One of the main enemies of e-commerce websites happens even before the user ever experiences the your shopping cart software. For many shoppers the concept of doing business on line is still a foreign language. They fear what they do not understand and cannot see.

Add the lack of person-to-person communication and fears about unsecured processing of funds leads to other doubts for perspective customers and the result presents a challenge. Software features like the shopping cart can either enhance or hinder these concerns.

Build Trust

It’s a matter of building trust through professionalism. When a shopper finally gets brave enough to try an online transaction, the software and the shopping cart feature must be flawless. Clearly explain the buying process, the steps involved and the amount of time needed to complete a transaction on the first page and reinforce these factors throughout the checkout process.

In addition, websites giving phone numbers or electronic addresses for the purpose of answering questions or concerns need to make sure responses are provided in a timely manner, and so stated before the user request communication. If you list contact information only for a potential client to find a dead end, the clatter of clicking sounds to escape your site will vastly drown out the wanted “cha-chings” from money entering your bank account.

Mobile Friendly

Prior to arriving at the shopping cart, the entire experience should be mobile optimized. If apps and user friendly mobile sites are available for tablets and smart phones, those apps need to provide a smooth and sophisticated transition. Maybe even specific services for popular devices like iPhones and iPads should be a consideration. Expect shopping carts to be abandoned if too many options make the process complicated or slow through extra wait time to load intensive graphics and excessive finger zooming in and out. Consider a quick check out option or some type of mobile express lane for shoppers purchasing one or two items. Mobile shoppers will typically less time on your site and buy less.

Live Tracking

There is no substitute for clear and effective communication. Keep the customer informed of the process throughout. Changing a selection or back tracking to find a product should not be complicated.

Surprises are great for birthdays but not so good for customers trying to make a purchase. Give important information upfront to prevent unpleasant surprises at checkout. For example, keep inventory up to date. If a product is not available, the customer should get that message immediately when the item is checked. Live order processing after purchase ensures a confident shopper, who is much willing to refer you new business.

No surprises should show up in the shopping cart at all. Any extra charges or special conditions need to appear on the home page or cart in plain sight. More customers are likely to follow through with a transaction if the shopping cart includes an accurate list of selected items and prices listed. If your layout allows for it, a perpetual shopping cart which shows all items in your cart throughout the shopping experience can help reduce shopping cart abandonment when the checkout begins.

Even extra fees for shipping or taxes should be listed on the home page. There should be no surprises during the shopping cart phase when the shopper checks out. Surprises equal more abandoned carts. Many other factors are important to e-commerce but exhibiting mobile friendliness while maintaining a professional but friendly website with live tracking will give any business a solid start.

“I just wanted to let you know that we are now live and all traffic redirected to corecommerce. I also would like to let everyone that has helped me along the way know that I really appreciate your time and extreme willingness to help me through this transition. Every tech company should strive to have the outstanding level of service that Corecommerce provides! What a painless walk through a difficult transition! Thanks for being there with me!”

Brian Krenzin – petandkennelsupply.com

“Our average sale went up over 20% just putting our new CC site up.”

Julie Feickert – culturesforhealth.com

Hey folks:

As our ongoing effort to improve communication with our customers about our new features and the projects we are working on, we wanted to let you know about the new features inside your account (available now). The following features were rolled out successfully to all customers yesterday, Wed, 10/12. These features were financed by customers asking for these specific features (rather than community votes). Here is the list:

CoreCommerce Built-In Blog

We now have a Blog that you can use directly inside of CoreCommerce's system. You can create posts, categories, and have people comment on your blog items just like any standard blog can do. It is very useful and will help any CoreCommerce customer with SEO by having a blog on the same site as the CoreCommerce store. By having a blog on the same site as your CoreCommerce store, you can have the blog setup as http://www.yoursite.com/blog, which is better for SEO something like http://blog.yoursite.com.
For those of you asking for this feature — it's here! Details on how it works are in our knowledgebase here.

Google Product Feed Updates

We have updated and implemented the new updates to the Google Product Feed as required by Google.

Amazon Fulfillment

You can now use CoreCommerce in conjunction with Amazon Fulfillment to fulfill orders. You can have your orders sent to Amazon, and have the orders shipped and tracked via the Amazon Fulfillment interface.

Email Address in API

In the CoreCommerce API, you can now search for a customer by their email address.

Importing/Exporting Sort Order Values

In the past, you could create a custom sort order for options inside an option drop down, but this field was not part of the Product Option Import and Export tool. It now is so this field can now be imported and exported.

Channel Manager Integration

We now integrate with Channel Manager, a 3rd party tool you can use for fulfillment and order tracking. You do have to have a Channel Manager Account to use this feature with CoreCommerce. It can communicate with CoreCommerce to auto update orders with tracking information.

Tracking Integration with Lynx fulfillment

We previously integrated with Lynx fulfillment so that you could send orders from CoreCommerce to Lynx. We have also added the ability in this release for Lynx to talk back to CoreCommerce and update tracking numbers inside your orders.

Custom Payment Method Messages for Emails

For the Payment Methods "Check" and "Money Order" we have added a new field you can enter HTML into that will be included in the email reciept (HTML ONLY) to the customer when they place an order using that payment method.

NoChex Payment Gatewat Integration

We now integrate with the NoChex Payment Gateway for accepting credit card payments with CoreCommerce.

BCC Emails are sent as true BCC emails

In the past, you could go into the Admin Store Settings and tell the system to "blind carbon copy", or BCC, and email to another email address. When you set that up, it didnt actually BCC that email to the email, it sent a separate email. We have changed that at our customer's request to actually attach the email address you with to BCC emaill to to the actual email that is sent, like a true BCC.

Qty Based Pricing Updates

We have added the ability for Qty Based Pricing to show just 1 number for the low and the high ranges, when they both used the same number. In the past, if your low was 1 and your high was also 1, it would show "1-1". Now when you turn on this setting, it will just show "1".

Top Level Categories

We have added the ability to go to a specific screen that will show a list of JUST the top level categories in the system.

Don't autopopulate Ship To Address during checkout

We have now added the feature that will force the shipping address to NEVER populate automatically with the billing address, to accommodate those stores that require a different shipping address for each customer order.

Product Option Images Now Exportable

We have update the Product Option Import/Export tool to allow the images to be imported as well. It works just like the Product Images import too, where you upload the images via FTP to a folder on your site, and then you reference the name of the image in the import file.

Custom Fields can now be exported with Orders

If you create a custom field that a customer fills out during checkout, and that field is set to save with the order, that field can now be exported via the order export tool, whereas previously we did not.

New Payment Gateways

We now integrate with the Planet Payment or iPay gateway for accepting credit card transactions. Paymate Payment Gateway (Australia-based) & iPay Planet (aka Planet Payment) Gateway

Tax Update for US and Canada

Our system was setup in the past that if your main tax Country was something other than US or Canada, you could not set a tax rate for US or Canada at all. Now this has been changed to allow a flat rate for US and Canada, just like any other countries, when your main tax Country is something other than US or Canada.

New Design Tokens
We added 4 new tokens to the design token system, to allow for specific if statements based on your browser type, i.e. mobile, firefox, internet explorer.

Next Release: Early November 2011

We will do 1 more round of new features before the holiday season that focuses on improving page load time before the busy holiday season as well as FedEx Label printing with FedEx WebServices. We hope to get back on track with the community feature votes starting again in January.

Thanks,

CoreCommerce Team

CoreCommerce is a finalist for the 2011 Nashville NEXT Awards. The NEXT Awards, is to be held Tuesday, October 18 at the Renaissance Nashville Hotel, will honor the area’s most innovative entrepreneurs and area businesses experiencing the most significant growth in terms of revenue and employment. In addition to the awards recognizing businesses making the greatest contributions to the local economy, individual awards for outstanding entrepreneurs will be given in several categories.

The NEXT Awards build upon the Nashville Chamber’s Future 50 Awards, which for 19 years recognized the fastest-growing entrepreneurial businesses in Middle Tennessee. The new partnership with the Entrepreneur Center extends the concept beyond simply spotlighting emerging companies, differing from the Future 50 Awards in three important ways: public companies are now eligible to enter; three tiers have been established to recognize businesses at all stages of development (startup, growth and market mover); and individual awards will be given to entrepreneurs making an impact on the Nashville economy.

View the list of finalists here.

We have expanded our Legendary Support coverage to 24x7x365.

Providing 24/7 support is part of our ongoing commitment to customer service, and will be a particular benefit for our international customers. We’re pleased to be able to expand our phone support hours so CoreCommerce customers will have access to the technical support they need regardless of the time zone they’re in or the hours they work.

This has been one of our goals we have been working towards throughout 2011. We have quietly been offering 24/7 support for almost 5 weeks now as we moved our staff into those roles.

CoreCommerce’s commitment to customer service is supported by the high level of satisfaction expressed by customers backed by our Legendary Support. CoreCommerce holds a 93 percent customer satisfaction rating based on the feedback received in response to each interaction with a customer by e-mail or phone.

Identify 50 of the 70 websites in this image, and you’ll be entered into a drawing to win a free CoreCommerce store for 1 year.

Brought to you by ZippyCart.com and Designed by Killer Infographics

Get Started Now

The ecommerce industry standard 15-30 day free trial is outdated! It really hasn’t changed much over time and has the same flaws it did years ago! A 15-30 day trial is ok if you have unlimited time set aside to launch a new venture and can cram all your efforts into a 15-30 day timeframe. What about the rest of us???

What happens if you create a 15 day trial, work on it for a week, go on vacation for a week and you come back and all your hard earned work has been nuked? We’ve been working on trying to address this problem for a while now and we’ve come up with a solution that new {prospective} customers seem to love!

Old Way: FREE 15-30 day trial

New Way: FREE trial for as long as needed (just need to login at least once every 30 days to keep account active). You don’t pay until you go live.

We’ve had alot of requests for extended free trials (beyond our 15 day trial) and we’ve added an extra 30 days to customers who’ve requested it, but we are taking it a step further. At the end of the day what customers really want is to “pay once they go live”. This new way allows for an unlimited trial, provided you login and are still working on building your store. The store remains in a “closed mode” and can be viewed by the admin and can accept 3 test orders.

How does it work?
When you first create a free trial, your store is created in the “closed mode” until you are ready to go live. This ensures customers don’t visit your store until you are ready to take orders. Take as much time as you need to build your store, setup your design, add products, configure payments, setup shipping & taxes. You just need to login at least once every 30 days to keep your free trial account active. Once you are ready to open your store for business, click the “go live” button, choose a plan that meets your needs, enter your payment information and your store is now “live” and open for business. Your dream of creating an online business is now live.

Effective August 1st, 2011

We are replacing our FTP service with “FTP over SSL”. For most up to date FTP programs, this is 1 simple setting change and will then work as expected. These changes will affect 1/2 customers today (Aug 1st) and the other half of our customer tomorrow, Aug 2nd. You will receive an email message stating which half you are in today.

A quick tutorial on how to change your setting inside your FTP program is here:
https://www.corecommerce.com/kb/index.html?module=kbarticle&id=5224&m=detail

As many of you know we recently upgraded our design framework. We have just released our new guide.

You can also view our detailed KB article on this change here.

We have added several new features in our latest release. The biggest of which is our new template tokens.

We have changed our entire templating system, making it even easier to modify any themes. This includes our all new token system, so instead of relying on complicated php to pull in data or to create if statements, you can now use our new tokens, which completely removes PHP code from our design templates. To view the new token list go here.

The following new features have been added during the July Release:

• New Template System
• Use text personalization fields as a quantity fields
• Progress bar option when submitting a customer submits an order

Below are training videos on how to use each of these features.

New Template System

NOTE: We are currently working on an updated customization guide to go along with our new token system, which will be released by late July.

Use text personalization fields as a quantity field

Progress bar option when customer submits an order

Do you have an affiliate program to help with sales with your ecommerce store? If so you will want to pay attention what just happened in California. California Gov. Jerry Brown, just signed legislation that requires online purchases to be taxed at 7.25% if you have any affiliates in California, even if you don’t have a physical business presence there. Previously, only internet companies with stores or operations in California had to collect the tax.

Large retailers such as Amazon.com and Overstock already cut their affiliate ties to California due to this new legislation.

According to the law, an out-of-state online retailer with any kind of “nexus” in the state – a physical or corporate presence, not just a brick-and-mortar retail outlet – is liable. With one exception: retailers who have sold no more than $500,000 worth of goods in California in the previous 12 months.