Blog: company store

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

Sometimes your customer may be looking for something specific – not just a polo, but a blue polo. Or a polo that fits within a specific budget. They can now do all that and more with new color and price filtering enhancements to storeBlox CS.

Now your customers can narrow down their choices in any listing  by product color and/or specific budget. Hunting around for a Turquoise t-shirt and tired of clicking on every item in apparel to find it? Color filtering shows the colors available for the list of products currently being viewed. Now it’s crazy easyto find the item in the color you want.

Price filtering lets customers set their price ranges to the penny, and they can combine them with color filtering to find that special item that satisfies their Goldilocks needs!

Plus: Shopping Cart Conversion Tracking

If you use Google’s Adwords or other ad networks to drive customers to your company store, you can now track all the details of purchase conversion. This enables true ROI (return on investment) tracking of your advertising efforts, by transmitting the order amount back to the ad network:

The new feature includes a variable that can be inserted in any snippet of conversion tracking code, so this can be used with any ad network or analytics tool that tracks shopping cart conversions. It’s easy to put your ad network’s tracking code into the dashboard, but if you need help, just call us!

Under the Hood Improvements

Web sites aren’t perfect, and occasionally they produce errors. In an effort to make the company store experience more robust, we’ve introduced a new automated, detailed error reporting system into storeBlox CS for 2017 that will allow us to track down those pesky problems and squash them even faster than before.

All these features are in your store, right now! Need help or a tutorial? Give us a shout today!

Categories: Launches

Tags: adwords company store e-commerce google promotional products search storeBlox CS

storeBlox CS has had nifty group management features for your company store for quite some time, allowing you to manage group access to things like product categories and budgets, or to automate registrations. It’s also got powerful approval controls, enabling you to fine-tune who gets to buy what and when a higher-up needs to review the purchase.

Put those two together and – boom! – you’ve got the chocolate-and-peanut-butter of company store purchasing management (yes, we really said that): Group Approvers! Group Approvers are approvers that you assign to a (wait for it) group.

Since you can already manage approvers at the user level, Group Approvers allow you to control approval at a higher level and reassign approvers to large numbers of users when someone leaves or changes roles. Available now for all customers.

New Editor

We felt that our WYSIWYG editor (the little menubar that lets you format text for your products, landing pages and other site content) was getting a little long in the tooth, so like a good dentist we ripped it out and replaced it with a brand new one:

In addition to just working better, the new editor includes support for full-screen editing, easier source code editing (for you HTML wizards) and more formatting options. It’s in your dashboard now. Check it out!

Date Modified Sorting

Put this in the “a customer beat us over the head until we finally added it” category: You can now sort products by date modified! 

This is a useful way to sort products you are updating to find what you most recently worked on. Combined with the fabulous View History feature on the Product Edit page, it’s also a great auditing tool to see what’s going on if things don’t seem right with your products.

All these features are in your store, right now! Need help or a tutorial? Give us a shout or sign up for a helpful storeBlox CS webinar today!

Categories: General

Tags: company store company stores storeBlox CS