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California’s new Consumer Privacy Act, a law very similar to Europe’s GDPR, is coming next year, and if you sell anything in California, it may affect you. Before we go into the details, please note that we are not attorneys or accountants and nothing here should be construed as legal or financial advice. That said, we can glean a few things from the law that might affect your online business. The law is based on four essential principles:

• Informing visitors of the data you collect
• Giving visitors the ability to be “forgotten”, e.g. removed from your records
• Allowing visitors to opt out of having their personal data sold to third parties
• Ensuring that customers who opt out of data collection get the same price for good and services as customers who opt in

Of the four, the first two will be the most common requirement for distributors in this industry. You may have already seen the overlays and popups informing you of data collection policies on sites you visit; this has become a common practice since many US businesses sell to E.U. customers. This can be added easily to any storeBlox CS company store or site.

The second requirement is twofold: First, you have to give a user a contact email or other method to communicate with you that they want any personal data you have about them deleted and forgotten. Second, you have to actually do the deletion, which might sound easier than it is. Most companies keep customer information on multiple systems, e.g. not just the website but also internal order processing, accounting or CRM systems. You have to get rid of the personal data everywhere.

The right to be forgotten also stipulates that you quickly “quarantine” a customer’s personal information as soon as they request removal, presumably to protect the data while you work to delete it, which might take longer. This may be tricky for those companies that have customer data on disparate systems, so we suggest you do a full technology audit so you understand which systems need to be touched when a customer requests that they be forgotten.

Like GDPR, CCPA compliance can be interpreted in a variety of ways as there are very few specific technological rules or requirements. We don’t feel that most companies in this industry will need to worry about selling personal data to third parties or charging a different price for opt-in vs opt-out, so those shouldn’t be a problem for you.

While CCPA doesn’t have a lot of specifics about technological requirements, it’s worth noting that if your online store takes credit cards and you have passed a PCI compliance test, then you are likely most of the way to making “best efforts” to secure user information. The payment card industry has been ahead of the curve on securing personal data for many years, because breaches of cardholder data can mean thousands of fraudulent transactions.

Also like GDPR, we think CCPA compliance will be a malleable thing as the law goes into effect. That doesn’t mean you should slack on getting your data policies in order, but you should be prepared for some of this to change over time. We’ll keep you up to date as the law approaches at the beginning of 2020. And as always, if you have any questions or need to implement any of the above, just give us a shout and we’ll get you taken care of.

Categories: Articles

storeBlox CS has always lead the way in flexibility with third-party tools like analytics and advertising networks. Through custom code injection – or embedded code – you can plug just about anything into your store for tracking, slicing, dicing or whatever you desire.

Until now, there were only one or two places that you couldn’t drop a code snippet into your store, but we’ve fixed that. For those of you who need to drop in things like chat software that require special positioning in the code, storeBlox now has you covered with every possible insertion point.

If you’re looking for live chat options, there are quite a few of them out there, from Olark to Intercom to Freshchat. Any of them can easily be enabled on your store with these new embed options. Don’t want to mess with it yourself? Just give us a shout and we’ll be happy to take care of it for you!

Other updates

The latest release of storeBlox includes numerous bug fixes and improvements, including:

• Color and size are now available in the Transaction Detail Report
• Numerous improvements to order display and listing
• To help with thorny freight calculation issues that sometimes occur with third-party shipping quotes, we’ve added additional logging to quickly triangulate the source of the problem.

Categories: Articles

If you haven’t checked out our loyalty marketing email system yet, we’ve got even more reasons for you to get familiar with it. Loyalty marketing emails allow you to schedule followup emails based on a number of events, like a registration or a purchase.

We’ve detailed before how this can be used to automatically remind a customer when it’s time to re-order, or to send a new user a coupon after they’ve registered. But you can also use it to directly build your brand and reputation by soliciting followup reviews.

Avery Manko of the Manko Company did just that, to great success:

“The loyalty marketing feature is brilliant. I have several automations set up but my favorite is an automation for collecting Google reviews. It was super easy to set up: for the subject line I wrote ‘Can I ask a favor’ I then wrote a simple email that asks the customer if they’d be willing to write a review and I included the link to my Google Reviews that takes them to my reviews page. It was that simple.”

—Avery Manko

The result? Dozens of five-star reviews since he started requesting reviews. Now, soliciting reviews may not be right for every situation; you’d never use it for a private-access company store, for example. But for distributor stores and retail-oriented company stores, reviews can make a huge difference not just in exposure, but also in click-thoughs – users are much more likely to click on businesses and web sites that have good ratings.

Check out the Manko Company here, and if you’d like to learn more about our marketing automation tools, we’ve got an instructional video for you as well as an overview here on the blog.

Categories: Articles