OrderDynamics Upgrades Call Center Technology in its eCommerce SaaS Platform

Toronto, ON - OrderDynamics, Canada's Leading On-Demand eCommerce Platform Provider, has recently deployed a major upgrade to its Call Center module specifically designed for online merchants with customer care teams that support multiple eCommerce websites.

As part of their regular SaaS platform feature release cycle, OrderDynamics delivers another important upgrade to its multi-channel Order Management System (OMS) within its eCommerce Platform. The recent update to the fully integrated Call Center application provides additional features especially important for multi-store retailers and additional Dynamic Merchandising to support fast and easy cross selling and upselling. In addition, the Call Center module has been overhauled for performance to make it even more appealing for large catalog merchants with SKU counts beyond 100,000 and large customer databases. Some of the new eCommerce Call Center features include: multi-store impersonation, streamlined customer lookup, guided navigation product search, autocomplete product search, customer also bought dynamic merchandising, related items merchandising, stock availability, pricing overrides, and more.

The multi-eStore (often referred to as multi-site) technology allows merchant call centers, or a third party call center, to take orders for any branded websites that they support with all per-site features such as product pricing, promotions, customer records, transactional emails, payments, shipping rates, and more. In addition, the OrderDynamics Call Center utilizes a best practice single-page checkout page and latest shopping cart features that provide support for in-cart triggers, merchandising of bonus items, ability to add and remove promo codes, shipping rates, offline payments, and the ability the save the shopping cart as quote for lookup later. Another feature that was added is the ability for a merchant to lookup a shopper's saved cart from the CRM module and load that cart into the Call Center to help the customer checkout. The merchant can also retrieve saved quotes or any frontend shopping list, such as a wish list or shopping list that is part of a shopper's account, to assist with checkout.

In addition to these new features, the OrderDynamics Call Center has always allowed the merchant to process current customer orders securely, without requiring access to the shopper's credit card, assisting with PCI compliance. "The integrated frontend and backend nature of OrderDynamics is what mid-sized online retailers are looking for in their eCommerce platform" explains Michael Benadiba, CEO of OrderDynamics Corporation. "The Call Center module is a critical part of our strategy to give high-volume, multi-store merchants the tools they need to quickly grow sales and operate efficiently" continues Benadiba.

As with all releases to their On-Demand eCommerce Platform, the new Call Center was seamlessly released into the core platform making it immediately available to all OrderDynamics Clients. OrderDynamics launched the upgrade in January as part of their winter 2011 release.

OrderDynamics Sponsors eTail Canada

For the first time, eTail is coming to Canada and promises to draw a great group of retail executives and people in the Canada eCommerce scene. Held on Toronto on May 16th-17th, eTail Canada is the only Canadian event that is completely focused on multi-channel marketing and e-commerce optimization.

Come visit us at our booth, or contact us to setup a meeting at the show.

About eTail Canada.

Since 1999 the producers of the eTail conference have been researching with senior executives from the top retailers in the world bringing them together to discuss the latest trends that impact the industry. In the last two years Canada’s astounding growth in the ecommerce sector has been a prevailing topic of discussion.

A report from Statistics Canada revealed that window shopping has become one of the most popular activities online, with 52% of Canadians reporting that they window shopped online in 2009. 39% of Canadians also reported buying goods or services online.

At eTail Canada, retailers will engage with the top-level speaking faculty, and each other, to discuss key initiatives to bring back to the office. Initiatives that will cut costs and drive revenue for 2011.

Search Merchandising: 5 Tips to Optimize eCommerce Site Search

Connecting shoppers to products quickly is the goal when planning an effective search merchandising strategy. A strong Site Search, in combination with a robust Guided Navigation system, is the first step to reducing the number of clicks for your customers. Once these tools are in place (and we realize many high-growth B2C and B2B websites are lacking in this area), it is important to constantly optimize your eCommerce platform in response to how shoppers are using your site.

Below are the Top 5 Search Merchandising tactics that should be part of your routine.

Monitor Search History
Keeping on top of what keywords shoppers are using on your website is a good way to understand how you should merchandise your products so they'll find them faster. An effective Search History report should provide you with the ability to drill down to each of your websites, define a date/time range, and immediately see the keywords used by your shoppers along with 1) How many times these keyword was used and 2) Average search results. This will allow you to zero-in on key consumer searches and prioritize the rest of your Search Merchandising Plan.

Optimize Product Keywords
Once you're armed with real-world data of how your Site Search is producing (or not producing) search results, you can begin to optimize the fields searched by your platform. This usually includes adding or removing keywords to your products, adjusting titles and descriptions, and any other fields your site search platform uses (like product attributes for example).

Create Search Overrides
Search Overrides are a great way to ensure a specific set of products are included in the natural search results or that they're the only products that are displayed. For example, if you have a promotion running for a group of products, using Search Overrides you can ensure these products are at the top search results when the shopper searches specific search terms, regardless of the natural results the platform may produce. An example might be appending these promotional products to the natural results when searching Product Sub-Categories that these products might appear in or competitive brands you do not carry.

Adding Search Redirects
Search Redirects are used to when you want to totally avoid sending shoppers to the product search results. It usually involves sending the shopper directly to a landing page that is better suited for the customer and thus more likely to result conversions. For example, some merchants will redirect shoppers to a Guided Selling Page, Category Page, or Brand page for broad-based search terms brand names, topics like "Gift Cards", and more.

Add Attributes for Guided Navigation
Product attributes that are available for use with Guided Navigation (also referred to as Faceted Navigation) make refining large search results quick and easy. This involves creating or updaing Product Attribute Groups with key attributes that can be used with guided navigation. Then each product is updated with its associated attribute value. For example, a sock that is made of wool vs. cotton. Using this efficient search merchandising tactic, shoppers can immediately filter their search results with what interested them the most.

For more information about Search Merchandising tools from OrderDynamics, contact us today!

Chiefsupply.com Launches on OrderDynamics!

Congratulations to CHIEFSupply.com on the re-launch on OrderDynamics! The CHIEF team totally redesigned their high volume B2C and B2B website to lay the foundation for significant revenue growth over the next 12 to 36 months. The website is fully integrated with the CHIEF backoffice systems for Products, Pricing, Attributes, Inventory, and Fulfillment. Checkout their huge selection of products from categories like: Law Enforcement, Military and Federal, Fire and Rescue, EMS, and Medical and Scrubs.Here are some of the cool features of the CHIEF site:

• Faceted navigation
• Multi-level category pages
• Brand pages
• Sophisticated Promotions
• Ratings and Reviews
• Multiple Images, Zoom, and Video
• Recently viewed, Top Sellers, Recommendations
• Mini Cart and Streamlined Cart and Checkout

The new www.chiefsupply.com was designed by our partners, UXER Design.

Pilotpen.us Launches on OrderDynamics!

Congratulations to Pilot Pen on their recent launch of their eCommerce website on OrderDynamics! The Pilot team completely re-designed their site to create a fast and fun way to shop for pens and refills. Go checkout the wide variety of brands, colors, and styles of your favorite Pilot Pens and many more now available directly from www.pilotpen.us!Here are some of the cool features of the Pilot Pen site:

• Multi-Select Faceted navigation
• Easy-to-use Product Finder Tool
• Brand pages
• Shop for singles, multi-packs, refills
• Multiple Images, Zoom, and Video
• Mini cart and Recommended Products
• Complete backoffice integration for Products, Inventory, Pricing, and Fulfillment

The new www.pilotpen.us website was designed by our partners, GPROXY Design.