This Friday, November 29th, is Black Friday where shoppers flock to take advantage of post-Thanksgiving sales.

Last year on Black Friday 2012 shoppers spent-up an amazing record $59,100,000,000, an increase from the $52,400,000,000 spent in 2011.

On a per-shopper level, the average consumer spent $423 which again was an increase on the $398 spent per consumer in 2011.

So, is your website ready to nab a bit of that consumer spending frenzy?

Shoppers expect sales on Black Friday and the easiest way to do this is to offer a Black Friday coupon code.

Creating a coupon code in DecoNetwork

First create a Black Friday coupon code in DecoNetwork. Why not use something like “BLACKFRIDAY” or “BF2013″.

To create the coupon code:

1. Log into your DecoNetwork website
2. Browse to Manage Fulfillment > Settings > Configure Coupons
3. Select New Coupon

Complete the New Coupon form with the settings you want. i.e.

You can set your discount amount as a percentage (%) or exact value ($). You can also configure your coupon to only apply if the customer buys a minimum purchase value. i.e. only applies if the customer buys more than $100 worth of goods.

Finally, you can select the Available Products tab to configure what type of products the coupon can be applied for, and the Availability tab to configure what stores can use your coupon code.

Promoting your sale

As with any promotion you need to promote the heck out of it! Splash it everywhere, but don’t spam other peoples sites or forums.

On your website

Include it on your website as a floating promotional banner – Click here to read out previous blog post on how to do this.

On Facebook

Post about the sale on your Facebook page. Images always provide the best impact so download our free template for creating a Black Friday promotional code post. Don’t forget to change your promo code, discount amount and website address!

• Download CorelDRAW version
• Download .PDF version

When you post your image don’t forget to include a link to your site and include the hashtag #blackfriday. i.e.

“Check out our Black Friday deal at http://www.yoursite.com. Enter promo code BF2013 for 10% off custom printed tees! #blackfriday”

Twitter, Google+ and other social channels

Don’t ignore the other social channels such as Twitter and Google+, and again use the hashtag #blackfriday in your posts PLUS a link to your site. People need to know where to buy

Email

Beyond doing a general promotional email to your customer list, you should also update your email signature so that every email you and your team sends promotes your Black Friday sale.

Have fun and good luck with your Black Friday sale!

Meet 18-3224, otherwise known as Radiant Orchid, who has been named PANTONE’s 2014 Color of the Year.

Check out the full specs on this bright and happy color include the RGB, CMYK and web HEX values at PANTONE’s official page on the color here: http://www.pantone.com/pages/index.aspx?pg=21131

You can expect during 2014 an explosion of radiant orchid products hitting the shelves and possibly logo designs of up-and-coming businesses.

Perhaps you should start stocking some radiant orchid tees!

Have you considered using Groupon to promote your business? Here is what you should know before making the decision.

What is Groupon

Groupon is a coupon site offering daily deals for a very good price. Because of its popularity among the consumers, you may get thousands of new customers, just by having your deal listed on the site for 24 hours. This is very appealing for both parties, and can help your business to address new audience in a very short period of time.

How does it work?

Let’s say that you are offering your products on the site for $20. Groupon will then offer on their site a voucher for $20 but the customer will have to pay only $10 for it. On top of that Groupon will probably take half of it for themselves, so you will make only $5 on the product worth normally $20. Sounds like a bad business? Yes, and No. There are many successful stories among the businesses who wanted to promote their products and services on Groupon. If you are a startup business you will get immediate attention of hundreds or even thousands of customers, and there is a good chance that, if your services are good, many of them will come back at later time to buy more products from your site. Groupon does not charge you any fees at front, so the risk is minimal. Now, compare this to the campaign in your local TV or yellow book (is someone still doing this?). In both of this cases you need to pay for the advertisement at front, not having any guarantee that you will be recognized and that this will generate sales on your site. Now, Groupon does not guarantee anything either, but at least you will not pay for it at front.

Mistakes you should avoid.

One of the local haircut salons decided to promote their services on Groupon by offering haircut for half the price. Within 24 hours they have sold many hundreds of vouchers for a haircut: much more than they expected. In the following weeks, all of those customers started to contact them in order to schedule an appointment for a haircut. Due to the high volume of customers they were unable to provide service in a timely manner. As a result, the customers were unhappy asking for their money to be refunded, but also gave a lot of bad press to this local hair salon saying that they were unprofessional. The biggest mistake here was lack of planning of how many customers they could serve at once. To avoid this mistake, you need to plan carefully how many products you can process in timely manner, and discuss this with Groupon. You can set the limit that only, let’s say, 100 vouchers can be sold on the site.
Another thing you should take into consideration is to calculate your expenses versus the benefits for your company. The price for which you will offer vouchers on Groupon site probably will not leave a lot of margin (if any) on your profit. The whole idea behind it is to get attention from those customers, so they will come back and buy products on your site again. If they bought the voucher on Groupon it means that they are interested in your products, and now you just need to make them to come back in the future. This is your five minutes of attention you have got from the whole new crowd. Use it wisely by offering good quality products, and perhaps some other content on your site (coupon…but this time raised in DecoNetwork?)

Are people still using Groupon?

Since Groupon was opened in 2008 it had its ups and downs. It was definitely most popular in 2011: only a year after Groupon refused an offer from Google to sell it for $5.75 billion! Beginning 2012 the problems occurred, and just by looking at the stock price (it went down from $26.19 per share in November 2011 to as little as $2.76 in November 2012) you can tell that Groupon was facing huge challenges, but 2013 is much better for them, and the situation seems to be stabilized and future secured. It is definitely worth taking Groupon into consideration in your marketing strategy as millions of people every day are looking on their site to find a new deal.

How to start?

First, you will have to contact Groupon by filling out this form: https://www.grouponworks.com/get-featured You can also give them a call on this number: (888) 582-4354 Remember, Groupon is quite big company and they can be selective in choosing who they want to work with. Be persistent, and do not give up if they will not contact you back initially.

How to use Groupon in DecoNetwork?

Once you will sell your vouchers on Groupon site, you just need to add functionality in DecoNetwork to use them. Using Gift Certificate option is a perfect fit for that. You can import all of your vouchers from the CSV file in Manage Fulfillment > Settings > Manage Gift Certificates > CSV Import

On the next page you can define the value assigned to the imported codes, and the dates between which those codes are valid.

Your customers will be able to use this code during the checkout as shown below:

In DecoNetwork version 6.06 we introduced rush order fees which allows you set up rush production times and charge for it.

Setting up your rush order fees

The first step in setting up your rush order fees is to ensure your standard production time is configured in DecoNetwork.

1. Log into your DecoNetwork web site
2. Browser to Manage Fulfillment > Settings > Order Options
3. Browse and locate “Default production time (days)” under Order Settings and set you default standard production time in days. i.e. 5 days.
4. Save this page

This will set your default production time that all orders will use unless your customer selects a rush order option.

Creating a Rush Order Fee

With your default production time configured, you can now set your rush order fees.

1. Log into your DecoNetwork web site
2. Browser to Manage Fulfillment > Settings > Rush Order Fees
3. To create a new rush order fee select Add Rush Order Fee from the right Page Actions menu
4. Complete the General tab form:Active: Tick this to make you Rush Order Fee active for customers to use.
   Name: This name will appear in the rush order drop-down to your customer. i.e. “2 day production”.
   Description: This is a longer description of your rush order fee that will appear in the rush order fee drop-down.
   Production time (days): Set the number of days production. i.e. 2 days in my example.
   Cutoff order time: Select the latest this rush order fee can be selected for the current day to be included as part of the production time.
   Minimum quantity: Set a minimum quantity required to use this rush order fee.
   Maximum quantity: Set a maximum quantity allows to use this rush order fee.

   
   

5. Select the Pricing tab to set a flat rate ($) or percentage based (%) pricing for the use of that rush order fee. This fee will be charged to your customer if they select this rush order fee option.
6. Select Save to save your changes.

Your rush order feel will now display on the select shipping page of your check out process and will combine with the shipping time to give an estimated delivery time. For example:

Enjoy the new Rush Order fees!

There is a one old expression which says: “A picture is worth a thousand words.” But how about if you combine picture with the words?  We decided to find out an answer to this question by starting this new video blog where every Monday we will try to  answer your questions. For  many years now we answered many thousands of questions either by ticket, email, phone, or on our forum related to DecoNetwork. We have received so many good questions, and always wondered what is the best way to share with the answer, so others can also benefit from it.  It seems that the video blog can be a good way to tackle this challenge. We encourage you to send your questions in the comments, and we will be happy to address them in the next post. Each week we will try to address at least 3 questions in the form of the screen cast.

For  a start, below you will find our answers on how to setup your Godaddy domain with DecoNetwork. It only take a few minutes to do it!

1. How to setup my  Godaddy domain with DecoNetwork.

2. How to setup my  Godaddy domain as a subdomain used with affiliate stores.

There are times when you need to add refund to your order. The video below will show you how this can be done.

Did you ever wonder how you can open saved layouts in Business Hub and use it to create quotes or/and orders? The video below will guide you through the steps of how this can be done.

The video below will show you how you can cancel and/or delete orders in Business Hub:

In this tutorial I would like to show you how you can create an in-store pickup shipping method. The entire process is fairly simple, but requires few tweaks in your DecoNetwork system.

In order to make it right you want to make sure that:

- The customer will receive a separate order/shipped confirmation email with all the details about the location from where the order can be picked up.

- In-store pickup shipping method is free.

- In-store pickup shipping method is available to customers only within the same state you are located.

Please see the video below which explains that process in details:

In DecoNetwork you can add your stock designs in Manage Fulfillment > Stock Designs. When stock designs are enabled by default all of your stores have access to them. The video below will show you how you can limit this access to the selected stores only.

This week we have addressed the question: how can you generate reports which are showing products for back-ordering.

I received a question on how to create a product view in DecoNetwork that also contains a printable bleed. This is perfect for sublimation products such as iPhone cases and other full-print products where the print position may shift slightly during the printing process.

Check out the how-to video!

DecoNetwork version 6.08 is released and all version 6.07 sites have been updated.

Some of the new improvements include:

• Allow a customer to re-order previously ordered products from the website
• Allow a shipping method to be available in Business Hub only
• Allow reCaptcha to be disabled on the ‘Request a quote’ page.
• Allow coupons to include the tax value
• Edit the customer’s email when emailing them quote or order in Business Hub
• Display products in Webstore only option
• Create an order or quote in Business Hub for an affiliate store

For more information and full release notes visit deconetwork.com/releasenotes/v608.

Business Hub is great to create orders for your clients. It creates a visual mock-up of the product, while also calculating printing and stitch costs.

However, in previous versions of DecoNetwork you were only able to create an order for your main affiliate site.

In DecoNetwork version 6.08 you can now create an order for your affiliate stores in Business Hub.

To do this:

1. Log into your DecoNetwork website.

2. Launch Business Hub and select Orders from the left menu.

3. Select Add New Order.

4. From the ‘Store‘ drop-down menu, select the affiliate you want to raise the order for.

The price for the products in based of the affiliates prices, and the affiliate store will earn commission for that order.

Enjoy!

Another good question, from one of the DecoNetwork users, we have recently received was: “How I can predecorate products with team names?” The video below will show you how to use team names with predecorated products.

Update:
Here is the video on the same topic created by one of the DecoNetwork forum users. Cheers Alex

Have you ever thought how you can add additional options to your products such as drop down menu, text field, or checkbox? DecoNetwork allows you to do it by using custom fields, and the video below will take you through the steps of how this can be done.

You Asked – We Listened. Traditionally, DecoNetwork is offering design collections created by well known in the industry companies such as Digital Art Solutions, OESD, or Rival Art. As is right now we have over 18K designs available for use in DecoNetwork, and we will continue to add more collections like that in the future. That said, we decided that our DecoNetwork subscribers deserve even more from us, and as a gift, we have added completely FREE premium template and clipart collection. The first batch contains 72 high quality sport artworks, and we are looking for a feedback from you, and what would you like us to do next? Yes, you heard us right, this is just the beginning, and we have in plans keep adding more entirely free design collections for you :-)

To enable free sport collection in your store go to:

1) Manage Fulfillment > Stock Designs > Add DecoNetwork Design Collections
2) Select Sports Collections under DecoNetwork

Enjoy it.

Ps. Special thanks to Cris who was managing this project, and made it happen.

We live in a world where your computer can be infected with various number of adwares, malwares, and viruses. Fortunately once you will recognize the problems, there are always ways to remove them. I have received recently a question about how to remove “Deal Finder” widget in DecoNetwork. This question was very suprising as we don’t have such functionality in DecoNetwork, so I did a quick research just to find out that the Deal Finder is an adware. If you have experienced similar problem as you can see below, it means that you also have this adware installed on your computer.

Deal Finder is not related to DecoNetwork in any way, and is not caused by DecoNetwork. The source of the problem must have come from some via free downloads, fake updates and abundant extra methods on your end. It also shows only on the machine which was infected, and when you have it, you will see it in all of the online stores including i.e. amazon.com

You can also find other variations of this adware called “Hot Deals” or “Similar Products”

How to remove it:
The easiest way to remove it from your computer is by using one of the many available on the market adware removal tools. Some of them are commercial but you can also find a freeware tools like Adware Removal v3.8. Which software you will choose is up to you; we don’t recommend one choice over the other but overall most/all of the adware removals should do the job just fine. You can also manually remove this adware from your computer by following one of the many instructions available online on this process. I have found this particular instruction to be the most straightforward: http://malwaretips.com/blogs/deal-finder-virus-removal/

Recently I did a seminar on Understanding eCommerce. In this seminar I focused on the ins and outs of building an online store, but I think I got the most attention when I spoke about how to acquire new business. When I got to that part of my presentation, not a single person was updating their Facebook status or playing Candy Crush. Nope, all eyes and ears were finely tuned instruments waiting on each word that I spoke. The anticipation, the excitement, the build-up, it was perfect. I could feel the tension in the air as the attendees held on to every word waiting for that magical thing I would say that could help them transform their business. Ok, maybe it was not exactly like that, but there was definitely a sense of expectation that I could bestow on them the ‘Magical Sales Wand’ to acquire new customers through their eCommerce business.

Is There A Magical Sales Wand?

While I gave them great advice and tips that our clients have told me they swear by, there really is no Magical Sales Wand. What I told the attendees is that most clients who sign up for DecoNetwork tell us that they sign up to acquire new clients and new business. And my best advice to them… ‘Start with your existing clients’. Yes, the closest thing to a ‘Magical Sales Wand’ that could jump start your business, is ‘Your Existing Client’ base.

How Much Did That Customer Just Cost Me?

Sure, I can understand the desire to attract new customers, but the reality is that attracting new customers is really hard work and can be very expensive. The cost of getting new customers vary greatly based on what you do to attract them (marketing, promotions, tradeshows, etc.) but it is not uncommon for clients to spend as much as $100 per lead. Take a look at what some of these very popular companies spend to obtain one new client:

• Priceline.com – $7
• Sprint PCS – $315
• Barnes and Noble – $10
• TD Waterhouse – $175

The reality is that for every dollar you can spend on Pay Per Click on Google to attract clients there is someone out there who can outbid you…by a lot. But all is not lost, in my opinion, the best way to get your eCommerce business booming and to attract new customers is to start with your existing customers. That’s right, start with those clients that already do business with you today.

It Makes Financial Sense:

Not only are there some standard reasons why it makes sense to start with those clients, such as, they already trust you and they already feel comfortable doing business with you, but financially it makes more sense to start with your existing clients. The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60%-70%, but the probability of selling to a new prospect is only 5%-20% (Marketing Metrics).  It also costs between 6-7 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one (Bain and company).  Not only it harder to attract new prospect to buy from you than working with your existing customer base, they also are not as willing to spend some of their hard earned money with you. An interesting statistic is that eCommerce spending for new customers is on average $24.50 per order, compare that to an average of $52.50 per order for repeat customers. The reality is that your best bet to kick start your online business is to start with those clients you already call your own.  Organically those clients will spread the word about you and your business will grow.  That growth overtime will include new customers. I am not saying that you should not try to acquire new customers, you will need them to grow and expand but there is a time and a place for that.

Your Existing Client Base Is The Key:

There are tons of other reasons why it also makes sense to put your initial marketing push to your existing client base:

• Existing clients typically are a little more understanding if your site has small hiccups
• If they are unhappy with your service or offerings on your site existing clients are much more likely to call you and tell you. People that have never done business with you will just leave your site or post a negative comment about your business.
• Existing clients have a relationship with you and their feedback on your site, your product offerings, pricing and design offerings will prove to be invaluable. By adjusting your site based on their feedback you can be sure that once the new clients start to find your site it will be solid.

In my next blog post I will share with you some ideas on how to maximize your sales opportunity utilizing your current client base. In the meantime let me know your thoughts using the comments section. Thank you. Until next time…