Enabling Fraud Monitoring Tools

September 8th, 2010 by Art Vivino

Posted by Art Vivino, Technical Support Supervisor

Many Dydacomp customers enter a fairly large number of orders per day and using tools to catch fraud is something everyone wishes they could do more efficiently.  There may be times when orders manually entered are not carefully scrutinized and more importantly, orders imported that need to be checked by an automatic system so that they can be flagged for a manager to determine if certain potential fraudulent parameters or restrictions are met.

An effective way to monitor fraud today would be to use the Manager’s Authorization checkpoints in conjunction with the Dashboard feature within the User’s Profile of Managers and Owners.

In Global Parameters / Order Processing Design there is a check box to enable the Manager’s Authorization settings.  These settings will prevent an order from processing unless a user with Manager’s Authorization allows the order to be released.

There are a number of different settings you can use to restrict the order from proceeding unless it is approved by a user with Manager’s Authorization rights.

For example, I set a trigger to force Mail Order Manager (M.O.M.) to place an order on ‘review’ if the total dollar amount for the order exceeds $100.00.

After adding all the info required, the order will go into ‘review’ status.

To review and release this order, there is an icon to the left of the order status field.

Once you click the icon, another screen will appear requiring the input of the Manager’s user id and password.

Once the manager signs in, there will be another screen showing why the order is on review.

There may be more than one reason why the order is set to review.

A Manager should also have the ‘Manager’s Dashboard’ enabled in order to view all orders that are currently on review. To enable this, go to the user’s ID under:

Check the box next to “Enable Manager’s Dashboard”

On the Dashboard tab, select ‘Orders’ and then check the box below.

Log out and back into MOM.

In the main menu, there will be an icon to view the Dashboard.

When you select this icon, any order on review will display.

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Cut Your Abandoned Shopping Cart Rate with the Right Shipping Offers

August 31st, 2010 by John Healy

Posted by John Healy, CEO of Dydacomp

John V. Healy, CEO of Dydacomp.Customer acquisition is going to become more difficult as large retailers are maximizing organic search and pay per click to sell more efficiently on the web and as comparative shopping engines handle more and more traffic.  Additionally, comparative shopping engines typically serve up the big sites first because they are able to offer lower prices and well known brand names, making it tough for you compete.

As a result, when you finally do have someone on your site, you need to do everything in your power to convert them during that visit.   One of the marketing “weapons of choice” retailers often use to try to accomplish this is “free shipping.”

We at Dydacomp have been telling our clients to be really careful about their shipping offers.  Shipping is a hard cost that has to be covered with a fee.  We estimate that Dydacomp clients spend around $150 million a year just in shipping.  Covering this cost can come at the expense of more sales:  according to Comscore Research a little over half of consumers surveyed are “somewhat likely” to cancel their entire purchase if free shipping is not offered.  But there is good news and that is almost 70% of those same consumers are willing to pay $9.99 and under for shipping:

ComScore Data

Carefully look at what Amazon does with shipping as well.  Most of the time they are trying to keep it below $9.99/order and this shipping expense issue is certainly one of the driving reasons they want to do fulfillment for you on the items you sell on Amazon.com (as well as speed of delivery).  Speaking of delivery speed, one of our Client Advisory Board members pointed out to us recently that you need show the consumer value in paying for shipping.  In his example free shipping can be offered as a tier, with a 7 – 10 day delivery window, while the paid for shipping options get the order delivered to the consumer faster.   One other benchmark: Many sites offer consumers free shipping over a certain dollar amount or if you are a member of their loyalty program both of which you can handle using Mail Order Manager.

Finally a shipping rule of thumb from Dydacomp: you can probably get away with charging for shipping on orders under $100 if the shipping costs are close to what the consumer would have spent in sales tax for a reasonable delivery date, possibly 3 -5 days from placing the order.

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Welcome Back!

August 19th, 2010 by John Woodhour

Posted by John Woodhour, Sales Manager

According to studies by The Brooks Group, there is a 1 in 15 chance of selling to someone new; a 1 in 2 chance of selling an existing client additional products or services and a 1 in 4 chance of reclaiming a lost account.  Recently we have noticed a trend of M.O.M. users that have ‘tested the waters’ elsewhere coming back to M.O.M. in an effort to regain the efficiencies they once experienced with Dydacomp’s suite of products and services.

The major reasons we are hearing that people abandon other order management and e-commerce solutions and come back to M.O.M. are:

  • Lack of PCI Compliance
  • Lack of access to data for reporting purposes
  • Less features for multi-channel selling
  • Lack of integration across all channels
  • Plug-ins, apps, add-ons required for basic functionality
  • Less efficient processes

Dydacomp’s single suite of fully integrated solutions covers all of these areas and much, much more.  For 20 years our solutions have been used to process 80,000+ orders per day, manage $4 billion dollars in inventory and generate more than $8 million dollars a day in sales.

We welcome the opportunity to speak with you about how we can help you once again become the most efficient and profitable company you can be with the help of our tools.

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Ticket Response Times – We’re Closing Them Faster Than You Think!

August 13th, 2010 by Michael Nardini

Posted by Michael Nardini, VP of Client Satisfaction

Michael Nardini, Dydacomp VP of Client SatisfactionYou saw my post earlier this week regarding rising customer satisfaction scores.  One of the biggest factors impacting customer satisfaction ratings  is our ability to resolve system down or other critical issues quickly and effectively.  As you can see from the graphic below, we are happy to report that the all critical “system down” issues are being resolved faster.

Since March 2010, we’ve fully resolved nearly 80% of all issues within 2 hours of being reported.  60% of them are actually fully resolved under one hour!  Other categories are getting better including errors and basic categories.  Overall, we’re seeing that our average ticket close time went from 20 hours to about 5 hours to get an issue fully resolved.  The time is a bit higher than we would like because some “basic” issues and “how to” questions are handled by scheduling a call at the customer’s convenience, which may not be until later in the day or the following business day, resulting in a longer “ticket open time.”  Ultimately, we’re happy and hope you are too knowing that we’re here to help when you need us.  System down issues have been handled appropriately and consistently for about 5 months.   The graphic below shows that that any client reporting a system critical down issue will receive a response within 5-15 minutes of reporting the issue and will generally have a full resolution  within 2 hours.

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Dydacomp Sees a Significant Trend in Taxing Out-of-State Merchants

August 12th, 2010 by John Healy

Posted by John Healy,  CEO of Dydacomp

John Healy, Dydacomp CEOIn the last few weeks I have made several posts concerning Colorado and Oklahoma’s attempts to hold their citizens accountable for sales tax on goods purchased and shipped from out of state companies.  These states ask you to supply the information to both them and the consumer annually.   Luckily, Mail Order Manager and Dydacomp can help you with this administrative nightmare.

Unfortunately, there is one issue we cannot help you on.  According to the Direct Marketing Association, The Ohio Commercial Activity Tax (CAT) imposes an aggressive nexus standard known as a “bright line” nexus standard.  Under this standard a taxpayer is deemed to have nexus if at any time during the year it has any of the following:

  • $500,000 of taxable gross receipts
  • $50,000 worth of Ohio property
  • $50,000 of Ohio payroll or other compensation for services in the state
  • At least 25 percent of its total property, payroll, or gross receipts in Ohio or is domiciled in Ohio

This is NOT a sales tax.  This is a direct TAX on your business.

The DMA

I strongly suggest that you attend a free webinar on this subject put on by the Direct Marketing Association, Wednesday August 25th, 3 – 4 PM EST.  Click on the link below or call to register in advance.

Online: Register Now

Fax: 212.302.7643

Phone: 212.790.1500

Mail: Printable Form
DMA Customer Service
1120 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036-6700

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Client Satisfaction Surveys

August 10th, 2010 by Michael Nardini

Posted by Michael Nardini, VP of Client Satisfaction

Michael Nardini, VP of Client SatisfactionIn Tech Support, one of the most important things we do is make sure that you,  as the client calling in with an issue, are comfortable with the problem’s resolution before we end the call.  Once you are satisfied  with the resolution, we will send you a confirmation that the ticket is closed with details of the problem and its resolution for your records along with a survey to fill out.  We’ve been getting a lot of surveys back lately and I thought I would share the upward trend of the responses.

If you remember last year, we had you call us and you frequently experienced long hold times.  Sometimes we weren’t able to get to your call in time and you had to hang up.  Many of you got through but we didn’t have the ability to handle issues that were important to you in a satisfactory amount of time.  More than 50% of you were unhappy with this scenario which is why we built out the ticketing system further and allowed all of you to have your issue reported immediately and routed to the best equipped agent.  We’ve been shuffling the Support team around and know that response times are better.  All survey responses are read by me personally,  so many of you have received comments and questions from me to learn more  about your experience.  I look forward to your continued feedback  to help to further improve our process until customer satisfaction reaches 100%!

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Internet and Mail Order Sales Tax Idea Spreads to Oklahoma

August 4th, 2010 by John Healy

Posted by John Healy, CEO of Dydacomp

John Healy, Dydacomp CEOIn previous posts we’ve addressed the sales tax situation in Colorado, now the sales tax reporting law has now spread to Oklahoma.  Here is an excerpt from an email that the Direct Marketing Association recently sent out on the subject:

“DMA filed comments this week on the draft rules implementing the new use tax notice law in Oklahoma.  The draft rules closely mirror the legislative language in contrast to the expansive and highly prescriptive regulations adopted in Colorado.

The draft regulations can be found here.  Please note that these are not in effect yet.  As we (DMA) understand it, there will be a hearing following the comment period before the regulations are adopted and go into effect.”

We at Dydacomp will keep you posted like we have for the Colorado law as the implementation of the regulation in Oklahoma becomes more clear.  We also suspect that this is a trend that will continue as states try to balance their budgets any way possible.  In an earlier post, we took you through an analysis that the individual states are showing about a $112 billion deficit, or roughly a 17% deficit on average.  That deficit has to be made up as most states have passed balance budget amendments so look for more activity.  The only fortunate part is that Mail Order Manager can help you with the necessary reporting to be compliant.


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The New “Mandatories” of eCommerce

August 2nd, 2010 by John Healy

Posted by John Healy, CEO of Dydacomp

John Healy, Dydacomp CEOCurrently there are many merchants looking to switch shopping carts to get more out of their e commerce businesses in terms of growth as well as compliance.  As I literally travel around the world I am asked all the time what am I seeing in terms of “must haves” from a shopping cart.

So, in true David Letterman style, we have developed the top 10 must haves in a shopping cart (plus a bonus one).  I will go in order of priority because there are over 600 shopping cart options globally that merchants have when picking a shopping cart vendor.  This top 10 list will whittle down the contenders very quickly:

ecommerce must haves

Not sure how your current vendor stacks up on these “must haves”.  Also, I have another post on e commerce strategies that I’ll share with you at a later date.  All of this is fresh in my mind as we just finished developing our new state-of-the-art e commerce platform, Complete Commerce.  If you have time for a demo, it is well worth it.

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A Little More Background on the Colorado Sales Tax Issue

July 28th, 2010 by John Healy

Posted by John Healy, CEO of Dydacomp

John Healy, Dydacomp CEOI thought I would share with you a very good summary of the Colorado Sales Tax reporting issue that you will unfortunately need to deal with in the very near future.  A summary of the most current thinking has been best captured by Monica Smith, CEO of Marketsmith, Inc.  Her company specializes in mail planning, database and analytical marketing services.  Take a look at her very thorough and brief take on the new law at: http://www.marketsmithinc.com/2010/07/update-on-colorado-salesuse-tax-legislation/

Also, read our post on how to deal with this law from a reporting standpoint using M.O.M. at http://blog.dydacomp.com/new-sales-tax-law for more details.  We’ll also do our best to keep you curent on this law as the Direct Marketing Association among other groups is challenging Colorado’s authority as a state to implement this type of tax on out-of-state companies.

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The Dydacomp Client Advisory Boards

July 21st, 2010 by Lisa Gittleman

Posted by Lisa Gittleman, Dydacomp Marketing Specialist

Lisa Gittleman, Dydacomp Marketing SpecialistIn June, CEO John Healy posted a call for applications for the new Dydacomp Client Advisory Boards in this post.  The response to his post was tremendous and a testament to the strength and dedication of our user community.  After a careful review of all the applications received, we are pleased to announce the members of the Major and Select Client Advisory Boards.

Major CAB Members:

  • Bob Mayer of Mayer Berkshire Corp.
  • Laura McManus of Mackenzie/Chesapeake
  • Larry Fugleberg of Active Forever
  • Mark Hayes of National Tire & Wheel
  • Tom Hansen of Russell-Hampton Co.
  • Bill Nero of Central Parts Warehouse
  • Jimmy Telles of Dragon Herbs
  • Justin Hammer of B-21 Liquors
  • Ben Watson of Hyperdrug
  • Sean Fleischman of Landfall Navigation

Select CAB Members:

  • Mark Fothergill of Replicarz
  • Nancy Kittle of E. Burnham Cosmetics
  • Fred Weiner of Frederic H. Weiner, Inc.
  • Joe Mediate of KooKoo Bear Baby & Kids
  • Jim Meyer of Mall Services Group
  • Roya Rejai of Envelopper Inc.
  • Lee Cooper of Industrial Automation Components
  • Matt Adams of Rescue Response Gear
  • Mike Julian of Hometown Favorites
  • Tommy Tsitouris/Matt Crowley of Chicago Steak Company

Each member has accepted a two year term with the charge to give us feedback and in some cases endorsement of product and service ideas that would positively affect the relevance and use of our solutions and services with our clients.   Welcome to our inaugural CAB members and thank you to all who applied.  We look forward to working with you all.

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