Say, for example, your product is cycling gear — clothing, accessories, food and beverage, shoes, and other items for serious cyclists — and you want to know what kind of demand is out there. Google Insights for Search can show you.

Open a web browser and go to http://www.google.com/insights/search:

Enter the search terms you’d like info on. Let’s put “cycling gear” in the search box and click “Search.”

What we can see is that there have been distinct spikes of interest over the years of folks searching Google for “cycling gear”:

If we hover over the graph, we can see that each year, demand for cycling gear hits it’s high-water mark in July:

Also, while we can see a predictable July influx, we can also see that the overall trend is downward. We can check these numbers against our historical sales numbers in CartGenie using the Sales Detail Report to see if the broader trend holds true for our company. From here we can postulate that our best month in 2010 is bound to be July — we better have our warehouse stocked!

This is just scratching the surface of data that can be accessed with Google Insights for Search. How can you use this free tool to gain a competitive edge?

You can learn more about our new program here.

If you’re a Web designer and would like to apply to be a part of our program (it’s free!) click here.

Click here to view all our Tips of the Week.

Have you ever wanted your customers to make some choices about a product before adding it to their cart? You can accomplish this with Personalization options.

Start in CartGenie Desktop Engine by navigating to the product that you need to add personalization option to. In this example, we’re looking at a Mens’ Cycling Top.

Click on “Personalization.” You will see the Product Id and the Product Name and a blank field under “Personalization Group.”

Click “Edit” to add a new Personalization Group. A Personalization Group is a series of questions or fields your customer will answers before adding a product to their cart — in many cases, you will have a single Personalization Group that applies to a number of products.

Personalization Manager opens and you will want to click “Edit” to add a new group of questions.

Name your Personalization Group and click “Add/Update.”

Close the Personalization Group Manager, bringing you back to the Personalization Manager. From the drop down box, select your Personalization Group. One at a time, type in the questions you want to ask your customer. Use “Sort” to organize the questions in the order you want.

You can choose whether or not the question must be answered by your customer in the “Answer Required” field. If you select “Yes,” your customer will have to answer the question before they can add the item to their cart.

Click “Add/Update” to save changes. If you do nothing else, you customer will answer the question by typing into a text box. But what if you wanted them to select only from a drop-down list of answers? Click the “Answer Options” check box, which opens up the “Personalization Answer Option Manager.”

Input a sort number and an answer option. If you want to attach a price increase to certain answers, choose a “Price Level” and a “Price.” For example, if the question was “Gift Wrap Options,” the answers might be “None,” “Free Basic Wrapping,” and “Premium Wrapping” which costs an additional $4.99.

Click “Add/Update” to save changes. You can now  use this Personalization Group on not only this product but on any other product where you want to ask the same series of questions.

Click here to view all our Tips of the Week.

This week, we’ll take a quick look at setting up the Payment Manager. When you first set up your online store with CartGenie, you have to define which forms of payment you are going to take online. Once you have set this up, from time to time you may need to add or delete a form of payment — say you now have the ability to accept American Express, for example. Both tasks are accomplished easily in the Payment Manager.

From the Commerce Menu, select “Payment Manager.”

In the blank rows, you will want to type in the types of credit cards you accept (e.g. “Visa,” “MasterCard,” etc.). Under “Display” choose “Yes,” assuming you want that credit card to be an option for your customers. Under “Card ID Required,” define whether you need the customer to enter the card’s unique ID number (sometimes referred to as the CVV2). Finally, click “Add/Update” to save changes.

In the bottom half of the Payment Manager, you have additional payment options. For example, if you allow customers to place an order online and then come into a physical store to pick up the order and pay in person, you would want to check the box for “In-Store/Will Call.”

Lastly, the “PayPal Payment Option” is if you are setting up PayPal integration. Learn about setting up CartGenie to work with PayPal from this Knowledge Base article.

Click “Add/Update” to save all changes and you’re done!

They say a picture is worth a thousand words — wouldn’t it stand to reason that a moving picture is worth exponentially more? We created our Video Tutorials page to serve as a library of our “How To” videos. Now, if you’re running stuck doing something in CartGenie, pop over to search for a related video tutorial.

Most videos are just a few minutes long and show you how to do some of the most common functions in CartGenie. So check it out and learn something new!

If you don’t see what you’re looking for, we’d love to hear your suggestions! Click here to Contact Us.

Click here to view all our Tips of the Week.

This week we’re looking at using the Mail Template Manager to create customized, automatic e-mails you can send out to your customers.

In CartGenie Desktop Engine, click on the “Tools” menu, hover over “Mail Management,” then select “Mail Template Manager.”

The Mail Template Manager opens and at the top we see the “E-Mail Template Selection List.” If we click the drop-down menu, we see that CartGenie comes loaded with three templates we can customize: New Order Auto Confirmation, Send Gift Card, and Send Order Complete.

• New Order Auto Confirmation is the e-mail that is automatically generated and sent whenever a customer places an order. This e-mail is sent without you ever having to do anything (hence, “Auto Confirmation”)
• Send Gift Card is the e-mail that you send to the recipient of a gift card. It tells the recipient their E-Gift Card number and their PIN so they can start shopping at your online store immediately (Click to view Part 1 and Part 2 of our E-Gift Card video tutorials).
• Send Order Complete is the e-mail you send out when you have finished processing the order. It “closes the loop” for the customer and gives them follow-up steps if they have questions on their order.

Let’s take a look at the New Order Confirmation template to get a feel for how we can customize any of these three templates.

Each phrase in brackets like [BusinessName] is a field that is pulled from the database. You can change any of the other text to suit your needs.

For example, let’s say you wanted to change the first phrase in the New Order Auto Confirmation from:

“This is an automatically generated email from [BusinessName].“

to:

“Thank you for choosing [BusinessName] for your widget needs! (This email has been automatically generated)”

Simply replace the text in the template with your desired text and then click “Add/Update” to save changes.

In a similar fashion, you can customize the text in this template and the other two templates as well.

Heading up this initiative is Toby Getsch, a Program Manager and SharePoint MCTS with extensive experience deploying, installing, and configuring SharePoint for numerous organizations across a wide range of industries. Toby’s experience with SharePoint dates back to the early 2000′s and he has continued working with all sizes of organizations, from small businesses to large multi-national corporations.

Adding to his SharePoint-specific experience is more than a decade of IT leadership, consulting, advising, and project work. With a particular passion for planning the right strategy and execution, his experience with various engagements fits very well with J Street’s growing SharePoint expertise.

At first, I didn’t think much of this question until I realized it revealed a larger trend in the Custom Programming industry — namely, a dearth of longevity. I don’t mean to malign any particular development shop, but the reality is that many companies are one or two-person operations who work out of a home office. While many of these companies do excellent work and can provide great value to their clients, it can be inferred from this frequently asked question that they are also more susceptible to changing economic conditions and availability.

Small companies need less work to be profitable, but losing one or two key clients can be devastating and may even be cause for that solo developer to close down their freelance business and go work for a larger company with more job security. And the client who had a project with them a few years ago finds themselves out of luck today when they come back for more help. This client now has to find a new custom programming shop, who must spend some time (which the client pays for) to come up to speed on a system they didn’t build.

J Street isn’t a huge custom development shop. But we do have a team of developers who come in to work on a daily basis at our office. This allows our team to leverage each others’ strengths. Biff might be humming along on a project until he hits a piece of the application that requires a technology he’s not as familiar with. If Biff were a solo operation, his efficiency would plummet while he learns the new technology and comes up to speed on it. At J Street, Biff walks down across the hall and asks Trixie for some help. She helps Biff with that small piece of his project and then goes back to her own. The result is fewer hours of development and a lower overall cost for our customer.

But the bigger benefit to the client is continuity. Here at J Street, we’re pleased to have long-time employees. In an industry where 6-12 month stints are all too common, we have developers who have been here for 4, 5, 7 years — and longer. As a result, when one of our past clients comes calling we (1) are there to answer because we’re still in business and (2) know the system because we built it — often, we can even assign the original Phase 1 developer to Phase 2. Not having to start from scratch and come up to speed saves the customer hundreds — sometimes thousands — of dollars.

The decision for a potential client to choose us is a complex one with a lot of factors. But our hope is that companies consider continuity as one of them.

If you missed last week’s post on adding users to CartGenie Desktop Engine, you can find it here.

Today we’ll show you how to offer downloads on your website for sale that your customers can purchase and download without you ever having to ship a physical product.

Say you have a downloadable product you would like to sell like a form template, an e-book, or a pdf. We’ll start in the Desktop Engine, and the Product Manager. We’ve already chosen a Product Name, Category, Sub-category, and Brand and input a description. We click “Add/Update” to save our changes so far…

Next click on the “Item/Price” button to access the Item Manager. We choose the sort order, type in our item number, and a description of the product and click “Add/Update” to save our changes.

Now click the “Download Manager” button. Choose which item is going to be downloaded (most likely, you only have one item for this downloadable product). Now we have to tell CartGenie which file our customers are paying to download. Also, we have to upload that file to the server using the FTP Manager.

Let’s take a moment and open up the FTP Manager from the Tools menu.

First, ensure you have your settings entered by clicking the “Settings” button. You find these settings in the J Street Customer Support Center on the “Settings” Tab. Click “Connect.”

Now you need to find the file on your computer that we’re going to upload. Click the “Find File” button and navigate to where you have this file on your computer (note: you don’t want any spaces in the file name).

In the FTP Manager, select the Destination Folder on the server by double-clicking “/CartGenie/Downloads” Click “Upload” to upload the file.

Close the FTP Manager. Now we have to tell CartGenie the name of the file on the server that our customers are paying to download. The Download Manager knows to look in the CartGenie/Downloads folder, so we just have to put in the file name. Remember, you need to have chosen a file name without any spaces. Type in the file name, including the extension — in this case .pdf

Choose the expiration. This is when the download link expires for the customer. If you want the customer to be able to download this file multiple times, choose “Never.” If they should only be able to download the file once, choose “After Download.”

Click “Add/Update” to save changes.

Now, after your customer pays for this download and places the order, you will have to go into Order Manager and “close” the order before they can download the product (unless you have the order set to close automatically).

Once you’ve closed the order, your customer can go to your website, log in, click the “Your Account” link and find a link to download their purchase.

Before your product will show on your site, you will need to:

• Add a price level and a price in Pricing Manager
• Add “quantity on hand” in Inventory Manager

Great Job!