Blog: apparel

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

Tags: apparel company store company stores 101 e-commerce promotional products

We like to close out each year with some analysis of the transactions that run through the storeBlox CS company store system. This year we thought it might be fun to see exactly how 2016 stacked up to the year before. Maybe we’d unearth some upcoming trends! Or predict the downfall of some fading product category!

Nope. 2016 was, well, pretty similar to 2015. Across millions of dollars in company store transactions, the most popular product categories and their respective shares largely stayed the same, almost like a mirror image:

Apparel and Drinkware continue their reign as the champions of company store sales, with Hats, Office & Desktop and Writing Instruments rounding out the top 5. In fact, the only real significant movement we saw was a 3% drop in Holiday products.

Nothing earth shattering here. Average order size for 2016 was $304, which has increased slightly over the last few years. What can we glean from this? A few thoughts:

• Company stores are an established, mature business with a consistently varied product mix
• A successful product mix is pretty clear – the top 5 rarely change
• If you’re not sure what to pitch to your customers, you pretty much can’t miss with wearables and drinkware

Need some nifty statistics for your next presentation? Wanna talk company store shop? Give us a shout today!

Categories: Articles

Tags: apparel company stores product trends promotional products year in review

eBlox is proud to announce the launch of Leaderpromos.com, a top 50 promotional products and apparel distributor headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. Leaderpromos.com is a completely new web presence that showcases new features and technology for Leaderpromos’ clients, which includes top companies like Starbucks, Intel, Zappos and many others.

“Leaderpromos challenged us to create cutting-edge technology to help their clients discover and save products more easily,” noted eBlox CEO Brent Buford. “Our developers built new tools like the Idea Board and Sample Bag that take the friction out of these processes and encourage new ways of interacting.”

First among these innovations is the Idea Board, a proactive tool that enables seamless, one-click saving of products for projects. Always just a click away in a floating tab on the site, Idea Boards can be shared with colleagues instantly or printed for presentations.

In addition, eBlox streamlined the sample ordering process for Leaderpromos.com so that any number of samples can be ordered with a minimum of clicks. No login is required and sample ordering and management is consolidated onto a single, easy-to-use Sample Bag page.

Built on eBlox’ storeBlox e-commerce platform, Leaderpromos.com is fully responsive for mobile devices, completely secured with SSL and packed with useful features like easy product color filtering and built-in blog posting.

Check out Leaderpromos.com and give us a shout if you’d like to explore what storeBlox can do for your company.

Categories: Launches

Tags: apparel distributor e-commerce launch promotional products storeblox