E-commerce and Online Business Reference

An ecommerce consultant has the job to help you improve and market your site effectively in order to assist you in increasing your traffic flow. There are a number of businesses out there and many of which are selling exactly the same product. How are you still going to be a success? Marketing your product successfully is the key to bringing the visitors to your site and thus, getting their business.

Here are a few points an ecommerce consultant will work with:

Number of visitors to your site

Ratio of visitors to buyers

Ratio of visitors to new customers

Ratio of visitors who request information

An ecommerce consultant will use this information to analyze which parts of your site needs improvement. Then, after the changes are suggested they will check to see if they made any difference at all. A good suggestion is only good if it will bring you the success you are looking for or a change in the right direction. An ecommerce consultant checks your site for visitors and how many of them actually made a purchase from your store. There may be many visitors but no buyers which makes the visits of no use to you.

An ecommerce consultant will check the keywords on your site which in turn triggers the search engines and brings customers to your site. When you change the key words you can often see a growing numbers of people visiting and the more that visit the more opportunity you have to make a sale.

Design changes as needed to meet the requirements of the site.

Set the set of changes needed for the site.

Apply them.

Measure the effect the changes caused on the site.

If the changes were not effective the circle starts again.

Ecommerce consultants are very helpful especially if you feel you have done everything properly yet your online business is simply not taking off. They usually bring to light some problems and changes that may be made to your site to be most successful. At the same time don’t underestimate the power of your customers and their comments.You should take very seriously their recommendations as they usually will tell you what they expect of your site in the first place. When you give your customers what they want you have a successful site. Your customers are usually the best ecommerce consultants.

Andrew Karasev asked:


Ecommerce integration with Microsoft Dynamics GP is possible on various levels.  If you are starting ecommerce project from the ground, you may look at packaged ecommerce products, available as custom add-ons to Dynamics GP.  However, and this is what we assume in this small publication, a lot of ecommerce businesses have their websites and the integration should be on the level of custom connectors: pushing new customers, new catalogs, new orders and probably payments to Great Plains.  Please, consider these tools and solutions:

1. eConnect.  It is set of stored procedures with interfaces for Microsoft Visual Studio ecommerce developer.  If you have programmers in staff, you should review eConnect with them and decide on the integration specifications.  One thing often comes to the question – eConnect doesn’t have functionality to post Great Plains batches, in order to post Dynamics GP batches directly from ecommerce portal, you should consider deployment of Alba Spectrum Posting Server

2. Order Connector.  This product is supported by Alba Spectrum.  It allows you to deploy simple ecommerce integration logic to Great Plains Sales Order Processing module.  If this is your case, Order Connector allows you to call its stored procedures directly, which might give certain performance gain over eConnect and you do not have to learn eConnect.  For small Great Plains Dynamics customers, who are on older GP versions: 8.0, 7.5 – you could also use Order Connector, and eConnect for those versions was in introduction phase

3. Integration Manager.  IM allows you to setup integration on the GP user level with some custom tweaks: VBA scripts.  It should solve your ecommerce integration needs, if real time integration is not required – you can either have GP user to call integration on demand or schedule IM via Windows macro routines (out of scope for this article)

4. Direct SQL Custom Stored Procedures.  This approach may look natural for SQL programmer, however in this scenario you will need to replicate GP business logic in your scripts.  Just consider the fact, that eConnect already did exactly this – it replicated Great Plains Dexterity code in encrypted SQL Stored Procedures, so maybe you should consider more efficient programming time spending simply by deploying eConnect instead.  However, this is possible approach and theoretically you can replicate data feeding to Dynamics GP tables as if it is done via user interface

5. If you have further questions or concerns, please feel free to call us: 1-866-528-0577, help@albaspectrum.com



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