Blog: General

If you haven’t yet, you’re probably going to get an RFP or RFQ from a big customer that requires a company store with punch out (or “PunchOut”) capability. What exactly is a punch out store anyway? And why should you care?

A lot of large corporations use procurement software to control how goods are purchased. If you’re in the marketing department at one of these companies and you need to buy some pens, you log in to these systems —Ariba, Coupa, SAP, Oracle or one of many others—and place your order in there.

The primary advantage of these systems is controlling cost. They manage budgets, limit spending and try to make the purchasing process as efficient as possible. However, they don’t do things that some e-commerce stores can do, and that’s where the “punchout” comes in.

When you build a company store for a customer, it often contains complex products like apparel that will be decorated with one or more company logos, name drops or other customizations (all of which are easy to setup in storeBlox CS, of course!). Instead of configuring and buying these products in one of these applications, a punchout allows the buyer to temporarily exit to buy these goods in your company store—which can handle all that decoration a lot more easily—then pushes the transactions back into the procurement system.

If it sounds complex, it is! There are a lot of moving parts, but the good news is that storeBlox CS supports punchouts with nearly every major system using the cXML standard.

At eBlox, we’re pros with punchouts, so if you’ve got an opportunity and need some help answering questions, digging into technical details or building a punchout strategy for your customer or prospect, give us a shout!

Categories: General

We’ve been building technology for the promotional products/wearables business for almost 14 years, and we’ve learned a lot of lessons along the way, including how challenging it can be for e-commerce sites to rank well in search engines. We finally decided to distill years of experience practicing and teaching search engine optimization into a free eBook.

Sample pages from our new SEO eBook

This easy-to-digest volume includes tips on how to correct problems with your site, how to build original content and how to leverage some of the idiosyncrasies of search traffic to craft a strategy for grabbing more visitors and sales. It’s almost 30 pages of SEO goodness and knowledge and it’s absolutely FREE. Download it here.

Categories: General

As many of you know, Adobe’s Flash technology is on its way out, at least for the kind of animations and banners that most companies feature on their homepages. Flash animations do not work with Apple’s mobile devices, which now constitute a large chunk of the web browsing public. In general, Flash animations do not work well with any “touch” device because of technical limitations. In order to keep our clients at the forefront of web and mobile technology, eBlox is pleased to offer two new services:

• Flash conversion: If you have any Flash-based content on your home page, eBlox will rebuild it in HTML5, which works in all modern browsers and touch devices. HTML5 is the standard that most web sites and devices are moving toward, so conversion of your animations, including their interactive features and buttons, is a wise move for forward-thinking company store managers.

HTML5 banners have interaction and animation, and work on all modern browsers.

• HTML5 Animation: eBlox will create original HTML5 animations and presentations for your homepage or other site areas (we’ve got a couple of good examples in this project and this one). HTML5 banners work on almost all mobile and touch devices, such as iPads and other tablets, and have the same type of animation, interactivity and “gee-whiz” factor as Flash animations. If you’d like a quote on HTML5 animations or banners for your company store (or any site you manage), please contact us for a quote.

Categories: General