How can Flash enhance the customer's experience?
Flash can certainly enhance your customer's experience. You can display rotating featured items or add interactivity with real-time item customization. Flash can enhance a visitor's experience or provide customization control – reaping huge benefits.

What purpose would Flash fulfill?
Integrate Flash into your website strategy, not as an afterthought. A Flash element on your site can definitely increase conversions. You can utilize Flash to bring attention to special promotions or featured items. Flash can also make your pages dynamic by rotating special deals or products, giving customers another reason to return to your site and drive them to the item page.

Where will you place it on your site?
Since most Flash integrations are animated and eye-catching, you will want it prominently displayed in the middle of the homepage or in the header, so as not to disrupt the eye's natural flow. If your website is heavy on text and information, adding Flash may further confuse and distract your customers.

Flash, Ajax, other solutions?
Work with your developer to research whether or not Flash might be better managed by another technology. Sometimes a JavaScript and/or AJAX solution will be better suited for the functionality you need. There is also a chance PHP and a database or XML might be a better solution. Don't get caught up in the latest and greatest Flash feature without doing some research into other solutions.

Planning for Flash Integration
If you are confident that Flash would improve your website, start planning your expectations and try not to leave any of the details out. Find examples of you would like to see incorporated into your site. When putting together a feature with your developer, be sure that others test it. Make sure you get a good mix of people not familiar with the feature. Get them to evaluate the functionality. For example, some testers may say the feature loaded in their browser but don't understand the next steps. You will need to use this feedback in fine tuning the feature's interactivity.

Any other considerations?
Keep in mind some users block interactive content, such as JavaScript and Flash for security reasons. If you do use Flash on your website, make sure everything looks and functions properly without Flash in case users do block it.

Flash also has SEO weaknesses. The Flash feature you incorporate into your site will not be completely indexed by most search engines. However, many of the larger search engines such as Google and Yahoo! continue to work on extracting the information from the Flash movie and indexing it. With this in mind, do not use Flash for main navigation or displaying critical information on your website.

Speak with experts to help make the best decision for you, your customers, and ultimately, your e-business.

Writers' Top Picks of Flash Examples:
The Weekender (www.theweekender.com) – example of Flash rotating dynamic content
Spytown and All The Whey – more examples of Flash rotating dynamic products
BTI Tactical – example of Flash rotating brand names in the header

Greg Paone and Sarah Johnson, Solid Cactus Platinum Web Developers contributed this entry.

 

According to Marketing Sherpa's E-Commerce Benchmark Guide 2007, "a very small sample of research conducted in 2006 showed that persistent shopping cart technology had the potential to lower abandonment by 20%. Unfortunately, cost is often a major barrier."

Solid Cactus has developed an affordable solution that:

• Provides a visual display of the cart, its contents and shipping costs on every page
• Allows customers to easily add and remove items or change quantities of items without leaving the page to go to the "cart page"
• This works with all major browsers, even when third-party cookies are blocked
• Bypasses the first page at checkout and goes straight to the shipping and billing information
• Eliminates "E-Commerce Sticker Shock" by having a constant display of the total cost of your order in the cart

Start reducing cart abandonment and Register Now for this special product release webinar! Space is very limited.

Here in Small Business, we've been making improvements to our systems that we'd like to share with you. Merchants often ask about how we preserve their store data, and rightly so. In addition to regular backups, copying data within the primary data center, and replicating data to a remote data center in a different geographic location, going forward your store's data will also be published to multiple data centers simultaneously. This has the following benefits:

• Similar to our image-caching technology, which uses a content delivery network, shopper requests for your store's pages will now be served by the closest available data center to the shopper. This should improve page serving times and the overall reliability of shoppers interacting with your site.
• Should a major event such as a natural disaster occur and one data center becomes unavailable, the other data center can service all requests with limited impact to your shoppers. Previously a major data center outage would mean bringing the other data center online before being able to service requests.

We've also made improvements to our overall network architecture. Key benefits include:

• More than double the order-taking capacity for our checkout systems.
• Double the front-end serving capacity, allowing us to handle twice as much traffic to our page serving systems.
• Improved ability to quickly add capacity to handle sudden increases in traffic.

The needs of our merchants are important to us. We remain committed to continually improving our systems so we can meet these needs, now and in the future.

eBizInsider (The official magazine of Solid Cactus) -- The name eBiz Insider says it all. Our publication is a resource for e-commerce professionals. Each monthly issue features valuable information, tips, advice and tools designed to help the e-commerce store owner run his/her business better with additional resources at eBizInsider.com. (http://ebizinsider.com/subscribe.html

Internet Retailer -- designed to assist managers and owners of online stores with the common concerns and challenges they face each day. This publication offers advice from those who have been working in online retailing for a long time and have learned a thing or two about what works and what doesn't. :) They also publish the IR500 list -- the "top internet retailing" stores of the year. -- http://www.internetretailer.com/IR/USA/

Revenue Magazine -- focuses on everything about online marketing, including key business strategies, innovative marketing methods, effective online advertising techniques, emerging advertising trends in technology and much more. http://www.revenuetoday.com/section/Free%20Subscription

Practical E-Commerce -- Each issue contains ecommerce-related features, interviews, website profiles and recurring columns including search engine optimization, customer conversion, legal issues, pay per click advertising, etc. http://www.practicalecommerce.com/ix

Website Magazine -- Website magazine focuses largely on web visibility trends, including a big focus on improving visiblity on search engines, design, and onilne social media marketing. http://www.websitemagazine.com/scripts/sub/subscribe.aspx

Scenario 1:
Annie: Thanks for calling, how can I help you?
Sally: Yes, I'm calling to order more filters for my CleanAir 2000.
Annie: Ok, let's get your information and we'll have them shipped off to you...

Scenario 2:
Annie: Thanks for calling, how can I help you?
Sally: Yes, I'm calling to order more filters for my CleanAir 2000.
Listening Result: "I'd like to place an order for more..." sets off a little alarm in Annie's head.
Annie: Oh, have you ordered this before?
Sally: Yes -- The light goes on to "Replace Filter" every three months or so.
Annie: Let's see -- I could easily set that up on our auto-ship program. You'll receive a filter every three months, and we'll automatically bill your credit card and ship it without your having to call in. Let me pull up that screen and we can set you up.

Sally agrees, and you set up the auto-ship. She's happy because she doesn't have to call any more to order her product. You've done something merchants dream of – recurring revenue at little or no expense. Sally won't be calling again taking up your customer service rep's time.

3. Upsell and Cross-Sell
Good listening will also help you to upsell the customer as well. Listen to what the customer is ordering initially and take a moment to offer the appropriate additional items. Fast food joints are great at this… how else did "Would you like fries with that?" become a phrase ingrained in our culture? Remember, you don't get what you don't ask for!

4. Close and Paraphrase
After you've taken care of the customer and you are about to end that call, take one more moment to summarize with the customer what you have accomplished during your time with them on the phone. It doesn't have to be a detailed list, just paraphrase with the customer. Be simple and straightforward. It lets the customer know exactly what occurred during the course of their call and makes for a great close.

If you take the time to really listen to your customer, you will maximize your opportunity to assist your customer with what ever need prompted them to call in the first place.

Hey, LISTEN......is that the phone?

Alison Wydawski, Solid Cactus Call Center Shift Supervisor contributed to this entry.