CORESense Integrates Social Candy for Facebook eCommerce

CoreSense, a leading end-to-end multichannel solution provider, is partnering with Social Candy to provide CORESense clients with the ability to quickly and easily create customized, professional Facebook Fan Pages that include online shopping functions.

Social Candy provides businesses with easily implemented, cost-effective tools to create and manage effective Facebook marketing campaigns and customized, professional Facebook Fan Pages with integrate eCommerce functions. Products and their associated information, such as title, description, price and images, can be fed directly from the CORESense product catalog directly to the Fan Pages. Facebook members can browse a retailer’s products directly from the social network. If a member user likes a product, all they need do is click “Buy Now” and they’re redirected to the Retailer’s eCommerce site to complete the purchase.

 “Establishing a strong social media presence allows retailers to track feedback, trends and other shopping indicators that they can leverage to fine tune their merchandising strategies,” said Mark Gordon, CEO of Social Candy. “Now, using Social Candy, CORESense’s clients can cost effectively build and manage professional looking Facebook Fan Pages, removing the financial and technical barriers and, as a result, realize increased customer loyalty and sales.”

"Partnerships with leading retail and ecommerce application providers such as Social Candy gives our clients the same reach as the large chain stores and allows them to compete more effectively," said Chris Martin, CEO of CORESense. “We are excited to add Social Candy to our growing COREPartner program.”

Demandware Launches Facebook Store Solution

Demandware, Inc., Inc., a global leader in on-demand eCommerce, has announced the availability of a new prototype application for implementing a Facebook Store, extending core Demandware functionality into the social commerce channel.

The application, Facebook Shop, allows Demandware clients to tap the more than 600 million active users on the social network by selling directly through a branded Facebook store, usng the core merchandising data contained in Demandware Commerce for enabling consumer engagement and shopping.

The Facebook Shop prototype was developed in Demandware Labs, an experimental research center dedicated to applications and innovations that extend the core functionality of the Demandware Commerce platform.  The prototype applications developed in Demandware Labs are available to Demandware clients and partners for testing and implementation, and may eventually be added to Demandware’s roadmap.

Putting It to Work
Using the Facebook Shop application, retailers can easily set up a storefront in Facebook that leverages all of the capabilities of the Demandware Commerce platform. The storefront can be fully customized to meet a retailer’s unique brand requirements, enabling the following capabilities within Facebook:

• Consumer shopping: Retailers can provide consumers with a rich shopping experience in Facebook, including inventory availability and product information delivered from the Demandware Commerce platform for display directly in Facebook
• Content slots: Retailers can easily change content images within Facebook to feature selected products, conduct promotions or display other content
• Search: Consumers can search all products included in the product pages
• Like and share: Users can like and share products with friends to create a more social shopping experience

“Social networks are an emerging channel for branded engagement. By leveraging this new channel for commerce, retailers can use Facebook to build a stronger connection between the consumer and the brand,” said Jamus Driscoll, vice president of marketing for Demandware. “Our Facebook Shop application is a great example of the innovative platform extensions we are building in Demandware Labs.”

Pitney Bowes to Introduce Digital Mail Delivery Service

Back in 2009 we wrote about Zumbox, which allows you to receive your mail online instead of on paper: Zumbox Offers Virtual Postal Service. Now Pitney Bowes has introduced a competitive offering called "Volly," a secure, spam-free digital delivery service that allows businesses to:

• Coordinate physical and digital mail in one cloud-based application
•  Send bills, direct mail, coupons, catalogs and more
• Reach customers from any computer or web-enabled device
• Lower mail production and operating costs 

Customers who opt in will be able to receive, manage and view all of these mailings from a single application, and will be able to electronically pay their bills, as well.

Pitney Bowes has a relationship with 74% of the country's high-volume mailers, many of whom they expect to sign up to use the service, and is enlisting additional mailers as well. The official consumer sign-up will begin later this year. There will be no charge for the Volly secure digital delivery service, which will be funded by retailers/service providers who will benefit from reduced costs on printing, fulfillment, and postage by not having to send physical mail.

Pitney Bowes has initially developed an appliance strategy to facilitate integration of high volume transaction mailers into the Volly digital delivery service. Later they will be publishing APIs for smaller mailers as well as establishing a developer community.

OrderDynamics Upgrades SEO System Module and Call Center Tech

OrderDynamics, Canada's Leading On-Demand eCommerce Platform Provider, recently deployed upgrades to its multi-eStore Search Engine Optimization (SEO) system as part of their quarterly feature release strategy, and deployed a major upgrade to its Call Center module, as well, for customer care teams that support multiple eCommerce websites.

The SEO system is specifically designed for large catalog merchants to grow organic traffic and avoid duplicate content.

The recent upgrade extends the capabilities of their SEO metadata toolset that allows merchants to optimize Product, Category, Brand, and Manufacturer landing pages. The upgrade enables control over all dynamic pages, referred to as Faceted Navigation (sometimes called Guided Navigation) pages and Search Results pages, a major contributor to the cause of duplicate content on eCommerce websites.

The OrderDynamics platform now allows point-and-click control over SEO metadata for any URL, even dynamic URLs, including Page Title, Link Title Tag, Meta Keywords, Meta Description, Vanity URL, and Link Canonical tag. OrderDynamics also offers the ability to generate metadata using formulas and a combination of phrases and source data such as product names, descriptions, etc.

 "OrderDynamics is squarely focused on helping our Clients grow their business by leveraging the latest traffic building and conversation best practices" explains Michael Benadiba, CEO of OrderDynamics. "We continue to lead in the area of on-page SEO and we are investing heavily in this area because of the significant benefit it brings to our Clients".

The latest upgrade allows merchants to quickly optimize strategic landing pages, instantly improving organic traffic from search engines and reducing pay-per-click (PPC) advertising costs through increased page quality scores.

By enabling control over the Link Canonical Tag, OrderDynamics Clients can avoid duplicate content issues, a hot topic for all online retailers especially large catalog merchants that offer multiple points of navigation like brand, category, and search. In addition, OrderDynamics has provided the ability for keyword rich Product Attributes used in Guided Navigation to be appended to the URL to further optimize pages with no merchant intervention.

Call Center Technology Upgrade
The recent update to the fully integrated Call Center application provides additional features especially important for multi-store retailers, plus additional Dynamic Merchandising to support fast and easy cross-selling and upselling.

In addition, the Call Center module has been overhauled for performance to make it optimize it for large catalog merchants with SKU counts beyond 100,000 and large customer databases. Some of the new eCommerce Call Center features include: multi-store "impersonation," streamlined customer lookup, guided navigation product search, autocomplete product search, "customer also bought" dynamic merchandising, related items merchandising, stock availability, and pricing overrides.

The multi-eStore (often referred to as multi-site) technology allows merchant call centers, or a third party call center, to take orders for any branded Websites that they support with all per-site features such as product pricing, promotions, customer records, transactional emails, payments, shipping rates, and more. 

About OrderDynamics Corporation
OrderDynamics Corporation is a privately owned eCommerce platform service provider for high-growth B2B and B2C businesses. The success of OrderDynamics is highly attributed to its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) eCommerce model and Dynamic Merchandising concepts which provide superior control and help drive revenue. The OrderDynamics solution caters to multi-channel retail, manufacturing, business-to-business, and complex online retail offering full back-end inventory management, fulfillment, and call center support, as well as an eCommerce and mCommerce platform. OrderDynamics officially launched its On-Demand eCommerce Solution in 2006 after two years of research and development.

Boden Implements Autonomy's Optimost

Autonomy Corporation has announced that Boden, a leading online and mail-order clothing retailer, will be implementing Autonomy's Optimost "meaning-based" revenue optimization platform across all of its Websites. The initiative comes as a result of the bottom-line improvements already achieved through the implementation of Autonomy Optimost on Boden's Websites in the UK and USA.

Boden uses Autonomy Optimost's Multivariable Testing (MVT) solution to test virtually limitless permutations of Web content and layout of the Boden Websites in real-time and identify the versions which optimize customer behavior online. The solution optimizes virtually every online marketing element, including landing pages, registration pages, shopping carts, credit card pages, banner ads, email creatives, and Web applications, as well as every content type within them, including headlines, copy, forms, images, and rich media.

As a result, Boden has experienced a dramatic and measurable improvement in the bottom-line performance of its UK and USA sites. In just one of many recent tests, Boden saw an increase of over 4.5% in revenue per visitor. Implementing Autonomy Optimost's revenue optimization solution on all its current international sites should enable Boden to extend the benefits of MVT across to its entire online presence.