Closing Online Sales, Keeping Customers Happy and Maintaining Your Online Reputation

Feb. 10, 2011 - PRLog -- Successful e-commerce companies have three things in common: Good online reviews, reasonable delivery fees and prompt delivery of goods. Web services can help you streamline delivery rates and assure your products are delivered on time: key ingredients for keeping customers in your online sales process and inspiring them to leave positive feedback in return.

---STREAMLINE RATES---

Has this ever happened to you?You find the perfect product at the right price, only to find out that the shipping rates nearly double its price? If you’re like me, then you click out and search for another place to buy your product. We’re not unique in this. Some studies estimate that up to 75% of all shopping carts are abandoned before sales are closed, and report that the #1 reason is high shipping rates.

Why are some shipping rates so high? Location is the first thing that comes to mind; but then there’s that dreaded “handling” fee that often inflates the cost.

Companies can often keep people like us in the sales process by simply tightening up on distance calculations, thereby reducing “handling” in the sales and shipping process. This is something that can easily be done by integrating their online stores with a hosted geocoding Web service.

Take, DOTS Address Geocode, it’s a Web service that pinpoints the exact locations of your customers the moment they enter their addresses into your online form; allowing you to offer delivery rates based on actual distances rather than geographic zones.

--- ASSURE DELIVERABILITY ---

While DOTS Address Geocode pinpoints customers’ locations, it also cleans up their addresses, fixing things like ZIP codes and left-out apartment numbers, for example. It can also push the clean customer data into sellers’ CRM systems. That means less “handling” via no re-keying efforts and fault-free delivery.

Undeliverable mail accounts for billions of dollars of waste in the US alone, and some of that comes back to you and me in “handling” fees associated with reprocessing bad deliveries.

Undeliverable (or late-arriving) purchases also account for the majority of online complaints when it comes to rating customer experience.

To sum it up, pinpointing exact customer delivery locations and cleaning up addresses to assure deliverability help you not only in your efforts to reduce handling fees, but also in building and maintaining your online reputation.

Offering better value and better customer experience drives more loyalty and ultimately more revenue to online companies. Good reviews attract people like me to initiate business with online companies in the first place. Reasonable handling fees inspire us to stay the course and complete sales processes; and quick deliveries on our purchases gets us to leave positive feedback in return.

DOTS Address Geocode pinpoints customer location and assures address deliverability while instantly updating the seller’s CRM system. It’s a simple solution to help online sellers offer better bottom-line prices, streamline sales and shipping processes and keep customers coming back and/or sharing their positive experiences.
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About-
Service Objects™ is a privately owned technology company based in Santa Barbara, California, specializing in Contact validation and verification Web services for real-time lead enhancement. Our web services easily integrate with any business-quality online application and tap into the freshest, most accurate data available, including CASS certified USPS data, top tier Telco information and the largest database of mobile phone numbers in the industry.