Blog: company stores 101

Does your company store handle orders that get fulfilled by multiple outside vendors? For instance, do your stocked hard goods come from a fulfillment warehouse, while your name drop apparel gets routed to a embroiderer? Good news: Using Vendors in storeBlox CS, you can handle any kind of order routing, from simple to complex.

A Vendor in storeBlox CS is any entity that fulfills a product for your store. There are two types of vendors: “Manufacturer/Supplier” and “Warehouse”. In practice, you’ll want to use the former for drop-ship (custom) orders and the latter for in-stock (fulfillment) orders.

Setting up a product to use a vendor is a two-step process.

Create the vendor

First, you create the vendor in the dashboard, entering the relevant contact information:

Assign Products

Second, you assign your product a vendor on the product edit page:

And that’s it! The rest of it is done automatically for you – when a customer places an order, storeBlox CS automatically sends the relevant document to the vendor for each product in the order. Manufacturer/supplier vendors get a Purchase Order while Warehouse vendors get a Pick Slip.

Best of all, it doesn’t matter how complex an individual order is; even when a customer orders items across multiple vendors (say, a dozen custom-decorated polos and a couple mugs from the warehouse) storeBlox CS automatically breaks the order down and sends the appropriate documents to each vendor.

One other cool benefit: By using vendors, your shipping rates will be calculated accurately from the vendor facility to the shipping address for each item in the order. This means accurate shipment rates for every item in an order, regardless of how it’s split up. If you’re not using vendors to streamline your fulfillment processes, give it a try now!

Categories: How-to

Tags: company store company stores 101 e-commerce purchase orders purchasing storeBlox CS supply chain vendors

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

Tags: company store company stores 101 e-commerce purchasing storeBlox CS

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

Tags: company store company stores 101 Email marketing storeBlox CS