Actually, kCentric invested in two health ventures. Venture, because it is a risky business these days to grow a moustache while maintaining a healthy and happy relationship with your partner. The two ventures will come to an end on December 1st.
Review some the best creations from these ventures! Great job to the Brothers of the Bean and to the kCentric Crew! Team information can be found here at www.movember.com
Please help us raise in this venture!!!
Online marketing videos have been around for a number of years now but are more and more becoming an essential part of any online marketing strategy. They are inexpensive to produce, easily distributed and can last for years. They break through the online noise, improve search engine rankings and accelerate the sales process.
The world of ecommerce is growing fast. Online sales are up 14.8% (source: IR: Top 500 guide 2011) since last year and are expected to grow even more in the years to come. This means more businesses are going to want to play the game and the ones that are going to stand out are the ones that will use every tactic available and online video is first in line.
There are 4 steps to follow when creating an online video according to Lou Bortone at doneforyouvideo.com:
1- Goals:
You need to ask yourself what is the main purpose your online video will serve. Do you want to increase traffic on your site, increase sales or build your brand? You should set clear, measurable goals so you can plan your next steps accordingly.
2- Message:
What is the direction you wish your video to take to best serve the goals you just set? Should it promote a product? Should it inform or educate customers or should it engage new leads? Establishing this from the start will make it easier to stay on target when creating your video.
3- Format:
An online video can take many forms. It can feature a close up of a person talking (talking head), a live webcast, slide shows, demos, narrated presentation, animation and many more. At this point you need to figure out the best way to broadcast your information to the viewer in agreement with your business’ core image and values.
4- Distribution:
Where will viewers be able to see your video? On your site? On YouTube? Or maybe through your social media channels such as Facebook, Google+ or industry related blogs and forums, or maybe all of the above?
Focus on content and get great SEO ranking
The key feature to focus on when creating an online video is content. There’s nothing wrong with small and simple videos as long as the content is rich, concise and easily assimilated. Easy to produce and accessible content includes expert tips, promos, testimonials, how-to demos and live Q&A.
Content is more important than quality when it comes to online videos and you’re better off with an imperfect video than no video at all. One major reason is that online videos improve your search engine ranking. When properly optimized, using a video sitemap, your small and imperfect video could rank in the top results on Google and other search engines. Unlike traditional SEO, search engines don’t take into account things like domain ranking, page views and visitors when displaying video search results. Only the relevance between the video content and the search keywords determine the ranking and value of your video. Big and small companies alike have an equal chance to rank number one.
Easily upload marketing videos with your k-eCommerce solution
You’re ready to upload your video to your k-eCommerce online store? Simply access the desired page you wish to upload your video to by using the CMS tool in your system administrator. Go into edit mode and select the media manager in the desired section. Upload the desired video than insert it in the page using the insert button. It’s that easy.
You can also insert YouTube videos to your site by including the embedded code in your pages. It’s free and it provides great sharing options.
With today’s technology, online marketing videos are easily accessible. Start small by using what you have. The camera on your iPhone or a web cam can do the job. Keep it simple, keep your goals in mind and focus on content.
Only 4 years have gone by since French company Vente-privee.com became the first online private sales site to offer member only flash sales. This little revolution might have gone unnoticed to some but only a few years later this $3B industry has now more than 500 players around the world, the world of ecommerce that is.
This phenomenal growth isn’t the result of sheer luck and in a way, it makes perfect sense when you look at the facts. Even if today’s private sales offer a wide range of products from electronics to real estate, the really successful ones managed to gain spectacular growth by targeting one specific consumer, the one in charge of household spending: women. By targeting women, private sales also dictate what products are most susceptible to succeed in a flash sale. That’s why those that offer fashion, clothing and Home décor flash sales are amongst the most popular.
The success of private sales revolves around four concepts:
Daily habits:
In the world of private sales, 75% of sales come from repeat shoppers. New flash sales, that take only a few minutes to review, become available each day and customers are happy to include this moment in their daily routine, not unlike reading your morning newsletters.
Curated Solutions:
Because private sales are so exclusive and each of them is a happening in itself, customers have come to expect only the best. Not everything is available in a private sale, only the best is available. One of the great challenges of ecommerce is to find a way for customers to break the touch and feel barrier and offering the best available product can help resolve this issue.
Urgency & Fun:
A flash sale isn’t forever. It’s gone, well, in a flash. Customers can’t stare at a product page for hours and hours trying to decide if they’re buying or not. With the flash sale, quantities are limited and time is running short. Customers need to act quickly or someone else will get it. This makes flash sales fun and exciting and extremely rewarding for consumers because not only have they acquired something great for themselves, they’re also the winner in a race against thousands of other customers.
Social Commerce:
Women drive 62% of commenting on Facebook. They have a bigger influence circle and bigger networking effect. These facts, combined with the exclusive nature of private sales (each member usually needs to be referred by another member to get in), give a social aspect to shopping. Consumers don’t shop alone anymore. They share tips, they comment on their latest acquisition, they invite members of their own circle to join and pretty soon you get a ‘’Black Friday effect’’ where the site, flash sales and products are promoted by the users themselves.
Private sales are marketing platforms. They are huge communication tools that allow users to revolve around specific types of goods and share their enthusiasm with their inner circle. Because there is a lot of unique merchandise involved, because managing the supply chains can be tricky and because sales are generated inside a short window, these platforms must be driven by the best technology available.
With a benchmark of over 250 000 uploaded products, flash promotion tools, newsletters and flyers and a robust technology capable of handling sudden increases in traffic, our k-eCommerce solution combined with its private sales module makes it one of the leading platform out there.
Today’s conferences are all about multi-channeling. More than 90% of today’s customers are multi-channel users, meaning they shop using every means at their disposal. They use the web, they use their mobile, they use text, they go in stores and they use social media. These channels need to be part of a global strategy because they all play a different, but essential, role.
Walgreen for example uses mobile apps to help customers renew their prescriptions, text messaging to alert customers their prescription is ready, Walgreens.com for general purchases, Beauty.com for prestige purchases and Skincare.com for cosmetic purchases. They use different channels to meet different needs. According to their president of eCommerce, multi-channel customers are 3x more valuable than single channel customers.
We are halfway through day two at IRCE 2011 and so far the conferences have been amazing.
The lead of eBay North America came to talk to us about Commerce 3.0, you read right, 3.0. Without going too much into the details (a full review will be posted on our blog in the next few weeks) commerce 3.0 is basically the intersection of all available technology with the consumer being in the middle of it all. The three axis of commerce 3.0: Mobile, Social and Local.
We also got the chance to hear a conference about the future of internet & TV. Fun fact: 70% of people watching TV use tablets or smart phones at the same time. And I thought I was the only one.
Arianna Huffington then came onto the stage to talk about the challenges of running the Huffington Post. For her, the most important qualities when doing business online: ”Real-time, Social and Engaging”.
The conferences don’t start until tomorrow and today all of the exhibitors are busy completing their booths for the grand opening later this afternoon. More than 500 hundred exhibitors are present this year so it won’t be a surprise when I tell you the convention center is jam packed. Everything an online business needs to grow is here, from emarketing services to warehouse automation systems and ecommerce platforms (that’s us 
). Later today we’ll give you a quick tour of the exhibitor floor.
Stay tuned!
The k-eCommerce team has just arrived in beautiful, but not to sunny, San Diego, California to attend IRCE 2011, the biggest ecommerce show yet. During the next three days we’ll be attending all sorts of conferences from emarketing strategies to the future of ecommerce itself.
Be on the lookout for our daily reports on Twitter, Facebook and here on our blog.
There are a few good things that come from doing business online: amongst other things you get access to over 2 billion internet users spread around the globe, you make huge savings by avoiding high rent street premises and you reduce your order processing costs. Unfortunately a certain level of complexity still remains, namely in the tax department.
In a brick & mortar store, this operation remains relatively simple. You collect sale taxes according to a number of factors such as where the transaction is taking place and the nature of the product or service being bought. In almost every case these parameters never really change. Online stores operates in a similar way but with one major difference; parties involved (buyer and seller) are often in different cities, states or countries which makes a challenge out of collecting the right sale taxes.
Online sale taxes in the U.S. and Canada
Canada
Canada has a rather simple tax policy. One federal sales tax is applied to almost every purchase and a provincial sales tax, unique to every province, is then added. In some provinces the two taxes are harmonized into a single rate, in others, they’re distinct. The rule here is that you charge the rate based on where the goods are being shipped to, it’s that simple.
US
In the U.S. things become more complex. Unlike Canada, sale taxes can be commissioned on federal, state, municipal, township, district and county levels. Meaning each of the 52 states can operate multiple sales tax policies within their borders bringing the number of different sales taxes for the united-states alone at around 14 000.
Ex: Arkansas has a state sales tax of 6.00%, plus any additional local taxes like Little Rock’s 0.5% city sales tax.
Adding to the complexity is the concept that online retailers need only to collect sale taxes in states where they have physical presence, also called NEXUS. So if someone from state A wishes to buy an item from an online company operating exclusively from state B, no taxes need to be applied. If the company has a physical presence in state A, then sale taxes for that particular state and additional local taxes need to be applied to the purchase.
All this wouldn’t be so terrible if the definition of ‘’presence in a state’’ meant the same thing for everyone, but it doesn’t. Presence in a state can, but not necessarily, include: Head offices, offices, warehouses, resellers and even delivery routes. Each state has its own view on the matter.
Tax Web Services
Thankfully there are tools out there to help you in your tax collecting endeavor. The most convenient is probably the online tax web service. These powerful solutions have been designed for real time sale tax calculation. They are seamlessly integrated to your ecommerce solution and fit your specific business. When a customer decides to purchase one of your items, the web service kicks in and calculates the rate that needs to be applied by taking into account the shipping address, the kind of goods being sold and the states specific tax policies regarding your business and its presence in the state where the package is being shipped. These solutions are time and money saviors but are not integrated to every eCommerce solutions so be on the lookout for the ones that come with such an integration.
The time when there were only two types of mustards and three TV channels to choose from is long gone. Today, every industry offers a wide array of products to meet an equally wide range of needs. This also applies to ecommerce solutions. There are different platform specifications, features and prices that all serve one general purpose – allow you to sell your products/services online. The process of choosing the right ecommerce solution can easily become overwhelming if you don’t know what you need. To help you in your quest, we have put together what we think are the important questions your business needs to address before evaluating your next ecommerce platform.
1- What type of ecommerce strategy does your company wish to adopt?
Thinking of selling your products/services online is only the beginning of the thought process. Do you intend to sell to the general public (B2C) or to other companies only (B2B) or both? Do you intent to offer extended customer support or not? Many solutions are specialized in B2C, some in B2B and only a handful excel at both.
2- What is your timeline?
How much time do you have before your business goes online and becomes operational? Days, weeks, months? Knowing this will greatly help you choose a service provider. Some solutions are pre-built and can be deployed rapidly; others need to be programmed to your specific needs and can take much more time before they are ready to go live.
3- Will your eStore be part of an already existing website?
If not, chances are that you will need to allocate a part of your budget to the design of your eStore. Some ecommerce solutions include a certain amount of design while others don’t. If the solution doesn’t include store design, you will need to do it yourself, allocate internal resources to the task or hire an external design team.
4- What type of hosting are you looking for?
There are basically two ways an ecommerce solution is hosted: In your company’s IT environment or in the ecommerce solution provider’s IT environment (more commonly called SaaS – Service as a software- hosting ).Think of it as owning an entire office building vs. renting a floor in this same building. On the one side, you have complete freedom but you also need to attend to the daily job of managing a building – paying taxes, window washing, repairs and improvements. On the other side, you have the freedom to focus all your efforts on your business without thinking about building maintenance. Not all ecommerce solutions offer SaaS so you might want to be on the lookout for those.
5- How many products will be available on your eStore?
A health product manufacturer can have less than 10 products on its web site, an online library could easily have more than 20 000 books to sell, and an auto part dealer specialized in B2B could have more than 200 000 different parts available. The need for a robust and powerful ecommerce solution differs greatly according to the number of products you wish to sell.
6- Are you looking for integration between your ecommerce solution and your ERP or accounting software?
Integration with ERP’s or accounting software usually makes your whole business more efficient and less prone to mistakes. If you like the idea of efficiency, you will need to find a solution that can be connected to your internal systems. Standalone versions – no integration- work just as well but without the benefits of sharing the same database as the rest of the company. You end up spending more time creating and updating the same information in two databases, manually entering orders in your ERP or accounting software and correcting the errors that will follow.
7- What are the tools you wish your ecommerce solution would offer?
Do you need eMarketing tools, SEO optimization tools, the ability to generate reports, offer private sales, the list goes on. Don’t compromise; find a solution that meets your needs. Some providers can also custom build some features to fit your specific needs.
8- Are you looking for Open source or proprietary technology?
Open Source ecommerce allows you to make your own modifications to your solution. It may require additional dedicated IT resources capable of handling such a task which can be more expensive and take longer if they are not familiar with the product. With proprietary technology ecommerce solutions, only the provider of the solution can make modifications because he has already invested time and money to develop it and therefore, knows it inside and out. He becomes the IT resource for your solution so to speak. Proprietary technology ecommerce solutions are usually very affordable. You only need to develop a healthy and trusting relationship with your provider.
9- What is your budget
All these tips about tools, products and strategies won’t help you if you don’t know how much you are willing to spend on this project. eCommerce solutions can range from Free to millions of dollars so your primary tool for narrowing the list is your own budget.
No matter your choice, always ask for a few customer references. Verify delivery times, support and customer satisfaction. It’s also good to know how long they have been providing ecommerce solutions and what resources are available.
This week, MSDynamicsWorld.com takes a look at the way Zila.Inc, integrated the k-eCommerce solution to their Dynamics GP. Albert Bachman, Director, Management Information Systems at Zila talks about the importance of choosing the right ecommerce solution and shares a few useful tips.
You can read all about Zila Inc., kCentric and its k-eCommerce solution on MSDynamicsWorld.com.
You can also visit the k-eCommerce powered http://www.zilaconsumerproducts.com/
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