Faster, Better Product Pages

We are proud to announce a partnership with Sellpoint, Inc.

Sellpoint provides animated product tours for a large number of products on our site. Flash animation, product manuals, detailed images are all part of the package. Look for the "View Product Tour" button below the product images. If you want to check it out, take a look at our part numbers 3333688, 3163924, 0414820. It is almost as if you can touch the product and it's a very powerful sales tool. We hope you and your customers will benefit from this great addition.

The partnership has also prompted us to take another look at the way we display the products information on the product detail page. We have re-designed the page and made significant improvements, not just in the way the information is displayed but there's more of it and it is displayed much faster than before.

Major Changes
Here are some of the most significant changes we have made:


1) A special block on the page which includes additional functionality like setting price and stock alerts.
2) We added a "buy together" section which displays the most popular accessory for the product. Both products can be added to the cart with one click of a button.
3) All accessories are conveniently located on the right hand side of the page
4) On the bottom of the page is a list of the 5 most popular products in the past hour. Popularity is calculated using product views and purchases.


We have already seen a dramatic increase in pageviews and an increase time spent on the site since Friday. We're working on adding social bookmarking and other great improvements of the site as a whole. I'll keep you posted.

Get Ready for the Season

Whether you like it or not, Christmas is just around the corner and Internet sales usually spike during this time. To make sure you can capture as many sales as possible we have created a Holiday Gift Guide with nicely categorized products. Your customer can search by category and by price and we've made sure there is something for everyone. We've put a link on every page of the storefront so they can't miss it.

Banners
If you have your own web site (click here if you don't) you can put some great new banners on it and capture those sales directly from you site. Go to the promotional tools after logging into you reseller account and get the HTML code for these banners.
Good luck and feel free to shop around yourself.

Protect your business and your time

Each week we receive requests from resellers for quotes for high-ticket items destined for Nigeria, Ivory Coast or Ghana in Africa or Indonesia in Asia. Here at NextDay Network we receive emails from those countries on a daily basis. Price is usually not an issue. Most of the time the products will be paid for by credit card, sometimes even by check. Because we are able to block most of the IP-addresses from those countries, these “shoppers” are increasingly targeting resellers.

In the history of our company we have never had a legitimate order from those countries. There have even been attempts to pay for transactions with fraudulent cashier’s checks. Furthermore, the individuals trying to place these orders are finding new ways to try and get you and us to ship the products.

What can you do to protect your business?
Well, the easiest solution would be to just not respond to requests from those countries. However, it is not that easy, you have to know what to look for first. Here are the most common things to look for in a potentially fraudulent transaction:

1. The shopper uses a free email address, like hotmail or yahoo. If you are not sure if it is a free email account just try looking for the web site of the domain that is used. For example, if someone sends you an email from the following email address customer@domainname.com, just open a web browser and type in the following http://www.domainname.com/. If this is a free email account the web site usually has some sort of login screen and a way to set up a free account. If a real domain name is used, it is quite easy to find out where the domain name comes from: just go to http://www.geektools.com/whois.php and type in the domain name. You can quickly find out where the company is located that issued the email address.
   


2. If you know how to extract the IP-address from the email or order you have received, you can use a very nice tool to find out the geographical location of the shopper. Just type in the IP-address and in most cases it will tell you exactly where the shopper is from. Give it a try here. http://www.networldmap.com/TryIt.htm .
   


3. Shopper is unconcerned with shipping costs. Most legitimate shoppers are very sensitive to shipping costs. A "please expedite and add the extra onto my card" with no maximum or qualifying comment or question may be a tip-off: Use Caution.
   


4. Very large dollar amount order or large quantity. Thieves need to score quickly and move on since fraudulent delivery addresses have a short lifespan, at least in the USA. They will try to hit a perfect spot where the order is big enough to profit them, but small enough NOT to make merchants suspicious. Sometimes they will aim for $500+ orders, other times try to stay in the $199 range.
   


5. Ship-to address is not the same as the billing address. There are many legitimate reasons for a shopper wanting to do this, but it is a "cheat" of the AVS (Address Verification System) system if the thief has the billing address of the real cardholder. This is also one of the reasons why we always ask the customer to have the shipping address added as an alternate address.
   


6. Tell them you have their product in stock, and ask if they want an accessory to go with that, for only $200 more. Phrase this appropriately to avoid annoying legitimate shoppers. A crook, if monitoring their bogus email box at all, will say "sure!" without even a question. This should raise red flags.
   


7. Call the phone number given in the order. It may be entirely bogus, and sometimes it is even the actual number of the person whose card was stolen. If you don't get a phone number with the order, write and ask for one.
   


8. We have heard of some cases where the shopper emails you the credit card information. Unless you know the customer very well, don’t expect this to be a legitimate order. Normal shoppers would never send their Credit Card information via email.
   


9. Sophisticated thieves now also use very legitimate looking cashier’s checks. Please make sure to clear those checks with your bank and hold on to your products for at least two weeks after you have deposited the check. We have heard of several cases where the reseller had shipped products after depositing the check only to find out two weeks later that the originating bank had refused the check because it was fraudulent.
   


10. Always use common sense when you are dealing with pure Internet orders and if a deal looks too good to be true, be very careful.

Refurbished products - You get what you pay for

For at least a few months now we have been offering refurbished products on the storefront. From cell phones to servers, from TVs to networking equipment, there are usually a few hundred different types for products available. I picked up a Gateway TabletPC a few months ago for less than $800 and apart from a few scratches on the bottom, it has served me very well. To easily find refurbished products on the nextdaypc.com, just type in "refurb notebook" or "refurb phone" or similar wording, depending on what you are looking for.

I'm sure every now and then you run into a customer with a limited budget and refurbished products are a great resource to retain this customer.

But you have to make sure you explain the limitations of refurbished products before you make the sale. The majority of products does not come with the standard warranty a new product has and sometimes the documentation or software is missing. Usually the latter is not an issue if your customer knows where and how to find this. The technical support or warranty is usually handled by a third-party company that handles a variety of products and brands so you cannot expect the support you would expect from the manufacturers themselves. Check on the storefront or just call us for detailed warranty information.

So, if your customer is willing to dig for support online or ask you for paid support when needed, refurbished products are certainly an option.

Protecting your Reseller Account

When I opened my mailbox this morning I found the following question from a reseller: Why do my customers have to sign up before they can see anything on the storefront?

Every once in awhile this question seems to return along with another question I get asked: What do you do to make sure my customer places an order through my reseller account?

In general, the most important thing for us is to make sure that you feel you can rely on our services. Without you as a reseller we would not be able to sell any product so it is in our own best interest to make sure that you and your customers keep coming back.

To answer both questions, and maybe more, let me describe the paths your customer might take to get to the storefront. It all has to do with cookies and linking.

1. If your customer has never visited NextDayPC.com before and types in http://www.nextdaypc.com/ he will see a secure sign in page, where he will be asked to set up an account and to include a discount code. To try this just delete your NextDayPC.com cookie, close all browser windows, and visit http://www.nextdaypc.com. If you think that this is just what your customer might do, make sure you give them your discount code.
   


2. The most common path for your customer is probably from clicking a link on your website or in an e-mail. To get detailed instructions on how to do this, click here. As soon as that customer goes to the storefront, a cookie with your discount code is placed on the customer's machine and from then on and determines the look and feel of the site and the product pricing. This takes us to the next possible path.
   


3. Once your customer has a cookie and returns to the storefront, even if they just type in http://www.nextdaypc.com, the discount code information will be read and the pricing and layout will change on the fly. Your customer will never see this secure sign in page.

If your customer decides to delete the cookie, he returns to the first option described above, leaving him with the option to sign in or to create a new account. If he signs in because he had created an account previously , the storefront will recognize the customer, associates him with the appropriate reseller and will put another cookie on your customer's machine.

I hope this clears up the some of these questions. Feel free to comment on this post or ask me a question by clicking here.

Storefront Linking de-mystified

We have been getting a lot of emails lately requesting a little help linking to certain areas or pages on NextDayPC.com. With the holiday season right around the corner it will probably pay off re-visiting your links and making sure everything works the way it should.


What NOT to do...
Make sure you never link to the storefront without including your Discount Code. Your Discount Code is the 9-digit Code starting with ND0. You can find this code on the home page after logging in to your account at http://www.resellersonly.com/. For the examples below we will use ND0123456 and the links have been disabled.

Linking to the Home page
Only for the home page there are 2 ways to send your customers there. Let's start with the most difficult one;

1. Because of engineering issues we advise you to use this one on your web site, it is more reliable and will modify any old or incorrect cookies. Use the following format
   http://www.nextdaypc.com/main/default.aspx?&rsmainid=ND0123456 and replace the Discount Code with your own.


2. We also have the option for a "simplified" URL. You can change that in your storefront settings on www.resellersonly.com . When you're visiting customers, for printed material or in your email signature you can use something like this www.nextdaypc.com/art . Of course this is much easier to remember than the first option.

Linking to ANY page
The formula for linking to any page on nextdaypc.com is quite simple.
Once you have located the correct page on the site just copy the URL (see image below) and add the following string:
&rsmainid=ND0123456 where you replace ND0123456 with your own Discount Code. The result would look something like this:
http://www.nextdaypc.com/main/products/details.aspx?PID=2735863&rsmainid=ND0123456



Again, you can do this with any page on the storefront.