How do you do this?

• Pull a report of SKUs sales history for the past 12 months. Look at your average inventory turns overall and by category.
• Compare individual products’ inventory turns over the past 3-4 months with your overall turns average and the category turns average – this will give you an indication of which products are performing poorly in your portfolio.
• If you don’t have access to inventory turns information, you can investigate the issue by pulling a sales history for your SKUs over the past 6 months. Based on the quantity of sales by product over the past few months, project the quantity of sales by product that will occur in the next 30 days – use the each product’s average monthly quantity sold if you don’t have access to more sophisticated prediction tools.
• Identify the products which will be in excess based on your quantity sales projection.
• Evaluate how much of a discount or which type of awareness campaign you believe you would need to offer to sell all of the products based on prior experience.
• Assess the type of marketing promotion you would use. Would you promote the products with a sale on your primary webstore? Invest in additional keywords or adwords? Would you email to your current customer base?
• What will the marketing expense for the promotion be?
• If this is the first time you are predicting products that will be in excess in the next 30 days , a quick review of the products identified will help you understand which to promote and which to eliminate. When this becomes part of your monthly routine, a more structured approach can be followed.
• Combine this information to finalize your plan and execute it.
• Track results – incremental margin, marketing contribution margin, how long it takes to clear the inventory.

Infopia has created a service that goes beyond the basic matching of existing parts in the eBay Parts Compatibility catalog. Infopia will support the ability to match unbranded parts to branded parts which are already in the catalog, significantly increasing catalog utilization. Sellers will identify the unbranded part and a similar branded part they designate, then search the catalog for compatibility and the auto-populate the fitments for listings. Sellers with ACES/AAIA data already available will also benefit from the use of a decoder, which will match ACES/AAIA XML to the eBay standard, and populate fitment data behind the scenes.

Of course, Infopia also supports parts specification via item specifics, which is essential for parts such as tires and rims that are dependent on specifications, as well as for parts not found in the eBay Parts Compatibility catalog. Infopia will also support “Manual Fitment” based on the ability to search by Manufacturer, Part Number, and UPC, matching to “Year,” Make,” and “Model.”

With such a significant enhancement to Motors selling for eBay, Sellers may choose to leverage Infopia’s Data-oriented Professional Services team. Services include optimization of listing titles and descriptions for catalog-enabled categories and data mapping.

A motors seller does not have to be an Infopia Transact user to be able to add this service to their online business.

If you would like more information about The Infopia Parts Compatibility Solution:

Infopia Motors Team: 1-800-337-6352 motors@infopia.com for information about Lighting, Lamps & Accessories beta participation now, or other categories as they become available , or to accelerate your eBay Motors sales by shifting your business to sell using Infopia Motors solutions.

Salt Lake City, UT – Sep 22, 2010

Infopia today reported same store sales growth of 14.1% in Q1 of 2010 and a 9.8% increase in Q2 of 2010. This is much higher compared to the average eBay seller that grew on average 6.5% in Q1 2010 and 2.4% in Q2 2010. Infopia has also exceeded same store sales compared to eCommerce platform provider competitor ChannelAdvisor by 328% in Q1 of 2010 and 316% in Q2 of 2010.

“The positive growth can be attributed to both our savvy clients and the continuous improvements to the Infopia Transact platform,” says Matt Craven, Infopia’s Director of Customer Success and Services.  According to Craven, Infopia product enhancements like eBay parts compatibility make it possible for clients to list more products, faster, with better information, all while saving listing fees. In one case an Infopia customer doubled their GMV in 60 days.

Infopia is a leading provider of eCommerce software and analytics that helps merchants grow their online business. From managing inventory across multiple online channels to increasing sales conversions and bottom line performance, Infopia’s robust SaaS product solutions have the right set of features and capabilities for successful online retailers.

Infopia is an award-winning eCommerce solution company headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. For more information, visit www.infopia.com

Contact
Marissa Nichols
Infopia, Inc.
mnichols@infopia.com

Holidays can be a very profitable time for online retailers. But, with the increase in traffic there is also an inevitable increase in internal stress levels. While staff struggles to keep up with increased sales volumes, customers also tend to become more impatient at this time of the year.

Customer satisfaction is most critical during the holidays. Online retailers spend valuable money and resources all year long to create new customers and to create a loyal group of repeat customers. These customers can quickly be lost if they become unsatisfied due to untimely order to fulfillment processes. These processes, as complex as they can be, should remain invisible to customers. The orders must be filled in a timely manner to meet the standards that online customers of today expect.

Overselling of products will cause customers to become dissatisfied. It will be very difficult to create loyal customers once they have experienced an overselling issue. The holidays are the most common time for online retailers to have their own issues with overselling and it is the most crucial time to fulfill on an order quickly when it is purchased as a holiday gift.

To prevent overselling issues during the holiday season, online retailers must have an increased visibility into their supplier’s stock information. Online retailers also are able to save on time and errors that can cause issues regarding order fulfillment by selecting the best partners for automating many of these processes.

Please join us for a free webinar for more information on managing your inventory effectively this holiday season.

Our webinar will be held Tuesday, Sept. 14th at 3:00 PM EST. The presenters for this webinar include Lisa Morgan at Practical Ecommerce; Anne Pingree, sales engineer at Infopia; Manish Jha, founder at Atandra; and Andrew Ruppar with Inventory Source.
Register Now

Once your business is growing it’s time to look at your product portfolio and determine which products are contributing the most from a revenue and margin perspective. While there are many ways to look at this – you might want to see which products are selling to specific customer segments, for example – one of the most efficient actions you can take is to look at products which have been sitting in inventory without sales and move quickly to eliminate those SKUs from your portfolio. In almost all cases, you’ll find that a simple decision to eliminate the non-selling SKUs will result in the ability to shift marketing and inventory dollars to high performing products. A quick “elimination” sanity check is all that is needed to take profitable action quickly.

How do you do this?

• Pull a report of SKUs that have not sold in the past 120 days. Give yourself a break and begin with a high number of days since the last sale occurred so that you are not surprised by the number of under-performing products you have, you can always shorten the amount of time you are willing to have products sit in inventory without sales as this becomes part of your operational routine.
• Evaluate how much of a discount you believe you would need to offer to sell all of the products based on prior experience.
• Assess the type of marketing promotion you would use. Would you promote the products with a sale on your primary webstore? Your discount webstore or an alternate online channel? Would you email to your current customer base? A segment of your current customer base?
• What will the marketing expense for the promotion be?
• Decide if you want to phase in discounts to capture additional margin or if you want to start with a rock-bottom deal – this will determine how quickly you clear poor-performing stock from your inventory.
  If this is the first time you are reviewing aged inventory, a quick review of the products identified will help you avoid dumping the wrong ones. When this becomes part of your monthly routine, a more structured approach can be followed.
• Combine this information to finalize your plan and execute it.
• Track results – incremental margin, marketing contribution margin, how long it takes to clear the aged inventory.

Infopia has formed a new support team named after the new Infopia eCommerce platform. Transact Customer Support offers merchants a tiered support structure with greater accessibility to help when needed. The new team will enable online merchants to focus on growing revenue instead of dealing with technology-related issues.

The new team has created a knowledge base, as well as a support portal where Infopia customers can log and track issues. Support is accessible via a new toll-free number. The call center, support portal, and knowledge base are powered by salesforce.com, which gives team members the ability to have a 360 degree view of customer interaction to provide the best solution possible. The focus of the team is to give merchants more time to grow their business by streamlining operations and getting eCommerce issues addressed as quickly as possible.

The rapid evolution of business on the Internet has dramatically changed many organizations’ strategies for growth and profitability, especially those in the retail sector. I have written about the importance of analytics overall and in retail, but many companies are maturing slowly in using them to analyze electronic business and commerce. Data derived from analytics can enable them to manage the cycle from electronic merchandising and promotions to assessing interactions with sales categories and products and then to details of customer behavior and revenue. While there have been advancements in analytics of Web traffic, more is needed to be done to operate the Internet channel of retailing like those of “bricks and mortar.” As I have written about the evolution of Web sites to business sites, organizations need to invest in this business not just with people and processes but with the information and technology required to be successful. Our recent benchmark research into business intelligence found slight maturity and inadequate use of analytics to support retail. The research specifically discovered that the overuse of spreadsheets and lack of analytic capabilities are holding back organizations from maturing: Only 15 percent of retailers are at the highest Innovative level of maturity according to our Ventana Research Maturity Model.

Infopia provides software for planning and execution of e-commerce transactions with a product called Infopia Transact. Now the company has announced and introduced Enterprise eCommerce Analytics, which enables integrating e-business data for Web site traffic, sales and other activities into a single data model in which analytics can be applied to generate operational metrics. These metrics become the foundation for an interactive dashboard where multiple roles can interact and discover ways to optimize efforts. I like that Infopia provides all the basic reports and prebuilt dashboards in the package, which can be exported directly into Microsoft Excel. If your organization is struggling to perform analytics for profitability, customer lifetime value, order referral and other valuable metrics, they become readily available with this product.

Infopia makes it available through the rental model of software as a service (SaaS) and uses the tenets of cloud computing to make it easy for customers to get onboard and start using the product. This approach is growing in importance, as our research in the retail industry found: More than half of retail organizations will be assessing new approaches to help them with analytics and business intelligence (BI), and more than one-third are looking at SaaS. Infopia has addressed one of the difficult points of entry by making it easier to upload and integrate data sources into its underlying data model; the software handles the rest of the analytic processing to ease longstanding challenges in data integration that often required extensive technology consulting work.

In other approaches to retail analytics for e-business I have seen, some require significant expense and resources to implement on-premises and establish the data model and metrics while others turn out to be just BI tools available in the cloud computing environment. Infopia has built the model and metrics and the application interfaces on top of analytic technologies from QlikView; this base will enable Infopia to advance readily and utilize advancements like mobility for users who want to be able to access analytics from the convenience of their mobile devices. In addition Infopia has an experienced team with backgrounds and expertise in analytics.

Readily available solutions like these from Infopia can help retailers significantly improve their information and technology competencies and mature in the dynamic channel of e-business. Building a similar approach with traditional BI tools would take much longer; just as companies do not build their own e-commerce technology for online transactions, it is best not to build your analytics from scratch. Retail business leaders with support from IT should evaluate ways to get savvier with analytics for e-business. Infopia now needs to make itself more well known in the industry and communicate further about its new deployments and capabilities so those companies will consider it in new evaluations.

Salt Lake City, UT – August 19, 2010
Infopia today announced the release of Infopia Enterprise eCommerce Analytics. The product is designed for online retailers looking to identify the most profitable methods of acquiring new customers and increasing sales conversions on web storefronts. Infopia Enterprise eCommerce Analytics combines critical web storefront data, sales information and operational costs into a powerful intelligence tool that allows retailers to make better business decisions quickly. Features include easy to read dashboards with up-to-date revenue results and profit measures on promotional activities. And, unique guided analytics to quickly perform forecasting activities on marketing programs and inventory.
“Our focus is always on how to help online retailers become better at increasing online sales and acquiring new customers,” said Coleman Barney, President and CEO of Infopia. “The announcement today of Infopia Enterprise eCommerce Analytics is in response to the need we’ve seen for eCommerce retailers to have greater visibility into business activities so they can make better business decisions.”
Infopia Enterprise eCommerce Analytics enhances all aspects of decision making – from tracking sales results and promotional activities using intuitive dashboards, to selecting the products and promotions that generate the greatest profitability for their business. Businesses can attract more customers to their web site, convert more shoppers to buyers, and promote and sell the products that deliver the greatest return to the bottom line.

Infopia Enterprise eCommerce Analytics enables users to:
• Combine critical website traffic data, sales information and operational costs into a single data source that tells businesses where the customer came from, what products they purchased from the website, what the fully burdened ROI is on all marketing activities and sales, and which customer segments are the most profitable and responsive.
• View sophisticated and interactive dashboards with critical up-to-date business data.
• Access essential online retail performance metrics related to Revenue, Promotions, Categories and Customers.
• Utilize actionable insights to drive best practices across the organization.

The ecommerce analytics market is changing dramatically. No longer is it enough to measure web site traffic and conversion rates. A recent report by Aberdeen Group shows that the more actionable information a retailer collects about its customers and customer activities, the more success it will have in improving gross margins and customer conversion rates. “E-commerce analytics, defined as the combination of web analytics and internal operational data, helps retailers make actionable, timely decisions for the optimal consumer shopping environment.”
Infopia CEO Coleman Barney said, Enterprise eCommerce Analytics meets the requirements of a true ecommerce analytics product. “Enterprise eCommerce Analytics from Infopia is the result of over nine years of experience working with online retailers. We combine all the relevant operating information of an ecommerce company into a single place where actionable insights can be created that guide a user to the right answer.”
Early adopters have mentioned that combining web analytics, cost of goods sold, inventory levels, and the results of sales and promotional activities is invaluable. “We’ve deployed the beta version of our new product to several of our top online retailers over the past several months,” said Mark Nimnicht, Vice President of Analytics for Infopia. “They have seen things about their operational performance and product portfolio that they had not recognized before and have taken actions to optimize the way they promote and source their stock.”
Enterprise eCommerce Analytics is available today to meet the needs of medium to large online retailers. More information about the product can be found at www.infopia.com, or email info@infopia.com for a live demo.
About Infopia
Infopia is a leading provider of eCommerce software and analytics that helps merchants grow their online business. From managing inventory across multiple online channels to increasing sales conversions and bottom line performance, Infopia’s robust SaaS product solutions have the right set of features and capabilities for successful online retailers.
Infopia is an award-winning eCommerce solution company headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. For more information, visit: http://www.infopia.com/.