Earlier this year we introduced the concept of labels to ChannelAdvisor Complete. In our current implementation, labels are a way to dynamically group inventory items together. But why did we choose to do this? Why is this useful?

You might hear labels referred to as tags on other web destinations. Sites like Flickr, del.icio.us, and Gmail popularized their use as a flexible way to organize information. They are short, free text descriptors that you assign to a piece of information so you can group it together with other similar data. For instance on Flickr you can label all your photos of your kid’s soccer games with “soccer” and search on that keyword later to find them all. Or you can have Gmail automatically label your incoming e-mails from specific people with “Chicago” to find messages from all of your friends who live there.

Currently labels in ChannelAdvisor are used to group inventory items together. You can use labels to tag your items as “clearance” for example. Or you can label a set of inventory as “holiday” items. Or you can mark some inventory as both “clearance” and “holiday” - you can assign as many labels as you like to an item!

Once you have labels on inventory, you can filter it by label in the All Items view. This enables you to segment your inventory and operate on just that subset of your items.

So why use labels when you can just group inventory together with ChannelAdvisor’s classifications? For one thing, an item can only belong to one classification at a time. Classifications are good for a general category such as “men’s boots”. But if you want to segment your inventory as clearance items across many classifications (say, “men’s boots” and “women’s boots”) you are better off using a clearance label to accomplish this.
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Lately my posts have been exceedingly long, and I know nobody wants to read that much, so I’m going to try to keep this one short. This week, “C.” in De Smet, SD writes:

Dear Feed Doctor,

My inventory data doesn’t have a shipping price, but I know what each item’s shipping price SHOULD be: it’s based on the item’s selling price. If the price is less than $20, shipping is $1.99; if the price is more than $20 but less than $50, shipping is $4.99; and for items over $50, shipping is $9.99 . Can I use a lookup list to do this?

Well, C., the answer is: no.
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On an unstoppable mission to give online retailers the broadest eCommerce tool set to grow sales and profits, we announced last week support for PayPal Express Checkout for our merchants in the U.S., United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Germany. Not to disappoint us a number of online retailers immediately had questions on this checkout solution: How is it different from regular PayPal? What are its benefits? Can it help reduce my payment processing costs? Should I activate PayPal Express Checkout or Google Checkout? To answer some of these questions I have created below a brief primer on PayPal Express Checkout (Reader’s Digest version: turn it on).

Short on time? Here are three three important resources that will help you better understand its benefits, when and how to use it, and hopefully answer any questions that you may have:

• PayPal Website Payments Pro - Express Checkout is part of PayPal’s Website Payments Pro package, a comprehensive payment solution including credit card payment processing and PayPal’s Virtual Terminal product.

• ChannelAdvisor’s PayPal Express Checkout mini site - Integrated into our Strategy & Support Center, our mini site provides valuable information on PayPal Express Checkout, instructions on how to activate it within ChannelAdvisor Complete, an FAQ and more.

• PayPal Express Checkout webinars - You probably already know that we’re big fans of education and this new feature is no exception. We will be holding two webinars together with PayPal on PayPal Express Checkout during the next few weeks to help merchants understand the product and how it can drive incremental sales.
  • U.S. Webinar: Wednesday, 08/01, 2 p.m. EST. Register here.
  • U.K. Webinar: Wednesday, 08/17 at 2 p.m. GMT. Register here.

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Considering Amazon.com as part of your multi-channel portfolio? Already selling on this channel but looking to grow it significantly? Here’s your chance to get up to speed on this leading online retail shopping site: join us this Thursday, July 19th, at 2 p.m. EST for a webinar on Amazon.com featuring Tim Mirick, Amazon.com’s Director of Business Solutions North America and Asia (here’s a good recent interview with Tim from AuctionBytes).

Tim will be joined by a team of product experts from Amazon to talk about why Amazon.com matters, the new Amazon Webstore and Fulfillment by Amazon programs for online retailers and success strategies / best practices.

ChannelAdvisor expert JD (Jonathon Davis) and I will be reviewing how we enable merchants to automate and scale their Amazon business (as part of a multi-channel strategy) and a new Amazon.com promotion for ChannelAdvisor customers looking to get onto this leading online shopping site (and if you’re not already, you should …).
Click here to register for the webinar.

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Searching for the perfect checkout is like the search for the Holy Grail, except that the latter was probably more fun with adventures in far-away countries, on horse back and with sharp objects at your disposal. Every online retailer has a different checkout flow with most of them too long, confusing and at times even unreliable. A new study study by the UK’s e-Consultancy group now indicates that checkout abandonment rates could be as high as 80% as a result of poor usability (here’s a good interview with the author Dr. Mike Baster on checkout best practices). That can’t be good for business.

Google Checkout’s arrival last year raised the profile of checkout and its significance for conversions and sales (with Yahoo! replicating the search tie-in) but it also set a new bar for checkout simplicity and ease-of-use for buyers. Recently PayPal has turned up the heat with its PayPal Express Checkout product that doesn’t outright replace the entire checkout but conveniently lands the buyer on the retailer’s “complete your checkout” page (for more interesting reading check out last week’s Internet Retailer’s report on third-party checkout adoption rates among the leading online retailers). And before you ask, yes, ChannelAdvisor supports today Google Checkout and will have good news shortly for retailers looking to add PayPal Express Checkout as an option for buyers.

So what are buyers looking for in a checkout (and what will positively impact cart abandonment rates)? Here’s my unscientific list:

• Security & Trust – Above all I’d like to make sure that my payment information doesn’t end up in Madagascar. I heard it’s a nice country and all, but the data is for you Mr. Merchant and nobody else. That’s no big deal if you’re a brand-name merchant since I trust that the thousands of shoppers before me were okay (Google didn’t report anything on you losing credit card data), but it’s a little bit of a challenge if you’re new to me. May simply be a small token of safety similar to what Global Golf has done with its Hacker Safe feature at the very top of the screen.

• Speed – Make it fast. Very fast. I have already spent time selecting the right product, let’s just get it over with and don’t give me any opportunity to get confused and quit. Want to build a relationship with me? Follow-up on the order to make sure I got it, give me a chance to rate the transaction and then allow me to opt-in to a newsletter (call out that you’ll be sending out promotions and not product announcements — if there’s no good reason I won’t do it). I bought a good bag recently at eBags and was excited when I was asked to rate the deal, glad you care.

• Simplicity – Speaking of confusion, I don’t really care to subscribe to any email lists, financing offers, the same product in different colors or a wishlist during checkout. Every time I buy something at a site I end up automatically getting a newsletter and that counts against you, Mr. Loyalty Builder. Remember, the more you hit me over the head with the size and the color of the checkout button, the better. I don’t want to guess what I need to do to pay you right now (before I change my mind).

• Personalization – And please, please, please: recognize me. I hate data entry. Point and click. Have a guest checkout for shoppers that have privacy concerns. I’d rather register (IF you have other products I am interested in) so that next time I just have to indicate “yeah, ship it to me” and get back to my show. Amazon’s One-Click works for a reason.

• Options – And while I may like the payment options you have (doesn’t everyone accept credit cards these days?), it’s important that you offer me some progressive checkout solutions before I even get into the weeds of your marketing maze. Yes, I am talking about Google Checkout, PayPal Express Checkout and Bill Me Later. A good number of leading eTailers are already offering this (Starbucks is a good example of how this can be done) so get on the same page. In a perfect world I’d also like for you to default to my preferred checkout method.

Whew, that felt good.

And although I am a big fan of Google Checkout, I have recently found a checkout that beats hands-down anything I have ever used. Wait, it wasn’t even me. My son, a new Webkinz addict, showed me a few days ago what he can buy in this virtual world and I was stunned. Here’s a checkout that doesn’t ask how I want to pay for the product (use what I always use unless I object) or how it should be shipped.

Now where am I going to put my new virtual trampoline?

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