ERP, CRM and eCommerce Blog

Be among the first to get an in-depth look at the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 for Retail Point of Sales, multi-channel management, social commerce, merchandising and more. Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 can help you deliver the complete shopping experience to meet and exceed today's consumer expectations. Learn how this powerful solution has helped top retailers connect to their customers and out-innovate the competition, while empowering them for rapid growth as the destination for their customers.

This FREE virtual launch event takes place on Wednesday, February 1st, 2012 at 9 a.m. Pacific Time. Register here

Sandeep Walia is the CEO of Ignify. Ignify is a global leader in retail and ecommerce solutions for retailers and has been ranked Microsoft Partner of the Year in 2011. Ignify has been ranked in the 100 most innovative companies globally by Red Herring in 2010 and 2011. For more information, email retail@ignify.com , call Ignify at (866) IGNIFY5, or visit www.Ignify.com.

While there are several articles out there that talk about Search Engine Optimization in general, very few are tailored to web stores and eCommerce sites. While the basic concepts of SEO are similar, there are fundamental differences in the execution that are required. Over 10 years of building Ignify eCommerce, our focus has not been just to be an eCommerce transaction engine but to be a marketing engine that drives additional revenue for merchants. Hence our mantra – ‘Rev Up Your Revenue.’

Let’s be clear – Investing in Search Engine Optimization for an eCommerce merchant has one and only one primary reason – and that is higher revenue. However, revenue is a function of three factors. At a basic level – here is the formula:

Web Store Revenue = Web Traffic In Unique visitors X % Conversion Rate X Average Size of Order

So for example if my Average daily traffic is 1,000 visitors a day, my conversion rate is 1% and my average order size is $60 dollars then my average daily revenue is $600 (1000 X 1% X $60). Now let’s talk about how we can really Rev Up your Revenue. It’s a little obvious but I have to increase the numbers on all 3 counts. Each of these revenue drivers has different things that influence it though

#1 Revenue Driver – Web Traffic: The most effective way to increase this is through Search Engine optimization of the ecommerce site. The easiest (but potentially expensive) way to increase this is through paid search. For example, Ignify ecommerce uses a folder structure with each page natively search engine optimized with URLs and web addresses that are humanly readable instead of a lot of $%#$ signs. Additionally Page Titles (which is the #1 field an eCommerce merchant should work on for SEO) are automatically filled in with product or product category names instead of a generic single page titles across the store

#2 Revenue Driver – % Conversion Rate: This is a function of two things a. how easy the site is to buy from b. How attractive the products, pricing and promotions are for the end customer to make a purchase. Point a is effectively Usability and the shopping experience. For example in our store deployments we will typically enforce that the buy button is always much bigger in the check-out page than any other button.

#3 Revenue Driver – Average Size of Order: The most effective way to increase your average size of the order is to have great upsell and cross-sell. For example the merchandising functionality in Ignify eCommerce automatically recommends products to a customer based on what they have in the cart + past history of shoppers who have bought those products.

Let’s go back to our example – if I can increase my average daily traffic by 40%, double my conversion rate and increase my average order size by 20% – what does this do to my revenue? Incredibly – it actually more than triples revenue. ( 1,400 visitors per day X 2% conversion X $72 per order = $2016 per day Versus $600 per day prior to the Rev Up your Revenue formula).

In my next blog article, I will go into more details of how you can increase revenue by positively impacting each of these revenue drivers and more than double your revenue by following these simple tips.

Sandeep Walia is the Chief Executive Officer at Ignify. Ignify eCommerce is the only PCI certified eCommerce solution in the market that integrates with the Microsoft Dynamics ERP and Sage ERP solutions. Ignify has been included as the fastest growing business in North America for four years in a row by Deloitte, Inc Magazine and Entrepreneur Magazine. Ignify was ranked in the Red Herring 100 finalists for 2010 – this list represents the top businesses in North America with disruptive and innovative technology.

Microsoft has launched the Microsoft Dynamics AX for Retail Point of Sale solution . When I visited the Microsoft Convergence show in 2009, I saw the solution in action under its prior owner and was very impressed with it. The thought that crossed my mind then was ‘I wish Microsoft would buy this solution’ – and they did. Today that solution has been re-launched with improvements as the Dynamics AX for Retail Point of Sale Solution.

We’ve had quite a bit of experience with the product today by dint of being a Microsoft premier partner – in the last few months, we have integrated the AX for Retail with Ignify eCommerce, demonstrated it to a few customers and done some configurations for a demonstration store we plan to launch early next year. In this time, we have gotten to know the solution very well.

Most Point of sales do a basic set of functions and then some do more advanced functions. Microsoft Dynamics AX for Retail has the basic functions covered very well but has some incredible advanced functionality. In this blog, I plan to cover primarily the basic functions and in my part-II talk about the advanced functions.

User Interface: First off – the interface is extremely slick. This is what caught my eye. An example lay out is below. But what’s attractive is not that it is a cool-looking lay out but that you can make changes to this in a snap. For example, I can right click a button and not only re-label it but also trigger a completely different function. For example – I can make the Edit Line Item button be my Void Transaction button. I can also decide how many buttons I want and how many rows and columns and what colors they should be. For example – I can have my top selling items each be a separate button – or my top selling category each be a button e.g. Men’s Shoes, Men’s Hats, Women’s Shoes, Women’s Hats etc. But then I can also color code all the Men categories in blue and the Women product categories in Pink for example. Now you will likely not have a sales clerk do these changes – but someone like a store manager or IT do them. But you can create multiple POS layouts and based on the user or role you can assign the layout and when the person logs in they see the lay out assigned to them. For example I can have the same machine show a lay out for customer service supervisor that has returns, credits, returns, warranties, exchanges while for a sales clerk the focus may be on the sale, checkout like the one below. I don’t need to setup a machine specifically for customer service and another one specifically for checkout. Any machine can be used for any role and adjusts to who logs in. Additionally the user interface is built to work with a touch screen so it will natively support a self-service Kiosk touch pad. I’ve put this in my basic blog feature description but frankly most point of sale products in the market don’t offer this flexibility. California law (and some other states) requires retailers offer a dual screen where not only the cashier can see what is being transacted but so can the customer. Dynamics AX for retail offers this dual screen capability natively.

Figure 1.Dynamics AX for Retail POS has the capability to automatically apply discounts

Upsell: Items can be configured to do up sell. For example when I rang up the HP 22 inch LCD monitor in the transaction shown above the system automatically prompted me to check if the customer wants extended warranty with it. This was a pretty simple up sell but you can do much more e.g. have multiple options for extended warranty or have a bundled item. The upsell screen can be configured in many ways – it can be a pop-up or another screen or just show up as a reminder. In this case I set it to be a pop-up where the cashier has to select an option thus increasing my average order amount.

Figure 2.Example of Upsell in Dynamics AX for Retail

System Interfaces: Dynamics AX for Retail provides out of the box interface for the cash drawer for opening the drawer for cash out to the customer, or for accepting cash and interfaces with credit card swipe but also an interface with the credit card payment providers through Dynamics payment services. This interface is at no charge.

Figure 3.Native Credit Card capability in Dynamics AX for Retail POS

Promotions: Dynamics AX for Retail has rich promotion capability to support item discounts, quantity discounts, mix and match, multi-buys etc. For example, the screen below shows a promotion of 10% running in August starting August 1st 2010 and expiring on August 31st, 2010 on all of my HP LCD monitors. Promotional offers can be a discount amount, a discount percentage or just a flat offer price, or an offer price including tax (the last is more common in places like UK)

Figure 4. Dynamics AX for Retail Headquarters with Promotions

Technology: Finally the platform is built entirely on Microsoft Technology written in C# and the .NET framework. The database behind this is SQL Server. A local database is available through SQL Server Express that can maintain a local copy in case connectivity in the store is an issue. I will talk more about the architecture in the next blog. In addition, the product natively interfaces with the Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP for financials, end of day reconciliation, refunds, credit card settlements, Item Master, Pricing etc. The entire AX for Retail Headquarters is natively integrated into the Dynamics AX ERP

All in – I am very excited of the future of Microsoft Dynamics in Retail. Microsoft is too – their Microsoft Stores run the Microsoft Dynamics AX for Retail Point of Sale. Kevin Turner – the Chief Operating Officer comes from a Retail background having been the CEO of Sam's Club and the CIO of Wal-Mart. He has definitely taken Microsoft into Retail with great results.

Figure 5.Microsoft Stores run the Dynamics AX for Retail Point of Sale

Here is a great video for you that gives an overview of the product.

If you have specific questions on Dynamics AX for Retail Point of Sale – email us at dynamics@ignify.com and we'd be happy to answer them.

Sandeep Walia is the Chief Executive Officer of Ignify. Ignify is a technology provider of ERP, POS, CRM, and eCommerce software solutions to mid-market and enterprise businesses and public sector organizations. Ignify is a Top-tier Microsoft Gold Certified partner ranked in the Microsoft Partner of the Year for Retail in 2010 and both the Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle and the Microsoft Dynamics Presidents Club in 2009 . Ignify offers Microsoft Dynamics AX, Dynamics AX for Retail POS and the Dynamics CRM Loyalty Management solution for retailers and to several other businesses. Ignify has been included as the fastest growing business in North America for 3 years in a row by Deloitte, Inc Magazine and Entrepreneur Magazine. Sandeep was ranked in 2010 in the Microsoft Dynamics Top 100 Most Influential People List by DynamicsWorld. Ignify has offices in Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, Nashville, Chicago, Toronto, Manila, Pune and Bangalore.

I still recall the days when shopping at Gap was only possible in the mall. Banana Republic was across the way and Old Navy was in the outdoor shopping plaza across the street with other discount retailers, like Marshall’s. Since the creation of shopping online, shopping for my favorite family of brands gets easier and easier to the point where I prefer to shop online rather than go through the trouble of driving to the mall.

A couple years back, Gap.com merged their family of brands by creating a multi-store website. Each of their clothing brands along with two online-only stores (Piperlime and Athleta) are all available with a click of a tab.

Just like shopping in the store, the look and feel of each brand remains independent of each other. Banana Republic remains subdued and sophisticated; click on Old Navy and it’s young and colorful. Customers have the option of signing up for store-specific emails, so as a customer, you don’t need to be bombarded by the brands you’re not interested in. Of course, Gap does take advantage of cross selling their brands. The email sign-up includes the option of receiving updates for their other brands.

While shopping the Maternity – New Arrivals category on the Old Navy store, the footer banners display Gap Maternity and Gap Kids – categories relevant to where I was currently shopping. At other times, the banners display ads for Piperlime and Athleta. Also, Quick Links float off to the side, ready to take the shopper to a corresponding category on another store.

Jumping between stores really is as easy as the click of the tab. The site is also smart enough to remember what department you were browsing in Gap when you left to check out Old Navy. Clicking on Gap takes you back to that department or that item. To top off the shopping experience, there’s only one shopping cart and one checkout. No waiting in lines at each store; no reentering of address and credit card information. Once you’ve created an account, the checkout process is so fast that you have to slow down to check any impulse shopping at the door.

With the multiple stores, Gap offers flat shipping rate across the stores. Piperlime products ship for free, keeping in step with the trends in other ecommerce shoe stores, like Zappos and Shoebuy. Just like shoes need to be tried on before purchasing, I believe clothes do, too. I’d like to see Gap offer more free shipping incentives since online purchases do still bring me back into the stores to make returns. Their store credit card holders can get free shipping with $100 purchase; a lower minimum purchase would definitely make me more checkout-happy!

Gap also ships four of the brands from the same warehouse so that items from those stores come in the same box – a win-win-win for customers, Gap, and the environment.

When I found out that Ignify eCommerce began supporting the ability to run multiple store fronts, I immediately thought of Gap, the first place I’d seen it. It’s worked well for Gap and perhaps your business fits a similar model and can stand to benefit from running multiple stores from a single instance of Ignify eCommerce.

However, I also realized that multi-store can mean different things. In Gaps case, there is one shared shopping cart, one shared login and even the web address domain name is shared – all the stores are actually sub-domains of gap.com e.g. oldnavy.gap.com. One would almost argue that this is not ‘true multi-store’ because as a customer the other ‘stores’ work more like departments. Ignify eCommerce supports the Gap multi-store model where each store is like a department as well as a more delineated model where each store is completely different. In the latter model you can’t tell that all the stores run on the same multi-store framework – the look and feel is totally different, the domain names are completely different and the shopping cart experience for each store is unique and does not have to be shared across other stores running on the Ignify eCommerce multi-store framework. While the Gap.com model may work for some merchants, other merchants may need a more unique experience for each store. Ignify eCommerce is one of very few eCommerce products in the market that supports a true multi-store experience through a single store manager panel.

What's Good about Gap.com:

• Easy, shared checkout
• Remembers where you were in each store
• Look and feel of each store is independent

What’s Not So Good about Gap.com:

• Could offer more free shipping incentives
• Signing up for multiple stores’ emails means more spam in your inbox. An option for a single email digest could be helpful.

Katie Lee is a Team Lead in the eCommerce group at Ignify. Ignify eCommerce is the only PCI certified eCommerce solution in the market that integrates with the Microsoft Dynamics ERP and Sage ERP solutions. Ignify has been included as the fastest growing business in North America for 3 years in a row by Deloitte, Inc Magazine and Entrepreneur Magazine. Ignify was ranked in the Red Herring 100 finalists for 2010 – this list represents the top businesses in North America with disruptive and innovative technology.

What is meant by Landed Cost?? In general any cost incurred in addition to value paid to vendor to procure the item is a landed cost. Examples are shipping and handling, customs and excise.

The What of Landed Cost

Landed cost is not that big an issue while dealing with vendors who charge a consolidated value to leave the goods at your door. Life would be too easy if it were that simple, wouldn’t it? We ask vendors to charge our account with carrier while shipping because we have better negotiated rates with the freight carrier. Vendor does not have control over import duties such as customs, excise. So we need to find handling agencies that take care of paper work and get the goods out of the yard. Or we pay to government and handle it ourselves.

The Why of Landed Cost

Guess what, all these are additional costs paid on top of the bill paid to vendor for the item. We need to add all these up to get the true cost of inventory. So you get to know the real margin. Some businesses simply expense out the cost because they don’t have the facility in their system and it is too much overhead for them to track it manually. Well, Dynamics GP customers can use the  Landed Cost module to track landed cost at ease.

Dynamics GP provides true ability to handle third party landed costs

So if your Vendor charged your UPS account for the freight, log an approximate value of freight in landed cost are of the purchase receipt. When you receive the freight bill from UPS

• Match the UPS invoice to the landed cost recorded on shipment from Vendor. The variance between the approximate value and this actual value can be applied to inventory or recorded to a Purchase Price Variance account.
• So GP provides ability to record the third party vendor landed cost invoice, match it landed cost, updated variance to inventory or to a variance account.

Oh, what did you say, the UPS invoice has several lines each pointing to shipments for multiple items or multiple shipments for the same item. Don’t worry, Dynamics GP provides ability to record a third party vendor invoice and match each line to different shipments.

Other real time applications of landed cost are adding the freight cost when moving items between warehouses.

Have you ever had to move goods from one warehouse to another? What happened to the cost incurred in moving stuff from one warehouse to other? Use the landed cost feature the ‘In Transit Transfer’ window. This is a very useful feature, especially when you want to obtain the true cost for an item in the warehouse.

Nice to haves:

It would be nice to get a feature similar to landed cost in SOP module. So we can record an approximate freight charge. When we get a real invoice from a carrier, we can either charge the excess or return the balance by way of a credit memo or debit memo.

This post is written by Raja S L N. Raja is a Manager in the Microsoft Dynamics GP Practice at Ignify. Ignify is a Global Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle Partner specializing in Microsoft Dynamics ERP for RetailDistribution, Manufacturing and Chemicals verticals. For help on Microsoft Dynamics ERP email us at dynamics@ignify.com