Volusion is committed to exceptional customer service, which is why we’re excited to announce the first phase of better personalizing your Out of this World Support experience.

In my last blog post, I mentioned that Volusion is making significant investments into the tools that we use to deliver Out of this World™ Support to our customers. As we are in the process of designing our ideal customer experience for support and architecting the systems required to deliver these experiences, we are looking to some unlikely sources for inspiration.

You might guess that we’d be looking at best practices within our own industry. As much as we’d love to, unfortunately there is only so much to be learned within our own ecosystem. Many of our competitors are still trying to figure out how to answer the phone 24 hours a day, 7 days a week without having to outsource overseas.

So we extended our scope, looking at world-class service companies like Nordstrom, Lexus, USAA, Apple, Rackspace, Zappos and other customer experience leaders to take their best practices and bring them to Volusion customers. One such company is the Ritz-Carlton family of hotels.

Ritz-Carlton holds the honor of being the only company to receive the Malcolm Baldridge Award for Quality not once, but twice. For customer experience geeks like myself, that’s the equivalent of being inducted into the Hall of Fame two different times. Suffice to say – it’s a pretty big deal.

At the heart of the Ritz-Carlton customer experience is a system called CLASS – short for Customer Loyalty Anticipation and Satisfaction System. Any time you interact with a Ritz-Carlton employee, CLASS ensures that the employee has all of the information needed to deliver a world-class experience, including past stay history, room preferences, food allergies, and more. By delivering this information in real-time, Ritz-Carlton is able to give their guests personalized attention.

Needless to say, I wanted this for Volusion. This is an iterative project that will develop over time, but I am happy to announce the launch of the first stage of our very own CLASS-like system. Starting soon, any time you call Volusion for help, the Support Concierge on the other side of the phone will automatically be presented with relevant details about your account – including your contact history, information about your online store, important server details and more.

We accomplish this with some pretty neat behind-the-scenes wizardry. When you call in, you will be asked to provide your store ID# (which will be located in the top right-hand corner of your admin area). When a Support Concierge begins to assist you, they will automatically be presented with the information needed to best serve your account. Over time, we will be continually adding new information to help our Support Concierges to deliver a more personalized support experience.

Happy selling!
-David Mitzenmacher, Chief Customer Officer, Volusion
talktodavid@volusion.com

To stay informed of how things are going at Volusion headquarters, take a look at how our Out of this World Support fared in July 2011.

In a previous blog post, I wrote about our decision earlier this year to dramatically change the focus of our support team to emphasize quality, responsiveness and “wow factor” over traditional productivity metrics found in most other companies. This change of focus was not without challenges – we spent the majority of Q1 hiring additional staff, delivering training and reworking core processes to support this change in mindset.

In Q2 we began to realize the fruits of this effort, ending the quarter with a record high 95.1% of support contacts receiving perfect ratings by our customers. Q3 is already off to a fantastic start, and I wanted to share some of the results.

While these results are exceptional, I believe that there is an opportunity to provide you with a level of support way beyond anything you’ve ever experienced. To help realize that vision, we are making some significant investments towards enhancing Out of this World™ Support in the coming months.

Thanks you for trusting us with your online business. It’s our privilege and pleasure to be here for you 24x7x365.

- David Mitzenmacher, Chief Customer Officer   talktodavid@volusion.com

The Volusion Product Team is excited to announce new enhancements to social sharing buttons for your product pages, including the addition of the Google +1 button!

If we’ve learned two things about social media, it’s this:

1. Social media is a vital marketing tool
2. People like to talk about and share products – but only if you make it easy for them

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With the spirit of these truths in mind, we’ve recently reworked our social sharing buttons for product pages on all V11 stores.

As an improvement to our AddThis integration, we’ve updated your product sharing buttons to be cleaner and more relevant to major social channels. Now your customers will have the option to share your product via Facebook, Twitter, Email and even with the new Google +1 button.

Furthermore, you can use this addition with our current Facebook “Like” and “Send” buttons.

To learn more about how to use this feature, click this link to our Knowledge Base article.

Here’s what it looks like:

And this is what you see when you have the Facebook “Like” button enabled:

And now with both the Facebook “Like” and “Send” buttons enabled:

We hope that you’ll enjoy this new addition and that it will help you gain a larger social presence. Remember that this feature is only available on the latest version our software, so if you haven’t made the upgrade to V11, here’s another reason to do so!

Happy selling!
-Jason Woosley, Head of Product, Volusion

The Volusion Product Team is excited to announce the release of our latest feature on V11, Deal of the Day! Continue reading to learn more about this awesome new addition to your store.

Daily deals have taken the world by storm. Businesses of all shapes and sizes are flocking to sites like Groupon and LivingSocial to post their deep discounts. And if you’re like the average consumer, you’re probably receiving daily emails that inform you of the latest deal.

There’s no denying the power of daily deals. There is, however, a valid concern regarding how profitable these third-party sites are to your business – is it really worth the risk and high costs?

To help you leverage this marketing tactic without the uncertainty, we’ve shifted the power of daily deals into your hands. With the introduction of our latest feature, Deal of the Day, you now have the authority to fully manage daily deals on your site, all without having to pay big bucks to someone else.

What is Deal of the Day?

Deal of the Day was designed with one goal in mind: to make you more successful.

In addition to setting up one deal per day, this new feature gives you the freedom to schedule multiple deals for the same day, or even schedule promotions that span multiple days. And to help you draw attention to these irresistible discounts, you can easily spread the word via built-in social sharing capabilities!

To get started, all you have to do is enable the feature in the admin of your V11 store. Then, simply select the product you want to feature, enter the discounted price and select how long you want the deal to last. And just like that, you have a dedicated page where customers can quickly find your daily deals.

Here’s an example of what the final result looks like to your customers:

To learn how to enable and use Deal of the Day, read this article from our Knowledge Base: http://support.volusion.com/article/deal-day

New Free Templates

We’re also excited to deliver three new free templates for your store. You’ve been asking for more options and we’re excited to deliver. Take a look at these new designs:

Aura

Fad

White Light

Our Development team is already hard at work to create the next great feature for your business success. Remember that these features are only available on the latest version of our software, V11, so don’t forget to upgrade.

As always, a special thanks to our merchants for providing recommendations and insights on how to improve our software.

Happy selling!
-Jason Woosley, Head of Product, Volusion

We’re proud to release the newest version of our company website. Be sure to take a look around to see how far we’ve come!

Change is good. At least we think so, anyway.

Early this week, we launched the latest version of volusion.com, designed to help new and current customers find the information they need. We also wanted to lighten things up a bit, both with the color scheme and the simplicity of the site.

Some major changes you should be aware of include:

1. Movement of Volusion Credit Card Processing to the “Services” tab
2. Movement of Live Chat, SSL, Domain Names and Fraud Score section to “Services” tab
3. Addition of interactive feature tour under “Features” tab
4. Addition of current customer resources at the very top of the site

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We hope that you like the new design and layout of our website – we’re still wrapping up a few loose ends, but are excited about the new release!

And now for a blast from the past…

To illustrate how far we’ve come, take a look at some of our homepages of yesteryear:

May 2004

December 2004

October 2005

April 2006

August 2006

February 2008

March 2010

May 2010

August 2010

July 2011

The value of social media is no longer a question. From main street to Wall Street (think of LinkedIn’s major IPO), business owners across the globe are embracing social outlets to connect with customers and sell more products.

With this reality in mind, we’re particularly excited to share our latest round of product enhancements, heavily focused on incorporating and expanding your ecommerce site with social media. These additions can’t be found with any other shopping cart software, which reinforces our dedication to giving you the latest and greatest tools to help you succeed.

Please note that these new features are only available on V11 stores, so if you haven’t upgraded yet, we recommend doing so.

Without further ado, take a look at what’s new:

Admin Integration with Facebook and Twitter

You can now post content to two of the most popular social networks, Facebook and Twitter, directly from your admin. Under the Marketing–> Social tab, you can easily log in to your Facebook and/or Twitter account and make a post. Better yet, if you want to share a link to any page (including product and category pages), this feature will automatically create a Bit.ly link to save you space.

Here’s what it looks like:

You can also make a Facebook or Twitter post directly from any category or product page within your admin. By sharing from this location, you can quickly point customers to a specific product or category.

These additions will save you a lot of time and clicks by streamlining the management of your social channels in one central location. Instead of navigating between three different sites and logins, you can now share your products faster and further than ever before.

Learn more about how to use this tool by referencing this article: Posting to Facebook and Twitter within Your Store

YouTube Video Management

Let’s face it – customers don’t like to read anymore. This is particularly problematic when you’re trying to sell something with a text-based product description. To help alleviate this issue, we’ve added a tool that helps you manage your YouTube videos within product pages.

With this addition, you can easily add multiple YouTube videos to your product pages. To do so, simply add the link or embed code to any YouTube video and plug it into the corresponding product within the admin. You can add as many as you like, and even drag and drop them to establish the order they appear.

Keep in mind that videos are proven to boost conversions, SEO and overall customer satisfaction. If you’re not using product videos, it might be time to pull out your director’s chair and yell, “Lights, Camera, Action!”

Check out how to use this feature: YouTube Video Management

Facebook “Send” Button

Facebook recently unveiled its “Send” button, which is similar to the existing “Like” button. The main difference is that the “Send” button allows users to send links as a Facebook message or via email. To help shoppers better share your products, we’ve added a config variable that places this button on your product page.

To use this new feature, you’ll first need to enable it. Learn how here: Adding Facebook Like and Send Buttons

Images with “My Recent History”

This last enhancement isn’t necessarily social, but it’s definitely one worth sharing. First, I’d like to extend a big thanks to our customers who suggested this feature within our forums – we’re always using your feedback to help shape our product development decisions.

“My Recent History” is a built-in shopping tool that reminds your customers of products they had previously viewed on your ecommerce site. With this latest release, the main image associated with these products will now appear in this section. By visually reminding shoppers of what they’ve seen, they’re more likely to go back and make a purchase.

If you haven’t enabled this feature before, you can see how by reading this article: My Recent History.

We hope that these features will give you a leg up on your competition and help deliver great experiences for your customers. As a product team, our mission is to continuously find ways to make your online business more successful. Keep in mind that you can always see the release notes from your V11 admin by clicking “Support –> Release Notes.”

Stay tuned! These new features are just the tip of the social iceberg.

Happy selling!
- Jason Woosley, Head of Product, Volusion

There’s been a lot of activity on the first floor of Volusion headquarters. Whether it’s growing our product team to developing new ways to enhance our platform, we’re excited to share what’s going on inside our office.

One of our ongoing goals at Volusion is to stay better connected with our customers by sharing product announcements and news. The product, development and IT teams have been working hard to improve our software, infrastructure and time to market. We wanted to take a minute to share some of these updates with you.

Thriving in Austin

After much discussion and planning, we decided to co-locate all of Volusion’s corporate functions in one of the USA’s hottest technology areas, Austin, TX. This allows for an increased level of collaboration with Support, Marketing and Sales that can only happen from face to face interaction. We’re excited that dozens of our development and IT personnel have made the move from the coast to join the team in Austin.

This move will result in faster time to market with new products and faster resolution of questions and issues.

Key Additions

We’re focusing on building out the team to drive a) increased focus on our customers, their needs and the evolving ecommerce market and b) execution on designing and creating top notch ecommerce products.

In the last six months, we’ve added a Head of Product, Director of Development, Product Management and Marketing expertise, key development functions and we’re soon to add a Chief Architect.

Expect to see this team of industry experts to release some great new developments in the months to come.

Increasing Visibility

We want to be actively engaged with our customers. So in the coming months, expect to see more visibility from the product/development team:

• Direct involvement in social media activities
• A more active approach to communicating status and resolution on major issues
• An increase in information on coming product enhancements

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IT Enhancements

We’ve continued to make investments to improve our capacity, stability and performance of our hosting infrastructure:

• Increased Capacity: As our customers grow, we need to ensure we are providing adequate room for expansion and have increased our hardware capacity accordingly.
• Increased Performance: We’re implementing new load balancing measures, including Gzip compression and SSL offloading, which are already improving load times an estimated average of 15-25% and, after full implementation, will increase the performance of the checkout process.
• Monitoring Everything: To keep a close eye on every Volusion storefront we have implemented new, enterprise-level monitoring on every website – watching both performance and up time.

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New Product Developments

• V11: The best ecommerce solution just became easier to use with our latest release. Currently in preview mode, the new version has already received positive reviews from our preview customers. Stay tuned for information on general availability or check out our V11 page: www.volusion.com/v11
• Realex Partnership: We’ve recently partnered with Realex Payments, one of Europe’s leading payment gateway. This partnership allows us to provide great rates and customer service for our UK customers.
• Renewed PCI DSS Certification: We’ve recently been recertified for PCI DSS Certification, a rigorous process that reaffirms the level of security that we continue to provide.

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Now back to the development lab… please keep an eye out for additional exciting news in the coming months.

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Happy selling!
-Ashley Menter, Product Marketing Manager, Volusion

Yesterday, we held the first of our holiday webinar events . To see the recording, check out the Volusion YouTube channel or download the full list of 101 Ecommerce Tips to Boost Holiday Sales. Continue reading to see answers to questions we didn’t get to the webinar.

Thanks for attending yesterdays’ webinar, 101 Ecommerce Tips to Boost Holiday Sales. We had quite the turnout, and we appreciate those who took the time to join us. If you missed the webinar, we covered a wide variety of topics, ranging from coupon strategies to shipping costs and holiday marketing. Comparison shopping engines (CSEs) and social media were two of the hot topics of the conversation.

Click here to download the full PDF: 101 Ecommerce Tips to Boost Holiday Sales.

And here’s the webinar recording, broken into smaller chunks:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

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We also had a rapid-fire Q&A session where attendees asked their burning holiday ecommerce questions. I answered as many as possible, but unfortunately time ran out before getting through the list. So in the spirit of helping you succeed online, here are some extra responses:

Q: Are PriceGrabber and Nextag free comparison sites?

No, PriceGrabber and Nextag are paid comparison shopping engines (CSEs). They follow a model that is very similar to traditional pay per click, meaning that you’ll pay a certain sum of money for each click on your product ad. Prices often depend on the category that your product is listed under, so many online business owners opt for a third party to manage their shopping feeds, especially during the busy holiday ecommerce season.

The main CSE that allows you to list items for free is Google Product Search. Just remember there’s a lot more competition on this engine, so ranking higher is a much stiffer challenge.

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Q: How can I see which customers abandoned their carts? Is this a part of Volusion or do I have to install a third party software?

You can pull your abandoned carts report directly from the Volusion ecommerce software. All you have to do is click the “Orders” tab, then find the “Abandoned/Live Carts” option. For full details on how to interact with this report, read this article from our knowledge base. In order to contact the customer, you would need to have their email address or phone number, which is available if they’ve already created an account with your store.

One important thing to note about your abandoned cart report is that it will seem much longer than it really is. This is because when search engines crawl your site, they are guilty of leaving an abandoned cart. In order to mitigate this, check out this highly recommended read: Abandoned Carts Out of Control? Blame Search Engines.

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Q: Is it a good idea to have a price comparison to competitors area in my store?

This one really depends. Personally, I’m very hesitant to recommend this idea unless you’re 100% certain that you have the best price, benefits and service in your competitive set. If you do explicitly list your competitors on your own site, you’re ultimately letting your customers know that there are other alternatives out there. Then all they have to do is enter a search for your competitor, causing them to leave your site. From here, it’s very possible that you’ve lost a sale.

It’s an ideal situation that your customers remain unaware of your staunchest competitors. If shoppers want to comparison shop, make them do the work on their own.

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Q: Which meta tags are most important?

Good question. While all meta tags are important, the most important is the meta title, followed by the meta description. Meta keywords are a good practice, although they typically aren’t considered by search engines when performing rankings. For an in-depth look at meta tags, read this blog post: Learn SEO One Step at a Time: An Introduction to Keywords.

Remember, when adjusting your meta tags for the holidays, don’t completely abandon or modify your current ones. Making huge shifts will hurt the rankings you’ve already achieved throughout the rest of the year.

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Be sure to check out our next webinar on holiday web design, coming on November 18!

Happy selling!
-Matt Winn, Online Communications Specialist, Volusion