Sometimes it hurts.  Like when a customer returned a tube of sunscreen because the expiration date was 2 months off, even though we knew the product would be good for another year.   Still, we took it back, and sent  a replacement.    Sometimes we fall short of the standard, but we always try.

And then there are those times when we are just unable to give the kind of customer service we want to.

We carry a line of stainess steel water bottles.    A couple of years ago, when the news about Bisphenol A (BPA), the harm it causes, and the fact that almost all plastic water bottles and kids’ sippy cups had BPA, Our Stainless Steel water bottles became instantly popular.

Suddenly, the bottles were flying off the shelves, and our inventory was almost depleted.  No worries, we thought,  the supplier is also in CA.  It takes two days for the bottles to ship from them to us.  So, when we got a few orders for bottles that didn’t exist, we weren’t particularly concerned.  Until our supplier told us that they would not be able to fill our order for six weeks.

Meanwhile, the orders continued to pile in until we deactivated the products.   When the dust had settled, we had 60 orders we couldn’t fill, and we wouldn’t be able to fill them for a minimum 6 weeks. We had never been in  that position before.

We emailed our customers, and told them the situation, apologizing profusely.  A few cancelled, but most took a wait and see attitude.

Over the next several weeks, we emailed our customers every week to 10 days with the latest news from Klean Kanteen.  Mostly, there was no real news.

Then, finally, we started to get our Kanteens.  As we were shipping them out, we ran into a few problems.  For example, a credit card associated with one of the orders had expired.  We contacted the customer, to get the new information, and that’s when it happened.  She thanked me for giving such great customer service.

I said “What?  We are 6 weeks late shipping you an order. That’s terrible customer service”

Her reply “But you kept me informed of what was going on, and that was great.”

All in all, about 6 of our 60 orders were cancelled.  We offered some discounts, and upgraded some orders from Parcel Post to Priority Mail. and we learned a lot.

While we never want something like this to happen again, and we have gotten more careful about deactivating products that are out of stock,  we learned that communication is the single most important thing for a customer.

The core  of any shopping cart is the checkout process.  EVERY shopping cart has to, at a minimum let the customer select products, pay for them, and get you enough information to fulfill the order.

Most shopping cart software does much more, ranging from content management to order fulfillment.

The functionality you need to have in your shopping cart depends on the type of products you carry, how many products you carry, how frequently they change, and how complicated the products are, and how complicated order instructions are.

For example, if you only have a few products, or if your products change infrequently, integrating a very basic shopping cart (such as Paypal) into static HTML pages may be more than adequate.  One company that takes this approach is Sherwood Oaks Experimental College.  (SEOC).   SEOC offers screen writing classes.  At any given time, they have only a few classes accepting registration.  Integrating Paypal into their static HTML works adequately for them, at a very low cost.

By contrast, Kate’s Caring Gifts has over 700 active products at any given time.  Many of these products have options (such as color or size), and several of them fall into multiple categories.  For example, a wallet could fall into “Accessories” – or “Gifts for Men, Under $25″.   Products are added, dropped, changed and suspended. Sometimes a product might become unavailable for a period of time.    So, a simple “cash register” shopping cart was impractical.  For Kate’s Caring Gifts, a shopping cart had to meet the following minimum requirements:

• Content Management.  The shopping cart software needs to allow us to easily maintain our products.  This includes all the descriptions of the products, price, weight, status, and other miscellaneous information.
• Multiple categories per product. A product such as  Dropwise organic scent free lotion, could be contained in lotions, scent free body care,  and, Dropwise.
• Additional Order instructions. Customers need to be able to specify gift wrap, gift messages, and add other information to their orders.
• Gift Certificates and Discount Coupons.  The system had to support both
• Flexible formats.   I wanted complete control of the look of the site.
• Order Management Integration.  We chose Stone Edge Order Manager, and needed a shopping cart that exported orders easily
• Easy export. I needed to be able to export flatfiles with all the information needed to feed Google shopping (formerly Froogle), Amazon Ads, and other data feeds
• Support Affiliate marketing. I’ll say more about affiliates and affiliate marketing later in the series, but whatever shopping cart we chose had to provide at least basic support
• Support tracking software. Such as Google Analytics and/or Hitslink.

For Kate’s Caring Gifts,  we chose Miva Merchant.   Now, there are (and were) a number of possibilities, and we basically stumbled into Miva before we really had a clue what we were doing, but for a number of reasons, we are pleased with the choice, and plan to stay with it for this store.

We should note at this point that Miva Merchant, out of the box, does not support all of the required functions listed above.  However, it has an open architecture, that has allowed us to extend the functionality and meet the requirements.  We’ll talk more about the different architectures available in  our next article.

Conclusion.

As we can see, there is a huge range of functionality available in shopping  cart packages, from simple “cash registers” to complete systems with multiple options.  When selecting a shopping cart, the prospective merchant should think seriously about all the needed functionality, and remove from consideration any packages that don’t meet that standard.

In our next installment,  we’ll talk about how shopping cart software is sold, and the different ways that it can be built.

Net neutrality means that Internet users, not Internet service providers, should be in control. It ensures that Internet service providers can’t speed up, slow down, or block Web content based on its source, ownership, or destination.

Of course broadband providers are insisting that we should just trust them and there’s no need for consumers to be protected by net neutrality rules. But we cannot trust AT&T, Verizon and Comcast to protect a free and open Internet any more than we could trust BP to protect the oceans.

Spot on

To a new eMerchant, this can  be a daunting task as there are an incredible number of choices. Practical eCommerce Magazine currently counts over 500 shopping cart packages, up from 350 just two years ago.

Shopping cart software ranges from free to thousands of dollars,  from do-it-yourself toolkits to complete turnkey solutions each with dizzying array of  claims, features, and options.

So, faced with a smörgåsbord a mile long, and told that we can only make one selection, and it is a selection that we are going to have to live on for several years (at least) how do we make the choice?

In this article, we’ll lay down some foundations.  I am going to talk about what shopping cart software is, what it does, and some of the major options.

Over the next couple of articles, I am going  to present some guidelines for selecting a shopping cart, along with a few personal preferences.  Every situation is different, and their are positives and negatives for any choice you might make.  In other words, I’ll talk about my experience, but Your Mileage May Vary.

Just what is shopping cart software? At its simplest, shopping cart software can be thought of as your electronic cash register. The shopping cart allows your customer to select, purchase, and pay for items from your online store.  Shopping cart software has to record the following.

• Which product(s) your customer is purchasing (including options such as size, or color
• Whatever information is required for fulfillment, such as address, email address, etc
• The price of all items purchased
• Taxes
• Shipping charges (as well as shipping method)
• Payment method, including credit card number

The shopping cart software then connects to the payment gateway (more on payment gateways in a  later post) gets authorization or payment,  and transmits the completed order to you, and confirmation to the customer.  Here is a quick outline of the process

The core functionality of any shopping cart is the checkout process.  EVERY shopping cart has to, at a minimum let the customer select products, pay for them, and get you enough information to fulfill the order.  But most shopping carts do way more than that.  So, let’s look at what else they do.

Content Management. Most, but not all, shopping carts also manage the store’s content, including product and category pages, as well as other pages such as “About Us”, “Contact”, or “Frequently Asked Questions”.      Some shopping carts manage all the pages, some manage a subset, some shopping carts let you create custom pages.

Some shopping carts do not manage any of the content (the basic Paypal shopping cart is one example) In this case,  the “BUY” button will need to contain code to transmit product and price to the shopping cart.  In other words, if the content is static html, or managed by a different application, the BUY button ties the content to the shopping cart.

When we opened our first online store in 2004, that was exactly what we did.  I was unable to get the look I wanted in our shopping cart (which was and still is Miva Merchant) so I created all the product and category pages in static HTML and inserted “BUY” button code (taken from Miva) into the static page.  When we only had as few dozen products, this was OK, but as we expanded into hundreds of products, this became a maintenance nightmare.   We have since moved all product and category pages to the Miva content management system,

Order Fulfillment. Once a customer has placed an order, the shopping cart needs to communicate the information to you,  and to provide the customer with a confirmation.  At the simplest,  this can be an email to you and an email to your customer, with the list of products ordered, as well as shipping address.

Again, when we started, this was how we operated.  When a customer placed an order, we got an email.   We printed the email out and wrote the customer name and order number on a  piece of paper.  Later, we created shipping labels by cutting and pasting the address from the email.  Once the order was shipped, we crossed it off the list.

Many Shopping carts now have order management functions built in.  That includes assigning an order status, printing shipping labels, recoding tracking numbers, and communicating with the customer.

Another option is for the shopping cart to communicate with an outside order management system, such as Stone Edge Order Manager.

Conclusion

While the core functionality of every shopping cart system is checkout, we can already see that what we call shopping cart software can also include other functions such as content management and order fulfillment.

In future articles we;ll discuss some of these options more fully

A friend of mine sent me this post about a really poor customer service experience that she had.

I have a long-haired cat who needs a lion cut and bath.  I can’t take him to a walk-in groomer because he’s a “pooper.”  He gets so upset that he pees and poops and those groomers won’t take him without the cat first being sedated.  Vet won’t sedate for a grooming session.  Mobile groomers is able to deal with “pooper” cats and anxiety won’t be as great without all the other dogs around.

SO – - last time I had it done, I had tried to go with a new mobile groomer service,  because they were much cheaper – but they didn’t call me back in time and only came to my neighborhood one day a week  – - a day that wasn’t convenient at the time.  I ended up going with another groomer who charged almost double – - though I was otherwise happy with the service.

The first groomer (the less expensive one)  has a website where they say that they prefer you to fill out an online form and they’ll reply.  Well – I filled out the form – - twice – - and nothing.  It just went out to cyber space and disappeared.  So I called and left a message.  And another.  And another.  Two weeks later, on a Friday afternooon, they finally got around to returning my call, and they gave me a window of a few hours to call them back (they promised to leave their cell phone “on” uring those hours.)  The voice mail message tells people the preferred method of contact is again that web form and the message says that they only return phone calls “some nights.”

So,I wasn’t able to call them back in the narrow window provided and another week transpired with me leaving messages and them not calling me back.

Until last night.  At 7 pm on a Saturday night they called and had an opening the next morning – Sunday morning )today) at 9 am..  So – I took the appointment – thinking at least they were quick in setting appointments up (probabbly because they have no other business).  I asked them if there was anything they needed froom me (last groomer needed access to a sink for hose to drain) and they said no – I didn’t need to do anything.

SO TODAY – the groomer shows up and runs over my neighbors bush where she parks.  When I ask her to move the van so the neighbor doesn’t get bent out of shape – she seems all miffed.  Before she gets out of the driver’s seat, she tells me she’s going to need proof of my cat’s immunizations and rabies’ shot.  Funny.  It’s not like I keep it handy and carry it around with me; I could go to the vets and get the necessary proof – - but not at 9 am on a Sunday.  Soo – because I didn’t have the proof that I wasn’t told I needed, the groomer left.

When I called the scheduler back, she said the reason she didn’t tell me about the immunizations is because she doesn’t particularly care about that, but some of the grooomers do.  Huh?  Like that makes sense.

Wow – there is so much bad customer service that it is hard to know where to start.  Not responding to email?  or Phone?  Not preparing the customer for what is needed?  An employee who runs over bushes?

I think it is a pretty clear bet that these folks have lost a customer for life

]]> http://marketqwest.com/?feed=rss2&p=27 0 http://marketqwest.com/?p=18 http://marketqwest.com/?p=18#comments Tue, 25 May 2010 04:32:47 +0000 LeeAmon http://marketqwest.com/?p=18 Second in a series on eCommerce basics.

In this series, we’ll talk about the basics of shopping carts, payment gateways, pay per click, and search engine optimization.

But, before we get to talking about eCommerce specific topics, I’d like to spend a few minutes talking about general marketing and business decisions that you need to make first.

Who is your target market?

When I teach marketing, I stress to my students that this is the single most important decision that any marketer makes.  Every other decision is based on your definition of your target market.  There are lots of different ways you can segment a market, based on attitudes, interests, income.  You can serve multiple target markets, but you need to define each one clearly, and understand their needs.   When I meet a new client,  the first question I ask is “who is your target market?”  If the client answers “We have something for everyone”, I know we are in trouble.

Why are you different?

The internet has changed the way we think about distance.  Put simply, everything on the internet is one click away from everything else on the internet.  Therefore, if you are not giving your customers a reason to choose your product or your service, they will click over to someone else.    And price can not be the main selling point.  Yes, you need to be priced competitively, but there will always be someone ready to undercut you.  Your difference needs to be something that makes a difference to your target market.

An internet business is a *business* first. So, before we even begin to think about eCommerce (we’ll get there, I promise) you need to be clear on the same basics that every business needs to be clear on.  Who are your customers?  And why should they buy from you?

Define your product or service.

Do this carefully.  If there are options, define them exactly.  Be sure you know exactly what you are going to sell, and how much you are going to sell it for.  While this is important for most businesses, it is crucial for eBusiness.  The reason is that customers do not have the chance to examine the product before hand, so you have to be extra clear on what you are selling.  We’ll talk more about this in future installments.

How are you going to spread the word?

Even though you probably won’t execute your communication strategy until after you have built the site, it is important to think about it.  The days of “if you build it, they will come”, are long since over, assuming they ever really existed.

The internet is a BIG place.  How will your customers find you?  You need to have a plan in place before going any further.

The answer t0 these questions will have a major influence on which shopping cart you select, and how you implement your store.

And that will be covered in our next installment

Some background.

My wife and I own a small apartment building in Scottsdale AZ.  Since we live in Northern California, we needed to hire someone to manage it.  We have had someone in place for several years,  but about a week ago, he called me and told me that he didn’t have the staff to continue managing our building.

So, I set out to find a  new building manager.  After doing a Google search for Property Managers in Scottsdale, I found three that seemed possible.

I called each one,  and spent some time discussing the situation and my needs.  The condition of the building, the history of the tenants, and a little bit about the neighborhood.  I then asked each one if they wanted to talk to the current manager, or take a look at the building.

2 of them said “No, we know the area”, and emailed me their standard marketing material and pro forma contract.

The third one said, “Yes, I would”.  Interestingly, this was the most experienced of the three.  She had previously managed buildings on the same block.   But even so, she called the current manager.  She went down to the building and talked to tenants.  She did some research on other buildings nearby.

When she called me back, she had a plan on what to do.

Making the choice was a no-brainer.