ShopSite Merchant Newsletter - Shopper Rewards
One of the new features in ShopSite Pro version 8 is the Reward program. Here is a look at this feature's setup, benefits, and uses.
What is the Reward Program feature?
With this feature you can reward loyal customers and encourage new customers with rewards such as "buy 10 get 1 free" or "buy two pairs of shoes, get a free pair of socks". Rewards can be set up per-order, or over time for registered customers.
How To Setup The Reward program:
- You would need to go in the back office to Merchandising > Reward Program.
- The first two things you would need to do are configure how you would like your rewards set up, and then also create categories of both the qualifying products and the rewards available.
- Then you can create a reward with the specific categories it applies to as well as any expiration dates, the name, and the description.
Benefits:
- When shoppers see a sale, whether it's a "buy two and get one free", a deep discount, or a free service offered with a product purchase, the word free is a huge eye-catcher. Those kinds of things are a big factor in terms of driving conversion.
- It has been our experience with successful ShopSite customers that upwards of 30% of total sales comes from selling to existing customers.
ShopSite In The News
Review: ShopSite 8
http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/solutions/building/article.php/3583426
"New versions of software need not necessarily look entirely new. A case in point is the e-commerce shopping cart application ShopSite 8, which retains the same user interface as its predecessor ShopSite 7. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?
Though it looks the same as its forebear, ShopSite 8 adds a bevy of new features that existing ShopSite users will definitely clamor for."
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Merchant Tip
"When Shoppers add products to the cart, they are taken to a page with the default shopping cart template. Is there any way to customize the look of the shopping cart without creating a custom template?"
Solution
What you can do is create a wrap of your home page HTML around the default shopping cart template. To do this you will need to go to your home page, right click and view source. Then find where the body of your text begins and copy everything from there back up to the beginning (including the opening table tags for the text field). Then go to into your ShopSite back office, Commerce Setup > Order System > Shopping Cart, and paste that HTML into the text box, Text at the Top of the Shopping Cart Screen. Then return to the source of your home page and find the bottom of the body of the page and copy and copy all the HTML from there to the bottom (including the close of the text cell table). Go back into ShopSite Commerce Setup > Order System > Shopping Cart, and paste that HTML into the text box, Text at the Bottom of the Shopping Cart Screen. You can then repeat this process for the Checkout Page, the Confirmation Page, and the Thank You page.
Note: Any images you use on the Checkout, Confirmation and the Thank You page need to be secure images. You can make these images secure by replacing the first part of the image URL (domain name), with the SSL URL listed in the back office in Preferences > Hosting Service.
For example:
http://mystore.com/media/image1.jpg
Changes to:
https://secure.settings.com/mystore/media/image1.jpg
The "Support Queue"
Q: I have ShopSite Pro and am using the Gift Certificate feature. When I do a product search as a shopper in my store for "gift certificates", nothing is found. How can I get the product search to return a link to the Gift Certificate order page?
A: The shopper product search only returns results on Products, and while a Gift Certificate could definitely be considered a product in terms of something that is being purchased, it is not actually a product in the stricter ShopSite sense because it is not in the Products database.
However, you can create a new placeholder Product and name it something like Gift Certificate and in the Search Destination setting choose the radio button option next to the text field so you can provide your own URL for the product link if the product is found in the search. In this field put the full http:// URL to the Gift Certificate order page (which you can find at the bottom of the Merchandising > Gift Certificate > Configure menu). In the Add to Cart button settings section for this new Product you may want to turn off the Add to Cart button so that this placeholder product itself is not orderable from the search results screen. You may also want to include other words that shoppers may use to look for gift certificates in the Search Keywords field for this product. After adding this new product you will need to Publish, of course, before you will be able to find it with the product search.
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Industry Articles
E-Commerce Site Design: The Product Page
http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/solutions/building/article.php/3579196
"Simplicity is key in a product page. Simplicity in the sense that it's about one product, because when you have multiple products that's when you add complexity and it just becomes overwhelming. The main thing should be extremely clear, like ’what is this product?’ Here's a picture of it, here's the price, and here's the shopping cart."
E-Commerce Site Design: Checkout Pages
http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/solutions/building/article.php/3584596
"At the heart of the checkout process, of course, is the shopping cart. The design and set-up of this critical tool drives the successful (translated: profitable) checkout process. To truly harvest the most revenue, a shopping cart should be user-friendly, therefore it should offer links to get more details about any items in the cart, enable shoppers to easily change quantities and - believe it or not - remove items, and, of course, provide a big bold ’Return to Shopping’ link."
Shipwire is a popular order fulfillment service that allows you to store merchandise in massive Chicago and Los Angeles warehouses. Then as each order comes into your online store, Shipwire will pack and ship it for you.
Knowledgebase Articles
The following article was recently added to the support knowledgebase.
S5510: 8.0.2 maintenance release fixes some problems with v8.0 and v8.0.1
Current Product Information
Most recent release of ShopSite:
- Version 8.0.2 on Linux, Solaris/SPARC, Windows Server 2000 and 2003, FreeBSD or BSDI servers.
To upgrade your ShopSite store, contact your authorized reseller hosting partner.
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