Objective

The distributor wanted to ensure that customers stayed engaged and kept coming back for more. So, we came up with Loyalty Program Software, a plan to make the loyalty program work seamlessly and provide perfect customer engagement solutions.

Challenges faced

In today’s business arena, it’s difficult to manage multiple tasks efficiently and, most importantly, to continue engaging with potential customers. Here are some challenges faced by upsellers and cross-sellers.

• Lack of customer engagement
• Managing loyalty programs
• Manual entry of reward points
• Long waiting times and lost sales
• Redemption process inefficiencies
• Tracking top reward point collectors

Solution Provided

We aimed for simplicity, creating an accessible software system for all businesses searching for Customer Retention Tools. It features a web interface and mobile app, simplifying loyalty rewards management effortlessly.

Web Interface for Admin

• Admin can set reward points based on SKU prices and profit margins through the web interface.
• The system automates the process of assigning reward points, eliminating the need for manual entry and saving time. No more manual work!
• Admin can generate and print reward point details directly from the backend, enhancing efficiency. Save time effortlessly!

Mobile Application for Customers

• Customers download the mobile application from the Play Store and register using basic details.
• Upon registration, customers create their profiles within the app.
• Scan product barcodes to instantly retrieve assigned reward points.
• Accumulate points with purchases to encourage repeat business.

Reward Point Redemption Process

• When customers make purchases at the shop, they scan the barcode printed on the product’s backend using the mobile application.
• The app instantly retrieves the corresponding reward points assigned by the admin team from the web app.
• Customers accumulate reward points with each purchase, incentivizing repeat business and higher spending.

Redemption Request Workflow

• Customers can redeem accumulated reward points by submitting redemption requests through the mobile application.
• These requests are routed to the web app managed by the admin team for approval and processing.
• Upon approval, customers receive their rewards, fostering loyalty and satisfaction.

The Result

The advanced Rewards Program Software makes it much easier for the sellers and their customers to earn and use loyalty points. It’s a big improvement!

• The software automates the entire loyalty program, saving you time.
• The system ensures that every point is counted accurately, without mistakes.
• This makes customers excited to shop with you again, increasing customer engagement.
• Using such software leads to higher profits and increased sales.

About Xcellence-It

At Xcellence-IT, we leverage over 15 years of expertise as a leading certified development company. We specialize in e-commerce development, custom solutions, website design, mobile app development, IT consulting, and system integration. We assist our customers in building their online businesses by providing Integrity Business Solutions.

Ready to take your online business to the next level? Reach out to us today to discuss your needs and goals.

The post Efficient Loyalty Rewards Program Software for Up-selling and Cross-selling appeared first on Xcellence-IT.

Learning from mistakes is the key. Taking lessons from your own mistake as well as those of others helps you avoid those and make some others..:)

If you’re a Web Designer or a Software Developer, you must have at some point of time made following funny mistakes…

• “I accidentally put a half-finished (with massive broken bits) update of a website over top of the current live one without a back-up.”
• “Worst programming mistake: editing off a live server and then uploading an old version of the website. All files lost!”
• “Sat on the development FTP for half an hour, being mad that the live website wouldn’t update!”
• “Deleted the shopping cart table from a live website instead of deleting one of the records in the table.”
• “Uploading to the dev website FTP and wondering why the live website wasn’t changing, which sent me around the bend in the process!”

Seems to be a familiar mistakes? Here is a article on “What Is The Worst Design or Programming Mistake You’ve Ever Made?” if you want to read more.

The post Worst Design or Programming Mistake many of us make appeared first on Xcellence-IT.

Many a times, our e-Commerce customers doesn’t know what does the PCI DSS means? And how important it is to their store, and how it protects their buyers and themselves too. So I decided to write an article explaining what is PCI DSS, and how it helps any Shopping Cart / e-Commerce website or Online Retailers. And why your online store must have these things implemented.

What is PCI DSS?

The standard was created to increase controls around cardholder data to reduce credit card fraud via its exposure. Validation of compliance is done annually — by an external Qualified Security Assessor (QSA) for organizations handling large volumes of transactions, or by Self-Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ) for companies handling smaller volumes.

Refer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_DSS

In more simple words, it is the standards for securing sensitive information of your customers when they do any transactions using your services. It could be a Debit or Credit card information, or any other sensitive information involving any kind of payment cards.

Why should e-Commerce Shopping Cart Store comply with PCI Security Standards?

So, why should any online retailer comply with it? Its seems very confusing and complex too. No, you’re wrong. Its not the headache you’re expecting but a solution to prevent a security breach.

Getting your e-Commerce store secured with PCI Security Standards means:

• Ensures that your e-Commerce system is secured, and customers can trust you with their sensitive payment card information.
• Customer’s trust will result in more long term business.
• Increases your reputation among your customers and your partners
• Prevent common security breaches and theft of card details by making sure your store is compliant in future as well.

And if your e-Commerce application is not compliant:

• It can negatively affect your customers, buyers and your partners
• One such data breach incident can damage your reputation and your ability to conduct business effectively resulting into loss of business
• And several other consequences like lawsuits, insurance claims, cancelled accounts, etc.

You’ve invested a lot for success of your e-Commerce store, and non compliance may break your dream. Make sure to secure your success by securing your customers sensitive data.

For more details, refer: https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/security_standards/why_comply.php

What does it mean for me, as an e-Commerce store owner?

This is a must read article for all e-Commerce sites owners, and you should ask your e-Commerce solution provider whether the e-Commerce solution they provide are compliant to PCI DSS or not?

And if the e-Commerce application you’re developing or getting developed from some e-Commerce development company, then make sure you insist on this feature. Also make sure to get it verified by third party security consultants whether it has been implemented correctly or not.

To get started with PCI Data Security Standards: https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/security_standards/getting_started.php

These small measures will make sure your success as serious e-Commerce company. We at Xcellence-IT, makes sure that all our custom development software and application adheres to strict guidelines and industry standards incorporating proven methods, so our customers can rely on us for secure, reliable and scalable software application.

We can Help

We also specialize at offering our expert e-Commerce solutions & services which ensures that you get the finest bundle of software to power your e-Commerce store. Our custom e-Commerce solution built on the top of NopCommerce, is already incorporating all such industry standards & security practices including PCI DSS.

If you’re looking for expert e-Commerce development company or a NopCommerce Development Company, make sure to contact us to discuss how we can help you.

The post Why your e-Commerce Store should comply with PCI DSS? appeared first on Xcellence-IT.

Everyone knows the importance of having a website. For any business to flourish, it has to have a strong web presence on the internet. And just having an amateurish website design Wouldn’t do! Your website design has to be such that it captures visitors’ attention and make them stay longer.

Here are few errors must to AVOID while you design your website:

• Don’t pick a domain name that is not appropriate for your business.
• Avoid “under construction” sign on your website.
• Avoid the usage of visitors counter.
• Avoid much use of animation, gimmicks and flashes.
• Lacks of copy write statements.
• Poor design and slow functionality.
• Over use of technology.
• Passive verbs.
• Long content makes visitors distract from your website.
• Bad navigations.
• No place for feedbacks comments or question.
• No contact information.
• Ignoring statistic.
• Free and cheap hosting.

When designing website these are a number of decisions that you will make that can have a huge impact on the long-term success of the site. Many times these decisions don’t seem as important as just getting the site up and running and as a result they don’t get the attention they deserve. So avoid all the above points to have a great site.

First impressions are really important, especially on the internet, so remember; you have to do a lot in a really short time!

Xcellence IT would appreciate you to contact our team to learn more about how we can put our expertise and experience to work for you!

The post Must Avoid Business Website Mistakes appeared first on Xcellence-IT.

Search engine spiders are out there crawling the internet – looking for content that’s relevant. For search engines like Google and Bing, the goal is to provide the most relevant results for any given search query. As the search algorithms change and adapt to the newest SEO tricks, and as the tricks adapt to the new algorithms, one thing will stay constant; good content is good content, and eventually it will get noticed.

Always keep in mind your target audience while you draft your content for SEO, addressing the audiences at once is the art of SEO. The following points should be kept in mind for relevant content for SEO:

• Importance of your web copy.
• Write for your visitor not majorly for SEO.
• Don’t forget the keywords.
• Keep your content fresh-your visitors will loves them and so Search Engines.
• Edit the long story in short without losing its main essence.
• Usage of “call-to-action button” like buy now, contacts us or subscribe now.
• Anticipating your customers’ needs, and writing a message that engages with them increases your chance of an enquiry or sale.
• Don’t perform SEO without even checking out the competition.

The search engine algorithms are putting more and more emphasis on the relevancy of the written content of your website. If a website contains lots of good content that talks about your search keywords, it is going to be rated higher.

The more keywords-centric content you have, the better is your chance of getting a higher ranking once a search is conducted by your prospective customer or client. And writing a good relevant content material for your search engine than your search just stops at XCELLENCE-IT.

We would appreciate you to contact our team to learn more about how we can put our expertise and experience to work for you!

The post Why Good Content is Important for SEO appeared first on Xcellence-IT.

Refer the under mentioned tip to improve your sale for your present website or for your new one:

• Avoid using lengthy web copies and use short headings to act as an advantage.
• Paragraph all in bold and caps should be avoided.
• Be in the visitor’s shoes and write the article to seek their problem, to give them personal touch.
• Offer all the needed required information to your visitors.
• Make your website content on various other important article
• Plan your copy at your target audience.
• Articles posted on the web should be brief and easy to understand.
• Be careful in graphics and colour combination in regard to your website content.
• Avoid wrong colour combination.
• Articles posted on the website should be classified.
• Placing advantages of your product on your web copy will be of great benefit.
• Place your copy in such a way that it becomes informative, encouraging and sale generating in context of customers.
• Usage of easy and direct language would be of great benefit.

The above tips will surely inspire you to get serious about you web presence. The ultimate objective of any advertising media is to generate sale and profit and website is one of the important medium of such form of advertising. Take the time to get your website up to scratch and catch up to the firms that are using the internet strategically. It’s easier and more affordable to achieve these things than you probably think and the results you can get with an effective web presence are limitless.

We would appreciate you to contact our team to learn more about how we can put our expertise and experience to work for you!

The post The Top Ten Checks For Low Web Site Sales appeared first on Xcellence-IT.

The internet is now widely used around the globe for a number of purposes like for online shopping, to get information, to book tickets, to reserve hotel rooms and many more applications. There are a lot of individuals and companies who market their product and services through the internet; hence it becomes necessary that you design your website flawless and make it attractive, informative and functional so as to attract more and more customers and retain them and get paid dividend for long term.

How important is Website Design for big business houses? Big business Website needs to look professional and trustworthy in order to create buyer confidence. A poorly designed Website will cost you sales. Creating a website for a big enterprise becomes a tedious job as it becomes hard to cover all the data.

First impression counts a lot in web designing, it should have that appeal which attracts the viewer to stop and go through the website in more detail, if you achieve that than you sure will achieve your sales and revenue. There should be a balance maintained between the advertisement and content, such can be solved. A misplaced content, navigational dead-ends and confusion that curses the worst Website could easily be evaded by site managers with appropriate planning and administrations.

The umpteen success of website is said that it depends on the traffic generated on your website. It is important to have someone who specializes in SEO to go over your Website and make sure it is ready to get crawled and indexed by the search engines. This will tell you whether your website has the essence of people interest to generate you sale, revenues or business. Once you get success in generating traffic than the use of traffic corridor study parameters looking for the dead ends as well as more often used click tracks is considered good initiative.

The next thing important after generating traffic is to check your website bounce rate. The percentage of visitors who leave without first visiting another page is the called the Bounce rate. You should compare through all old sites whether the linked information had more visitors in that site design pattern. Moreover, if you feel to ascertain whether your present site design if intended changes may work, approach directly to the source and census your visitors.
Internet market or website success can only be gauge by the latest technics used. Try to team up the various site designers or groups on the questionnaire who are probably always on the site design decisions.

Though many web designers do not agree, contending the alike Web sites the extensive study and creative ideas are considered as the most common means. The expert site creator gets educated by the skills and designs of other Web sites without copying it thoroughly.

Even if your product or services are good but you would need a good web design to attract customers to generate revenues and dividend for long term. A good web site design would be appealing to the eyes and would have easy to understand, informative and interesting contents that would capture the interest of the visitors. . Choose the ones that provide you quality services at affordable rates.

About Xcellence-IT

We at Xcellence-IT, don’t just design & develop websites, but we offer the complete solution that includes consulting that helps ensure your website success in online space. Xcellence-IT is a India based Web Design & Web Development Company providing professional Website Design, Custom Web Development, eCommerce Solutions and Internet Marketing Services. It’s One Stop stop for all your web related requirements.

Look at our Portfolio, Client List, Testimonials and talk to us directly using Online Chat or send us your inquiry and request a free quote for your website.

The post Good Web Design Pays Dividends for Long Time appeared first on Xcellence-IT.

And many web masters use WordPress as CMS to provide easy to manage CMS to their clients. We use WordPress for our clients too. And while we do offer some of them an Admin user, to others we offer editor user. Because, sometimes its dangerous to play with admin user, when your clients does not fully understand WordPress or are web novices.. they can easily mess up the website under Admin level.

But to manage website efficiently using editor role, client needs to manage Menu (WordPress Menu) to be able to modify the navigation, as well as update Widget. Using normal editor role, they are not presented with Appearance section of the WordPress administrator panel.

So what we want is to allow editor to manage menu, widget, background colors from their editor login. While this is not presented by default to the editor, we can change this with a simple following code.

Following code will allow the Editor role access to: Menus, Theme Options (but will not be able to switch, add or edit themes), Background (3.0+), Header (3.0+) and Widgets.

// get the the role object
$role_object = get_role( 'editor' );

// add $cap capability to this role object
$role_object->add_cap( 'edit_theme_options' );

You need to add above code into your theme function.php file.

While you don’t always require to allow editor to manage these functions, you can add above code only for those clients where you are offering them editor login to manage their contents and site.

The post Providing WordPress editor to manage Menu, Widget and Background in Appearance Section appeared first on Xcellence-IT.

Businesses use internet to promote and sale their products online to a wider market. The advantages of selling online is that it can take place anywhere and at any time of the day. With various e-commerce solutions, it has become easier to sell online, 24 x 7, without engaging expensive sales staff round the clock.

But before starting an e-commerce store, one must gain some knowledge of online business, its process and major open source ecommerce shopping cart solutions applications.

But before looking into that, let’s first look at what is e-commerce?

What is e-Commerce?

Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce or eCommerce, consists of buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as Internet or computer networks. I would like to add mobile networks too in this list. Because with increasing numbers of smart phones and data services on mobile networks, people are using mobiles to buy products and services online from various websites.

An e-commerce site can be as simple as single page website with phone number and order form that collects customer details. Or it can be fully functional website with dynamic multiple category catalog, with real time payment processing functionality, where customers can purchase goods or receive them as downloads on the spot. People now-a-days sells virtual items such as access to premium content on a website too. But still a large chunk is generated by selling or retailing products online.

With an advancement of internet, amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily and is supposed to grow further at a steady pace.

E-Commerce became possible at the birth of current version of Internet in the year 1991. Amazon and eBay are the first internet company to embrace the idea of e-commerce, and since then many others has joined. Nowadays, you can buy anything via internet.

Normally, ecommerce is considered as the sales aspect of e-business. But it is much more than just selling online. There is B2B (Business-to-Business) e-commerce models where one business sells goods to other businesses. And there are B2C (Business-to-Customers) e-commerce models where business sells to its customers. Other varieties include, C2C (Consumer-to-Consumer) where consumers sell to each other, for example through auction sites like ebay. P2P (Peer-to-Peer) is another form of e-commerce that allows users to share resources and files directly. There are other form of e-commerce too, which sells products by auction, or offer group discounts, etc.

Let’s now look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of e-commerce.

Advantages of e-Commerce

• Time saving: eCommerce saves time of sellers as well as buyers. From sellers perspective, you don’t need to be present always, because your site sells for you to any number of visitors by presenting information, comparisons, pictures, video on your e-Commerce website. And buyers can buy at any time from home or work from the ease of their computer or mobile phones.
• Wider range of products: As a seller, you can offer wider range of products to your buyers where your customers can browse, compare, read or write a review or buy one.  Unlike, retail shop, it’s not always necessary to have product in your inventory, you can sell it first, and then procure it to deliver to your buyers. Moreover, your buyers can browse your online catalog themselves or search to find what they are looking for.
• Allows small businesses to do big business online: Starting e-commerce shopping cart portal costs much less relatively to opening a new retail shop physically. A new business can start and do a big business online with small cost.
• Opens new channel or market: It’s like opening a new shop that is accessible to all a worldwide international market. You can easily build multi-lingual and multi-currency e-commerce shopping cart that can sell across geographies, in newer market where you do not have access otherwise.
• Its Open – 24X7: With ecommerce shopping cart website, your business sells even when you play, sleep or vacation. It stays open for every day of the week, every week of the year. Your ecommerce website is your receptionist, greeter and the sales people and can serve your online shop visitors 24X7 without complain.
• Reach quickly to the World Wide Market: With ecommerce shopping cart website, you can reach to the world wide market. Advertise on Internet using SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SEM (Search Engine Marketing) or SMM (Social Media Marketing) and you can reach out to the potential customers all over the world quickly at small cost.
• Real Time Payment: With ecommerce shopping cart website, buyers can pay online securely in real time, and sellers can receive money in real time using online payment gateways.

Disadvantages of e-Commerce

• Delivery time lag: eCommerce saves time, but unlike traditional business, there is a delivery time lag between order and delivery. Of course, there are several products or services which can be delivered online, just like a software, music, movie or e-book, but some products just cannot be delivered online instantly. For such product, there will be a delivery time lag which is annoying for buyers.
• Unable to feel the physical product: It’s nearly impossible to feel the Playstation or X-Box online, until you goes into store and play it there. Just like this, it is impossible to feel things like furniture online. Furniture is something people like to sit on it and feel it themselves. It’s a challenge that eCommerce cannot fulfil.
• It takes time to make a big: Although starting an online ecommerce shop is easy and less costly, it takes time to make it big. It requires at-least few months to get recognized by search engines and few more months until you start making money to cover costs.
• Security Concerns: People are not still very much confident about using their credit card online. This might stops them to buy online from your store. Make sure your ecommerce portal have other payment methods too.
• Lack of Expertise and Technology knowledge: We have seen numbers of ecommerce sites coming online each day, but only few of them are able to make it big. It’s because of lack of technology knowledge and expertise in running the online store. Moreover, legal environment in which e-commerce is conducted is full of unclear and conflicting laws. However, with hiring the right ecommerce development and internet marketing company, you can overcome this.
• Lack of Knowledge on how to operate & manage e-commerce store: Apart of technology knowhow, there is a lack of knowledge on how to operate ecommerce site profitably. Because of its online nature, its management do also differ. You have best product at cheapest price, but still you might not make a sale. It may be because of several other things that needs to be considered and tweaked accordingly to increase a sale.

With this discussion, let us now conclude this article. But note that this is just a first part of Beginners Guide to e-Commerce Solution, there will be more expert information on this topic very soon.

In the next few article, you will find:

• What is Shopping Cart? Why do I need it? With Several promising opensource Shopping Cart applications
• Things to consider while starting an e-Commerce business
• Effective tips for e-Commerce store

If you like this article, please don’t forget to share it with your friends, and share your thoughts with us by commenting here.

The post Beginner’s Guide to e-Commerce Solution appeared first on Xcellence-IT.

Apart from several launches, we have been busy working on deploying CRM & Customer Portal. Although, still we’re working on it to integrate it with our processes and operations.. and get everything deployed right. We hope to complete it soon, and launch Customer Portal for all our clients. Currently we offered access of Customer Portal only to certain clients.

Moreover, we have just started using newer Project Management System which is more robust and easier to use. This transition is definitely going to take some time. But we’ll complete it very soon. Moreover, in near future we’ll be able to offer access to our clients for their Projects on our newer Project Management System. So our customers will be able to see the daily progress of their Projects and interact directly with the team working on their project on a centralized location so everything is organized & recorded at one place which is common to us and our clients. This effort is inline with our goal of offering excellent services to all our customers, ensuring of highest level of integrity and transparency while offering services.

We’ll update about Customer Portal and Project Management System here in coming weeks.

Moreover, last few days was really fun at Xcellence-IT, as we tried and tested HTML5 and CSS3 on one of the project. Its really innovative and challenging to get everything done on the HTML5/CCS3 with Cross-Browser Compatibility. However,  until it becomes standard and browsers starts fully supporting it, there is a limited usability of it and one must care while choosing HTML5/CSS3 for project.

Lets conclude here, as it is really getting late tonight. You can expect more very soon.

The post Lot of Happenings at Xcellence-IT during last week appeared first on Xcellence-IT.