With 2 major payment providers having issues in the past 4 weeks to the day (Authorize.NET July 3rd 2009 and PayPal August 3rd 2009), many online retailers and merchants that rely on these systems were effectively out of business, unable to take orders, and losing revenue.
Although failures like this are considered unacceptable to businesses and executives, there are ways retailers can avoid being impacted by these types of failures. The solution rests in the capabilities of the eCommerce platform and its Order Management System (OMS).
Order Management Systems (OMS) provide software to facilitate the capturing and processing of eCommerce orders. When this system is part of your overall eCommerce platform (same eCommerce vendor platform driving the frontend presentation and backend OMS) you get a very robust and flexible foundation to power almost all online retailing needs. For example, eMail Marketing, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Fulfillment and Inventory Control, and Advanced Merchandising Rules. This type of "end-to-end" solution helps retailers drive more value from their eCommerce investment by reducing complexities, manual tasks, and less systems / vendors to manage. Obviously, we believe an on-demand or SaaS eCommerce platform is the way of the future for most retailers vs. purchasing and customizing software.
In addition, most platform providers (with an integrated backend OMS) will automatically capture order information prior to posting to the payment provider. This allows for steps to occur before fulfillment like address validation and correction, fraud detection, pre-authorization, etc. This also takes care of two critical problems if payment providers fail. 1. The user is oblivious and can place their order on your website 2. Retailers can quickly and easily resume order processing once the gateway has returned to normal.
As is the case with PayPal and Google Checkout, the shopper has to leave the merchant's website in order to complete their purchase - something not required for other alternative payment brands or traditional gateways like Authorize.NET. However, the eCommerce platform should fully capture the order first and provide logic that informs the user of a payment gateway problem then invite them to use an alternative method or be notified once the gateway has returned.
OrderDynamics takes this a step further and automatically creates a Customer Service Case (ticket) for all abandoned PayPal or Google Checkout orders so retailers can proactively follow-up with these shoppers and convert the sale. This process can be tailored to include an email back to the shopper after X hours inviting them to come back and complete their purchase with a coupon or other incentives.
So when you're evaluating a new eCommerce platform provider it is important to look deeper than the frontend design or "flashy websites" and get into the details of how the platform technology itself will enable a robust, scalable, and cost effective environment for years to come.
See related post: Authorize.NET Outage Does Gateway Downtime Equal eCommerce Disaster?
Learn more about: OrderDynamics On-Demand eCommerce Platform
An Integrated Order Management System (OMS) Key to Avoiding Lost Revenue When Payment Brands Go Down (Paypal, Authorize.NET recently)
Authorize.NET Outage | Does Gateway Downtime Equal eCommerce Disaster? Not for OrderDynamics
If you're one of the many online retailers that rely on Authorize.NET as their payment gateway - today may have been a very painful day. I say maybe because if you're one of the websites that cannot take new orders because of this outage - you may want to look into a new eCommerce platform. Some, more sophisticated eCommerce platforms, allow for orders to continue even if the payment gateway is totally down. OrderDynamics retailers have been able to accept orders on their websites even if Authorize.NET is their only payment gateway.
What appears to be the result of a datacenter fire in their Seattle facility (located at Fisher Plaza), Authorize.NET has been down for over 5 hours already on July 3rd 2009. Many are hoping the sales volumes will be lower due to the statutory holiday for tomorrow's July 4th celebration of Independence Day happening today, Friday.
With regular updates coming from their recent twitter account, Authorize.NET is taking responsibility and also claiming their backup datacenter also failed. *At time of writing, Authorize.NET's website was also down - most likely hosted in the same facility. Details are spare as the company is focusing on bringing up their systems.
"An event like today underscores the need for online retailers need to think about their Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans and ensure their eCommerce platform provider can meet these requirements." Says Steven Berkovitz, On-Demand Platform Architect.
An important feature of the OrderDynamics on-demand eCommerce solution is its ability to still capture orders during a gateway failure, making them available for later processing. This allows shoppers to keep buying as normal. "Orders are still captured, shoppers get an order number and confirmation email, then when the gateway is alive, the system will process them automatically." explains Steven. "The last thing you want is to loose the order - this is the equivalent of closing your physical location instead of taking a credit card manually or cash."
"Another feature of our platform is the ability for OrderDynamics to dynamically route orders to different gateways or completely fail-over payment gateways if needed." Continues Steven. "Our platform is integrated with every major payment gateway and over 20 alternative payment brands; allowing for ultimate flexibility and reliability."
OrderDynamics also has redundant datacenters as part of its On-Demand eCommerce SaaS Platform and enhanced service plans that provide up to 99.9% service availability through a fully replicated Disaster Recovery plan to its secondary facility over 75kms away.
Be sure to follow the twitter feed for updates and if you'd like to learn more about how Payment Gateways are used, see this Informed Merchant Article.
The OrderDynamics team was happy to see you at IRCE 2009!
Dear Customer,
We at OrderDynamics really want to thank you for visiting us this year at the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition 2009. We sincerely enjoyed the opportunity to talk with you and learn more about your business. We’re excited with all that we saw from the exhibitors, and thrilled to see how far the eCommerce industry has come over the past eight years.
We look forward to connecting with you in the coming weeks, in the mean time we invite you to visit our website and learn more about our On-Demand eCommerce Platform.
Sincerely,
The OrderDynamics Team
1 (866) 559-8123
solutions@orderdynamics.com
On-Demad eCommerce Provider OrderDynamics - Off to Boston: Internet Retailer IRCE 2009
We're off to Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition from June 15th to 18th at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.Many retailers will be in attendance to learn about a wide variety of technologies and solutions to help them in their eCommerce journey. Despite the economy, IRCE attendance remains strong with over 4,500 people expected. With 91 sessions, 178 speakers, and over 360 exhibiting companies, IRCE is the one-stop-shop for those involved in eCommerce projects this year.
Come see OrderDynamics at booth 1024! - See Booth Floor Plan - we look forward to seeing you there!
Basic SEO Concepts For Online Retailers
It amazes us how many people we talk to have an "SEO consultant" - generally costing them anywhere from $1,500 to $4,500+ per month in "management fees" - and their eStore websites are not doing some of the basic things needed to rank high in the search engines. This article is meant to provide some basic concepts for online retailers to think about before signing up for SEO services.
First of all, Google is going to drive the bulk of your traffic so focus on getting your eStore optimized for Google first.
Search engines generally work from 2 principles and are tied together - Paid Listings, and Organic Listings. Paid Listings or "Sponsored Ads" require you to bid and pay per click whereas organic results are free. Organic positions take time to build and your goal should be to list on page one of Google for your chosen keywords.
Online retailers must start by determining the search terms (keywords and phrases) they think their target shopper uses to find their products or ones they want to use to compete with others. Google has tools to help them determine closely related search terms and the actual volumes of searching happening for them. Google AdWords Tool for example.
Google will only list up to 2 pages in organic listing per search term (keyword/phrase) in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). Therefore there is no point in optimizing an entire site for the same search terms.
It is important to lay out the pages on your site according to search terms and ensure these HTML pages are optimized for search (title tags, meta description, keywords, anchor text, image alt attribute, etc. ).
The next step is making sure these pages do in fact have content that is relevant to the search terms you believe are important. Simply optimizing the HTML tags is not enough. For retailers, this can be product landing pages or top-level entry pages with dynamic product listings.
You can test the quality of the pages using tools from Google, you should be targeting a 7+ (out of 10). For Paid Search Listings, a high quality score will also help your Pay Per Click costs (keep them down) and ensure your ad is shown.
Once your pages are optimized and have relevant content, the next step is a strong link building strategy. Inbound links build relevance in the eyes of the search engine and also help with your Page Rank, which is part of how Google rates the relevance of a site.
Link building can be done in many ways including press releases, manually listing yourself in high-quality directories, working with industry partners to exchange links, articles/blogs, and social networking. It is important to link from relevant site and hopefully pages with a high page rank. Avoid linking scams or "black hat" techniques that could cause Google to punish your listings in the SERPs.
All of these strategies are centered around 1 website domain name, so if you have more than 1 domain name you have an opportunity to widen the net. Although we recommend focusing on other keywords and phrases on the second site vs. competing with yourself.
Another critical part of an effective SEO strategy is to ensure the HTML code meets the latest XHTML standards, is error free, and the website performs well. Google will not rank websites high that have errors or are slow. Also important is your full URL path (page names, folders, etc.) as a method of capturing keywords and strengthen the results.
For online retailers, it is crucial that the eCommerce platform you select has the tools and expertise to help guide their clients to a successful SEO plan.
The OrderDynamics on-demand eCommerce platform not only provides easy to use SEO tools, our Account Managers and Developers have SEO expertise and help advise our Clients on how to make the most out of their SEO dollars.
On-Demand eCommerce Software Solutions By OrderDynamics Slash Project Lengths In Half
Leading on-demand eCommerce software provider delivers rapid eStore deployments thanks to SaaS platform and eCommerce web site design separation.
Toronto, ON May 15, 2009 -- OrderDynamics Corporation has observed that many online merchants are struggling with short eCommerce software replatforming timelines as peak shopping periods approach rapidly. Contributing to the tight timelines are delayed budget decisions and managers expecting more from their marketing team with a lot less.
OrderDynamics has designed its new eStore implementation process to reduce time to launch a new Client and is averaging a 15 week schedule from signature to soft launch.
"There are two factors at work here that allow us to roll out so quickly; eCommerce Web Site Design Flexibility and our SaaS Platform"
Explains Michael Benadiba, CEO OrderDynamics Corporation. OrderDynamics entirely separates the eCommerce web site design process from its on-demand platform, allowing this process to start in parallel and be delivered by a third party creative agency or internally.
OrderDynamics makes the eCommerce web site design come to life through a library of web 2.0 and 3.0 front-end web controls such as floating shopping carts, personalization controls, search merchandising, product reviews, and other pre-built controls which focus on enabling an fast, fun, and easy shopping experience. "The design and ease of use of an eStore must match the brand experience you're trying to create and the shopping expectations of your customers" continues Benadiba.
"By removing this hard linkage to the eCommerce platform, our Clients can accelerate design decisions and quickly implement future changes".
The other important time saver is the OrderDynamics eCommerce SaaS platform. eCommerce software as a service (or SaaS), means the software application is already developed and available almost immediately after signing a contract. It also means the SaaS provider takes care of maintaining the software and hosting it as part of a Service Level Agreement (SLA). "Our platform is fully redundant and is engineered for Availability, Performance, and Transaction Integrity - all things we guarantee in our SLA " adds Steve Berkovitz, On-Demand Platform Architect.
OrderDynamics Solves eCommerce Problems | Find out if You're Ready
We've recently launched our You're Ready Campaign aimed to reach prospective Clients that may be hitting the wall with their current eCommerce solution. Although there are many issues retailers face, we've selected 5 recurring problems that seem to come up regularly in discussions and that we've helped solve for our Clients.
As always, a special thanks goes out to all OrderDynamics Clients who give us valuable feedback and input on what's important to their business so we can shape our solutions.
Infinitely Simple eCommerce
OrderDynamics is a leading provider of on-demand eCommerce solutions designed to help online merchants grow revenues and simplify operations. We allow you to deliver superior shopping experiences through our innovative multi-eStore platform and integrated backend management systems that enable Dynamic Merchandising, Customer Service, Order Management, and Automation. You're Ready is our way of providing you solutions to the common problems that we help our Client's solve every day.
OrderDynamics is a leading provider of on-demand eCommerce solutions designed to help online merchants grow revenues and simplify operations. We allow you to deliver superior shopping experiences through our innovative multi-eStore platform and integrated backend management systems that enable Dynamic Merchandising, Customer Service, Order Management, and Automation. You're Ready is our way of providing you solutions to the common problems that we help our Client's solve every day.
There are hundreds of reasons retailers are choosing OrderDynamics -> Find out if You're Ready
Rich Consumer Experiences | OrderDynamics Tops Practical eCommerce Top 10 List for April 2009
Practical eCommerce recently asked industry insiders to share a great, innovative idea that could help an eCommerce firm. Here’s what ten of them had to say.
OrderDynamics topped the list with...
Rich Consumer Experiences Dominate
"Focus on immersive branding and marketing techniques that create unexpectedly fast, fun, and easy shopping experiences. Are your budgets caught up on technology or are you investing in creating that visceral connection to the consumer? What amazes us the most is that very few e-stores provide that connection."
Michael Benadiba
CEO
OrderDynamics Corporation
OrderDynamics topped the list with...
Rich Consumer Experiences Dominate
"Focus on immersive branding and marketing techniques that create unexpectedly fast, fun, and easy shopping experiences. Are your budgets caught up on technology or are you investing in creating that visceral connection to the consumer? What amazes us the most is that very few e-stores provide that connection."
Michael Benadiba
CEO
OrderDynamics Corporation
OrderDynamics Launches Support for Amazon Payments: Amazon Simple Pay™
Canada's leading On-Demand eCommerce platform provides its online retailers support for Amazon's payment solution Amazon Simple Pay™.Toronto, ON March 26, 2008 -- OrderDynamics Corporation launches support for Amazon Simple Pay™, a set of payment-only products that allows shoppers to use payment information from their Amazon.com accounts as a payment method. By offering Amazon Simple Pay™ to their shoppers, online merchants provide a convenient, trusted, and easy ordering mechanism to tens of millions of Amazon Customers.
"New payment solutions are constantly under evaluation by our product development team, because of the significant positive impact it can have on our Client's sales" explains Michael Benadiba, CEO OrderDynamics Corporation. "We also make the frontend implementation of these payment solutions easy through self service access from our backend management dashboard" continues Benadiba. Amazon Simple Pay™ provides brand recognition, purchase protection, and convenience to online shoppers - all things that can increase the chance of converting a sale.
The OrderDynamics On-Demand eCommerce platform has access to over 20 branded payment methods on their front-end eStores through its partnership with CardinalCommerce such as: Verified by Visa & MasterCard® SecureCode™, Amazon Payments™, Bill Me Later®, Ebates™, eBillme™, eLayaway™, Google™ Checkout, Green Dot® MoneyPak®, MyEcheck, PayPal™, RevolutionCard™, Mazooma™, ClickandBuy®, and more.Learn about how we've helped online merchants grow, Read our Case Studies
OrderDynamics is going to Internet Retailer IRCE 2009
For the first year, OrderDynamics will be attending the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition from June 15th to 18th at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.
Come see us at booth 1024 - See Booth Floor Plan
The IRCE 2009 Conference Content
IRCE 2009 is a four-day conference featuring 179 speakers in 94 sessions devoted to the strategies and tools that e-retailers can use to thrive in a recession that pulls the rest of retailing down. Hence the theme: Rising Above—Not Just Surviving—the Economic Storm. The agenda, which has fewer general sessions than last year and many more specific breakout sessions and tracks that are targeted to specific e-retailer needs, includes the following:
IRCE 2009 Agenda Summary
Day One (June 15) features two concurrent day-long workshops:
- Search Engine Marketing: Strategies for a more competitive market.
- Survival Guide for Small E-Retailers.
Day Two (June 16) marks the start of the general conference and features:
General Session (8:30 a.m. to 10:15 a.m.):
- State of the Industry: How E-Retailing Can Shine in A Gloomy Economy
- Technology Track: Finding Cost-Effective Web Technologies
- Retail Chain Track: Making the Web the Driver of the Chain
- Web Design & Merchandising Track: Making a Hot Site at a Cool Cost
- Small Retailer Track A: How Low-Budget Operators Can Have Big-Time Success
Day Three (June 17) contains a full day of breakout sessions in four tracks
General Sessions (8:30 a.m. to 10:15 a.m.)
- Marketing Track: What Marketing Works Best in a Recession.
- Operations Track: How to Cut Costs While Increasing Conversions
- Measuring Success: How Understanding Web Metrics Creates Online Success
- Small Retailer Track B: Efficient Ways to Attract New Web Shoppers
Day Four (June 18) features two concurrent day-long workshops:
- Capitalizing on the M-Commerce Boom
- Diving Deep Into E-Mail Marketing
