Web Cube is excited to announce a new partnership with cloud-based business management application Brightpearl. The partnership will provide Web Cube customers with more options to manage and process eCommerce orders by leveraging the system’s powerful business functionality, including accounting, CRM, inventory management, eCommerce and POS. By tapping into Brightpearl’s cloud software, brands can be confident their core data and processes are under control – saving them time and money while providing the freedom to grow their business.

In one system, Brightpearl integrates orders, inventory, and customer data from a variety of sales channels including Amazon and eBay. All orders and inventory are stored in one place and in real time. Brightpearl’s powerful reporting helps site administrators improve the quality of customer service and gain insight into their business, helping them decide where to focus their efforts more effectively.

With this partnership, Web Cube customers will have immediate integration access and will be able to utilize key online and offline channels that will offer more ways to manage their business. Learn more about Web Cube’s growing list of technology and integration partners here.



About Brightpearl
Founded in 2007, Brightpearl provides a real-time reliable system for small-to medium-sized retailers, which integrates data from customers, orders, inventory and accounting. Brightpearl provides companies with a way to optimize their total business processes as well as allowing multichannel integration.

About Web Cube
Web Cube offers a premier all-in-one mobile responsive web platform for brands, empowering customers with one turnkey platform for their website CMS, eCommerce, mobile, and social media. Web Cube drives business growth online for over 100 leading brands including Rip Curl, Dunlop, Osiris Shoes, Technicolor, Sony, and Manduka.

Great news! We are excited to introduce our new live chat on getwebcube.com. When you are visiting our site we want to ensure that you are well informed. With live chat available during office hours, visitors can now speak to our helpful representatives, ask questions, and get an immediate response. If you happen to visit us outside of office hours, not to worry, you can still leave a comment or question and we will get back to you. At Web Cube we want to help you grow your business - let’s talk about it!

At Web Cube, we understand consumers want eCommerce experiences tailored to their needs. Today’s online shoppers expect customization, personalization and a seamless user experience that will lead them to the right product in the shortest amount of time. Brands should focus on designing the optimal mix of guided discovery to offer targeted suggestions and encourage purchases online.

When it comes to optimizing your customers’ online experience, Web Cube has you covered. Web Cube’s advanced product selector functionality gives you the tools you need to help customers find the right size and model of the products they are looking for. Help shoppers discover your products faster, shop smarter, and leave more satisfied.
 Learn how three of Web Cube’s clients are using product selectors to increase conversion rates:

• The Rip Curl Wetsuit Selector allows surfers to select their gender, zipper preference, season, region, height, weight and performance features to find the right size and type of wetsuit. Surfers around the world can purchase their wetsuits online with confidence. Find your perfect fit here.

• Dunlop’s Tire Selector has simplified the process of selecting the correct model and size of motorcycle tires. The tire selector allows users to browse through a wide array of tires and provides instant results based on make, model, and year. See it in action here.


• Eldorado Stone’s interactive product selector helps consumers choose the right materials and design for their home or commercial space, with customized stonework recommendations based on design, shape, color, and regional preferences. Find the best manufactured stone products here.

Join these successful brands and see how Web Cube’s advanced product selector can help guide consumers to better conversions.

As the holiday season comes to an end we’ve tracked the shopping trends that started as early as the weekend of Thanksgiving, or Cyber Weekend as it has been dubbed. Aware of the shorter shopping season giving retailers 6 days less than last year, stores made sure they ramped up the deals to attract more traffic. Despite the blow out sales and optimistic outlook, shoppers were not motivated enough to take a trip to the store as mobile and tablet sales trumped in-store sales. Not only are shoppers avoiding the mall but they are turning to their smart phones and tablets that are easily accessible to them 24/7.

We’ve compiled a list of the most relevant shopping trends this holiday season:

• Biggest Cyber Monday in history reaching over $1.7 billion in sales

• E-commerce continues steady growth with 18% increase in sales from last year

• According to early reports from IBM, 25% of online traffic comes from smartphones and 15.2% comes from tablets but when it comes to sales, 15.7% of customers chose their tablets to shop compared to 7.4% who used their smartphones. Tablets also averaged 13% more dollars spent per order than smartphone purchases.

• Amazon reports that nearly half of their customers used a mobile device this season

• In-store sales saw a significant decline with 21.6% fewer foot traffic and 2.9% decrease in sales

Retailers are taking note of this shift in purchasing preferences and are trying to adapt as quickly as possible. Gap introduced the “Reserve in Store” option that allows you to find the item online and keep it on hold at a store close to you, Kohl’s offers “Ship from Store”, and Amazon and Ebay advertise same day delivery. With the goal of maintaining online sales while also bringing customers inside stores, now more than ever brands are prioritizing building robust online stores with powerful eCommerce platforms to optimize sales in every channel.

As eCommerce becomes the prominent channel for consumers purchasing gifts during the holidays, it is essential for brands to equip their online stores with the right features and promotions to maximize sales and gain customers. The holiday season is the perfect time to grow online sales with good customer service, product campaigns, and promotional discounts. In order to have a successful holiday shopping season, sites must accommodate consumer needs and provide them with the best online shopping experience possible. Here are five tips from the Web Cube team on preparing your eCommerce site and digital marketing for the upcoming holiday season!

1. Special Holiday Promotions and Discounts:

During the holiday season, consumers are looking for the best deals on items they wish to purchase. Providing holiday discount promotions will not only drive traffic to your site, but also increase overall online revenue. Brands should also consider additional promotions including free shipping, coupons or customer loyalty programs. These offers can be used to attract and retain new customers as well as generate additional revenue. Decide your promotion strategy early on so you can begin planning your holiday campaigns and designing creative for your homepage banners, emails, social media, display advertising, and other channels.

2. Merchandise Gift Ideas:

Optimize your eCommerce site for holiday shoppers by curating your products through campaign landing pages, holiday collections, and lookbooks with holiday gift ideas. An additional way to increase customer orders is by adding “cross-sell” and “upsell” features to your site, recommending relevant products to your shoppers based on their past purchase behavior and recently viewed items.

3. PPC and PLAs:

An essential pillar in every holiday marketing mix is pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on Google and other search engines. Be sure to get a head start now by testing and experimenting with small keywords to see what is effective for your brand. Don’t forget to include Google product listing ads (PLAs) in your search marketing mix. Google’s search enhanced product ads, whose CTRs have been higher than text ads since November 2012, will maximize your brand’s exposure on search engines and drive targeted holiday traffic to your site.

4. Mobile Strategy:

With mobile commerce expected to reach an unprecedented 16% of retail eCommerce sales this holiday season, it is imperative to plan your mobile strategy well before the holidays. Whether you build an app or mobile site, or decide to make the switch to a responsive website, your mobile experience should engage shoppers and increase conversions through easy navigation and a simplified checkout process.

5. Prepare for Heavy Traffic:

Don’t just assume that your website can handle and convert the spike in traffic caused by holiday shopping. After all the time, effort and funds poured into driving extra traffic to your site, there is nothing worse for your business than a customer getting an error message. Make sure nothing gets in the way of customers completing purchases by working with your IT department to prepare your website for the influx of holiday traffic.

We could spend all day talking about shipping tips, so instead, let’s focus on a single suggestion that can distinguish your brand from the pack: make the user’s experience personal.

Here are ways to use shipping to create personal experiences for your customers.

Use quality packaging for a positive first impression
When an online order arrives, I’m always excited to unpack it. From there, my enthusiasm can multiply or drop.

For example, the last two things I ordered online were a wall decal and a Glif tripod mount and stand for my iPhone. The decal arrived in a plain mailing envelope that held a flimsy damaged box containing the decal. The product served its function, but I don’t remember the brand and therefore won’t seek it out for future purchases.

In contrast, it was clear that thought had gone into packaging the Glif. In developing its packaging, co-founder Dan Provost explained, “We wanted it to be simple (unsurprisingly) and include instructions for using the Glif [...]. In the end, it became a simple die-cut craftboard card, printed on both sides with black ink. The shape of the Glif allowed it to stay in the card without any additional adhesive or attachments.”

The Glif could have been tossed in a plain envelope, but the product would have seemed cheap, thus communicating a negative message about the brand. Instead, the attention toward design speaks for itself. Upon receiving it, I felt like I had purchased a quality product from a brand that cares — that’s how loyal customers are born.

Communicate throughout the process and afterward
Once an order is placed, communicate through every step of the fulfillment process. Send notifications at these stages:

1) After purchase - Confirm the order and literally say ‘thank you’ for the customer’s business.
2) Once shipped - Send a notification when the order has shipped. Include expected arrival and tracking information.
3) After delivery - Confirm the order arrived. Say thanks again for their business and ask them to return, tell their friends, and write a review.
4) Stay in touch - Maintain customer relationships with periodical emails (announcements, special offers, discounts, etc.).

Say thank you
Consider including thank you notes with orders. The best crafted emails don’t hold a candle to personal thank you notes (depending on the size of operations, handwrite or templatize them). The extra effort will be noticed.

And if you’re dealing with an insert, use the opportunity include information about the purchased product or your company history. These small gestures demonstrate that you value the customer’s business and are interested in maintaining it.

Implementing these tips to personalize customer experience requires extra consideration, but a little more thought can result in big payoffs. Give it a try and see what you find. And let us know if you have any ideas to add to ours!

About the Author
Lauren Jow is a marketing analyst at Shipwire, a global fulfillment services provider with fulfillment centers in the USA, Europe, Canada, and Asia. Shipwire lets brands of all sizes grow sales, expand into new markets, and delight their customers by eliminating the hassles of shipping and storage.

The Shop.org Annual Summit 2013 has come to a close and we're back in our Austin and San Diego offices inspired and optimistic about the future of digital commerce. Between the breakout sessions, keynotes and our booth, we rubbed shoulders and shared stories with the top digital strategists in the industry.

Throughout the week we gave live demos of Web Cube's latest mobile responsive 4.3 web platform release which struck a chord with both mid-size and enterprise brands quite keen on Web Cube's turnkey solution for branding and eCommerce. We also had the opportunity to illustrate just how robust our platform is at a roundtable discussion with must-have yoga gear brand, Manduka's Pete Garbowski. Pete shared the brand's eComm success since implementing Web Cube for their CMS and eCommerce website.

So many great connections and takeaways from the show, however the top topic we're already planning for Shop.org 2014 is going global. The very near future of Web Cube will provide more advanced, international features for our clients' exponential growth and opportunity to sell and market globally.

Who said flow could only be found on a yoga mat? Living in a digital world, a state of flow can be experienced just about anywhere, and when it comes to a brand's eCommerce presence, creating the perfect flow for customers is critical considering online sales will grow from $225.5 billion to $434.2 billion by 2017.

In this Shop.org roundtable, Chief Visionary behind Web Cube, Aaron Cuker and yogi must-have brand, Manduka's Pete Garbowski will discuss the key elements that every emerging brand needs to create the ultimate online store. The discussion will incorporate best practices to offer an intuitive, dynamic, and engaging retail experience online as well as the imperative steps to capture and convert customers through a branded eCommerce experience. The duo will additionally discuss how Manduka leveraged Web Cube to launch their current CMS and eCommerce website which has resulted in 6x online sales growth to date.

Learn more about Web Cube at the Annual Shop.org 2013 here.

Shop.org Annual Summit 2013
Chicago, IL
Wednesday, October 2nd
12:00 - 1:00pm
Expo Hall - Table #3