Responsive Design 101 - Is Your Ecommerce Website Responsive?

What is Responsive Design?
Responsive Design is new approach of website coding and laying-out so web content can be viewed through various devices.

This design helps viewers providing an optimal browsing experience, ease of reading and navigation with a minimum of re-sizing, panning, and scrolling.
As more and more internet users browse through various devices such as iPad/Tablet, Smart phones, PC's and other internet enabled devices responsive design can push content to all viewers without having to maintain multiple website or code, with  single code base you can target all viewers.
Why is Responsive design so important to business?
Businesses have to evolve with latest proven technology and they must decide whether to build a native mobile apps or a responsive site for their online presences.  

Responsive design helps you to have single website, yet target mobile users and traditional computer at same time, easy to manage and maintain as more devices hit the market.

Few stats:
2.1 billion mobile users across the globe
85% of American adults have mobile devices
90% of them use smart phones for online browsing, shopping etc.



Anatomy of Responsive Design

Responsive design is built on HTML5 and CSS3 (Cascading style sheet), unlike traditional way of building websites were using HTML tables with restricted width and height of the content/images not allowing to grow or shrink to fit the screen, whereas responsive design uses fluid grids with help of using "Div" tags which can adapt to screen size resolution.

Fluid Grids, Flexible images and media are three ingredients that are required to build responsive design sites, identify the content, put together your images, identify the navigation flow as part of your responsive design framework.

(Pic from Mashable)

SEO - Search Engine Optimization
Does responsive design affect SEO? We would say it only helps SEO by allowing search engines to index your regular website pages and not duplicate pages geared towards mobile devices Example: www.Domain.com and M.Domain.com, by being responsive you can avoid duplicate content. 

Google prefers to index responsive designed websites for their search results and Adwords program, responsive design compliments your SEO.



Responsive Design E-Commerce Websites 

E-Commerce websites by design are complex in nature to build, maintain and to keep updated with latest shopping features, trying to keep your E-Commerce website mobile friendly will only make copies of your website thus doubling all your effort.

By using responsive design and building a template with responsive elements you can strike two birds with single stone, more and more internet shoppers are using mobile devices for their shopping list and it's very important to keep your website mobile friendly.

E-Commerce responsive design may look expensive but let me break it down for you, if you decide to have a great looking E-Commerce website targeting computer (PC) users and then decide to build mobile friendly websites your cost of development and maintenance doubles and gets expensive over years and you are duplicating every effort of building powerful E-Commerce website.

Responsive design cuts the total ownership cost, by means of taking away the effort to maintain different versions of a website i.e. a “desktop-version”, a “mobile-version”.  Thus, in the long term, investing in responsive website design is the smartest decision.

Talk to us if you are in need of Responsive design for your Ecommerce website, we can put together custom solution that fits your budget. Check us out at InfoSourcing Inc

Happy New Year 2013 - Interprise Suite and Customers

Wishing you all a very Happy New Year 2013, we are more than excited and eagerly looking forward to grow in 2013. It has been exhilarating journey through the years of learning Interprise Suite and it's new version, implementing and taking our clients live and feeling success as our clients operate more efficiently with automated tools.

In 2012 we achieved quite lot of breakthroughs and it's worth mentioning some of them here

• E-Commerce 360 Plugin - One of the best ROI plugin's which lets business owners to take control of their ecommerce business with easy.
• Sold 50 user license across small and medium Companies in US-Canada
• Implemented Interprise On-Cloud and On-Dedicated servers
• Launched new e-Commerce sites to mention few
• 1800 Supplements, USA
• Pickering Appliances, Canada
• Cable Loc, Australia
• QuiltersWarehouse, USA 
• Support and migrate existing clients
• OneStopFeed - Shopping feeds for newer engines ShareASale, Webgains and Amazon Product Ads 

2013 brings us more opportunities to soar with our new plugins which automate your business operations, newer Interprise version with more integrated features,  more implementation and customization services.

To know more about Interprise Suite (now called as Connected Business) call us, let us give you a free demo on how to automate your business using Interprise Suite and why more and more small and medium business are choosing Interprise Suite as their next ERP system and working with InfoSourcing as Partner sot Implement, Customize and Support their growing needs.

You need a partner in 2013, give us a call or visit our website http://www.Info-Sourcing.com  

Increase Sales Conversions, Join Google Trusted Store Program

Thinking of improving sales conversions, how do you bring the trust factor to your shoppers who are shopping online, you could adapt to add McAfee's Safe badge or BBB (Better Business Bureau) logo or SSL logo stating you'r verified and trusted business.

Google's new program "Google Trusted Store" launched early this year allows etailers to subscribe to their program and provide all your shipping information in order to verify that your business is legitimate and trusted vendor so they can allow to show the new "Google trusted store" badge.
The new Google trusted store program is part of Google Shopping,  this is free program available for merchants directly from Google, when shoppers see Google badge they know in a snap they’re shopping with a reputable retailer and they can feel confident making an informed purchase.

To get started, merchants need to fill up store information online, agree to Google program, submit data feed of shipments and add Google integration code to your website and wait for 28 days and 250 orders so Google can decide to make the badge visible on your website. Get started with Google Trusted Store

Google Trusted Store badge will make a huge difference in shopping, as shoppers search online via Google and find your website either through Google Search results (SERP's) or Google Adwords or Google Shopping and seeing the Trusted store badge will make their decision to shop and improve your sales conversions.

This new badge is clear indication of how Google wants to monopolize online sales and be able to track movement of goods and probably help  business drive sales and conversions. If it's free I would highly recommend to get your badge and improve your conversions and stay ahead of the curve.

If you would like to add Google Trusted Store logo on your eCommerce website, feel free to contact InfoSourcing Inc so we can customize your Interprise Suite Ecommerce website and take it live.

Interprise Suite - IRCE 2012 Conference Update

Internet Retailer Conference 2012, the upbeat was do more of everything to succeed, listen to your customers and reach our to your customers.

Fareed Zakaria CNN contributor spoke to the Internet retailers attending IRCE on the Main conference day along with Walmart CTO and Barnes and Nobles CEO, they all stressed the point to market your business across all fronts not just shopping cart but to reach out to customers across all channels of internet shopping, multi-channels such as Amazon, Ebay, Shopping feeds, SEO, Email marketing, Direct Marketing and offer your customers what they are looking for with great deals, reviews and tight integration of social media such as Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter and You tube.

Walmart is now offering various programs to bring its shoppers back to shopping not just to retail stores but more from web into stores by offering Shop Online and pick up from stores, shop online and pay at retail stores, pay by cash and much more initiative so they can tap the niche customers that are not tapped yet.

Barnes and Noble, largest book store company had to innovate itself into digital world as they saw the threat of online giant Amazon and it's Kindle offering and reached out to its own R&D to come up with Nook the largest selling e-reader today overtaking Kindle and iPad.

Such were success stories of the Fortune 500's who are leading the way to  many small and medium business/retailers who attend the show looking to innovate and use some of the niche products and services being offered at the show. The exhibition hall was packed with 100's of internet products and services Companies offering Ecommerce solution, Search solution, Multi-channel solution, ERP solution, Network solutions and more.

Interprise Solutions had their hands full with 2 booths showcasing their Integrated ERP solution with latest iPad solution and POS covering end-end solution for small and medium business to scale their business like the big companies do, place your order online and pick up the goods from retail stores or drop ship now possible through Interprise Suite.

We were fortunate to talk to several different business during the 2 day seminar that we attended and standing in the booth along with the team gave us a chance to meet prospects and business owners who were looking for integrated software or ERP solution, many of them still use Magento as their shopping cart and were looking to switch to integrated shopping cart system or tie into more powerful backend system such as Interprise as they see the reason to scale their business.

It was fun experience in midst of beautiful weather in Chicago.

Here are some pictures of the conference, we (InfoSourcing Inc) were part of Interprise tradeshow as trusted re-sellers and solution providers.

 

Interprise Suite Team with InfoSourcing team

  
Ezra and Iuval busy at the booth

John - Quilters Warehouse checking the new POS and iPad solution along with Ezra and Harsha 

Interprise Suite Version 7.0 - Sneak Preview

This summer coming soon to the awesome blossom Interprise Suite Ver 7.0 with whole lot of eCommerce features that will blow competitors and make every business owner at the edge of their seat to buy or upgrade to this new version.

• Our Biggest eCommerce Release To-Date: Dozens of major new features. I’ve provided some screenshots of a few of them below.
• Image Zoom 
• Address verification for online customer
• Gift registry
• Product Comparison 
• Remote shopping (B2B customers)
• New Payment gateway
• New! Connected Business Beta: Version 7 will include the first beta of our upcoming Connected Business Network. We believe that Connected Business will start a revolution in the way that suppliers and retailer work together. We can’t wait to launch it with the first round of beta customers.
• New! Import Manager: Completely rewritten from the ground up! 10x faster, far more powerful, tons more importable items, on the fly data correction and much more.
• New! Report Engine: Completely rewritten from the ground up! Much faster! New Report Center! Create Labels (thousands of templates to choose from!)! Ability to import / export! New, Calculated fields! New, Design Templates! New, Multi-Report Designer! New, Conditional formatting designer! And much more!
• New! Search Screen Designer: Create your own search screens! Includes the ability to “pre-filter” based on items like User Account, User Role, Team, Territory, Department, Location and more. This is great if you want to limit the records a user sees – i.e. sales people can only see the customers assigned to them OR if you want to create your own workflow – i.e. only show orders that are in the “Gary’s Approval” workflow stage.
• New! Server Side Job Service: This is a new pluggable server side service that our partners can use to create task that need to run at predetermined times – i.e. upload my orders to my fulfillment house every hour Monday through Friday. We will be moving our email service to this as well.
• Too many improvements to the other modules to list in a forum post. We will do a special webinar in the summer to go over the major ones.

Version 7 is scheduled to be released in the summer.

 
Image Zoom Built-in feature                   Online Zoom


 
iPad App                                            Address Verification online

  
 Product Comparison feature                 Gift Registry

 
   Request Remote shopping - B2B             Shipping estimate in Sales Order

Ecommerce 360 Plugin

Google Products - No more Free clicks

Google Shopping was the biggest free comparison shopping engine, Google has decided to kill free clicks program, no surprise there we expected this would come sooner or later.

Google announced today that it has begun testing and rolling out Google Shopping, which is designed to give shoppers more up-to-date information about prices and discounts, and give merchants more control over where their products appear, says Sameer Samat, vice president of product management, Google Shopping.

Google Shopping will be built on Google’s Product Listing Ads. “Ranking in Google Shopping will be based on a combination of relevance and bid price—just like Product Listing Ads today,” he says.

Instead of bidding on keywords for paid search ads, merchants buying Product Listing Ads bid on the amount they will pay if their product listings in search results attract clicks or result in sales. Product Listing Ads can include a product’s price, an image and the name of the retailer selling it.

No more free clicks from Google, that’s ending. There’s no firm date on exactly when the free ride will be over, other than it should happen by the fall of this year.

Merchants may continue to be listed within Google’s free web search results. That’s not changing. But those wanting to appear in a dedicated shopping search engine — and in the Google Shopping boxes that will appear as part of Google’s regular results — will need to pay.

Our integrated Interprise Suite shopping feed service OneStopFeed will continue to feed these engines regularly until we hear about the new merchant program.

You can read more about this on
Internet Retailer website.
Search Engine Land
Google Shopping, How much does it cost? 


Why The New Google Shopping Sucks for Ecommerce Merchants - SearchEngineWatch.com

• The new Google Shopping creates a rift to PPC management firms and merchants who are accustomed to using Google AdWords – bidding at the keyword level and creating product text ads for certain ad groups. The new Google Shopping will not work like that. Why?
• Merchants and Agencies will be required to use a merchant’s Google Product Search data feed to submit to the new Google Shopping. Most merchants and PPC agencies don’t have experience with data feeds.
• Bidding is product based, not keyword based. You can only submit your feed and bid via attributes in the feed in Google’s Product Listing Ads interface.
  
• Some small merchants won’t adapt fast enough to take advantage of the program and will lose out on traffic and sales.
  
• The potential for more sales is there, but at what cost? The new Google Shopping will require a high level of technical management with the data feed and constant optimization of the product bids in the campaign. This time and money suck will put a strain on merchants

Read more 

Internet Retailer Conference 2012 - Interprise Software Update

It's time of the year for the biggest eCommerce event "Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition" IRCE 2012 venue held at Chicago down town.

The best of best eCommerce products are on display the industry best speakers, consumers, developers and integrator's attending this conference makes it special to showcase your products and services.

Interprise Solutions is going to be there from Mon - Fri at Booth # 1707 and would be showcasing the new Interprise Suite version 7.0 along with the new iPad app, perfect for road shows like this one.
The iPad app will have the flexibility to connect to backend office while being on road and be able to take new orders, prospects on the go, kind of POS (Point of Sale) but on the go so love calling it as POS-Go app's.

Not to mention the powerful integrated Ecommerce the new version has whole lot of features, more than Magento, Aspdotnet Storefront out of the box which makes it even more affordable for small and medium business.

The event is geared towards showcasing new products, tech talks from speakers solving real world problems, how to grow your ebusiness, workshops to get your hands on Social media, web marketing and much more.

Read more about the conference here

Update: InfoSourcing Inc will be attending the IRCE 2012 at Chicago and will be visiting Interprise Booth to  demo Ecommerce 360 plugin.