PayPal, Google Part of NetSuite Upgrades
NetSuite, Inc., developers of on-demand business management software for small and mid-sized businesses, today announced that NetSuite has integrated the PayPal payment service into its all-in-one e-commerce solutions.
The company also announced a host of new features bringing advanced e-commerce capabilities to its online retailers. The newly unveiled functionality added to the NetSuite e-commerce engine provides a single system that manages global e-commerce transactions from visit-to-fulfillment, while providing tools to integrate with multiple online channels and optimize search engine rankings.
Mini Peiris, senior director of product management for NetSuite, told ECommerce-Guide.com that the new enhancements are designed to help small merchants “get more eyeballs, offer good service and increase sales.”
Some of the new features announced today include:
Google Keyword-to-Purchase Tracking and Optimization Tools – The new SEO tools are built specifically for Google improve search engine ranking for Web sites powered by the NetSuite e-commerce engine. NetSuite now provides “closed-loop analysis” of leads driven by the Google search engine-both paid and organic-from the time they hit a Web site to the purchase. For example, NetSuite tells which referrers, natural search terms and paid keywords have provided the highest visitor-to-customer conversion ratio and highest per customer revenue, enabling users to invest their marketing dollars more wisely.
“We’re making sure sites powered by NetSuite are optimized for optimal search engine placement,” said Pieris.
Multi-Channel Selling Capabilities — Allows merchants to go beyond traditional multi-channel selling to tap into any online channel and maximize their exposure on the Web with an easy export of their products into comparison shopping engines such as Google’s Froogle, eBay’s Shopping.com, Shopzilla (BizRate) and NexTag. Businesses can also create feeds for other online comparison engines.
PayPal Integration — This allows merchants to accept payments in multiple currencies, which in turn allows shoppers to choose their own currency. PayPal orders show the status of the payment and places orders that are still processing in a separate queue – a feature unique to NetSuite.
Close Abandoned Shopping Carts — With advanced search capabilities and e-mail marketing tools allow merchants to see exactly which shoppers abandoned their carts, what items were in their cart, and when the items were added. Then they can conduct direct e-mail marketing programs to close the sale. This is dependent on the shopper being a registered user of the site, however.
UPS and FedEx Integration — Now available to all merchants, providing rate generation, thermal label printing, and automatic tracking number.
“The Internet was supposed to make the size and location of a company irrelevant when it came to selling on the Web, but this promise was not realized because of weak, first generation technology,” said Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite. “NetSuite’s new features bring SMBs to the e-commerce ‘promised land,’ where the quality of the buying and service experience-not the size of the merchant-defines winners and losers.”
Peiris told ECommerce-Guide last week that merchants now have the ability to mine data for abandoned shopping carts. For example, if a particular (registered) customer adds a product to a shopping cart one week but does not buy it right then and there, the merchant can see this and market similar products to them via email or personalized Web pages the next week.
She added, “Eighty percent of the growth we are seeing is in e-commerce businesses and they’re getting more sophisticated and doing more creative things. We enable the smaller guys to look very sophisticated. The value they find with us is that it’s all one system.”
PayPal is In
The integration of PayPal provides seamless end-to-end online transactions with real-time visibility, the company says. The integration of PayPal appears to be a logical and necessary step, given that more than 80 million Internet users have a PayPal account.
Yahoo Merchant Solutions also added PayPal integration in beta form for its merchants last week.
NetSuite says its merchants can begin accepting online payments immediately, activating the PayPal service in minutes, without any monthly commitments. Merchants can use the NetSuite PayPal integration to accept all major forms of payment, including Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, debit cards, bank transfers and PayPal users’ stored balances. With PayPal, NetSuite merchants can accept payments in six currencies — U.S. Dollars, Canadian Dollars, Australian Dollars, British Pound Sterling, Euros and Japanese Yen.
“The integration of PayPal lets our merchants transact globally,” said Peiris.
The NetSuite PayPal integration provides extensive fraud protection to protect merchants. NetSuite merchants can safely accept online payments knowing that PayPal fights charge backs on a merchant’s behalf, and offers seller protection policies that help protect businesses from fraudulent transactions, says NetSuite. PayPal claims to have an industry-leading loss rate of 0.24 percent.
“NetSuite is committed to giving its customers tools that help them maximize their online presence,” said Nelson. “By integrating PayPal in conjunction with NetSuite’s e-commerce solutions, we are allowing our customers to make full use of one of the easiest and most intuitive payment methods on the Web.”
NetSuite says Web sites powered by its platform always have real-time inventory data and are tightly integrated with UPS and FedEx to generate rates and print shipping labels. All Web orders are automatically recorded for accounting purposes, and can be processed through an approval, fulfillment, billing workflow.
Customers can also view their lifetime order history online, track their own packages, and communicate with a support department that has access to the customer’s purchase history.
NetSuite says nearly 1,800 small and mid-sized companies rely on its products to deliver an integrated on-line selling experience to their customers and can increase their sales through marketing campaigns initiated from within NetSuite and then measure the effectiveness of each campaign down to the penny.
Pricing and Availability
NetSuite includes the core e-commerce functionality together with the marketing and search engine optimization capabilities highlighted today at no additional charge. NetSuite Site Analytics and Site Builder modules are an additional $199 USD/$299 CAD per month. The PayPal online payment option carries no setup fees or monthly fees. Merchants pay a per-transaction fee of 1.9 percent to 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction, depending on monthly volume.
Devin Comiskey is the Managing Editor of ECommerce-Guide.
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