I’ve known David Poindexter for a long time now.  Ever since I’ve known him, he’s been successfully running nvisionative.  David founded the company over 7 years ago now, and hasn’t looked back since.  The company is located in Mooresville, North Carolina and focuses on a central passion, which is generating ideas that can drive client businesses forward through marketing and technology.  I guess that’s why their client list boasts a world-wide presence, despite being headquartered in Race City, USA.  That’s what some people call Mooresville, due to the number of race teams that call this fine city home.

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with the president of ITX, a world-wide team of over 100 digital experience professionals.  ITX has been one of our partners for a while now, and they boast an impressive client list overall, including one of my personal favorites, Simon Sinek.  In addition to being the president of the company, Fred Beer is also a partner at ITX, an impressive company that started in Rochester, NY way back in 1997.  We really enjoy working with ITX on every project, because they have a similar outlook on clients as we do.  Fred himself mentioned that their goal is to create 100-year relationships with their clients.  I rarely hear a statement from any company as powerful as that.

One of our earliest partners to join the program is 10 Pound Gorilla.  They’ve been with us pretty much since our beginning, bringing us one of our first beta clients.  Needless to say, they know more about Hotcakes Commerce than most.  10 Pound Gorilla is headquartered near Denver, Colorado but has employees based all over the U.S.  The color red in their logo has roots too… Colorado is actually a Spanish adjective for “red” and this is only one of many interesting tidbits about their fun-loving company and culture. This was the first of many things I’d learn about Cassidi and her company in this interview.

If you’re anywhere near Germany and need an e-commerce website, our partners mintblau media are there to help.  They’re based just over the border from Belgium and Netherlands in Aachen.  You may have heard of Aachen since it’s home of the popular RWTH Aachen University, but you may not realize that it’s also where the coronation would be held for German kings.  Royalty has always been associated with strength and power, and this kind of inspiration seems to have inspired the folks at mintblau.  You’ll find some subtle and not-so-subtle hints at their superpowers pretty much everywhere on their website.

One of our newest partners is Moore Creative.  Their origin is similar to many companies in the U.S. – especially in the software industry.  Ryan Moore founded the company back in 1997, where they saw a market need for web development firms that specialized in Action Flash.  I don’t know if you remember the web back then, but this was indeed a very high demand talent.  Everyone was rushing to convert their static HTML websites to Flash.  Fast forward almost 20 years later, and Moore Creative is still going strong out of the home of NASCAR, in beautiful Charlotte, North Carolina.  These days, Moore and his team focus much more on B2B industrial, production, and asset management verticals in e-commerce.

We get it, abandoned carts are part of the process.  If you had a brick-and-mortar store, you’d see some people walk-in, browse, and then leave.  This is essentially, the same thing.  However, in both instances, there are some simple things that you can do to greatly reduce the number of abandoned carts your store sees.  We’ll walk through them together in this article.

No matter what you’re selling online, social media helps you sell it better. But you may be thinking “I already have Twitter and Facebook share buttons on my website – isn’t that enough?”

Not exactly.

Think about it. When was the last time you went to a website and thought, “this is such a great offer, I have to tell everyone I know about it!”

Never, right?

Hotcakes Commerce, like many companies, was born out of purpose. After years of being frustrated with various other online shopping software solutions, we finally decided to do something about. Like you, we realize nothing is perfect, but we knew then and know now that there was plenty of room for someone to work with online store owners – instead of against them. Hotcakes came to you with that mission… to make e-commerce easier, for everyone. With this announcement, we’re taking that commitment we made to you, and raising it to a whole new level.

When it comes to being an e-commerce powerhouse, Amazon seems to have all the right stuff. A recognizable brand, fast shipping, detailed reviews – the list goes on and on. But can Amazon really teach you how to grow your sales? Absolutely. You just have to know where to look. Here are three of our favorite Amazon sales ideas that you can borrow – starting today.

If you’ve been mulling over a possible redesign, you may be asking yourself, “does my site really even need it?”

After all, it’s not like you get a little alert or prompt telling you that your site could use a bit more than a fresh coat of paint. What you need is something more – a convenient checklist that you can look at and know when it’s time to redesign. Fortunately, we’ve created one just for you. Go ahead and print it out, then load up your website and ask yourself:

Some of you may already know that we’re working on something really big for you.  In fact, we’ve been teasing these updates for over a year now.  We still have a week or two before we can talk about those things more openly.  In the meantime, please enjoy this latest release of Hotcakes that we’ve prepared for you.  We had several reports of issues with Authorize.Net and the new tax provider that could cascade issues for you and your customers under the right conditions. 

It’s no secret that mobile is taking the web by storm. Every day, people log in to a variety of mobile apps and responsive websites to do everything from order food to check stocks and attend events. But many businesses are torn – should you invest in a mobile responsive site, or have an app developed? Both have their pros and cons and ultimately, knowing the benefits and downsides of each will help you be able to more confidently decide which is right for you. Let’s take a closer look:

We're very hard at work on some exciting things coming on both our website and within the Hotcakes Commerce solution itself.  However, there were a few glaring issues that had to get worked on immediately to help you run your stores efficiently.  Enjoy this release, as it stabilizes some issues recently found in our Authorize.Net, PayPal, and Google Commerce integrations.

From time to time, we get questions about how taxes work in Hotcakes, and it often would lead to our clients wondering if we supported a tax calculation provider of some name.  There's a surprisingly large number of tax providers out there, and you automatically have your choice of two when you use Hotcakes, including the built-in tax schedule and Avalara's Avatax.  With this release, you're no longer limited to those options.  You can now have any tax provider in the world integrated with Hotcakes.

This is a very hectic time of year for all of us, in many ways, and for varying reasons.  It's the holiday season already. The year is coming to an end, we're all shopping, preparing for respective visits and feasts, and so much more.  Let's not forget that our customers are and will be visiting our sites more and more frequently from this day, until after the new year.  For these reasons, we hustled as best we could to ensure that you get some maintenance updates available for your site.

Today we had our very first "hangout," where we used Google Hangouts to have a live broadcast to all of you.  We didn't really advertise it much, because we wanted to see what kind of kinks we might run into.  It went really well though, and we were able to have a great chat with one of our partners, nvisionative.  David Poindexter is their self-proclaimed GeekEO.  

One thing that has never been true - despite the infamous baseball movie - is that if you built it, they will come.  "They," your customer, won't come unless you give them a compelling reason to.  That compelling reason is going to be slightly different from store to store.  However, if you already have a great product offering, the next step might be to play with various promotions.  A great promotion can be the difference between stale product sales, and triple digit growth on that same product.  

As part of our continued partnership with you to ensure that you always have the best performing store possible, we added a large number of promotional enhancements in this release.

Whether you do business online, offline, or a combination of both, your customer is always forming an opinion of you. From first impressions to completed orders, your customer’s impression of your company does more to reinforce your brand than any amount of advertising. But what are they really thinking? And how can changing your customer’s perception improve your bottom line? Let’s take a closer look:

Let’s face it, many people do judge a book by its cover. And when that cover is your product image, you need to do everything you can to truly make it shine. Here are five best practices you should be following no matter what type of product you’re selling:

We're very hard working on version 1.9.0 for you right now, but there were some annoying little things that we thought would be good to get fixed for you right away.  So we put on our aprons and got to work.  The focus of this release was quite simple: minor enhancements to address issues with PayPal and order/inventory management.  We hope you like these updates.  If you're using our inventory features, we're certain that you will.

When you’re running your store, there are so many moving parts. No matter how long you’ve been doing it, it can always feel a bit overwhelming. What are sales today? Are they good? What makes those sales spike up or down? Compared to what? How do I do something about that? How can I duplicate the success from Product A to Product B? They’re almost the same thing. Uh oh, now the CEO is asking about it…

Our team is heads-down, working hard on our next release right now.  We always have great things planned - and you can definitely look forward to some "sexy" new features to be released in the near future.  In the meantime though, we know that you need to get some of those pesky bugs squashed.  We know how you feel.  This release will fix most of the outstanding issues that we know about.  

We didn't think this kind of proposal was earth-shattering, but the more we speak to our clients, the more we find that it IS earth-shattering to them.  I've personally said this before, that software is not about code, it's about people.  You see evidence of this all around you.  Just think about how you and others around you use Twitter, Facebook, and Google.  They've not only built businesses with customers, but they built thriving communities filled with brand advocates by focusing on the people.

How this is done is different for every business, and we've found that the secret of our success now and in the future is centered around you.  Here's how...

Our team is heads-down, working hard on our next release right now.  We always have great things planned - and you can definitely look forward to some "sexy" new features to be released in the near future.  In the meantime though, we know that you need to get some of those pesky bugs squashed.  We know how you feel.  This release will fix most of the outstanding issues that we know about.