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eCommerce is becoming a smart choice for almost every business. With eCommerce you can reach new markets, increase your sales, while reducing the costs dramatically, as you don’t have to run a physical shop with all its associated costs. You could even avoid stock costs as new models like drop-shipping allow you to deliver the assets right from your provider, with your label.

The digital nature of eCommerce provides a radical new way of thinking about sales process: With eCommerce you can track your visitors, so you know where they come from, how they reach you and what products and pages they visit on your site. This is tremendous feedback that you can apply right away to optimize your sales. You can change the way products are arranged, add new promotions, discounts and coupons, arrange special blundles, in a matter of seconds.

eCommerce is a perfect way to test new markets. Combined with web marketing, you can develop campaigns and promotions for a specific region to test its potential, you can start realizing revenues immediately, with minimum investment. But you could go further, and run promotions targeted to specific audiences, so you could offer a promotion for women in the 30’s range that live in Minnesota, and another for young male adults in the UK near London. You could also implement what is called dynamic pricing, by which knowing who your customer is you could adapt pricing and product offerings to make your offers more appealing to that particular market.

The savings are also on the side of the buyer, as he does not have to move physically to the store and he also saves his precious time, as well as transportation costs. In these days of worldwide tight finances, both the seller and the buyer benefit.

Mobile Commerce is an emerging trend opening amazing opportunities for buyers and sellers. You no longer need to be in front of a computer to buy something, you can purchase show tickets right from where you are with your smartphone or tablet. Technologies like QR Codes and Near Field Communications will enable a new wave of commerce of unprecedented potential.

Social commerce (or “Facebook commerce”) takes this one step further, by adding the potential of social networks to the mix. You could segment the 700+ millions of users of social networks with tremendous accuracy and develop customized product offerings, and market them as they socialize with friends, family and contacts. The possibilities are infinite: You could offer a cool getaway on Friday and develop a group buying offer for the customer’s contacts. The “open graph” architecture takes the peers-recommendation to a new level, by which anyone that likes, or buys a product, communicates this “recommendation” to all her friends or followers, triggering more leads -the viral effect.

How do these trends impact on your business model? Could you benefit from then right now? Would it pay off to become a first mover? Are any of your competitors already testing waters on them?

Our eCommerce Solution

At InnovationPath we apply this knowledge to your particular case. Our eCommerce solution starts from understanding your specific situation, business and goals, and then we develop the best approach for your business.

A typical eCommerce project from us includes the following steps:

• Understanding of your business, products and services, major markets, pricing structure, promotions, logistics and fulfillment workflows, so we make the right choices for your eCommerce solution.
• Exclusive visual design based on your brand requirements, developed by Sr. Graphic Designers.
• A full fledged product catalog, with multiple categories, flexible pricing structure, product snapshots videos,
• A Payment solution,including digital certificates and paymet gateways. We could ipmlement
  • Paypal
  • Google Checkout
  • eWay
  • Any other major payment solutions world-wide
• General content development, optimized by professional copywriters, optimized for seach engines as appropriate for your business
• Custom-developments as necessary, such as implementing a specific workflows to fulfill special products shipments or configurations.
• SEO: The website is delivered with Search Engine Optimization, including tools and registration of the website into major search engines.
• Traffic analytics with automatic reports so you know how the website is performing

We build the eCommerce solution using open source, powerful eCommerce software:

• Self-managed. You can manage the products catalog, pricing, promotions, shipments, etc yourself without any technical knowledge.
• Extensible. You can add new features, pricing structures, payment methods, content pages as you business evolves.
• No vendor lock-in. Being open source and actively developed, our solutions do not depend on a specific software vendor or on a web development team to be maintained or adapted in the future.
• Powerful features like shop comparison, bundling, wish lists, email marketing could be added seamlessly.
• We work with a set of proven technologies. We do not marry with just one solution, but we identify the best combination of products and technologies for your business requirements. And we are continously testing emerging technologies so you

Our eCommerce solutions have the following differentiators:

Your eCommerce

Our solutions develolp an eCommerce that you own. Data like product catalog, price lists, promotions, sales statistics are store on your very own hosting environment, to which you have full access.

The code of your website is not shared among other shops. You don’t need to hide any contact information, or obey certain rules to publish your products, or use restrictive contact forms. You own your customer base.

You don't pay extra commisions on each sale or for storing extra information for products, or after an increase in the volume of sales or size of your catalog.

The installation is customized for you and not shared, so you are not affected by neighboors that saturate your shared eCommerce server, nor you have a competitor under a similar domain name.

You don't have to use pre-defined designs for your shop. The design for your eCommerce is exclusively yours and fully tailored to your brand, business and marketing strategy, so you won’t find an identical site to yours.

Web 2.0 integration

We integrate your eCommerce with social networks like Facebook and Twitter so you can leverage the viral effect of these networks among your customer base. We implement integrations such as Like, share and retweet buttons for each of your products.

Users could register using any of these network credentials, so they do not have to create and remember a new userid and password to buy from you.

The solution could also make automatic announcement to these networks of new products, offers, coupon codes, bundles, etc.

Social Commerce

We could implement a Facebook e-commerce presence so you could sell your products and services right from this social network; users do not have to leave their navigation to buy from you.

Combined with a web marketing and social media campaigns this is a powerful feature.

Training

As part of our projects, we develop a customized, e-learning class to teaches you how to update the website to keep it current, add new products, offers, update pricing and shipping information, content pages, menus, change contact information, etc. It includes screenshots and videos guiding you step by step on how to perform your website administration tasks.

We also provide you with an administration manual in PDF covering the class materials so you can print it and mark them up as needed.

Hosting

Speed is a key factor of the success of an eCommerce solution, equivalent to the wait in line at physical stores. It is also a ranking factor for search engines, so it is very important to have a hosting solution that meets the estimated traffic and is local to its major markets of operation.

As part of our solution, we upload and set up ready the eCommerce under your hosting infrastructure.  We provide eCommerce ready hosting solutions, optimized for the solutions we develop. We deal with the digital certificate issues so you are freed from all this special handling requirements. This ensures you won’t have compatibility problems nor last minute surprises. We provide local hosting solutions for the major markets in which we operate: Americas, both US-Based and South-America based, Australia / Asia and Europe.

Our solutions are managed, you are freed from having to deal with hosting related issues and jargon, so  you focus on making your website take off for your business. We provide a hotline access as well as ticketing service so every requirement is acted upon as they happen.

If you already have a hosting solution and would like to keep it, we validate its infrastructure at project initiation and any requirements not met are communicated along with the recommendations to implement so it supports the new website. We also support our customers to interact with their hosting provider to sort these issues. We could also interact directly with the hosting provided if needed.

eCommerce Management

We could manage the eCommerce for you so just focus on selling, getting the best prices, analyzing the sales trends and manage the business a whole, leaving the technical specifics to us.

We agree on a set of standard processes and workflows so everything flows and we manage the shop for you.

Maintenance and Ongoing Support

Every project is delivered with a capacity to use 10 support interactions -”tickets”, that you can use for help and follow on questions about the website.

Besides that, we also provide maintenance and support services that ensure your eCommerce is available, performance is top notch, content is updated promptly and key maintenance tasks such as backups and software updates are carried on and tested on an ongoing basis.

Rapid prototyping

While we use traditional techniques like sitemaps, wireframing and mockups designs to evolve from an idea to a working product, we also like to work under a prototyping approach.

Using this approach, we have a set of initial designs and functionality, that we tailor to your specific needs. This includes an exclusive visual design for your business brand as well as total control over the components of the solution so they fit your specific business processes.

By using this approach, we are able shorten development and design times dramatically and achieve a solid, professional and proved web solution within weeks, while the “blank sheet of paper” approach usually is measured in months.

Depending on your priorities and branding requirements, we might choose to use one or the other method. We sort this out as part of our proposal development process, with a clear rationale about which method is the best for you and why.