Blog: How-to

Sometimes you need to provide a different company store shopping experience for different groups of users, but you don’t want the headache and expense of setting up a bunch of different stores. Maybe some users need to see products that other users don’t see. Or maybe a department at your client’s company gets to pay with a purchase order, while everyone else has to pay via credit card.

storeBlox CS lets you manage all this with Groups. Splitting your users into groups enables much finer control over what users can view and purchase, and how they can pay for it. Essentially, you can create a “micro company store” for each group.

Using groups instead of multiple stores has numerous advantages over multiple stores (reduced cost being the most obvious one), but don’t sleep on the management benefits – you get to keep all your product management and reporting consolidated into a single place. With no product duplication or store switching, your management overhead is much lower.

For some stores, however, putting users into the groups is the most daunting task. Manually assigning each user to their appropriate group is a time-consuming task for company stores with many users. That’s where Group Landing Pages & URLs come in!

These features let you assign a user to a group automatically. When you send a user to a Group Landing Page, they are automatically assigned to the group you selected when you enabled the page. They don’t even need to know that they’re a part of the group; it’s transparent to them. From that point on, they will only see the products and payment methods that they are allowed to see. Orders they place that require approval will automatically be routed to their group’s approver.

A second option is a Group URL. This is a foolproof way to ensure that a user is assigned to a group even if they don’t register at that time. Once they have visited a group URL, anytime they register afterward, they will be automatically assigned to the group.

Either way, you’ve eliminated the need to set up users and assign them to groups ahead of time. It’s fast, easy and included with every storeBlox CS company store.  Ready to learn more? Attend our monthly free Company Stores 101 webinar!

Categories: How-to

Did you know you can export your users and import them into an email or newsletter service, or even into a CRM (customer relationship management) package? It’s easy!

1. Log into your webBlox dashboard
2. Select Manage Users
3. Click Export Results as CSV File

That’s it! You’ll have a file you can open in Excel orimport into services like Constant Contact, Mailchimpor CRM packages like Salesforce, Highrise, Zoho or any others.

Need help with an export or import? Just give us a shout! Want more detail? Here ‘s a great video overview of managing users. Need to reverse the process? Contact us for assistance with User Imports!

Categories: How-to

After abandonment (people leaving in the middle of the shopping or purchasing process), the biggest problem for e-commerce is getting users back to buy again — in other words, generating repeat business.

It’s also a given that an opt-in email address is golden — when a user registers on your site and you can send them promotions, they’re much more likely to buy again.

You can conquer both of these with a little email kung fu, using storeBlox CS email customization to offer incentives for registration.

Customizing emails in storeBlox CS can help build repeat business

1. Log in to your storeBlox CS webBlox dashboard
2. Under Content Administration, select Email Notifications
3. Edit the User Registration template
4. Add a one-time discount code, e.g. “Thank you for registering! To receive a discount on your next order, enter this code during checkout!”

You can use this two ways:

• Offer a benefit for registering – Splash an ad on the homepage using our handy banner manager (tutorial here) that offers a discount for registering, and link it to the registration form. You’ll have an opt-in email address and registered user.
• Surprise bonus – Added to the order confirmation or registration template, a discount code (tutorial here) for the user’s next order is a fabulous way to get that customer back and ordering again!

Soon, we’ll be adding the capability to send one-time emails only after the first order, for even better customization.

Categories: How-to