Keeping even your most fickle customers can be easy, if you provide the right experience.

Even the most savvy internet marketers among us usually agree: online sales are most often lost at the checkout. And why would we not believe that, when you consider the fact that 51% of all shopping carts end up abandoned? A commonly accepted reason for this are that onerous shipping charges prompt shoppers in this direction – if it’s not free, or at least damned cheap, they drop the cart altogether.

That belief, it turns out, is a little off the mark. In fact, it’s simply untrue, according to Bridgeline’s latest eBook, “Web Experience Management: Secrets to Closing the Sale Before the Customer Checks Out of Your Website.”

The truth is that sales are lost long before your customer reaches the checkout phase. According to the eBook, “Somewhere in the web experience, the customer lost faith in the product, the company or the website – maybe even all three.” It’s an overall lack of a satisfying shopping experience, says Bridgeline, that  ultimately kills sales – in the same way a badly written plot leaves a film with no definable aftertaste, and therefore makes it merely forgettable. (more…)

Your CMS should bring your content creation and editing processes into the 21st century. (Photo: Creative Commons License)

If your company is in the market to upgrade their CMS platform to a shiny, new model, or just beginning to research options, it’s important to compare all the bells and whistles you’ll need to keep  your web experience management (WEM) capabilities strong, relevant and fresh. There are many newer features out there you may not have even thought were available, and some that will quickly turn into favorites making you wonder how you ever survived without. Take some time here – and over the next few posts – to familiarize yourself with some of the coolest features built into the iAPPS Product Suite, and then imagine these capabilities as an intrinsic part of your content management process. Chances are that much of the intuitive basic functionality built into iAPPS holds what you’re looking for – whether you know it yet, or not.

To effectively research a solution, step away from the processes and environments you’ve become accustomed to and really look to identify the goals you’re trying to accomplish – on a daily, weekly and seasonal basis. Then, ask how your CMS can help you to achieve those goals. Too often, users take current processes – frequently and unnecessarily complex – completely for granted. This narrow view makes it hard to be fully aware of any potential new functionality that may be available that can actually make a difference. As you vet all the possibilities, be sure you’re not missing the chance to solve many of your problems with the right CMS by identifying all the options available to you. (more…)

The entire iAPPS Product Suite has been made even more powerful with the release of iAPPS v4.5!

The 2010 CODiE Award-winning iAPPS Content Manager has always included page commenting but with this latest release we’ve given you even more control by including a Comments Awaiting Approval Workflow.  You already know how useful page comments are to site visitors – they show up everywhere these days. They can influence everything from online shopping decisions to whether or not to someone continues to visit your site. Comments can take a static page of content and turn it into a richly dynamic conversation. In general comments are useful and can help drive traffic to your site – but on occasion they can be inaccurate or put your company or brand in a bad light. You can use your own discretion to decide what stays and what goes by simply watching your site – but it might be more effective to have new comments go through an approval process before they are published to your live site.  With the Comments Awaiting Approval workflow you control whether comments are published or not. Comments can be edited or deleted at anytime – individually or in bulk – making the process quick and easy.  All of the powerful commenting capabilities  in iAPPS Content Manager are also part of iAPPS Commerce – in the form of product reviews – providing smarter eCommerce by design.

Comments Awaiting Approval in iAPPS Content Manager

It’s common knowledge how important a strong SEO strategy is to the success of your web presence. When done effectively it drives traffic and customers to your site that might not have otherwise found you. But once they get there will they be able to find what they are looking for quickly and easily? They will with the cross-suite implementation of ISYS Search Software – introduced with the release of iAPPS v4.5.  This best-in-class search tool provides seamless integration with iAPPS and powerful search capabilities that create an easy, yet powerful search experience on the front and back end. Site visitors will be able to find what they are looking for with ease and drill down into dynamic search results while content editors on the back end will save time with numerous powerful search features including a content preview within search results.

And speaking of site search – iAPPS v4.5 includes a new Site Search Analysis report with iAPPS Analytics. This powerful report will tell you, in real-time, what site visitors are searching for. This is actionable intelligence at its best. For example, say there’s a product that you don’t carry but through Site Search Analysis you notice that a lot of your customers are searching for it. This intelligence might prompt you to start carrying that product.

Internal Site Search Report in iAPPS Analytics

You can then set up a Watched Event to see how the product moves through your store and test the results of carrying it.  Go a step further by using iAPPS Commerce to create a promotional coupon for that product and send it out through iAPPS Marketier. The possibilities are endless with iAPPS – you get a true picture of your site visitor and can personalize their experience through real intelligence.

We are always striving to build in features most valued by online merchants and with 4.5 we’ve added some key enhancements to the already-powerful iAPPS Commerce platform.  Cross-sell and up-sell get a boost through more robust product relationships – that helps you to reduce buyer hesitation and drive sales through increased opportunities. On the B2B side the buyer order workflow has been optimized through the addition of configurable business rules. The rules enable iAPPS to call out to the ERP or other back office system to determine instantly whether an order can go through or not – a huge business benefit to the sell-side of B2B. And the buy-side isn’t left behind in this release of iAPPS – it benefits from the flexibility of payment on account and line of credit, as well as other enhancements designed to provide a positive user experience.

The release of iAPPS 4.5 continues the Bridgeline tradition of delivering rapidly deployable and infinitely scalable solutions that enable you to capitalize on all of your customer and site visitor interactions. Give us a call at 800-603-9936 if you have any questions or click here if you’d like to schedule an online demo.

I’m no stranger to eCommerce, I’m proud to say I am a regular contributor to this $129.8 billion industry. But it has always been on the consumer side.  Now I’m getting a whole new view into the online commerce world from the application side. There are so many eCommerce platforms to choose from and each one has something different, their own secret ingredient that sets it apart from the rest.

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The boom of eCommerce is certainly changing the way companies conduct business. Online eCommerce sales are growing from $335 billion in 2006 to $711 billion in 2010. According to IDC Research, more than a billion consumers will spend $1.2 trillion shopping online in 2012. And B2B eCommerce will be ten times larger, totaling $12.4 trillion worldwide in 2012.

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About two months ago I was sitting in a hotel conference room being trained on a new piece of software here at Bridgeline when an interesting philosophical question was raised. When something is not true, is it necessarily false? I suppose I should provide a little more background information for this question before getting into why this question is important.

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