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Integrate eCommerce with your POS and Online Marketplaces
Zeke Hamdani, Director of eCommerce at Celerant
My name is Zeke Hamdani and I’m the director of eCommerce at Celerant. I have been with the company for about 15 years now.
Our motto has always been to build premier eCommerce website while having the integration as our backbone. We build things where you are competing with tier one people, tier 1 companies, at the same time, but not at a tier 1 budget.
The Benefits of a Single Database
A single database allows you to leverage information from one channel to the other channel. You have the ability to leverage your information from stores over to your eCommerce, even on Amazon and eBay.
You can take inventory from any location, you don’t have to have inventory dedicated for a specific channel.
Staying Current with eCommerce Trends
In eCommerce, you have to be current with the technology, you have to stay with the trends, you have to follow the trends and sometimes you have to set the trends.
Our goal has always been to make sure that we are current with the market. We make sure we stay connected in the industry, we make sure we see where the industry is heading and our system follows.
Utilizing Digital Marketing Services
We interviewed a lot of our customers about a year and a half ago and we asked them how do you market your site, what kind of email marketing are you using and everybody had basically the same answer: “we send email blasts to all of our customers,” which doesn’t really work that well.
If you start to send targeted emails where they are specific and more personalized to the consumer, then you get much better results. People don’t ignore those emails, the open rates are much higher, and the conversion rates are also much higher.
So we have entered the digital marketing space now where we have come up with a digital marketing product where we partnered up with the ESP, we mine all your data, all the customer data from the Celerant system from the stores and website and you put it together into a data cube and you sends it over to the ESP.
Now that gives you the ability to have a lot of data points that lets you create dynamic segments and then you can have special targeted messages to those segments.
Leveraging the Amazon Integration
Amazon has taken up a big market share and we recognized that well in advance. We built a two-way integration with Amazon where your products that you currently have in your inventory, you can put those up on Amazon and then when the orders are placed on Amazon, the orders come in as if they’re coming from your own website.
You don’t have to change any fulfillment process and the orders flow through the exact same process that your online orders flow through. Our clients have seen some dramatic results, Amazon has become a significant channel for quite a few of our customers.
Why Web Analytics are Critical for Online Businesses
Analytics are a very important part of online business. You absolutely have to know who’s coming to your site, when they come into your site, where they’re coming from, how long they’re staying there, what they are looking at.
On the web, analytics are your eyes and ears. We leverage Google Analytics for our search engine optimization customers. We use mods that provides us a lot of data and also gives us competition analysis as well. I encourage everybody to dive into the reports, dig deeper, see where people are spending more time, where people are abandoning, and where are the friction points.
Usually people they just concern about getting people to the site, but they don’t really pay attention to “hey, how many of those are really converting,” because if you have the traffic and even if you improve your conversion rate by one point, that makes a big difference.
So you have to really dig into the analytics and see where the friction points are and eliminate those.
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