Question

Name some third party vendors who have tools to enable social listening and describe how the tool works. Would you recommend that company for which you are employed, participate in social listening if they aren't already and why/why not

Answer 1

There is hardly a single web development project today that doesn’t involve some kind of 3rd party vendor integration, be it for adding the latest must-have consumer features, ensuring you have the appropriate site analytics and marketing metrics or integrating your business process applications into your website. The ecosystem of e-commerce and business applications has evolved: highly specialized vendors now offer every kind of specialty tool, plug-in feature and business operations application imaginable and still, new applications are appearing every day.

ECommerce Partners can help you wade through the sea of choices in the market. For example, you may want to consider augmenting your core website with applications that help you meet your business goals and can transform your website into a dynamic and sophisticated consumer experience. . Based on our extensive experience and in-depth knowledge of the market we will select and integrate third-party tools and applications into your existing website. The end result will be an engaging, seamless, and unified experience for the consumer and your internal staff.

ECommerce Partners has over a decade’ of experience that spans the full range of vendor integrations. Because we’ve been there, we can help you avoid some of the most common integration implementation pitfalls. We will ensure the integration project is appropriately assessed in terms of scope, complexity, and cost and that the implementation is smooth and painless.There are many types of applications that require integration. Below is a sampling, grouped by broad business function.

Consumer Experience Applications: These are applications that enhance the consumer’s experience on your website by offering additional features, tools or services. Examples include:

• Alternative payment processing: Various solutions enable consumers to pay for e-commerce transactions via debit cards, ATM cards, phone cards, in foreign currencies, or through Amazon, PayPal, Google Checkout, etc.
• Sophisticated Site Search and Recommendations: Several vendors provide specialty feature-based and dynamic filter search engines, support auto-complete and type-ahead search, and offer product recommendations systems, predictive recommendations, customizable product finders or step-by-step diagnostic “wizards”, as well as various options to enable the dynamic reordering of product listings in your catalog to help increase conversion, the number of sales and the value of each sale

• Online Merchandising & Product Catalog Tools: Specialty catalog viewers can show your traditional product catalog in engaging ways. Online merchandising tools will optimize which products are featured at what price and in what order and ensure the listings are always fresh and compelling. Product customization tools and step-by-step wizards can guide the consumer through customizing their own specialty products
• Imaging & 3D Visualization Tools: Possibilities range from 3D rendering, animation, dynamic customized views of your products, immersive virtual product environments, 360-degree product views and pans, customizable virtual mannequins, photo albums and much more
• Other Consumer Features: The list of possibilities is almost endless, ranging from traditional and live video, mobile commerce, teleconferencing, “Live Person” customer service, consumer games, corporate or consumer blogs, social networking widgets and more.

Yes, I would recommend because: These are “back-office” applications that require integration with your e-commerce website for the most smooth-running, efficient business operations and supply chain management.

• Inventory Management, Warehousing & Fulfillment: Just as you need to manage your supply-side supply chain efficiently, you may have a complex fulfillment chain that is initiated by an e-commerce transaction, or costly overhead for warehousing product, or a need for sophisticated, just-in-time inventory management and delivery systems. The e-commerce transaction sets off a highly coordinated and often global chain of events that are critical to your business; so you must ensure that the integration of your online orders is seamless!
• Administrative/Reporting Tools: How well is your website supporting your business goals? Do you have a comprehensive “dashboard” or scorecard of business performance that senior management can use to monitor and improve sales? If not, consider investing in some basic reporting tools to help make such key web metrics more transparent to business decision-makers.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM): These applications help you to track, group, target, and monitor your customer relations, be it for sales, service or support. On-site support is often the first avenue for customer complaints—make sure your customer experience is a positive one!

• Supply Chain Management: If you have a complex global supply chain that ends with an e-commerce order, you need to tightly integrate all components to ensure you are listing the right products in quantities that are actually available. Few things irk consumers more in e-commerce than learning after their order has been placed that their product is no longer available, or that it will take 8-12 weeks to ship! Ensure your website listings are accurate and timely as of the time of the transaction.
• Accounting Applications: For the most efficient business operations, you need your e-commerce transactions to interoperate seamlessly with your business accounting software. Otherwise, you are effectively keeping two sets of books, with costly, time-consuming and error-prone human intervention in–between that will also require ongoing monitoring and reconciliation. Let us show you how to integrate your sales with your favorite accounting application.