The Upcoming 9.03 eCommerce Release is Packed with New Features
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eMerchantClub’s upcoming Version 9.03 eCommerce site is packed with several fantastic new features. This sub-release carries so many new tools that it could easily qualify as an entirely new version. Product Reviews This new feature will help your site approach the same level of professionalism as major retailers. You’ve probably seen this feature on popular sites such as amazon.com and target.com. With the upcoming Version 9.03, your site will carry this effective addition. Here’s how it works: while this feature is enabled, shoppers on your site have the ability to rate each product on your site. They can, for example, rate one of your products with four stars and leave a comment such as This product is great! One terrific aspect of this new feature is that you have complete control over which product reviews are actually displayed to the public on your site. After a shopper submits a product review, your site sends an e-mail notification alerting you that a new product review has been placed on your site. You can click a link in the e-mail which takes you to your Site Manager to look at the new review. A review must be approved by you before shoppers can see it on your storefront. Until you approve it, the review’s status is Unpublished.
You decide whether to make the review visible to your shoppers or not. Therefore, you have the choice to either pick only the best, most favorable reviews to display to the public or to moderate the reviews for content and publish even unfavorable reviews so that shoppers can get a clear picture of each product – that choice is entirely up to you! Once the review is published on your site, the published reviews will be displayed on the details page for that product.
In addition to displaying each published review on the product detail page, the average review is also displayed for every product which has a published review. This average rating is displayed on your home page as well. The home page is a great place to put your best reviewed products, as shown below:
This new feature will have a tremendously positive impact on your site. By showing shoppers the positive feedback of others, this can greatly contribute to the motivation of other shoppers to purchase that item. It also strengthens your business image and enhances your website’s credibility with potential and returning shoppers. Abandoned Shopping Cart Promotion The abandoned shopping cart promotion is an exciting new addition to your marketing tool belt. Like the product review feature, this is another feature which is usually only seen on major retailer sites. Having this functionality on your site will almost definitely uplift the public’s image of your site to a new level. Here is how this feature works. Using your Site Manager, you will set up an abandoned shopping cart promotion. An example promotion is Get 20% off the items you left in your cart for the next two hours. Once you set up this promotion, the promotion will automatically trigger every time a registered shopper leaves un-purchased items in their shopping cart. So if shopper Susan goes to your site, logs in and adds items to her cart but decides that she does not want to purchase those items right now or gets interrupted and leaves the items for later, then Susan will be receiving an e-mail from your website after a certain time. If you set the promotion to trigger 48 hours after a shopper has left the items in the cart, then in two days, Susan will be sent an e-mail from your site that you have designed. Typically, the e-mail will contain wording such as below:
Thank you for your interest in [Store Name].
We noticed that you have left some items in your shopping cart. Please accept our offer to take 20% off of these items. This offer is valid for the next two hours, so act now and enjoy! Please click here to redeem this offer. The two hour deadline creates a sense of urgency which will hopefully motivate Susan to act on this promotional offer and purchase the items that she previously abandoned in her shopping cart. You have probably received promotional e-mails like this from major retailer sites that you have visited. This promotion is extremely effective and its use by major retailers is testament to the potency of this type of offer. This feature is not typically found on smaller mom-and-pop type websites, and the presence of this type of offer will potentially elevate your site in the minds of your shoppers to a level approaching those major retailers. Social Networking Features Version 9.03 includes features which will allow you to market your website and your products in the popular arena of social networking sites. These new tools enable you to easily enter this trendy marketing arena to spread the word about your business and ultimately increase sales on your website. Here’s how it works in a nutshell. Social Networking features in the Site Manager The Version 9.03 Site Manager has a screen which connects to your existing Facebook profile. Once you connect your Site Manager to Facebook using our easy-to-follow step-by-step instructions, you will see an image and a link to all of your existing Facebook business pages in your Site Manager. You can then keep track of all of your Facebook pages, and use your Site Manager as a bridge to your Facebook account. Social Networking features on your Store Front On your store front, your shoppers will be able to recommend your products to their friends on any of these social networking sites: Digg, Del.icio.us, Myspace, Facebook, and StumbleUpon. You can choose which of the listed social networking sites are available to your shoppers, who can find buttons for them on every product on your site. Shoppers can easily click the button for that product and recommend that product to all of their friends on any of those social networking sites as shown below on the bottom of the image under the Share this item label:
This will give your business, your website and your products exposure on these popular sites. This feature will support your marketing efforts by employing one of the most effective and oldest marketing techniques – word of mouth marketing. For more detailed information on the Version 9.03 social networking features, check out last month’s newsletter article Introduction to Social Networking – Facebook. Product FAQs With this new feature, shoppers can send you a question via e-mail about a product on your site directly from that page on your site. When this feature is enabled, there is a place where shoppers can send you questions on each product page. On the page for each product, shoppers can click the I have a question button shown below.
Once the button is clicked, it expands to include an area where the question can be asked as shown below.
Once the shopper enters their question and submits it, you will receive an e-mail alert letting you know that a question has been asked. From your Site Manager, you can see all of the questions asked and enter your answers right there. You can also set whether or not the question and answer should be visible on your website. Setting the question and answer as visible will allow other shoppers to see the question on that product's page. Displaying the questions and answers has some good benefits because this will lead to shoppers having more information about each product. For every question asked, you have the ability to either show it on your site or hide it. You also have the ability to set the question as a common question. This will enable you to have a separate frequently asked questions section for each product on your site! This feature will lead to the shoppers having access to more information regarding certain products. This feature may also help the shopper feel as if their feedback and the feedback of other shoppers are important. Image Editor This exciting new feature gives the ability to enhance your images directly from your Site Manager. The new image editor contains many of the tools you would find in popular image editing software. Now, there is no need to make enhancements to your images using a separate piece of software. When this feature is enabled, you can spice up your images directly within your Site Manager! For example, take a look at the before and after images shown below. On this image, two options were quickly applied using the new image editor resulting in the effects shown below:
With this new tool you can make many easy changes to images such as changing color, scaling the image, rotating the image, adding a reflection to the image, adding text to the image, and more. Product Zooming With this dynamic new feature, shoppers will be able to magnify your product images by hovering over the image with the mouse! With this feature enabled, shoppers will be able to see closer details for every product on your site. This feature is displayed on the product details page of each product. For example, when your shopper goes to the product detail page for the below product, they initially see the product as shown below:
With the product zooming feature enabled, your shopper can move their mouse over any part of the image to see a closer view, such as shown below:
On the product image on the left, notice the clear window with the hand icon in the center. This is the section of the product which is displayed in closer detail in the window to the right of the product. The shopper can hover the mouse over any section of the product and the window on the right will change to show the close up detail of that section. This is another tool that is commonly used on successful retail sites. This capability will surely enhance the overall look of your site as well as give your shoppers a useful and fun tool to see your products more clearly. To see a video of this feature in action click here. Tag Cloud Version 9.03 offers the ability to add a tag cloud to your home page. What is a tag cloud? Wikipedia offers the following definition:
A tag cloud or word cloud (or weighted list in visual design) is a visual depiction of user-generated tags, or simply the word content of a site, used typically to describe the content of web sites. Tags are usually single words and are typically listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size or color. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. The tags are usually hyperlinks that lead to a collection of items that are associated with a tag.
An example tag cloud is shown below. In this example, it is easy to see that this particular website contains the words anniversary, birthday, and gift more frequently than any other keywords on the site.
Based on this, you can infer that this site has content related to gifts, anniversaries and birthdays. Furthermore, you can also see that the site contains lots of other type of content as shown with the smaller keywords, but that content occurs less frequently. This new feature will give your website a popular new way for potential shoppers to easily figure out what your site is all about in one quick glance. These are just a few of the new features offered on the upcoming Version 9.03 eCommerce website from eMerchantClub. There are a great many additional features in this release, including:
These new features were added to give you tools to effectively market your business and elevate your site to the level of popular major retailer sites in terms of functionality and appearance. Collectively, all of these fantastic new features should improve the look and feel of your site, give your shoppers the sense that other satisfied customers have purchased from your site (such as with the product reviews and product faq’s), improve your websites visibility and strengthen the sense of community (such as with the social networking features), and ultimately, hopefully increase your overall sales. The more you know about these new features, the more effectively you can put them to use for these goals so so if you have any questions please contact Technical Support via e-mail at techsupport@emerchantclub.com by going to Live Chat Technical Support at http://www.emerchantclub.com/support.html or by calling (877) 384-4691. If you do not have a Version 9 or if your site does not include all of the mentioned features, give us a call at (888) 806-2081 for information on getting these new features. Thank you, Your eMerchantClub Team
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