New Year’s Resolutions for Ecommerce

Are you making New Year’s resolutions for how to run a better, more profitable ecommerce business in 2013?

As both B2C and B2B ecommerce continues to grow, the New Year is full of possibilities to streamline operations and reduce costs while meeting growing customer demand for a relevant and interactive relationship with your brand. But those objectives are difficult to meet for merchants running ecommerce point solutions and legacy back-end systems.

Those first-generation systems divert focus from building the business, as staff wastes time manually manipulating data across incompatible applications. Visibility into inventory, sales and customers is limited, and what is available is weeks old. Customers will defect to a competitor if you can’t deliver a seamless cross-channel experience.

We recently spoke with a number of leading merchants running NetSuite SuiteCommerce to learn how they’re making out with our single, integrated commerce solution, with a rich web storefront linked natively to back-office ERP / financials, inventory and order management, CRM, support, marketing and more.

Quite uniformly, these customers have improved efficiency, customer service and the multichannel shopping experience with a real-time 360-degree view of customers and the business. They can closely control inventory across multiple locations, speed fulfillment and run multiple branded and geo-specific websites from a single SuiteCommerce instance.

You can read our announcement on these companies here, and in the meantime I’ll let our customers speak for themselves:

EnergyFirst

EnergyFirst (www.energyfirst.com) is an industry-leading natural products company known for their outstanding meal replacement protein shakes. “With NetSuite, we run real-time, all the time,” said EnergyFirst CEO Gerry Morton. “We make better decisions and operate our company much more efficiently.  With NetSuite's B2C eCommerce strength, we're able to drive unparalleled value for our customers and receive immediate actionable feedback on everything we do.”

Leland Fly Fishing Outfitters

Leland Fly Fishing Outfitters (http://www.flyfishingoutfitters.com) is a specialty retailer of fly fishing rods, reels, tackle boxes, clothing and other gear. “With NetSuite, our business is very close to being seamless,” said Burke White, Leland Sales Manager. “NetSuite has given us much better control over purchasing and inventory, and CRM and marketing tools help us further our mission of personalized customer service.”

Jafrum International

Jafrum International (http://www.jafrum.com) is a leading e-tailer of motorcycle helmets, jackets, luggage and other riding gear. “We’re glad we went with NetSuite early on so we didn’t have to switch from standalone applications several years later,” said Rumana Bai, Jafrum VP. “We went with NetSuite because it had everything in a single solution —eCommerce, accounting, CRM, inventory and more.”

KASK America

KASK America (www.kaskhelmets.com) is the US subsidiary of the Italy-based manufacturer of helmets for cycling, skiing, mountaineering and work safety. "NetSuite has helped us grow by working closely with us to deliver a striking look-and-feel on our websites, with the custom work on the back-end we need to support our processes,” said Eugene Kozhevnikov, COO & Managing Director of KASK America, Inc. “SuiteCommerce gives us top-notch design on a top-notch platform for reaching our customers."

Happy selling this holiday season and best wishes for a prosperous and profitable 2013!

-Andy Lloyd – GM of Commerce Products

Five Steps to Holiday Omnichannel Retail Success

The peak holiday shopping season is upon us and the difference between a season that puts a company in the black and one that fails to live up to expectations requires monitoring and managing customers across all channels..

Retailers pushing to satisfy increasingly connected and empowered customers across multiple shopping channels are the ones that tend to see their holiday dreams come true. Yet, that doesn’t require the IT infrastructure of big box stores to succeed. An integrated commerce solution that links physical stores and the web storefront with back-end order management, marketing and inventory puts omnichannel success within reach of all retailers provided they follow these five steps.

1) Optimize your customer touchpoints.
iPhones and other smartphones have become powerful shopping research tools for checking pricing, availability and reviews on the fly, while iPads and other tablets are increasingly being used to research and purchase products. Look to responsive web design to ensure that your web storefront can adjust dynamically to deliver content optimized for each digital customer touchpoint.

2) Make real-time inventory data available. Showing web shoppers what’s available in stores and what’s online is fast becoming a mandate, but it doesn’t stop there — in-store employees need access too. A mobile point of sale (POS) device can “save the sale” on the store floor by helping an associate quickly determine that an out-of-stock product is available at a store 10 miles away or can easily be shipped to the shopper.

3) Make the experience fast and convenient. Suppose the customer doesn’t want to wait until an item is shipped, or doesn’t want to drive 10 miles to the next store for an out-of-stock item? With an integrated back-end system, you have real-time visibility into the inventory in each store, accurate stock information and the flexibility to speed orders and fulfillment. For example, you can ship the item from your nearby store to the customer’s home, cutting days off delivery from a warehouse. Letting customers order online and pick up at their local store allows shoppers to get their products quicker and save on delivery costs. Additionally, retailers can boost customer loyalty, store traffic and incremental revenue by allowing online purchases to be returned to physical stores, ultimately resulting in great customer satisfaction.

4)Provide superior customer service with a holistic view of the customer. Customers don’t appreciate it when an issue raised at a store isn’t communicated to a call center or reflected in an online profile. A single view of each customer—for example, what that customer has ordered and when that order has been shipped—will enable you to deliver the attention and support customers expect by providing visibility into all online, in-store and call center transactions and interactions.

5) Leverage customer data to cross-sell and upsell. Increase the likelihood of future purchases by leveraging customer knowledge from all channels to promote the right products, to the right shoppers, through their preferred channel. A single view of a customer’s lifetime purchase and interaction history positions your organization to deliver targeted cross-sell and upsell promotions and encourages deeper customer engagement. 

As retailers work their way through these steps, they will realize that the drive to differentiate will ultimately require the flexibility to continuously enhance the customer experience. An omnichannel strategy quickly renders old bulk “spray and pray” approaches to online marketing as obsolete. Retailers will need to innovate with new marketing strategies, tactics and technologies. That means developing new ways to enhance your customers’ experiences through email, mobile, online, social, call center and in-store touchpoints that engage and inform.

Choosing the right commerce platform—one capable of supporting the creativity the marketplace demands—will make the prospect of this innovation more an opportunity than a challenge.

Happy selling this holiday season!

-Andy Lloyd – GM of Commerce Products

Relying on the Cloud to Succeed in Multichannel Sales

If the packed ballroom at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore during NetSuite’s recent stopover to officially launch its new SuiteCommerce platform is any indication, it is safe to assume that Singapore is indeed a strategic market for cloud adoption. A recentwhite paper by Frost & Sullivan established that Singapore is behind only Australia and New Zealand in the adoption of the cloud, and is ahead of most other countries in the Asia Pacific region.

Furthermore, ecommerce has been an increasingly important factor in Singapore’s economic activity. The Frost & Sullivan white paper suggests that the use of Internet to sell is already more advanced in Singapore than in Australia. Accounting for an estimated 28% of all customer interactions in Singapore, the Internet has overtaken other channels such as the telephone and mail. And although it trails traditional brick-and-mortar stores and field sales forces, the Internet is the fastest growing channel for customer and business interactions.

But given the continuously changing technology landscape, ecommerce adoption is bound to run into some complexities. Case in point—the growing range of digital channels customers use to access the Internet and to interact with suppliers (smart TV, smartphones, tablets, machine-to-machine, etc.) requires businesses to deliver an optimized customer experience regardless of channel, maintain security across all channels, create seamless and real-time integration of all customer touchpoints and link channels to internal systems such as ERP and CRM.

Running ecommerce in such a multichannel world creates opportunities for businesses to reach a wider market, but also introduces significant challenges that need to be faced head-on. And this is where Singaporean organizations’ fondness of cloud computing plays a big role. According to Frost & Sullivan, using the cloud to host ecommerce systems offers key solutions to such challenges.

The cloud provides the agility organizations need to power whatever channels their businesses require, as well as access to these channels wherever business needs to happen. The cloud also provides high levels of security and reliability, while reducing capital and operational expenses.

With NetSuite’s successful launch of SuiteCommerce in Singapore, it surely is safe to say that Singaporean companies are seeing the importance of the cloud in effectively running their ecommerce efforts, and that NetSuite has the ideal platform for such an important task.

Read more about NetSuite SuiteCommerce and download the Frost & Sullivan white paper to find out more about how the cloud answers the challenges of running ecommerce in a multichannel world.

-Andy Lloyd – GM of Commerce Products

 

Omnichannel Commerce: Are You Ready?

Welcome to the age of omnichannel commerce. Just a few years ago, shoppers who used multiple channels did so one at a time, usually for separate transactions. But today, they move fluidly across websites, smartphones, tablets, social media, call centers and brick-and-mortar stores, giving rise to the omnichannel phenomenon that is here to stay.

Case in point: 45% of U.S. online retail customers plan to shop by combining online, mobile and physical touchpoints in 2012, according to a recent survey by Experian’s PriceGrabber price comparison service. Forty-two percent said they would shop mostly online—more than three times the 12 percent who will shop mostly in brick-and-mortar stores.[1]

The rise of omnichannel shopping has clear implications for retailers, and for B2B, B2C merchants as well. Companies need to satisfy customer demand for a seamless, consistent experience regardless of the touchpoint used for product research, purchasing and service. That requirement for seamless consistency takes two forms.

First, the web storefront needs to adjust on the fly for optimal display to the customer’s device of choice, be it an iPhone, iPad, Android, typical laptop or other device to avoid poor rendering that prompts the shopper to click away. Secondly, a complete, real-time record of customers, orders and products needs to be available to both personnel and the company’s customer-facing systems to ensure accurate and timely response to inquiries across any touchpoint.

Responsive web design, the latest trend in website development, lets you deliver a website that adjusts dynamically to the user’s device, platform and screen resolution. So as your users switch from laptop to iPad to iPhone, your website will be automatically arranged for the resolution, image size and scripting abilities of each device.

The best thing about the concept of responsive design is that it reduces cost by eliminating the need for additional design and development for each new gadget that is out on the market, or to run separate website instances for each device. This method ensures you don’t miss traffic, regardless of what device your target audience is using. Importantly, responsive design and your underlying commerce system should be geared to future-proof customer interactions for touchpoints not yet envisioned—in other words, adapting flexibly as new touchpoints and interaction technologies emerge.

Responsive web design is a hallmark of NetSuite SuiteCommerce, which also addresses the second requirement of a single view. Operating directly on the core NetSuite business management application, SuiteCommerce consolidates all customer, order and product information into a single data set that spans touchpoints, empowering your personnel and systems to have real-time information at their fingertips whenever and wherever it’s needed.

The stakes are high. In our age of discriminating and connected consumers, missteps in the webstore experience or customer service can lead to not just customer dissatisfaction, but to an unflattering review on social media. Find out more about what NetSuite SuiteCommerce offers.

 

Andy Lloyd – GM of Commerce Products

[1] PriceGrabber, “2012 Shopping Outlook: Consumers plan a steady budget equal to 2011, according to PriceGrabber survey,” press release, February 28, 2012.