A Look Forward and Back at the eMerchantClub eCommerce Website
As the New Year looms just around the corner, now is the time to prepare to hit the ground running, boost your business efforts and launch your strategies for the coming year. In an effort to help you clearly envision the steps you might take with your business, we thought it would be a good time to give you a glimpse into what is coming up for your eMerchantClub eCommerce website in the very near future. First, let’s take a glimpse back at this year. In 2009 the eMerchantClub eCommerce website went through several important upgrades. In March, we released the Version 9.03 with tons of new features including Product Reviews, the Abandoned Shopping Cart Promotion feature, Product FAQ’s, the Facebook Social Networking Integration tool, the Image Editor, and much more. The 9.03 release was a large, feature-rich sub-release which offered an incredible wealth of new features and tools for your eCommerce website. For a complete list and description of all the features offered in this release, click here or click here for a past newsletter article on some of the 9.03 tools. This huge sub-release was followed up with our annual Version upgrade to the Version 10 in July. The Version 10 offered dynamic new animated content which allowed your site to be transformed with a brand new and up-to-date look. Version 10 offered ten stylish new layouts, each equipped with easily-customizable animated mini-applications (widgets) that display your products in a moving, interactive and attractive way. These new widgets included the image slider, carousel, 3D stack, product slider, accordion, product gallery, and video widgets. In addition to the various types of animated widgets, the Version 10 also gave you a Library for Creating and Maintaining Carousels and Slide Shows, Google Checkout, PayPal Express, MySpace Social Networking Integration, and much more. For a complete list of features offered on the Version 10, click here or click here for a past newsletter article on some of the Version 10 features. The Version 10.1, released in October offered new Holiday themes for your Version 10 layouts, including the Christmas, Thanksgiving and general holiday themes. In addition, a new product sorting option and a new pagination style were introduced. Improvements to the code were also made to keep up with changing PCI standards as well as improvements to streamline the checkout process for your shoppers. For a complete list and description of the features and enhancements offered in this release, click here, or click here to read our past newsletter article on the 10.1 release. The eMerchantClub eCommerce website is enhanced and improved year-round in order to help vitalize your business. 2009 saw huge enhancements and improvements to your eMerchantClub eCommerce website. Now, let’s take a look at some of the things which you can look forward to in the early part of 2010. The 10.2 sub-release for your eMerchantClub eCommerce website will be released in the first part of the New Year. This sub-release will offer some great new features and enhancements which are geared towards helping you to improve your search engine ranking as well as some enhancements to help you improve your e-mail marketing efforts. The new Product Upload / Download feature is designed to make it easier for you to optimize the keywords on your site. This tool will allow you to quickly download all of your product descriptions into an Excel file where you can easily edit your descriptions to include important keywords with the goal of improving your search engine rankings. After completing the changes in the Excel file, you can upload the file back to your site, where all of the changes will be applied in seconds. This new tool makes it possible to optimize all of your products in one file and is designed to allow you to complete a task in hours which would otherwise take several days or weeks.
The Product Upload / Download feature is an important addition to your website with the capability to allow you to greatly improve your website’s content and ranking. The 10.2 release will also enhance the Newsletter feature of your website, located at Marketing > Newsletters. These enhancements will offer you safeguards which will allow you to more effectively launch e-mail marketing campaigns without being labeled as a spammer (or blacklisted) by the major e-mail providers. E-mail marketing is one of the more effective and cost-free ways of marketing your business, however it is extremely easy to find yourself blacklisted and prevented from sending messages to your registered and potential shoppers. The enhancements offered in the Version 10.2 sub-release will include a double opt-in feature in which your new registered and potential shoppers must verify their e-mail address shortly after registration. This feature will ensure that shoppers are providing you with a valid e-mail address and they are also expressly giving their consent to receive promotional and other e-mails from you. These measures will greatly reduce the danger of finding yourself on the blacklist. In addition to the double opt-in enhancement, the 10.2 will come with enhanced back-end procedures for sending e-mail and a new way to use your own e-mail provider to send bulk e-mails from your Site Manager. Look forward to future newsletter articles which will educate you on effective e-mail marketing methods and the ways to avoid the dangers and pitfalls of becoming a spammer. The Version 10.2 will also offer new holiday layout themes for your Version 10 layouts, including Valentines Day, Mothers Day, and Fathers Day themes.
In addition these new features offered in the 10.2, next year will offer you the option of purchasing the new Keyword Maximizer package, which includes two important new enhancements. The first enhancement is a seamless link from eMerchantClub’s Site Manager to Google’s Keyword Tool. (Seamless means that Google™ comes to you in your Site Manager.) You supply current keywords or phrases or even your own eMerchantClub website address, and the Google™ tool will give you a list of suggested keywords and phrases and the stats on their effectiveness at driving traffic to websites. The second enhancement offered in the Keyword Maximizer package is a new Find and Replace tool which allows you to find all of the occurrences of a certain word or phrase on your site and replace them with new keywords of your choosing. With this package, you can use Google’s Keyword Tool to help you figure out which keywords to target and then you can use the Find and Replace tool to add those keywords to your site. This package also works great with the Product Upload / Download feature that is offered in the Version 10.2 mentioned earlier. The enhancements won’t stop there. After the 10.2 release, eMerchantClub will continue to apply new features and enhancements to your site in further releases which will be sure to help you keep your business rolling successfully through 2010. If your site does not include some of the mentioned features, give us a call at (888) 806-2081 for information on getting these features or for information on purchasing the Keyword Maximizer package.
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