By Ruth Richter • August 08, 2017
E-commerce popularity continues to grow with shoppers, as evidenced by last years’ record-breaking Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, which topped $8.72 billion. Want more evidence that e-commerce is important? Last year, 99 million shoppers arrived in stores on Black Friday, but 108 million shopped online. It’s undeniable that online sales are the wave of the future. Your store needs to stay on the cutting edge if you want to keep up. If you don’t have an integrated Sage 100 shopping cart already, or your shopping cart doesn’t offer the features you need, make sure you update your systems well before Black Friday 2017. This guide will help you understand what you should fix first.
For the past twenty years, the experts at ROI Consulting have led integration development between Sage 100 & shopping carts for e-commerce, and they’re ready to help answer your questions or optimize your shopping cart integration. Contact ROI Consulting online or call us at 402-934-2223, ext. 1 to learn more about how we can help you.
Switch to a Mobile Responsive Site
Not only does Google penalize you with lowered SEO rankings if you haven’t upgraded your sites to a mobile-responsive format, it also makes it nearly impossible for your customers to complete a purchase from you. Tiny buttons, cramped screens, and hard-to-read product pages dissuade all but the most determined shoppers from using your e-commerce site, but when it comes to entering sensitive user data on a miniscule screen, your customers are likely to balk and abandon their cart—never to return.
In fact, mobile sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2016 each topped $1 billion, which means you’re missing out on a lot of money if your site isn’t yet optimized for mobile.
If you find that your Sage 100 shopping cart doesn’t support a mobile responsive format, you’ll want to consider a different solution that can meet your needs in today’s e-commerce-driven sales environment. We can help you with that!
Ensure Your Shopping Cart Contains Details
Even though customers are purchasing more than ever using their laptops and mobile devices, the fact remains that most of your customers are still a little wary about entering their credit card numbers online. Any good e-commerce platform you use will feature a secured payment portal using HTTPS (if yours doesn’t, it’s definitely time to make a switch), but your online shopping cart should also provide a seamless, worry-free experience for customers.
Common problems for shopping carts include pricing or stock errors, difficulty modifying desired quantities, and troubles navigating in and out of the shopping cart to verify item descriptions on the e-commerce web portal.
Your Sage 100 online shopping cart should provide customers with as much item detail and interaction as possible. If customers have to exit their shopping cart to make small changes or verify nitpicky details, they are far less likely to return to the shopping cart before they leave your site.
Keep Customers Comfortable
Just as in brick-and-mortar stores, customers prefer shopping when the experience feels comfortable and safe. To get them shopping around and confidently purchasing from your store over and over again, make the shopping process completely transparent.
A “transparent” e-commerce process includes updated number counts for cart items, a clean layout, full product descriptions (leveraging SEO is a good idea), and a seamless checkout process that includes very few steps and sends order data directly to your Sage 100 system automatically.
Speaking of seamless data, if you’re still stuck performing duplicate data entry, you’re wasting your time and making a lot of errors. Errors erode your customer confidence, so you should ensure high accuracy by using bi-directional data syncing between Sage 100 and your e-commerce platform.
Supercharge Your Online Sales by Improving Your Sage 100 Shopping Cart
There are many reasons customers choose to abandon their shopping carts, but the main reasons are because they find it hard to make their purchase on your site or they’re suspicious of the way your site is run. Ensure an easy purchase process for them, and ensure an easy fulfillment process for you with seamless, accurate data integration which increases your company’s efficiency and speed.
ROI Consulting welcomes your call and the opportunity to help you solve your software integration challenges. Contact ROI Consulting online, or call us at 402-934-2223, ext. 1.
