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You probably know that you can highlight products and categories using banners on your storeBlox CS company store home page (all easily managed in your dashboard), but there are a few other methods for showcasing specific products throughout your site. Need to promote a brand new product or move a product that isn’t selling? Give these a try!

Any product in your company store can be put on sale using Specials. Specials have a number of cool features that make them easy to set up and run. First, you can group multiple products into a special and then apply certain rules to all those products at once, like start and stop dates and discount percentage.

Second, specials allow you to set pricing at the product level if you don’t want a global discount. So, while you may want to put all your in-stock hats on sales for 10% off, you might also want to set a specific special price for your custom-ordered golf towels, since your customers can order them in larger quantities and you have to use column breaks. Either way, Specials has got your company store covered.

In addition to all the special pricing and messaging on the product page, products on special get highlighted in your search listings and category listings:

Another nifty way to highlight products is to use the New feature. By checking the New box on a product in the dashboard, you highlight the product with a special flag on the site, similar to the Special flag. This is a fantastic way to call out products you’ve recently added to your store.

Of course, don’t forget to use the storeBlox CS Product Activity Report to find out which products are moving and which ones are gathering dust. This report is a great way to target products to put on special and move them out of that warehouse!

Categories: How-to

Many storeBlox CS store owners don’t realize that each email that your store sends out – registrations, order notifications, requests and so on – is completely customizable, right in the dashboard. Don’t like the ones that come with your store? Toss them out and make your own!

Not only is each email completely customizable with our WYSIWYG editor (so you can format, add colors, tables, graphics, etc.), but we’ve also provided you with some dynamic fields that fill in automatically with information from the store, order or account. These fields are available for both the subject line of the email and the body of the email itself.

This provides a wide range of possibilities for customized messages, offers, loyalty marketing and more. Some examples:

Registration offers: Want more users to register for your site (so you can add them to your email marketing, for instance)? Create an incentive for registration, like a discount code. Add this code to the **User Registration** email and you’ve got a custom offer (using their name, of course!) for every user

Return Actions: One of the biggest challenges with online stores is encouraging repeat visits. The first order is great, but you really want to gain long-term, repeat customers whenever possible. By adding personalized messages to the Customer Confirmation email to encourage specific actions, you can create a “curiosity gap” that brings customers back after their order:

Encourage Feedback: One of the most difficult things to obtain from your company store customers is constructive feedback about your products and services. Most of us hate filling out surveys (unless we’re really mad about something), but the best time to get feedback from someone is when they’re directly interacting with you or immediately afterward. By adding a survey link to your Shipment Confirmation email, you can catch customers when they are most likely to be paying attention – when they get that shipment notification

These are just a few uses of email customization. It’s a nifty feature that everyone should use — after all, these are emails that customers are more likely to pay attention to. Take advantage of it!

Categories: Articles, 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