We’ve Improved our Software!!
We’ve added 26 enhancements to our Auctiva Commerce software to help you operate a successful online store and improve your buyers’ shopping experience. We’ve made adjustments to improve shipping dimension calculations, added a shipping method and much more. Below are a few more of the many enhancements we released during our latest release cycle.
- Special characters in your product names. Include any of the following characters in your item titles: !,&,”,’,\,/,(,),[,[,-,#,$,%,^,@,`,~,*,+,;, and :. It’s your shop; you decide how you want your titles to appear.
- Up-sell your items. We’ve added a checkout link to your up-sell pages so buyers can easily purchase these products.
- PayPal adjustments. We’d make changes to ensure PayPal gets the appropriate address when buyers enter different shipping and billing addresses. No more mix ups!
- Customize in IE. Easily customize our Blank theme in Internet Explorer.
- Cross-sell adjustment. Auctiva Commerce will now check to ensure cross-sell items are public before displaying them, so you won’t have to worry about buyers running into problems when they click on these cross-promotional items.
- Adjustment to resize external image. Auctiva Commerce will now automatically resize your images.
To see a complete list of all of the enhancements we’ve made, please read our post on our Community Forums. And as always, if you have any questions about your Auctiva Commerce account, please contact our Customer Support representatives. They’re always available and happy to help.
Enjoy the new features,
Chris
News
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More great news!! As a celebration of Auctiva Commerce’s first birthday we are waiving the monthly store fee through June 2010. This is our small token of appreciation to all of our loyal users that have grown with us over the past year. As I reflect on 2009 we accomplished quite a bit – check out the summary list of enhancements that we delivered to improve Auctiva Commerce:
* Bulk product import and editing
* A streamlined checkout process
* A variety of payment gateways, including Authorize.net, Google Checkout,
PayPal and PayPal Website Payments Pro
* Integrated shipping quotes for USPS, FedEx, UPS and Canada Post
* Increased stability and security
* A Shop tab with filtered search capability
* Google Product Search category mapping and related enhancements
* 90+ store themes
And we’re not planning to stop there. In 2010 we’re planning to deliver:
* Better customization: more freedom to modify your storefront design
* More payment options: adding support for international payment gateways
* Google enhancements: additional product attributes to give your items better visibility in searches
* Additional data feeds: allowing product submission to more comparison-shopping engines
I’m excited about all that has been accomplished during this year and about the direction we’re heading. Hopefully you are as well – I think with the enhancements already delivered and the ones that are planned we can make 2010 the best year in e-commerce yet!!
Happy Selling -
Chris
News
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Want to help ensure that buyers can find your products? Then it is recommended that you map your Auctiva Commerce Store items to the product categories we are offering. We will automatically include your products in our new marketplace platform. That means your items will show up in our brand-new shopping portal, Elefy.
We want to help sellers connect with buyers who want to shop outside of the “Big Box.” Elefy emphasizes a unique shopping experience for buyers. If you are seeking the type of buyers who value variety and prefer purchasing from individual sellers, our platform will bring them to you. Mapping to our platform categories ensures your products are searchable in the exact categories you want them to be.
Start now! It only takes a few minutes to decide where your items fit best and as you add new inventory, individual products will be automatically associated to the appropriate external category. These choices are fully editable in bulk, or one item at a time.
Our online tutorial can take you through the category mapping process, step by step.
Happy Holidays !!
Chris
News category, mapping, product
Great News!!
Auctiva Commerce has been updated and enhanced with new features, including enhancements to the Bulk Edit tool, enhanced Payment setup pages, Google Checkout and more!! For further details on the enhancements click on this link: http://tinyurl.com/yg359o2.
- Chris
News Software Updates
Great News!!
Auctiva Commerce has been updated and enhanced with new features, including enhancements to the Shopping Cart, additional Google Base feed attributes, and an improved multiple image viewer. For further details on the enhancements click on this link: http://tinyurl.com/yl69js4.
- Chris
News
Auctiva Commerce was recently featured as Cart of the Week at Practical ECommerce magazine. Check it out here: http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1306-Cart-of-the-Week-Auctiva-Commerce
Practical ECommerce is an online magazine that delves into all things ECommerce, including a weekly review of shopping carts. Auctiva Commerce is pleased to have been selected as the most recent Cart of the Week by Practical ECommerce.
Happy selling!
Auctiva Commerce
News
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More Great News!! Just like we have done for the past few months we are going to credit the Monthly Store fee back to our users through March 2010 – the credit will appear on our statements as Auctiva Commerce – Subscription Promo (insert month here) 2009.
Thank you,
Auctiva Commerce
News
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Great News!! Just like we have done for the past few months we are going to credit the September Monthly Store fee back to you – the credit will appear on your statement as Auctiva Commerce – Subscription Promo September 2009.
Thank you,
Auctiva Commerce
News
Customizing your storefront theme can be a lot of fun. Here are some quick tips for new store owners on how to customize different parts of your storefront.
Editing the Home page
Your Home page is important part of the shopping experience. In many cases, a visitor to your store will view the Home page even if they entered your storefront from another area (e.g., they first arrived to a product page from a Google search). Customizing this page with a short welcome message will add value to their shopping experience. You should tell your web visitors what your store is all about.
Read the Customizing the Home Page tutorial for more information.
Editing the Contact Us page
When you first start your store, the Contact Us page will have a placeholder address in the Contact Us page. You’ll want to make sure you edit this before you start doing business. Make sure you provide a way for customers to reach you for questions regarding orders, shipping and purchasing. The Contact Us page is broken down into two sections. The sidebar on the Contact US page contains your contact information. This could be a mailing address, email address or sales phone number if you have one. The main content section of the Contact Us page is blank and you can use this space to write a little bit about what a customer should expect when they contact you. How long does it take for you to respond to inquiries? Make sure you let them know.
You can also use the main content area to explain little bit about yourself if you don’t plan on adding a separate About Us page (see our post on the About Us topic).
Read the Customizing the Contact Us Page tutorial to learn more about how to edit this page.
Once you’ve edited your Home page and updated your Contact Us page, you’ve got your basic storefront theme ready to go. You can add more WebPages to your theme if you’d like or add more links in the header or footer. These edits take a little bit more experience with HTML code. You can read more about making these customizations with the Add a Link to the Footer and Add a Webpage tutorials.
Store Tips Store Launch, Store Themes
Increasing the average sales amount per order is a great way to grow your business. This can be done using coupons and cross selling techniques. Let’s take a look at a few examples.
A simple way to increase the average sales amount per order is create an incentive for customers to spend more. You can use a coupon that will discount a fixed amount or a percentage of an order when a customer spends a specified amount. For example, if your customers spend an average of $18 per order, you might try promoting a $5 off coupon for orders of $30 or more (before shipping costs). This might encourage some shoppers to add more items to their cart and increase your overall revenue. Of course, you’ll need to calculate your risk and see if you can afford to discount prices.
Another great way to increase the average sales amount per order is to present shoppers with cross-selling and up-selling scenarios. Cross-selling and up-selling are two techniques that are used to get a shopper to either purchase a more expensive product (up-selling) or to get a shopper to add additional products (e.g., accessories) to the order (cross-selling). These tools are built right into Auctiva Commerce so that you can let your storefront do all the sales work. Read the Up-Selling tutorial and Cross-Selling tutorial for more information.
Beware of using Free Shipping promotions for the purpose of increasing the average order amount as they generally take too much out of profit margin. In this way, you won’t actually boost average order amount after you calculate your cost for covering the shipping.
Feel free to leave your own examples in the comments section. We’d love to hear how your growing your sales.
Store Tips Coupons
