In today's ecommerce marketplace everyone knows about the big boys like Amazon or Zappos. But what about the rest of the industry? The smaller shops: people selling art, handmade goods, designer fashion. Businesses like http://dodocase.com (running on Shopify) are running very successfully without the power of the big corporation. We call them "Small Giants" (speaking of which, you should check out Ben's sxsw panel: The Long Tail of Ecommerce: Small Giants). Olark has made these smaller ecommerce businesses our top priority. Here are some features that we've added recently to try and augment ecommerce.

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2010_8_19_blog_post_notes.mov (13498 KB)

Have you ever found yourself wanting to remember a small piece of information about your customers? Have you ever wanted to easily attach a note to an invoice? Now you can. !note allows you to easily store and retrieve conversation specific information. Multiple chat windows at once? Not a problem, the command is conversation specific, so something that you store for one chat is isolated specifically to that chat. In your chat window simply type !note followed by your note text to save a new note. Type !note by itself to retrieve all your notes. To remove a note, simply type !note remove # where the # symbol is the note numbe. Any note that you add to a conversation automatically gets added to your invoice. Watch how it's done in the above vid.

CartSaver notifies operators about interesting things that users are doing on their Shopify store. The plugin allows real time notifications for interesting events such as cart balances or where a customer is looking. But what happens when a user removes items from their cart? Do they have a question to ask? Are they confused about something? Did they make a mistake? Now, when a visitor removes something from their shopping cart, the operator will get a notification detailing how many items were removed and how much this affected your bottom line. We hope that this is going to give operators better insight into customer behavior.

In the world of niche e-commerce sites, business owners don't succeed by offering larger catalog than Amazon or by undercutting WalMart, they succeed because they have a deep understanding of their customers and can provide personalized service and  products.  That's where Olark's CartSaver live chat software for e-commerce websites comes in.

With its debut on the Shopify App Store (additional platforms are in the works), store owners can for the first time see their customers shop in real-time with live cart balance updates, automatic notifications, visitor locations, and a cart contents rundown.  Additionally, Olark's live chat functionality allows customers and store owners to converse about products, build a rapport, and resolve support issues.

Amazingly all of this information and interaction comes to the shop owner from within normal instant messaging programs like Google Talk or any Jabber-based client (iChat, Meebo, Digsby IM+ , etc), so it works out of the box on practically any platform including mobile devices like the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.

Olark CartSaver Highlights:

* See your customers shop in real-time

* View the cart balance and location of your customers in realtime

* Receive notifications of key events on your site (cart balance notifications)

* One click install from the Shopify App Store.

* Chat with visitors and see real-time information in standard IM software

* More platforms planned

Video of CartSaver in Action

Quotes from CartSaver users:

http://apps.shopify.com/shopify_applications/fbe3fc48ac088df7e3e2f78524ed3835

Screenshots from iChat and Meebo on an iPhone using CartSaver for Shopify

   

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Olark_introduces_CartSaver_liv.zip (236 KB)

In a former life Roland and I ran a web hosting company.  We had to deal with routers, switches, KVMs, and tons of physical hardware. All of these components were expensive and depreciated quickly over time. We made big mistakes with inventory, had hardware on hand to triple our size, and generally wasted money converting too much capital into physical hardware.  In short, we overbuilt and in the end were stuck with hardware that was worth basically nothing.

One car load of many physical servers from our former web hosting company, most were wiped and than donated. A few are still sitting in my basement.

Talking with your customers is incredibly valuable, especially when you’re just getting started and every customer counts. But you want to get feedback in the right amount. Too little and you’re building a product in a vacuum, oblivious to what people actually need; too much and you don’t have any time left to build your product at all!

The most important thing is to frame the interaction. Do you want to close sales? Providing support? Figure out the pain points of your website? Brainstorm ideas for new features? Figure out what feedback you want and put the relevant contact information on corresponding pages for your site. Centralize communication as much as possible* so you don’t just end up switching between e-mail, phone calls, live chat, checking Twitter, etc.

After you’ve figured out why and how you want to interact with your customers, think about the when. Dedicate some time each week to customer development, and post those hours with your contact information. Be sure to stick with the posted hours (trust us, people hold you to them)! We have a pretty small team, so we just all rotate through customer development days. Although initially I was skeptical, it really drives home for the whole team what issues customers are facing day-to-day. If you’re a one or two person shop, we’re interested in hearing when and how you provide support, let us know in the comments below.

Last, don’t worry about getting everything right the first time, like everything else iterating is the name of the game. Watch for when and how customers contact you and use that as your cue.

-Zach

*I can’t emphasize this enough. We have almost all of our customer support go through a single e-mail account, making it easy to see what customer work needs to be done each day, as well as go back and review past frequent requests.

We woke up no power today.  Apparently there was a small plane that knocked out high voltage lines for Palo Alto.  See the attached photos.

Our hearts go out to those involved.

     

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Power_Outage_in_Palo_Alto.zip (36 KB)

Don't be!

Canned messages (via autocomplete or text expanders) are clearly a mixed bag; save some time as an operator, risk sounding like a robot.  When used in moderation and with the proper phrases (keep it friendly and casual!) one can shift more comfortably to the saving time side of the spectrum.

Since Olark doesn't yet support system-level canned messages (coming soon!) we recommend using the following programs within your IM client of choice.  Most of these work by replacing short snippets of text with longer ones (some are fancier than others).