Dydacomp

Given current economic conditions, attracting new customers remains a top challenge for small to midsize retailers, with more than 50 percent citing it as their No. 1 concern, according to a recent Dydacomp survey.

All businesses should take measures to attract customers, and provide a positive experience to reduce shopping cart abandonment. Here are tips retailers can utilize:

It's estimated that small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) lose upwards of $66,000 annually through fraud. An increased awareness of fraud among large merchants has forced fraudsters — those individuals who perpetrate crimes against retailers — to switch their attention to small businesses that provide an easier target because of the lack of safeguards they have in place.

The final six weeks of the year — Thanksgiving through Dec. 31 — are the most important for retailers, as robust sales can result in many closing their books in the black. For those who depend on an e-commerce site to deliver added holiday revenue throughout the season, ensuring that your site continues to operate effectively is of the utmost importance.

While the order fulfillment department of your cross-channel retail business isn’t the sexiest or most fun, it’s arguably one of the most important. Most customer complaints are centered around fulfillment issues, for example. And if your business has even the slightest fulfillment gaffe in today’s social media environment, it’s one tweet away from a public relations disaster.

Welcome to Retail Online Integration's annual Resource Guide. This special section offers all the crucial details, company information, contact numbers and addresses of product and service providers to the cross-channel retail industry.

Until recently, selecting the optimum e-commerce platform for a multichannel business was a race to keep up with evolving technologies. The applications morphed at such blinding speed that the needs and requirements you defined when selecting your system easily could be obsolete by the time that system was up and running. Today's technology isn't evolving any slower — if anything, the pace of e-commerce change continues to accelerate. But the main differentiators among systems these days are less in the features and functions they support than the services they offer, flexibility, scalability, technical support, and the vendors' approach to charging for licenses or services. In short, your biggest challenge in selecting a platform may be determining which provider will be your best business partner going forward.

Access Technology Solutions Direct Selling Services 34 Randall Decker (801) 420-9225 www.accessts.com Associated Global Systems Fulfillment 62 Sales (516) 627-8910 www.agsystems.com B&W Press Printer/Specialty Mailer 23 Paul Beegan (978) 352-6100 www.bwpress.com Belardi/Ostroy ALC, LLC Lists 22, 39, 60 Andrew Ostroy (212) 924-1300 www.belardiostroy.com BowTie Inc. Lists 6 Kristina Grubb (949) 855-8822 x3420 www.bowtielists.com Brown Printing Printer 41 Jill Tobin (212) 782-7857 www.bpc.com Catalogs America Printing BC Dan Sayin (727) 864-2000 www.catalogsamerica.com Catalyst Direct Marketing Lists 32, 65, 67 Fred Litzky (201) 405-1414 www.catalystdm.com Chilcutt Direct Marketing Lists 52 Jane McCoy (405) 478-7245 www.cdmlist.com Commerce Register Service Bureau 48 Bob Schweighardt (201) 445-3000 www.comreginc.com Creative Automation Direct Marketing 55 Bob Rajan (800) 773-1588 www.cauto.com Cyber City Teleservices Telemarketing Services IBC Erv Magram (201) 487-1616 www.cctll.com Datamann Software 24 Kathy Reagan (802) 295-6600 www.datamann.com Direct Tech Inventory Management 21 Jack Mahaffey (402) 895-2100 www.direct-tech.com DM Transportation Group Transportation Management 56 Bill Wilson (717) 258-0611 www.dmtrans.com DoubleClick Performics Search/Affiliate Marketing 35 Robin Simkins (312) 739-0682 www.performics.com Dydacomp Development Software 8 Rob Coon (973) 237-9419 www.dydacomp.com Edith Roman Associates Lists 3 Kevin Collopy (845) 731-2684 www.edithroman.com Endicia Mailing Software 57 Sales Department (800) 576-3279 www.endicia.com Foster Manufacturing Production Equipment 6 Ted Borowsky (800) 523-4855 www.fostermfg.com Iverson Language Associates Translation

Tech Talk ◊ Find Which Parts of Your Site Don’t Work Customer experience management solutions provider Gomez has launched Actual Experience XF, an on-demand service designed to measure the online customer experience. The product takes into account performance aspects such as download times, abandonment rates and service consistency. Actual Experience XF also measures the differences in retail site performance caused by geographic location, or user-specific parameters, such as browser type, size of browser window, browser cache use, and first-time or repeat visitor status. The solution measures the effect each of these factors has on sales conversion or shopping cart abandonment and lets online merchants figure out

As the holiday season approaches you’re no doubt battening down the hatches for the season that is both the bane and blessing of every business. According to the National Retail Federation, one-fifth of all U.S. retail sales are holiday sales and with a 5 percent increase expected in 2006, it’s sure to be a busy time for any catalog business. It’s in this pre-holiday calm before the storm that planning, creativity and smart investments will help you get the most out of the season. Here are three tips to help multichannel merchants do just that: 1. Cut down on undeliverables. Whether it’s crazed online