Websites are Acquiring Responsiveness. How it Impacts eCommerce Industry? – Part 1

Ever changing technology trends have always been the game changers. In the current digital scenario, portable devices like mobile phones, tablets, wearable devices etc. are the next generation technologies, which are driving revolution in the digital era. Portable devices supporting internet interface are trending nowadays. We can observe that internet lovers are shifting their preferences from desktops to mobile devices for leveraging portability.

With this change, web development companies have accepted this challenge of transforming website development process to meet the change in internet access methods. Interactive and responsive website is the crucial requirement nowadays. Even Google has recently released an algorithmic update stating websites must be responsive. Even search engines are set to crawl websites that are mobile friendly.

To align with this new updates, responsive websites performs better over internet as compared to those which are not. Not only the screen size will be affected, but aspects like clicks will be replaced by touch, monitor will be replaced by mobiles devices with smaller screen size etc.

Why Websites needs to be Responsive?

The Mobile Era

Today, digital market is filled with variety of smartphone devices. With this small device, you can perform all the tasks efficiently for which you otherwise require a computer. Accessing emails, downloading content, viewing PDFs and many more were impossible to perform with just a mobile phone. The modern smartphone are capable of offering several functionalities as well. A smartphone has made our lives simple and easy. Responsive website design allows users to access websites through their smartphones. Thus, it bridges the gap between customers and businesses.

Development Cost is Reasonably Balanced

The development cost of a responsive website is somewhat more than a traditional website. But it does not cost much, which you cannot afford it. There is no need of making separate websites for every device. Responsive website can be accessed from all the devices, thus you can reduce the development cost as one responsive website works for all the devices.

Offers Great User Experience

You might get surprised that the responsive websites does not change its visuals like icons, images, fonts etc. Whether it is viewed through desktop or through a smartphone device, it looks similar. Only change you can observe is the varied dimensions of the website design elements like textbox, buttons, links etc. Users accessing responsive website through their smartphones receives improved user experience.

Do you think, in spite of making device specific websites, adopting responsive website approach would be a smarter decision? The next generation digital market deserves a modern approach to meet challenging and changing user requirements.

Stay tuned to check its effects over eCommerce industry in the next part.

Get More Features in Order Delivery Date Pro & Offer Improved Customer Experience

With great pleasure we announce new feature additions to our “Order Delivery Date Pro” extension, focused to boost deliver added value to our existing customers. In addition to having all the existing features like delivery date and time, adding comments, date and time while placing order, receiving shipping arrival time in confirmation email and much more, we have now added some premium features.

These features of Order Delivery Date Pro will not only improve your store management task but it’ll also offer better shopping experience to your online shoppers. A win-win situation for both you and your customers!

Have an insight into the added features to this extension:

View Delivery Date Calendar

Using this feature you can view the calendar from dashboard displaying all the delivery dates for that month.

This feature will display no. of orders being placed for specific days of that month along with the order ID, status, and customers’ name, order value, shipping arrival time and date and related comments, if any. This will give an overview of the entire order status to you for better order management.

Delivery Date in Calendar View for Customers

It will help the registered users of your store to have a complete view of their products delivery, as per date and month.

If the customer accesses the account on 29th of May, the delivery received before that day and delivery expected to receive after that day, both will be displayed.

Calendar or Timeslot View for Customers

This feature can be set by you from admin for your customers to view!

You can add calendar with date, day and time slot, which would be visible to your customers on their checkout page. It will help them select the day, time and date of delivery.

Allows To Show notes/info for delivery Date

This box will help your customers to make any related comment in this box for you while placing any order.

Your customer can review the comments made before placing the order in order review process.

Add and Disable Day-wise Time Slots

You can enable or disable the day-wise time slots for your customers to select from.

You can also add number of delivery dates and minimum interval of hours between the orders placed time and order delivery time.

Set Delivery Date and Delivery Comment Label

You can set labels for the delivery date and delivery comment for your customers.

Get the above added features and further simplify your order management system and offer improved user experience. This is a great deal to strike!

Note:-

Existing Customers within Upgrade Period: Pay a difference of $40 to avail all the above features.
Existing Customers with Expired Upgrade Period: Place order with above mentioned coupon code to get $9 less on total cost = $70 only.
Coupon Code: “HappyClients”

BUY ORDER DELIVERY DATE PRO!

Features Your Cloud-based ERP System Must Have!

The list of features and functions implemented into a cloud based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software depends on the organizational needs. In the current scenario, ERP software is not just a necessity of an enterprise, but it is a soul of every business. Not every ERP system contains the same set of features. Thus, by checking the features packed into an ERP software, helps you decide, whether it will suite your business or you should still search for a better alternative.

If you need an ERP system for a financial company, the set of features, you would be looking for would differ from that of the features required by a manufacturing firm. But there are some basic features, which every organization should look for. All such features are listed and explained in this article.

Must-Have Features of Cloud-based ERP

Simplicity – Easy to Use

No matter how big the cloud based ERP system you implement, it should be easy in use. If the cloud based ERP solution is challenging, using it can be a tedious task. If it would be so challenging, employees and top management would avoid, using it. Even accomplishing business activities would be difficult. To avoid such situation, your cloud based ERP solution needs to be simple and easy.

Scalability – Essential Feature

For the ever changing needs of organizations, scalable cloud based ERP becomes a feasible solution. This ERP feature will help businesses to grow, as it can be increased or contracted given the company demands. An organization appreciates a robust ERP system, as scaling a cloud-based application is quite simple and easy. Odoo ERP solution is one of the best open source software used widely by modern businesses. There are other such applications too, but Odoo’s feature list is much comprehensive and beneficial as compared to other ERPs on the list.

Customization – Must have

Customization is a must-have feature for every ERP solutions. Large firms having distinct type of processes and activities, which can be fulfilled by customizing the ERP software without spending huge amount of money. Building a new ERP system for new set of requirements is not a feasible solution, thus customization offers a solution with which you can make changes in your existing ERP system, rather than building a new one. This feature also helps small and medium sized companies to balance their revenue model.

Support – Round the Clock

This feature holds much significance. Customer support is quite essential for businesses to keep performing flawlessly. There are some Cloud based ERP vendors, who does not offer 24*7 customer support. Many organizations might overlook this feature, thinking it unimportant, but in reality, every cloud based ERP service provider should provide customer support round the clock. So that, whenever any issue arises, it can be solved quickly without affecting the working of business processes.

Do you own an enterprise? Have you implemented a cloud based ERP system for seamless business performance? Does your ERP application contain all the above features? If yes, you are on the path of success, but if no, change your ERP solution soon, as it can be a hindrance for getting success.

Social CRM: Answer to Brand Marketing

Today social media and content marketing are the major driving forces promoting business branding and lead generation initiatives. Social media is becoming an extremely controllable and cost effective platform for B2B and B2C companies – especially small businesses, due to affordable content marketing promoting brand engagement, client and even customer service.

Stretching Paradigm of Content Marketing

All the major customer engaging component like blogging, webinars, buyer engagement, white papers, videos, strategic landing pages, email newsletters and other related and supportive web content are driven by content marketing that shares the philosophy, methodology, mission and services of an enterprise. Effective content marketing is not limited to blogging or social media presence. Creating high end webinars is not enough. Today, business – of all sizes and nature – needs to explore diverse content platforms hitting on all cylinders to boost marketing campaigns, lead generation and the showcasing market-leading expertise.

Today’s Social Media

Simply updating published pieces and news capsules to social media platforms is not enough for getting the desired results. You need to have a well defined marketing structure to your social sharing – or else it will end up in social freakiness. It requires a consistent and concentrated content effort to design, strategize, and promote effective, timely, consistent and worthwhile social sharing. This has led to Social CRM for several start-ups to mid-sized enterprises particularly when it comes to social media efforts.

Social CRM enables you engage with your customers and other associates simultaneously across several core social channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. In fact social media is using traditional CRM software, which is meant to offer single central location to garner, store, process and evaluate present and historical customer data, and giving it a new look.

By deploying social media into your sales, marketing and customer service campaigns you can understand more about your customers’ interests and preferences. By leveraging the huge information available on social media platforms in a meaningful and organized manner, you can unearth several lead and enjoy an improved interaction with your customers and prospects, propelling the overall customer experience, adding to the bottom line business.

Businesses everywhere are leveraging the advantages of social media channels to stay connected more effectively with their prospects and associates. Combining social media activity with Social CRM can help connect and develop long-lasting, mutually-beneficial customer and brand follower associations.

You can also manage your social media initiatives to trigger brand engagement – and content marketing.

In addition, you can also streamline your social media campaigns to stimulate brand engagement – and content marketing.

How Social CRM Triggers Content & Brand Marketing

Social Media Optimization: Social Customer Relationship Management will give your social media campaigns a firm structure – real social media management. Social platforms should be organized like other vital marketing campaign of a business. This platform should be considered as an added bonus to marketing efforts. With Social CRM, your social efforts can collaborate flawlessly with other key enterprise initiatives, like marketing, sales, and customer service, what industry experts consider as a holistic approach to social branding – offering an extensive view of social media campaign successes and failures.

Delivering Customer Care: Social CRM unleash value in every social media interaction with clients, associates and brand fans. It helps a business readily engage with customers in a synergistic manner in order to drive sales, leads, nurture loyalty and catapult revenue. It catapults the overall customer engagement experience, adding value to your business – and trigger related marketing and sales drive.

Tracking Brand Coherence: Social CRM helps you ensure to keep track of your brand’s image across multiple social media channels. By mapping, scheduling and analyzing your social media content, you can make sure your brand’s message has been dispersed appropriately. Retaining brand consistency through social platform supports the branding efforts of marketing tricks and sales strategies – offering a closed loop approach to a centralized, synergetic branding initiative.

Social CRM is not going to fade away anytime soon. Leveraging its productivity and redefining your marketing and other related business efforts can propel your businesses to next stage of global ecosystem.

Unbeatable Tips to Grow your Email Subscriber List!

Email marketing has always been a tedious task for digital marketers. It involves human efforts in building effective strategies that can create a power packed impact on the readers. It is true that every email marketer does not get success in email campaigns they conduct. There are several aspects that should be considered while planning for email marketing. In fact, several surveys have also been conducted to help building effective email marketing campaigns to impress readers and generate leads.

Sending sms

This article is all about, how to increase your email subscribers list. We have tried to collect and mention all the tips that will help businesses to get conversions. Following the tips, listed below would boost your organizations helping it to sustain in the world competition. Once you check all the point, analyze your email marketing strategy and add the necessary aspects to your champaign checklist.

Highlight your Email Sign-up Button

Make sure that your email sign-up button is highlighted. No matter how interesting your articles would be, but if it contains a sign-up button which is hardly visible or if it placed in some corner where the readers might not check until they really want to subscribe to your emails, your efforts will go in vain. The subscriber button should be present on all your posts promoted through social media, which is the biggest marketing platform trending nowadays. All the branding touchpoints like social media icons should be placed and managed to allow users to subscribe your newsletter for notifications and the latest happenings.

Add Curiosity to the Communication

Stop thinking that people would read the whole article you sent through email. To make reader, pay attention to your articles, you have to incorporate aspects that make them think “what’s there for me”. But you should answer this question before they ask. Striking subject lines and interactive content will make your task easy. Attract them through your content and allow your readers to sign-up for more interesting articles. Add sentences like “Sign-up to check our exclusive articles” to make them curious about what’s more interesting for them inside.

Make the Email Template Design, Attractive

“Only content should be eye-catchy and interactive, all other aspects are not important”, is just a myth. Email template design holds equal importance as its content does. Template design offers the first impression of your business to your readers. Thus, it has to be alluring and enticing to make your readers delightful, with the look and appearance of your emails.

Make the Sign-up Form Short

Stop annoying your readers by asking too-many details on sign-up. You just need their basic details like first name, last name, email id, security questions etc. for registration, thus there is no need to ask for unnecessary details like their qualification, year of passing etc., which will give them a chance to leave without filling the registration form. Readers love short registration processes, so offer them a quick registration process, which includes not more than 3 steps.

Maintain the Email Frequency

Stop sending frequent emails; it will irritate your readers. Decide the time interval, which you should maintain between two consecutive emails. Frequently sent emails can make your readers less interested in your articles and newsletters. It is advisable to ask your readers about when they can be contacted at the sign-up stage itself. Get suggestions from them, implement it to retain your existing customers.

Try these tips and observe, how dramatically your email subscribers list will increase within short time period of implementation.

Innovative Change & Learning Initiative Supports ERP Implementation

Is your focus on the technical side of your enterprise systems implementation is so much that you’re neglecting to help your enterprise to adapt to the changes that the system brings into the way people work? IT sector is undergoing dynamic and dramatic change today, mostly by the evolution of cloud-based platforms and SaaS solution. Despite such ongoing developments, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems retain its relevance of being one of the crucial enablers of most of the world’s commerce and public-sector task. The most neglected aspect in this is dealing with the human and organizational implications of system and process change.

An ERP adoption almost always entails sweeping changes to the way work is done across any organization. It simplifies business processes, reporting relationships, roles, how customers are served, how data is stored and used, and much more. The organization also deploys some number of resources to train employees as part of the implementation, but such initiatives are often insufficient for several reasons. Training needs evaluation is often superficial. Training may be provided too late to pace with the workforce performance and is not reinforced at the right time.

Nonetheless, if deployed and implemented properly, an enterprise learning and organizational change program can entail a crucial impact on the success of the overall ERP implementation. Here are eight most prominent insights into how organization can make it work best by deploying a learning and change management program.

1. Deploy a Right Fusion of Skills to the Training Team: Enterprise learning requires a specialized skill set; not anyone can do it. Just ensure to deploy experienced learning professionals on board. In addition, have a combination of business function abilities and technology. Maintain a right balance of qualified and knowledgeable colleagues amongst the design, build, test and training team. Keep rotating systems and business function members in and out of the training and rotate initiative for stretch of time, while retaining a good team of skilled instructional designers.
2. Deploy the Training Team Early: Systems training is not a generic, off-the-shelf program. Each implementation process is unique given the unique needs of each organization. Deploy a training team since inception as an integral part of the development team. Start with small team whose members can become the experts for each functional area later on and stay with the project till the end. You should also have a mix of roles, like subject matter experts, testers, system developers to actively participate.
3. Initiate Training within a Wider Change Management Program: Apart from developing specific training program or web-based learning initiatives, organizations should think of enabling new behaviors, working associations and organizational structures. It should have a threefold initiated - training, change management and organizational alignment. This approach will ensure that specific learning programs are in harmony with the wider organizational change and that everyone gains right information and support.
4. Make an Iterative Approach to Training-needs Evaluation: Having the training-needs evaluation correct is necessary to the success of the project. The focus should be on the end-user’s performance needs and not just on the technical details of the program. It can be created during workshops with the design-and-build teams; their insights into technical details should be in alignment with the insights of others who understand the wider influence on the overall behaviors of users. Training is about learning the new program that the system supports. Iterative approach is required to define training needs rather defining it all at once. Keep changing the strategy to refresh the needs analysis with every release update of the program to keep it aligned with the system and business functioning.
5. Entail Innovative and Engaging Learning Initiative: Engage in more innovative approaches like online learning, collaboration systems, simulations, and social media. Dedicated intranet sites can be developed to publish news and support literatures, share information and to receive feedback from users. You can also use social media platforms to help everyone to contribute timely information along with user-generated content in text, audio or video form. You can use knowledge databases in wiki formats to standardize ways to accumulate very current perspectives from across the enterprise.
6. Assess Progress and Outcomes Rigorously: Do not limit your training evaluation programs to point-in-time temperature checks and understanding whether a few employees are satisfied with a particular program. Evaluate if the training actually has impacted the business. Engage in producing a more agile and extensive training analysis that assesses user analysis of relevance and impact on individual performance. It should also be assessed for user adoption, process performance and the effectiveness of the change initiative.
7. Align Cost-saving Practices with Value-adding Localization: Customized standardized training approach can be affordable and can enhance the positive impact on users within particular regional geographies. You need to maintain the right balance. Start collecting the crucial part of the training that can be reused. Once you are done, add the local specifics needed or business-driven sub processes. Training in local languages is also necessary. You may also rely on a trainer that can speak the local language and can translate instruction from the master documents, instead of translating complete project.
8. Make Sustainable Training Investment: Often the organizational changes and new ways of working are not sustainable after the initial training period. Data are not updated, accountability gets muddled and budgets dry up. Responsibilities are not well defined for workforce enablement and support, as time goes on. It is ideal to deploy an entity having the incentive and allocated budget to maintain the training programs and change initiative over time.

Gaining More from your ERP Program

ERP is a huge investment, with gigantic impacts on the performance of individuals and the overall organization. Deploying the right training and change programs, people can adapt to the new processes effectively. Organizations can expect to experience improved productivity on the system being turned on, and they can be quicker in exploring and grabbing marketplace opportunities.

Top 5 Website Designing Platforms

What You See Is What You Get – editor is the basic requirement of any web designer to implement his innovative ideas for building alluring designs for websites. Be it a CMS, eCommerce or any other website type, its design is its first impression, which can create a brand image for businesses. The same way, dull and unattractive design may impact your business performance adversely. Let us now check the top 5 website designing platforms which convert ideas into reality.

Top 5 Website Design Platforms

CoffeeCup HTML Editor

This software is a commercial product helping designers to craft versatile and enticing website designs. Its free version is also available, which have limited tools and features. Use the complete version to leverage its best features and make the design, highly attractive. With this software, designers can create versatile website designs. Be it a responsive or a website with a flat design, this software helps building great design. Using it does not require expertise as it is very simple and easy as compared to other HTML editors.

Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver is a proprietary design software served by Adobe systems. It was initially created by Macromedia, which was later acquired by Adobe systems in 2005. It is a remarkable tool for crafting HTML design, which is often used by website designers since years. It supports huge range of plugins and in-built features of HTML5 and CSS3 too. The pack of in-built website templates makes it reliable and usable.

Notepad ++

This software is a powerful editor for adding or modifying website’s source code with myriads of features. Designers can easily fix the errors in the code as this editor highlights the error. This feature even saves valuable time spent in coding. Features like code folding and auto completion helps designers to leverage its benefits like powerful search tool, bookmarking, document navigation, macro support etc. It’s simple and highly configurable user interface makes the designing process much easy.

Bluefish Editor

Bluefish is a free editor software, packed with several tools useful for web development and web / graphic designing. It supports several web development and scripting languages like ASP.NET, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, HTML etc. along with great tricks like syntax highlighting, powerful search, replace tools, code folding, auto completion etc. With the wizards present in the editor, objects like CSS, tables, forms, video and audio can easily be added to avail its features and benefits, while building enticing web designs.

Microsoft Expression Blend

This software is a user interface design tool, which was developed and retailed by Microsoft enterprise. It aimed helping the designers to create graphical interfaces containing features of web and desktop applications. Building interactive websites with this editor is an easy task.

This top 5 list might not be complete, but this list is made referring our choice and perspective. All the editors listed here are widely used due to its unique and comprehensive features. You can select any of them, given your design and development requirements. Get started by choosing a suitable editor and design eye-catchy websites effortlessly!