depends on how effectively you can serve your customers. Online customers are more detail-oriented and they prefer to be treated more attentively. The reason is simple – the customer cannot ‘see’ you and your products in reality and to give them the ‘feeling’ that he gets when he visits your store physically, you need to be more specific in both pre and post sale scenarios. Naturally, an extravagant design, use of cutting-edge technologies, and a range of hotcake products – nothing can ensure your success for a longtime if your customer care facility is inadequate.

Gone are the days when customer care meant that your customer would call up to complain about a defect in the product and the lady sitting on the customer care desk would pick up the phone lazily, note down the complaint, give a complain number to the customer, hang up the phone and start polishing her nails or continue reading the trash novel. For today’s business, customer care plays the most pivotal role. Good customer care means you are emphasizing on customer’s delight and thereby winning loyalty, which is the most significant thing for an online shopping cart owner who often faces fierce competition to remain in the market.

The customer care process for your website powered by shopping cart software should consist of the following services:

•    Email support – The turnaround time for an email should be ideally 12 hrs although the normal practice amongst online shopping cart owners is of 24 hrs.

•    Chat support – Should cover at least the business hours of your country/locality (12 to 16 hrs a day at least)

•    Phone support – Business hours normally; should employ additional manpower during shopping seasons

Please note that your customer care reps should be adequately trained to handle the queries and they should have proper product-knowledge and operational details of the shopping cart software. Besides, the customer care reps should also have the skill to build rapport with the customers and take the finer points of your products and services to them. Like your sales team, your customer care team should know about your customers’ demography, orientation, likings and so on. Most importantly, your customer care team members should have the linguistic abilities and communication skill to carry out their responsibilities successfully.

Besides these traditional customer support mechanisms, online retailers should also focus on social networking platforms which getting popular day by day. Social media platforms offer excellent ways to build communities loyal to your brand or product. At the same time, it offers a platform to advertise your product. Moreover, you can easily bring out new changes, offers or anything that connects with your customers on social media platforms and your customers will know this instantly.

An account in Twitter or Facebook has an enormous reach when it comes to sales through your online shopping cart. A small and targeted tweet or a short message send to your customers or a FAN page that describes the latest additions in your product-line is far more impacting than a roadside billboard in your locality.

Ecommerce is fascinating, profit making and a somewhat sophisticated business. But make no mistake – ecommerce is no child’s play! Running an ecommerce store involves a harmonized maneuvering of some technologically complex systems and that too – every time an order is placed in your store.  From database-driven dynamic pages to payment process to shipping integration – processes are all intertwined and not so easy to understand in one go.

So, do you need to know everything about these technologies? Well – not at all. You can use most of the shopping carts without even knowing a line of web programming. However, when it comes to customizing the features or adding a new one – your lack of knowledge fails you miserably! You are now at the mercy of the shopping cart vendor who, in nine out of ten times would charge you exorbitantly.

This is where we are different. When we say we are 100% customizable, we literally mean it. With 24Sevencart, the buck doesn’t stop at some run on the mill features; we have a plethora of domain (read business-specific) specific features, which are sufficient to serve some unique needs of specific businesses. Moreover, if you need something extraordinary, a feature nowhere to be found but you need it badly for your business – we are here for you!

Our customization charges for any standalone or RMS-integrated online store is truly affordable and sometimes it’s FREE too!

The truth is – we are not the no.1 in the business and it’s our continuous effort to match the top honchos in the trade. So, for us providing an online ecommerce store solution is a progressively elaborated process!

24SevenCart integrates with Microsoft Dynamics RMS and POS2009. That’s not all – if you are using any other third party application with Retail Management System, we can integrate that too! Above all, we have robust solutions for channel integration with a 24SevenCart-based online ecommerce store as well!

It’s ‘holiday’ season for most of the retailers; no long queue outside the store, no yelling customer over the phone for replacement, no capitalized email for delayed delivery – there is a lull everywhere these days. It’s the off-season – the same fanatic buyers simply not interested to buy anything these days! So, what do you plan to do these days? Watch soccer? Watch Wimbledon? Go fishing? Or do you have something else to do that would give you robust PROFITS during the coming shopping season? Well, it’s time to think seriously about your business!

The off-season gives you the time to assess your business capabilities and plan for the shopping season. In fact, most of the successful online retailers analyze, plan and act during this period; thus, just before the shopping starts, they launch something completely NEW and end up achieving ‘record-sales’ by the time the shopping season is over. Forget those game-changing marketing ideas of online giants, even a few simple and yet organized steps can do wonders for your business.

1. Automate the online store: If you are using POS software like Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System (RMS Microsoft), it’s time that you integrate it with your online shopping cart. Integrating your Dynamics RMS or the POS system with the online shopping cart will save more than 50% of your data-entry and order-processing time.

2.    Revamp the design: Do you compare the design of your website with your competitors? Does it look pale? Or is your competitor has a new design-element or a catchy animation that has the potentiality to woo more customers? Check out now! But please note two things – 1) You SHOULD never copy someone else’s design to build your online store and 2) Just for the sake of beautification never cut-down on navigational ease. Your online shopping store should look unique, aesthetically designed and yet it should offer the complete freedom to find out the products comfortably.

3.    Work on your categories: Your product categories are like the departments or the ‘floors’ in your shopping store and the sub-categories are like shelves or racks. So, arrange your categories as neatly as possible. If you are planning to add new products, add the categories and sub-categories. Experts say that the top selling categories or products should come first so that the customer’s eyes zeroes on those the moment he arrives at your online shopping cart.

4.    Recheck the pricing: Last year’s pricing structure may not work this year. Note down your best and worst performing products. Find out what others charging for the same product. Remember, a product that performed well last year may not necessarily do well in the next year. So, keep your pricing competitive.

5.    Plan your search-engine marketing activities: Search engine marketing is a long process and if you start it now, you will get the results right at the beginning of the holiday season.

6.    Rewrite the product description: Researchers say that the 70% of the reasons behind online shopping cart abandonment are inadequate or incomplete product information and product details written in “sales language”. Your customers were not born yesterday; they know what they want to buy. So, find out the products whose descriptions are incomplete or unnecessarily exaggerated and make the changes.

These are not everything that you should do during this off-season. Explore new business possibilities, ask your shopping cart vendor to help you and even more, if you don’t get a suitable answer, it’s high-time that you change your online shopping cart provider and go for a reliable before the shopping season begins.

Shopping has been an obsession of women across the globe. A new shop in the neighborhood, a new shopping mall in the area, a new brand launched – women are first to know and first to go. When it comes to shopping, women are more organized (45% of women come to retail stores with shopping-lists as compared 27% of men), regularized and they show some definite trends in their buying behaviors.  A woman is more likely to spend time in a retail store (29%) as compared to her male counterpart (23%).

Now, let’s look at online retailing; a Jupiter Research survey says 60% of U.S. online shoppers are women! Another equally intriguing and related fact is – 92% of UK female Internet users buy products online.  Undoubtedly, these figures show that there is an increasing trend amongst women to go for the online option.  The question is – do women shop the same way in an online web store as they shop in a retail store?
When a woman visits a retail store she will consider a few factors such as:

•    How conveniently the store is located
•    Behavior of the staff
•    Cleanliness (most of women are obsessed with it)
•    Products put at an easy reach so that she can check the label, feel it (if required) and physically compare it with a similar product from a different manufacturer
•    Overall aesthetic decoration of the store
•    And most importantly – freebies and discounts available with the products

Naturally, the same woman when she would visit an online retail store will look for these factors in her sub-conscious mind. She would love to get the same feeling as she derives from the environment of her favorite retail store. She will unknowingly demand these from your online shopping store. She would choose to stay and buy from your online webstore if you can meet the following:

•    Save time: You should give her the navigational freedom and easy roam around options in your store; give her instantly whatever she wants.
•   Get a better selection: Your product should be the best in the designated price bracket
•   Complete product details: Do not describe your products in single words; give as much detail as possible.
•    Better value/offer: Your freebies should be ‘useful’ enough and the discount should be noticeable
•    Logistics: You must deliver the product right at her doorsteps and nowhere else!
•    Flexible return policy: Many times a woman takes a second opinion and you should respect this nature. Be flexible if
she asks you to replace what she has bought.

It is the convenience of shopping from home that drives women to buy online and this has been the single most influencing factor that drives online retail sales. Online shopping store can help you to generate hefty profits and as women are your major customers, you must enact everything in your store to please them.