Blog: company stores

As you know, email spam is a constant problem for anyone doing business online. Symantec’s current figures show over 14 billion spam messages per day, and the problem continues to get worse. For you, that means that there is an ever-increasing likelihood that critical messages like order acknowledgments or registration confirmations might not make it to you or your customer.

Since most of our company stores, distributor websites and supplier sites send out transactional email (messages related to an e-commerce transaction of some sort), we’re constantly on the lookout for email deliverability issues. Recently, we began the process of upgrading our email services to ensure that every single message gets through to its intended recipients. This includes tools that provide much better insight into what happens to messages once they get sent out. Put simply, we now have the ability to not just track emails all the way to their recipients, but also to find out where they run into problems along the way.

We expect that these improvements will result in far fewer problems with email delivery. But nothing is perfect, so we’d also like to offer some tips for troubleshooting email problems. These apply to both you and your customers, so feel free to pass them along!

1. Check your spam folder

Sure, this is the oldest tip in the book, but you’d be surprised how often people forget it! All sorts of strange factors can trigger spam flags on legitimate messages, from specific types of language to the excessive use of exclamation points. A sender that normally makes it into your inbox shouldn’t usually be flagged because of this, but it happens periodically.

Most email clients have a clearly visible “Spam” or “Junk” folder, so if your sender’s message wound up in there, it’s important to both move the message to your inbox and make sure that you click any “Not Spam” or “Not Junk” buttons that your email client displays on the message. That will help ensure (though nothing is foolproof) that the sender doesn’t get sent into spam purgatory again.

2. Check other automated folders

Many email clients now try to organize your messages for you to help you sort through the mass of email and determine what to look at first. Google’s Gmail now groups messages into four tabs: Inbox, Social, Promotions and Updates. Other emails clients now offer similar automated rules to put lower-priority messages in secondary tabs or folders, or allow you to designate “VIP” senders for special treatment.

These are all wonderful features, but they can often lead to confusion when a sender that normally gets placed into one bucket somehow winds up in a different one. Before you hit the panic button, make sure you check all your automated tabs and/or folders to make sure something didn’t trigger the message being sent to the wrong place. You still received it, just not where you were expecting

3. “Whitelist” the sender

Whitelisting is the process of telling your email client or email host that a given sender (or domain) is authorized to send you email. Think of it like making a guest list for your party and handing it to a doorman. The doorman (in this case, your email client or your email service provider) asks the sender if they are on the guest list; if they are, they’re allowed in, no matter how ugly their outfit or how cheap the bottle of wine they brought with them.

Whitelisting can be done in a variety of ways, but it’s most reliable when it’s done by your email provider. Check with them to see what options they offer; many email providers have a web interface for handling things like whitelisting and forwarding.

Tried all these and still having email issues? Give us a shout!

Categories: How-to

Tags: company stores e-commerce Email spam webspam

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

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