Ecommerce Conversations

Stephan Schambach, CEO of Demandware, provides a host of helpful tips to improve a customer’s experience at your website in a recent interview with Practical Ecommerces Mitch Bettis. Schambach also provides a distinctive opinion of shopping cart abandonment rates, and he discusses the reasons he thinks shoppers leave a site. He also discusses the differences in online shoppers compared to those who shop in a brick-and-mortar store and notes how quickly an ecommerce business can unravel if his software isn’t successfully integrated and helpful to customers.

What makes customers unhappy at a website? Adelle Emery, director of customer experience at Siteworx, answers the question and gives website owners tips on how to improve the customer’s experience at a site. She also discusses the differences in how people shop online compared to how they shop at a department store and how that should impact an ecommerce owner’s thinking. She recently spoke with Practical Ecommerce’s Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis about improving usability and customer experience at an ecommerce site.

Ed Dawidowicz, senior consulting director for Creativegood.com, provides a series of do-it-yourself tips to improve usability and customer experience at your website. He recently spoke with Practical Ecommerce’s Mitch Bettis about the importance of keyword mapping and custom landing pages for key search terms to provide better experience for customers. He also discusses the importance of observing customers using your site and the types of things you can learn when you observe online shoppers in action

In the second of a two-part series, Chris Cleveland CEO of Dieselpoint speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis about how site-search technology improves sales at websites. Cleveland also provides tips on what an ecommerce owner should look for when evaluating various site-search providers, and he discusses the various price ranges for such technology.

In the first of a two-part series, Chris Cleveland CEO of Dieselpoint speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis about how site-search technology improves sales at websites. Cleveland also discusses the differences in search-site technology options and what features can be deployed to improve profit margins and dramatically improve a shopping experience at a website.

Richard Sexton has parlayed his 10 years of brick-and-mortar success into a dynamic multichannel sales business with Carolina Rustica. With a combination of brick-and-mortar and online sales, Carolina Rustica expects to generate about $3.5 million in 2006, a 30 percent increase from the previous year. Approximately 15 percent of his total sales come from his brick-and-mortar store and 85 percent come from his online sales channels. Sexton is looking at adding additional brick-and-mortar locations, but continues to take a conservative approach to company growth. Carolina Rustica was profiled in the November issues of Practical Ecommerce and Richard recently spoke with Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis.

Are you wondering why you should you be pushing products to shopping comparison sites or are you looking for a tool that can help you push products to various shopping comparison sites and public marketplaces? Michael Lambert is the CEO of Merchant Advantage. His company offers a product named Channel Management, a dashboard software application that sits on the merchant’s desktop, giving that merchant the power to manage his entire product catalog to any shopping destination site immediately and without third party assistance. He recently spoke with Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis about the opportunities merchants have selling products at shopping comparison sites and marketplaces and ways merchants can manage the task of pushing data feeds to those shopping areas.

Do you need an order management solution to help manage activity from multiple sales channels? Are you struggling to manage the mounds of paperwork from sales that come to your store from various sales channels? Barney Stone, President of Stone Edge Technologies, the company that produces Stone Edge Order Manager, says merchants tend to begin looking at order management solutions when they reach 10-15 orders per day. He explains what an order management solution does for a merchant, how it can incorporate an inventory management system for merchants selling across multiple channels, how much a typical solution costs, how that solution communicates to shipping and fulfillment operations and how a merchant get a return on that investment.

Do you have trouble with shopping cart abandonment? Research has shown that online consumers abandon their shopping carts 75 percent of the time. Second Bite (www.secondbite.com) integrates with a shopping cart and offers a potential solution for order recovery after a consumer abandons a cart. Chad Herman is the director of business development for Second Bite and he recently spoke with Practical Ecommerce’s Contributing Editor Mitch Bettis.

Ralf VonSosen, vice president of Infopia (www.infopia.com), a company that provides an ecommerce platform to help merchants manage multichannel sales endeavors, speaks about how to begin thinking about selling in multiple channels and what these new sales opportunities can do for help your brand and boost your bottom line. Ralf also outlines several pitfalls that a merchant should be aware of when beginning to diversify sales into other channels.