Congratulations on going live: Health Care Logistics, eMedDecor.com

www.emeddecor.com Selects OrderDynamics for Growth on On-Demand eCommerce Platform

OrderDynamics, Canada's leading On-Demand eCommerce Solution provider, announces recent customer acquisition, Health Care Logistics, a worldwide provider of medical equipment since 1978.

A recent re-launch of their consumer division, www.eMedDecor.com, Health Care Logistics looked to OrderDynamics for their superior eCommerce technology and services oriented around growing sales.

“OrderDynamics gives us a single, end-to-end technology solution to power our B2C websites. Their SaaS service model emphasizes growth and provides structured processes to manage traffic and conversions” explains Bethany Reid, Brand Manager for eMedDecor. “We simply outgrew our previous eCommerce platform, which didn’t have the features or management capabilities to support our growth” continues Bethany. “OrderDynamics helped us understand a reasonable growth target and works proactively with our marketing team to achieve our goals”.

The new eMedDecor.com website launched on OrderDynamics in 90 days with a broad selection of gifts and accessories and an easy-to-use design. New site features include:

• Shop by Profession – Doctors, Dentists, Nurses, Pharmacy, Veterinarians, & More helps the consumer find products unique to them.
• Gift Services – Wish Lists, Gift Certificates, Gift Messages, Wrapping Services, and Product Personalization make the site great for gift givers.
• Navigation features – – Intuitive product search, user ratings and reviews, guided navigation filters, and express checkout create a fast and fun shopping experience.

“We congratulate the great team at Health Care Logistics and look forward to a long term partnership” says Michael Benadiba, CEO of OrderDynamics.

About eMedDecor & More:
The eMedDecor.com website is a consumer website providing over 2,000 medical related products in categories such as Dental, Doctors, Nursing, Pharmacy, Veterinary and more. eMedDecor.com offers an exciting range of products for Appreciation and Recognition, Books, Cards, and Paper, Clothing, Collectibles, Décor, Office Accessories, Personalized Products, and Tools of the Trade. eMedDecor.com also provides easy shopping options such as Gift Certificates, Gift Wrapping, Gift Messaging, and Personalization.

Scheduling Site Promotions: Easier, Relavent, and Convert Better

As eCommerce platforms ramp up features to meet the needs of the savvy online buyer, retailers often struggle with effectively maintaining them. To be effective, retailers not only need the latest "frontend" merchandising capabilities, but "backend" systems that allow them to manage, what could be hundreds of promotions at any given time. Retails must have technology that gives their product teams the ability to manage the site proactively and reactively given the buying trends they experience.

To be effective, retailers need the ability to:

1. Launch promotions quickly

2. Time promotions to buying events

3. Measure promotion success

The OrderDynamics On-Demand eCommerce Platform combines the latest frontend merchandising technology with a powerful scheduling engine and management metrics that gives retailers "point-and-click" control over website promotions.

Launch Promotions Fast

It is important the the eCommerce platform technology provides real-time ability to create, stage, test, and launch new promotions. Whether it is, for example, a new sale, bundles, eCast (email) campaigns, shipping discounts, or in-cart promotions, the platform should provide easy-to-use web interfaces designed for a product manager or marketing resource to make website changes easily. The platform should also provide XHTML access and a secure Content Management System (CMS) for advanced levels of access.

For mid-market to enterprise reatilers, the ability to stage these changes and test orders against a test gateway prior to going live (without impacting their timeline) is equally as important. Staging changes also allows marketings teams to pre-provision promotions, but leaving them inactive until needed.

Time Promotions "Scheduling"

To effectively time website changes to buying events, like Thanksgiving for example, retailers need more control than simply being able to launch promotions quickly. They require a sophisticated scheduling "engine" to create and manage hundreds of running promotions at a time, and on a per-website basis.

The scheduling system must allow for multiple website promotions to be running concurrently with status reports. Some of the important scheduling capabilities are: eCast (email) marketing, personalized content areas, site seach controls, product / brand / category content areas, coupons, overrides, free shipping amounts, etc. These scheduling and promotion tools must provide granular control at a per-product / brand / category and per eStore website basis. The system must provide control to activate and deactivate promotions on a particular date/time, date range, recurring date/time, and the ability to chain promotions.

With this level of control, retailers can start marketing to their Clients well before the event, making them more proactive and always on top of the next promotion.

Measure Success

Like any other successful sales and marketing program, eCommerce websites require detailed metrics that allow promotions to be managed effectively. It is important that the marketing team can measure the success of each promotion in-real time, and against other promotions across the website.

This isn't specifically about web analytics (Google, Omniture for example), although they play a role, it is about the metrics provided by the eCommerce platform. It is important the platform itself can produce metrics about the performance of a particular promotion. For example, the ability to track click-throughs and impressions on personalized content areas, tracking delivery and open rates of eCasts (emails) promotions, sales from referring websites, ads, keywords, and ability to trend sales across different promotions; all core requirements of mid-market to enterprise online retailers. And all of these must be viewable against sales / orders across a defined time period.

With the right metrics, retailers will have the business information needed to make decisions about the promotions running on the website.

Look at your eCommerce Platform

For retailers to stand a chance against the ever more savvy online buyer, they must take a close look at their eCommerce platform provider to determine their plans for making site promotions more effective. There many of "add on" services out there, but we feel the platform provider plays a key role in this area and should have, at a minimum, the tools and technologies available in this article for launching and managing promotions.

To learn more, please contact us today!

An Integrated Order Management System (OMS) Key to Avoiding Lost Revenue When Payment Brands Go Down (Paypal, Authorize.NET recently)

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

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.

• Cost Predictability
• Enterprise Search Control & SEO
• Design Flexibility
• Reliability
• Integration

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.

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