We launched another great site for ITW Texwipe at http://www.texwipe.com! This site seamlessly blends the functionality of Hannon Hill’s CMS (the Products, Industries and Technical Data menus) with a full-featured ecommerce store (the Buy Texwipe menu), with shared navigation and design. This is the first project that integrated both products at the same time and, thanks to hard work by pretty much everyone on the software dev team at one point or another. 

BEFORE

AFTER

Other interesting features of the site:

• Ability to “hide” pages from different geographical regions, based on the “region” selection of the visitor in the footer.

• Transition of transactional applications from old system to new
• Email verification required to place order

Beacon is a development partner for the eCommerce platform ASPDotNetStorefront and has been developing successful eCommerce websites with them since 2007.  Here are some features and functionality that we love about the software as well as a few “tips and tricks” that hopefully you will find helpful!  Please be sure to chime in with your own thoughts and suggestions…

Public Site Features

These are some features about AspDotNetstorefront that we really like and promote to our clients, along with a few links to where we have put some of these features to use.  Note that a few of these items require a purchased add-on for full functionality, but they are generally inexpensive, easy to install and don’t require source code.

Admin Site Features

We successfully launched another AspDotNetStorefront site today, in partnership with G-Force Marketing, at http://www.famoustatemattress.com. This is another in the series of Sealy mattress vendors (including http://www.nobodybeatstheking.com and http://www.mattressking.net) that we have worked with in the past year.

The site features the following:

• Rotating banner image on home page, able to be updated by client via Admin site
• Dynamic filtering on category landing page (by price, size, comfort level, etc.)
• Multiple static content (topic) pages that can be updated by the client via Admin site
• Social media icons site-wide
• Customized warranty form (http://www.famoustatemattress.com/warrantyrequest.aspx) through which customers can submit warranty claims via the web site, which the client thinks will shave several weeks off of the process
• Tabbed product detail page, for Accessories and Recently Viewed items
• Opt-in mailing list that can be downloaded by client via Admin
• Interactive store locations page– http://www.famoustatemattress.com/t-storelocations.aspx

Thanks to John Wallwork and Thomas Brinegar who did the primary development on the site and to Wayne Van Zandt and William Nichols for assisting with launch today.  Also thanks to John Scaramuzzo for client support!

We launched a really cool new eCommerce site for BMI Surplus!  BMI Surplus is located in Hanover MA and is a supplier resource center of equipment for premier colleges and universities, research facilities, individuals and manufacturing businesses worldwide.  Their website uses the newest version of AspDotNetStorefront with several purchased add-ons and custom apps built by Beacon. The purpose of this project is to redesign the BMIus.com web site and replace the existing shopping cart with AspDotNetStorefront. The primary audience for the new website will be universities and other research centers, but also individuals looking for specific parts/equipment by searching via part number and/or SKU in search engines.

Here are the project highlights:
• Custom Logo Design
• Custom site design
• AspDotNetStorefront Version 9.1
• Rotating banner on home page pulling from Featured Products category
• Paginated, sortable and filterable category landing pages
• Custom fields pulled from backoffice system for product detail page (condition, tested, location, etc.)
• Share this button on product detail page
• Customized ‘Email a friend’ form that sends questions to customer service
• Customized shipping functionality (allow warehouse pickup, self-shipping)
• Wire transfer as a payment option
• Integration with back-office inventory system (Fishbowl)
• Web marketing analysis and recommendations
• eNewsletter signup integrated with Constant Contact
• Enhanced basic and advanced site search

HUGE thanks goes to John and Tiffany who really made it all work. There were lots of new and fun challenges with a new version of AspDotNetStorefront and the Beacon team met each challenge admirably.  Other big contributors: Wendy provided a lovely custom design, Thomas assisted with setting up the informational pages and Jeff provided essential WMS feedback and analysis.  Finally, BIG thanks to William and Wayne for their launch assistance.

I’ve already blogged about each of the sessions that I attended on Day One and Day Two of the conference, but feel compelled to share my overall impressions as well…

Overall, a very successful conference!  I learned a lot and am excited to go back to the office and put it into practice.  I also met many other people using the product to do some really interesting and exciting things.  I’m comforted that Vortx has committed to maintaining the same (or better!) level of support and community that I’d come to expect from the previous owners and I recognize their sincere commitment to high standards and dedication to the product.

Because I can’t seem to write a blog without a bulleted list, here are some other quick thoughts:

• I think the length of the conference was just right.  Three days would have strung it out too much and one would have been way too crammed.
• Not sure how I feel about the two “track” approach.  There were several sessions that were held simultaneously that I wish I could have attended.  Unfortunately, I’m not really sure how to fix that and still keep the two day format.  It would have been great to have gotten the agenda a little bit in advance so that we could have made the decisions about “who’s going to what” in advance.
• HURRAY for the organizers that got the coffee flowing all day on Thursday!  Even the most dedicated of developers start to get hazy around 3pm in a darkened room without a caffeine jolt.
• The staff (both hotel and Vortx) was extremely responsive and helpful
• Sessions and breaks were well timed and everything started and ended precisely on schedule
• The master of ceremonies/magician/announcer was brilliant…  Bravo!
• I think the conference could have benefited from an “Ask the Experts” or other open brainstorming-type session.  Despite very active forums and helpful support, there’s really nothing like sitting down with one of the “inside guys” and picking his brain.  Lots of times I don’t really need to know exactly how to do something, just whether or not there’s an easy way to do it (vs. the dreaded source code modification!) or if there’s an add-on out there that already does it (bonus!).  To keep the session from getting too detailed or bogged down, maybe asking for questions ahead of time would be effective?
• Organizers did a good job of making sure that the participants did not feel that every vendor was trying to push their products on them, but I do wish there were a few more hands-on examples of how to do things in the product itself.  I don’t mind seeing a vendor’s solution in action during a session as long as it solves my problem and it isn’t a hard sell.  I don’t feel like any of the vendors that I met would do that, but that they did feel constrained to not advocate their products too much.
• Post the slide decks to the presentations immediately after the session if at all possible.  Alternatively, make it very obvious (maybe in the agenda booklet) exactly how and when the slides would be available.  Someone asked about the availability of the decks at every single session that I attended and there was lots of confusion about where and if they would be available.

Keep the up the enthusiasm and commitment to being a company with very high standards and commitment to the AspDotNetStorefront community!  This was clear in every facet of the conference and made me proud to be associated with you all!  WELL DONE!

Welcome back to the play by play of my experiences at the 2011 AspDotNetStorefront Conference in Las Vegas.  Day One down, Day Two here we come…  Another incredibly informative day and I leave lots smarter and excited to start our newest AspDotNetstorefront project!

Developer’s Clinic– Technically the “developer’s clinic” was to allow the developers to bring solutions to coding problems that were e-mailed to them in advance.  The questions were way beyond my meager programming skills though (I leave that to our awesome developers!), but I did come to the conference armed with sixteen “how to” questions.  Since I didn’t see anywhere else on the schedule to ask my particular questions (and 90% of them would really bore an audience anyway), I invaded the developer’s clinic area and basically begged the unlucky AspDotNetStorefront staff member there for assistance.  Josh Belden was kind enough to indulge me, even after I pulled out the notebook with my myriad of questions.  He worked through each item with me patiently and didn’t once roll his eyes!

This is really the reason that we selected AspDotNetStorefront as a shopping cart in the first place – the exceedingly helpful support and active developers community.  I’m so pleased to find out that that spirit of sharing and community continues at Vortx and couldn’t be happier about the assistance that Josh provided.  Trying not to sound too gushy, but this 30 minutes of one-on-one consultation likely saved me hours of research and analysis.  I’d suggest that next year, rather than a “Developer’s Clinic”, which seemed rather sparsely attended, there be an “Ask the Experts” booth, where conference attendees can go to brainstorm with the experts.  Thanks Josh!!

Session 7B, “jQuery” by Dan Heberden, jQuery – This session also turned out to be too technical for my poor project manager brain (there’s only so many dollar signs and curly brackets my head can take!), but the developer that attended the conference with me was positively giddy.  “We can do everything in jQuery!” she said, which I really liked to hear.  I learned enough to know that jQuery is going to give us a more interactive user experience without sacrificing performance or having to edit source code (which I avoid like the plague if I possibly can).  Dan was incredibly knowledgeable on the subject and provided a list of resources which I plan to add to our corporate knowledgebase:

• http://www.learningjquery.com
• http://www.jqfundamentals.com
• http://api.jquery.com

Lunchtime announcements– We anxiously awaited the big announcements that were shared by Dana Greaves, CEO of AspDotNetStorefront and Vortx, during the lunch session:

• Of most immediate interest to me personally– Version 9.1 of ML was released today, which should offer many fixes and enhancements to the ML9 product with minimal impact to current custom code
• Change in licensing– Instead of being forced to purchase Multi-Store in 5-pack units, the product is now available in single store units, with the future option to purchase additional stores at a discounted rate
• Several promotions and discounts available to conference attendees were announced
• New branding/naming for the ML9 product as “MSx” (I think??)

Session 8B, “Design + Master Pages”, by Chris McKellar and George Solomon (Vibe Commerce) – I was anxious to attend this session because I’ve worked with Vibe several times in the past and have heard both Chris and George speak before.  They are both extremely knowledgeable about AspDotNetStorefront and very good public speakers and I was not disappointed.  One thing that stood out about this session, among the others, was specific examples of AspDotNetstorefront sites that used the principals in the talk.  They also did a good job of bridging the gap between the true developers in the room and those of us that have to make business decisions based on the technology.

Chris began with a nice overview of the psychology of design and prompted us to consider a number of different factors when designing and developing a site:

• Make sure the user experience is seamless and simple – “Make it so good they don’t notice”
• Understand exactly what you want the customer to do and how that goal can be accomplished
• Modern designs tend to have:
  • Less “ads” and/or call to actions in the site header (instead reserved for informational/account-related content)
  • Search box tends to be large and in the middle of the top nav bar
  • Tabs have been replaced with “mega-menus” and photography is leveraged to provide an emotional response
• Consistency in site design and presentation is KEY!
• Category landing and search results pages should look exactly the same to provide a seamless shopping experience
• Use whitespace/negative space wisely and generously… Let the site “breathe”
• Use appropriate color triggers– warm colors for strong emotions and immediate response (call to actions, promotions) and cool colors for calmness and serenity
• Provide the customer with a confirmation page before the final order is placed to increase consumer confidence

Next, George provided a summary of “Master Pages” and why we should be excited to use them.  As someone who has been reluctant to upgrade for this very reason, this was a very informative part of the session for me.  I learned the following (do I dare say I’m sold??):

• Master pages provide an effective way to establish a consistent layout throughout the website as well as separating the functionality from the design in order to enable team members to develop on different pieces of the same site simultaneously.
• When deployed correctly, there can be a performance boost for the end-users on an AspDotNetStorefront site using Master Pages
• Using Master Pages allows a service company to bring any .NET developer up to speed quickly on an AspDotNetStorefront site, whereas earlier versions often required a fairly high learning curve for both designers and developers
• There will potentially be more third party controls and add-ons available for a site based on Master Pages, due to its inherent extendability
• Applying styles and switching themes are easier with Master Pages
• .NET only allows one “run-at” form per page and AspDotNetStorefront uses that, so other sub-forms on the page (search box, newsletter submissions) must be implemented using .NET controls.
• Sites should be easier to develop and deploy using Master Pages (fingers crossed!)

Session 9B, “Stump the Experts” with Jesse Hodges, Josh Belden, Jason Addington (all of AspDotNetStorefront/Vortx) and George Solomon (Vibe Commerce) – The organizer’s intention was to make this kind of a “game” where the audience would write down questions that they knew the answers to and try to stump the expert panel.  This started pretty slowly, as most of us were unprepared and thought it would be more of an open brain-storming session (and personally, I still wish it had been), but it turned out fun in the end (I won a bag with a cheater question) with lots of laughs and trash talking.  I didn’t really learn a whole lot, except for one thing, which was probably the most important of all—these guys are really, really smart and they know what they are doing– period.  With a program that easily has tens of thousands of lines of code, they could quickly and easily spout of the exact name of a stored procedure and how to modify the code to get the desired effect.  They are proud of the work that they do and readily think outside the box to solve a problem.  Good enough for me!

I leave Las Vegas tired from a long couple of days, but full of energy and excitement about the product and the company that now owns it.  Congrats to all involved for hosting such a successful event!

I have the great opportunity this week of attending the ASPDotNetStorefront Conference in Las Vegas, hosted by Vortx (the new owners of the e-commerce shopping cart that Beacon has been implementing for about four years).  The conference is divided into two tracks– developers and merchants– and, being neither ;), I’m bouncing back and forth between the tracks, based on the topic.  Here are my thoughts and discoveries thus far:

Session 1 “Fearless Source Code Modification” by John Morrison, Morrison Consulting- I’d hoped this session would be focused on best practices to safely make source code modifications to the ASPDNSF code, which we do often.  It was actually a session on source control and was a bit too technical for me.  However, I’m sure that many of the developers in the room benefited from the information and I plan to take the information back to the office to have our DBA investigate both VisualSVN and TortoiseSVN to advance our internal code management to “vendor branch management”.

Session 2 “Email Marketing – Beyond the Basics” by Kristine Dobson (Email Direct) and Ross Kramer (Listrak) – Really enjoyed this session a lot.  Not really related to ASPDNSF per se, but lots of awesome information about creating email campaigns.  A small glimpse of what I learned:

Email Marketing

• The most effective campaigns are scheduled on a rigidly consistent schedule.  The most common frequency is bi-weekly, but also consider weekly or daily
• Consider sending an “email series” rather than single emails to new customers for maximum effectiveness
• Be sure to test mailings for email rendering and inbox delivery as well as content
• Items that can cause email non-delivery (particularly in Outlook, which is particularly content sensitive)
  • Trigger words (dear, free, mortgage)
  • Spelling errors
  • Using all caps
  • Not using consistent font size and face
  • !!!!, % and $ (particularly in subject)
  • Red font
  • Highlighted copy
  • Subject lines longer than 50 characters

Shopping Cart Abandonment

• Though stats vary, approximately 60-75% of shoppers ultimately abandon their online carts.  This is a huge opportunity to recoup sales through email marketing.
• Recommend a series of email to the customer, sometimes offering promotions/discounts and sometimes just reminding the shopper of items in their cart (or upsell related items)
• Carefully test the content and timing of the remarketing campaigns
• If applicable, offer the customer an easy way to find the products in a local store rather than online in the email
• Some customers respond very well to links to product videos in email and/or product reviews

Session 3 “Payment Methods” by Alex Brutin, Moneybookers/Skrill and Jason Doll, Amazon Payments- A very interesting session about alternatives to the traditional credit card payment.  In Europe, for example, credit cards are very rarely carried or used for online purchases, in favor of local credit sources, debit cards, or bank transfer.  Skrill will soon release an electronic wallet product in the U.S., much like PayPal, that will allow U.S.-based online stores to more easily accept payment from European countries in their preferred method of payment (potentially increasing conversions).

Likewise, Amazon Payments will soon be releasing an integration with Aspdotnetstorefront that will allow the visitor to check out of the online store using the address book and payment information already stored in their Amazon account, without leaving the online store.  Previously, Amazon Payment required a rebranded window that left the online store, which reduced the options for upselling.  This new interface will be a widget that will be included on the site’s checkout page and will never cause the customer to leave the site.  Since there are over 100 million Amazon account holders, this has a tremendous potential for increasing conversion rates.

Session 4 “Product Feeds” by Ryan Douglas, Singlefeed – The presenter described his own experience with a retail online store and the difficulty of maintaining data integrity.  He described how essential it is to maintain very good data, in particular with regard to feeding data to comparative shopping engines.  The accuracy and descriptiveness of your data can make a huge difference in a purchase selection between identical products listed in a shopping engine.  He highly recommended, in addition to the traditional required fields like product name and description, to maintain UPC, brand/manufacturer and model number for every product in your store.  UPC codes are particularly essential for the new mobile apps that allow the customer to scan a barcode and find the product online.  He also recommended listing product attributes like color and size as separate fields so that they can be more easily denoted in the comparison.  Also give very close consideration to product title and include as much relevant information as possible (color, size, brand) in the product name so that it can be easily understood outside the context of the online store.

Session 5 “Interacting With Customers” by Michael Teitelbaum, Velaro and Ian Rowley, WhosOn – These presenters each shared their online chat programs with the audience and gave very valid arguments as to why chat should be implemented in most online stores in order to add a necessary “touch point” for the customer.    There are two main chat formats– reactive chat and proactive chat.  Reactive chat is initiated by the customer in response to graphics/icons located on the site indicating that chat is available.  It was recommended that the chat icon be placed prominently on the home page as well as any other location that the customer is likely to “show intent” (like a product detail page) and anywhere that customers traditionally abandon the cart (checkout, shipping policies, etc.).  Proactive chat is an invitation to the customer that pop-up for the customer when they attempt or initiate some action.  For example, if a customer spends a certain period of time on a page, navigates to a particular page, adds certain items to their cart or is a “high value customer” could all prompt a proactive chat invitation.  Proactive chat is usually more than twice as effective as reactive chat.

Including chat in an online store has proven to significantly reduce call volume in call centers and is more efficient than phone banks because most agents can field more than one chat at a time (as many as four, in fact!).  Once involved in a chat, the agent can view the customer’s order history, browse history, referring sites, referring keywords, etc.  The speed and efficiency of the chat can be improved by implementing pre-made messages and links, so that the agent does not have to type answers to many routinely asked questions.  This is essential, because customers expect that there will be no queue when waiting for a chat response.

Good job to all of today’s presenters… Looking forward to tomorrow!

See a summary of “Day Two” here…

Vibe offers a variety of add-ons for ASPDotNetStorefront. However, its pretty common that a template design will get nuked or lose its style after the add-ons or functionality is included. One add-on. On a previous post, I explained how to integrate Vibe’s Product Compare Add-on with their Vibe Trib Add-on, both of which make use of the product listing and detail pages. I’ve run into a common template design problem with the Vibe Trib GS Add-on (includes filters, search, sort, and attributes) and on that can be easily resolved, given you know where to look. If you make use of a left navigation for products, you will unavoidably run into this issue. If you don’t this add-on will simply serve as your one and only left navigation pane for product filtering. (See Vibe’s example page.)

Notice in the previous post how the results filters are in the left navigation underneath other topic pages? The Vibe Trib plugin allows site visitors to filter results by different attributes of your store’s products. Getting these filters into the left navigation for the first time took quite some effort to resolve. The page content is rendered using “entity.vibe.trib.xml.config” and would obviously populate the right side, where the placeholder is positioned in the template. (See image below) Because this XML package is responsible for generating those filters, if the original template uses a left navigation area, the filters will be called too late by the XML package to be properly rendered. You could always use CSS to float the filters to the right, thats an easy solution, but recent projects have required using the left nav.

Steps

1. The first step is to carve out your leftNav from your template and save a copy of it in your ‘skins/skin_id’ directory.
2. Since these Vibe add-ons relate to products, I generally name it ‘products.ascx’.
3. In the admin screen, navigate to your product categories. Under ‘Extension Data’ for every category change the “Use Skin Template” field to match your new template name. (Include .ascx!)
4. With the leftNav on your clipboard, open the relevant XML Package to develop and simply build the leftNav as part of the XML Package in ‘skins/skin_id/XMLPackages’.
5. Remember to use a customized XML Package, you need to open the XML Packages directory in the root directory of your site.
6. Once the XML Package has been changed to include the leftNav
7. VibeTrib Add-on uses ‘entity.vibe.trib.xml.config’ for listing pages, but this will also need done for the search page (if you want filters on your search page–which of course you will).
8. In order to make the change on the search page, we need to develop the search content’s responsible XML Package as well. This can usually be a copy-paste job once its done for a prior package.
9. Once the search page has the modifications, they will not show without adding a custom AppConfig.
10. Again navigate to the admin screen, select the Configuration tab < Advanced < AppConfig Parameters.
11. On the left-hand side, we need to create a new AppConfig that directs the search page to use a different template.
12. The config name needs to start with : “Template” followed by the name of the ASPX page that will be called (no spaces). The Vibe Search included with the add-on is vsearch.aspx
13. The config value simply needs to be the name of the new template to use: products.ascx
14. Click add and the AppConfig should change the search pages template over to support the leftNav with filters all being produced by the calling XML Package.

Quick Disclosure:  As the latest addition to the Beacon team, the last two weeks have been spent adapting to all the things that come with starting out with a new company.   I’m really excited about my role as an Account Executive and I look forward to digging in and being a productive part of the team.  With that said, I must admit that having to contribute to the Beacon blog has caused me some anxiety as I have never wrote a “professional” blog post before, so please show mercy…

A year or so ago, I downloaded the Coupon App on my Droid.  It’s an awesome application.  My favorite by far as it has made me aware of a bunch of great deals.  The best deals have been their free magazine subscriptions.  I have a hard time turning down the offers, so I am now the proud subscriber of everything from Spin to Forbes.  I get so many magazines that I struggle to keep up.  Over the holidays, I vowed to work through my growing backlog of reading and stay on top of it in the New Year.

In reading through the January 17^th issue of Forbes, I came across a really cool article on how the CEO of the Teaching Company, Brandon Hidalgo has used marketing metrics to grow his business to $110 million/year in sales.  The article speaks to specific instances of how seemingly subtle tweaks to his online and offline marketing campaigns based on the behavioral data of his customers has increased sales anywhere from 5% to over 20%.

“In February 2010 the Teaching Company changed the color (from pale green to orange) and location (from side to bottom) of an “Add to Cart” button on its website. Result: Sales improved 5.8%. In one mailing, replacing an image of Michelangelo’s God’s hand with one depicting the ruins of Petra produced a 21.8% lift in sales…”

I liked this article, because it helped me understand the business impact of what our team of Web Marketing Specialists do every day for our clients.  They share Hidalgo’s passion for metrics and use it to optimize the performance of our clients’ web properties.

If you have a moment, check out the article on Forbes.com – I think you’ll enjoy it!

Mashable released the 2010 Holiday Season Online Spending Numbers and the results are excellent!   Interesting statistitic…Free Shipping was used in over 50% of all online transactions.

Enjoy the article below.

Patrick Flanagan, Business Development Manager, 336-944-4187

The 2010 U.S. online holiday shopping season fared remarkably well. Black Friday online retail sales soared and Cyber Monday made history when consumer spending exceeded $1 billion for the first time in a single day. When all was said and done, the November to December holiday season brought in $32.6 billion in retail e-commerce spending.

The enormous figure represents an all-time high for the season and marks a 12% increase in spending over the previous year, according to comScore.

Online shoppers put their credit cards (and PayPal accounts) to work for the entire season, but more so on Cyber Monday, which was the heaviest online spending day of the year with $1.028 billion in total spending. It was the only day to break the $1 billion threshold, but seven other days surpassed $900 million in spending.

Monday, December 13 — also known as Green Monday — was the second biggest online spending day of the year pulling in $954 billion. Monday, December 6 and Friday, December 17 (Free Shipping Day) followed closely behind with $943 billion and $942 billion in online spending respectively.

comScore credits holiday promotions, discounted merchandise and free shipping offers with helping propel the 2010 season to become the biggest yet. In fact, free shipping “was used in more than half of all e-commerce transactions this season, up significantly from last year,” according to comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni.

Article Found at http://mashable.com/2011/01/05/online-holiday-shopping-season/