Canadian Women’s Apparel Retailer, Anna Bella Fashions, Launches with OrderDynamics!

OrderDynamics® would like to congratulate Canadian women’s fashion retailer, Anna Bella, on the launch of their first ever eCommerce shopping experience on the OrderDynamics On-Demand Commerce Platform.

Anna Bella brings with it 17 years of retail experience in offering high quality women’s casual and work apparel, evening wear and accessories to its first online store. They specialize in providing customers with local designer brands and stylish private labels in sizes 6 to 18, as well as petite variations. With the launch of their omni-channel offering, Anna Bella extends its retail operations from more than 20 stores in Ontario, Canada to delivering their signature shopping experience all across Canada.

The new AnnaBella.com Home Page

The new AnnaBella.ca displays a full catalog of Anna Bella fashions with features that enable simplified browsing such as a Guided Navigation, Shop by New Arrivals, and Shop by Top Sellers.  AnnaBella.com’s sophisticated product pages offer care instructions and recommended items to complete an outfit and help shoppers’ match items to their personal style, while the Shop by Comparison feature allows customers to compare up to 4 products at a time on one screen.

Anna Bella's Shop by Comparison feature

Anna Bella selected OrderDynamics while seeking an eCommerce platform that would allow them to provide the same quality of service online as they do in stores. The flexibility and scalability of the cloud-based platform, paired with extensive experience in launching online stores for the first time provided Anna Bella with the confidence to partner with a solution they knew would enable their sophisticated in-store experience to resonate online.

AnnaBella.com Product Page

Through OrderDynamics, AnnaBella.com offers advanced fulfillments options to effectively serve and retain their online customer base. With the OrderDynamics’ Endpoint Solution, they are able to efficiently pick and pack orders in-store as soon as they come in, and ship 90% of all orders the next business day. AnnaBella.com will leverage the support and expertise of OrderDynamics’ dedicated Account Managers to help them seamlessly transition into online and omni-channel operations, and learn how to fully apply the end-to-end solutions and third-party integrations within the platform to quickly grow their business.

“We’re very excited about the launch of the new AnnaBella.com, and the opportunity to help them expand their business online,” says Michael Turcsanyi, President at OrderDynamics. “OrderDynamics’ experience and expertise helped us create a plan with Anna Bella to rapidly launch the site to meet their seasonal goals . The site has great functionality to help them build their online following, and they have access to excellent tools with the OrderDynamics Team that will help them continue to progress and grow”.

Recorders.com Launches Re-Designed Site with OrderDynamics

OrderDynamics® would like to congratulate Recorders.com on the release of their brand new ecommerce site design. Recorders.com – a leading supplier of digital voice recorders, transcription software and accessories – first migrated to the OrderDynamics On-Demand eCommerce Platform in 2011, and quickly saw vast improvements in traffic and revenue. Continued growth among  B2B and B2C web traffic drove the company to simplify its shopping experience with a slick new design to optimize conversions.

Recorders.com's new Home Page

The re-designed site features a sleek layout that seeks to help visitors to Recorders.com to better navigate amongst the extensive product offering. Visitors will be able to quickly access pertinent information via new quick-pick personalized content areas pertaining to popular products and brands, new media features, and industry trends and press. Recorders.com has also revamped its headers and footers with larger text to ensure visitors are easily able to locate direct links to what they are looking for.

Recorders.com Personalized Content Areas

“With the new design, we hope to improve customer experiences by making it easier for visitors to find and shop for exactly what they are looking for,” says Krish Michaels, CEO of Recorders.com. “We’ve always been a one-stop shop for digital recording devices, customer support and training, and we hope that by updating the site with new eCommerce best practices and features from the OrderDynamics platform, we can build on our reputation of a supportive retailer offering an exceptional online shopping experience.”

Recorder.com's Redesigned Footer

The Shoe Company Re-Launches on OrderDynamics!

OrderDynamics® would like to congratulate The Shoe Company on their re-launch of TheShoeCompany.com on the OrderDynamics On-Demand eCommerce Platform.

The popular Canadian shoe and apparel retailer based out of Toronto currently operates 65 retail outlets throughout Canada, and has offered trendy dress, casual and sport shoes and accessories to Canadians since 1992. The Shoe Company has established a resilient reputation of offering one of the widest selections of footwear, including comfort brands such as Clarks, Florsheim, and Ecco, as well as high-fashion brands like BCBG, Jessica Simpson, and Michael Kors, and is known for exceptional customer service.

The Brand New TheShoeCompany.com Home Page

Improved Site Search

TheShoeCompany.com seeks to mirror an excellent in-store shopping experience in their online store so as to boost consumer confidence in shopping online. The new site features a frontend redesign with simplified navigation via browse by Brand and Category options, as well as filtered search options based on size, width, price and colour. 

TheShoeCompany.com's Improved Search Navigation

Product pages showcase high-resolution images with product zoom for a realistic view of merchandise, and detailed product descriptions and promotional information (such as markdown rate) so shoppers are optimally educated in their purchase decisions. Pages are also enhanced with social sharing buttons, and shoppers can view You May Also Like, and read and offer Ratings and Reviews right on the product page.

TheShoeCompany.com's new Product Pages

Leading Fulfillment Capabilities

In addition to improved shopability, TheShoeCompany.com offers several value-add fulfillment features that contribute to a streamlined and satisfying shopping experience. With powerful OrderDynamics backend integrations, TheShoeCompany.com is able to keep the customer fully educated at every step of the fulfillment process, providing email notifications of order confirmation, and order shipped status. Orders can be fulfilled in-store, and multi-item orders are able to be partially shipped, providing unique tracking numbers for each package. Customers can opt to have their order(s) delivered right to their front door at standard shipping rates (or free shipping on orders over $70), or they can pick up items in-store for free.  TheShoeCompany.com has also coined its return policy as Easy Returns, allowing for refunds in-store or via UPS shipment, with reimbursement on shipping charges on damaged items.

Enhanced Store Locator

Supporting their move toward an omni-channel commerce model, TheShoeCompany.com has implemented an improved Store Locator. The new locator is integrated with Google Maps to search via postal code or province and city to display nearby store locations, address and hours of operation. This enhanced feature encourages unified cross-channel shopping, removing the separation between online and offline sales where a customer may view an item online but would prefer to try the shoe on in-store, and subsequently offers the flexibility to purchase either immediately in-store, or online when they’re ready.

TheShoeCompany.com Store Locator

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!

High Level Re-Platforming Goals, Changing eCommerce Platforms

The following is an excerpt from a recent presentation we did for Tenzing Managed IT Services, a leading Managed Hosting provider focused on large-scale SaaS and eCommerce websites. We helped them map out some of the common, high-level goals most online merchants share when migrating to a new eCommerce platform provider.

Goal #1: Building Traffic

•Introducing new traffic sources to diversify sales by major traffic segments (i.e. Paid vs. Organic Search or Shopping Sites, Referrals, Affliates)

•Requires strategies for SEO (on-page and off page), social networking, shopping aggregators, contact acquisition, affliates

•Setting goals for growing specific sub-segments of traffic (advanced segmentation and digital analysis)

Goal #2: Increasing Conversions

•Many times there are significant opportunities to grow sales simply by increasing conversion rate vs. traffic

•Deals with: ability to find, research, and buy products quickly and easily

•Conversion rate data is available by industry and website (i.e. IR Top 500)

Goal #3: Website Control for Marketing

•Many marketing teams have limited or no control over the website and have to “go through IT” to make changes; marketing teams want to make changes quickly

•Common controls needed: Promotions, Targeted Content, Product Carousels, Cross Sells, Banners, SEO

•Launching new products, categories, and brands; customer segmentation

Goal #4: Integration with Business Systems

•Reduce manual efforts for Order Management, Customer Care, Fulfillment, Fraud; enable the Order Maintenance team to “pull up orders, customers, manage orders”.

•Enable access to leading 3rd party services; Marketing services, Social Networking, Payments, Search

•Streamline business processes related to eCommerce (re-educate, adjust workflow); legacy systems integration to automate ERP/POS -> eCommerce

For more information, Contact an OrderDynamics representative today!

eCommerce Fraud Detection: Five Recommended Order Hold Rules

Earlier this year we saw record-low reports of fraud rates related to online retail. In January Cybersource reported 1.2% of revenue lost to fraud in 2009, attributing the improvements to the way retailers are managing risk.

With many tools, services, and technologies available for retailers to manage fraud, we wanted to provide some simple tactics to be deployed within the Order Management System. This post provides five great order hold rules for every high volume online retailer.

But first, lets explain what we mean by order holding within the eCommerce Order Management System (OMS) as part of your anti-fraud strategy. We're assuming that the fraudster has successfully passed all "frontend" validation checks, Address Verification System (or AVS), and other "card not present" technologies like Card Security Code (CVV2 for example) or even PIN systems like Verified by Visa. In our example, we basically have valid payment details and the order will be shipped unless we stop it within the OMS. So how does a merchant protect themselves without manually checking every single order? The answer: creating custom business rules within the OMS to trap and hold orders that meet certain criteria.

Within the OrderDynamics eBusiness Manager, we provide a comprehensive Fraud Detection engine that allows merchants to create custom detection rules. Each rule is defined using over 25 parameters and can be chained using AND/OR operators to form a "Fraud Detection Filter". All "payment authorized" orders are required to pass through these filters prior to being cleared for fulfillment. Orders that are caught by the filter are placed in a special queue called "Pending Fraud Validation" requiring a manual review by the customer operations team. As the merchant's business changes or they want to change their approach to fraud, they can easily modify their filters (rules and chains) over time.

Five Recommended Order Hold Rules

Rule #1: Bill To Address does not match Ship To Address

This can be very effective but may also flag too many orders for fraud review depending on your business. For example, if gifting is a big part of your business this rule may cast the net too wide. However, these rules can chained together so you can easily tighten the scope using AND/OR operators with other rules.

Rule #2: Overall Order Value Greater than $X

This allows retailers manually review orders of a certain value that they may not be comfortable being completely automated. Customer Service Tip: Retailers should take the necessary steps to ensure their high-value customers are getting "white glove" service. This rule will give them the immediate visibility into their largest customers.

Rule #3: Customer Account Charge Backs Exceed 1

Merchants should automatically hold orders for manual processing if the account has a history of charge backs.

Rule #4: IP Addresses or Billing and Shipping Addresses Out of Country

There are fraud hot spots around the world. Flagging shoppers from uncommon shipping destinations is a great way to avoid fraud.

Rule #5: Volume of Products, Categories, or Brands

With popular, and expensive, brands and products (for example iPhone 4G by Apple) available for online ordering, it is often a good idea to flag orders with high quantities of these brands, products, or categories from a single customer.

By chaining these 5 rules within the Order Management System (OMS), merchants can create comprehensive, business-specific Fraud Detection Filters sure to reduce fraud without costly manual effort.

For more information about OrderDynamics, contact Michael Turcsanyi.

Holiday Tips for Online Merchants

Since our job is to provide the platforms in which online merchants run their business, we routinely browse eStore websites and speak to our Clients to understand what’s working for them and their challenges. This year we were pleased to see many websites have a plan to make online holiday shopping more engaging. Sepcial events and holidays are a great way for online merchants to drive value to their customers and incent purchase decisions. We've provided a list of things we noticed and that we thought were great ways to service an online shopper during the holiday season.

Create a Holiday Theme
Don't you like how the Google logo changes on certain special events and holidays? Well even if it doesn't make you search more that day, it does remind you of the event and probably makes looking at the search logo a little more interesting that day. It’s the same for online shopping. Most of us shopping for a holiday event enjoy seeing some reflection in the website - and for repeat buyers it offers a unique shopping experience. Online merchants should consider their target audience and build themes to support various holidays.

Obviously this can be a slippery slope as not everyone celebrates the same holidays, so it should be done in a way that does not offend, and let's your shoppers know this is a unique time of year.

Keep it reasonable
Google just changes their logo, maybe that's enough for your eStore. Don't throw off your branding and keep it friendly on the eyes. The intention is to let shoppers know that you are aware of the season and that they'll find specials inside.

If you have the capabilities, build in dynamic content that can adjust the shopping experience based on the customer, originating visitor, or other factors.

Create Purchase Incentives
With the first part done, it is important to provide seasonal incentives to capture sales.
Some key incentives include:

• Blow out seasonal stock
• Free Shipping
• "Stocking Stuffers" (Bonus Items)
• Product Bundles
• Free Wrapping
• One-time seasonal promotions

Will it ship in time?
Worried the gift you bought someone will arrive before the big day? So are your customers. So, take every opportunity to remind shoppers of shipping timelines. You can use cut off times or counters to incent purchase decisions and remind them that the products will arrive prior to the special day.

We caution online merchants on this one. Although the intention is to remove concerns and incent shopping, if you can’t effectively check or anticipate shipping times you are running a risk of having unhappy customers with late gifts.

Chocolate Coins "Old Standard"
There are tons of reasons why people buy the same gifts year after year - not the least of which is the easy factor. With that in mind, online merchants should be extremely proactive during and leading up to the holiday season. Using marketing and promotional tools, you can connect back with past customers looking to purchase for the season. By creating relevant, targeted communications, customers are more likely to purchase the same product again or browse your site for something else.

We recommend targeting customers based on:

• Previous products purchase
• Geographic location
• Buying patterns
• Related and similar products

Even better, sign them up for a recurring purchase program that handles purchasing and shipping the same stuff once a year.

The Holiday Time Crunch
Back to the easy factor – time is already tight and the last thing anyone wants to do is shop online for hours upon end. With that in mind, make it easy for shoppers to buy from you quickly. Create custom categories and landing pages that promote products and provide gift ideas in a seasonal context.

Rather than losing the sale because someone can't choose a gift, provide a way for them to still do business with you. Gift cards are a great way to achieve this and should be considered during the holidays.

Another important thing to emphasize is the use of “Wish Lists” and popular product lists. Wish lists will allow gift receivers to browse your site and pick things out they'll enjoy - making it that much easier for the gift buyer. A Popular Products listing also helps reduce time browsing through product categories and searching. We recommend doing this across the board and at the category level.

Lastly, a great stocking stuffer idea: make sure "Also Boughts" (People that bought this also bought that") are being displayed to make it easy for someone to pick up some extra gifts.

Annual Strategy
Although we were pleased so many eStore websites had plans in place this holiday season, there were many that did not. There are many additional ways to create customer value and incent purchasing for special events and holidays, the important part of this is having a plan. Online merchants should plan all the special events in the 2009 calendar year and have a strategy based on several tactics.

Some tactics we didn’t look at here include:

• Advertising offsite (pay per click, print, and radio for example)
• Search Engine Optimization
• New domains or landing pages
• Online promotions only (for those with retail stores)
• Alternative payment methods

OrderDynamics plans to release a complete Dynamic Merchandising whitepaper next year to cover this topic in more detail. If you have any questions in the mean time, email us at blogs@orderdynamics.com.