Amazon deposits can be difficult to reconcile in NetSuite because there aren’t easy ways to match up the transactions in the Amazon file with the orders in NetSuite.  Manually trying to match up orders is time-consuming and error-prone.  To alleviate the manual effort, increase productivity, and improve accuracy, an automated solution is required.  Fourth Wave Consulting customers were struggling with the manual process of reconciling Amazon deposits, so we developed a custom solution to help.

BatchIt is the custom solution Fourth Wave Consulting developed.  This process records the payments and credit refunds within NetSuite, [continue reading…]

Upselling is proven to increase ecommerce revenue, with targeted product recommendations responsible for up to 30% of revenue. In fact, back in 2006, Amazon reported that 35% of its revenues were a direct result of its cross sales and upsells. It is also a lot easier to sell to existing customers than to start from scratch with new customers and offering the right upsell at the right time can even earn customer loyalty. Analytics show that customer lifetime value increases when you upsell. [continue reading…]

Netsuite 2020.2 is just around the corner, and as per usual, it brings with it a plethora of improvements, upgrades & new features, and nuances. In this article post, we will go over some of the biggest features and updates to be both excited and wary of with the release of 2020.2. We got you covered on how to prepare to ensure your business is ready for this new release and minimize any downtime.

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The time it takes to load a web page is called the page download speed, or load time. Your site’s average load time is an important factor in Google’s site ranking algorithm. Web users expect pages to load quickly, and pages with longer load times tend to have higher bounce rates, and those sites are seen as less important. For more information on the effect of site performance and organic rankings and conversion, see Cloudflares article on Website Performance and Conversation Rates.

To measure site speed, Google released a SEO tool called Lighthouse back in 2018 that offers some insight on the performance of your website and its pages. This audit gives a mobile and desktop score across four areas: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO. For the sake of this article, we will be focusing on solely the “Performance” category of the testing and its associated fixes. So, let’s dive in!

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Existing Functionality to be Preserved Until at Least 2022

A brief history of promotions in NetSuite:

1. Standard Promotions were the only option at first, allowing basic promotions to be created and offered in Site Builder or phone orders like a % off coupon code. This functionality is pretty basic.
2. In 2014, NetSuite released a SuiteBundle (a free package that users could install in their account) to support more types of promotions – line level promos allowing a single item to ship free, order based criteria, and things like Buy X, get Y free. This new functionality was welcomed and supported Site Builder.
3. Around 2017, NetSuite began offering a new feature called SuitePromotions, with lots of new functionality:
   • Stackable Promotions
   • Auto-Apply Promotions
   • Best Offer
   • Cached Saved Searches
   • Audit and Visibility
   • Automatically Add Free Gift to the Transaction

   The new feature is not compatible with the previous promotions – You can have both active in your system, but could only apply either a SuitePromotion or one of the others to an order, not both. The other major downside is that SuitePromotions can’t be used on Site Builder, where the vast majority of NetSuite companies host their sites.

4. In November 2019, NetSuite announced that they will be removing standard and advanced promotions completely. [continue reading…]

Use Google’s reCAPTCHA Service Without Annoying Your Users

As a site owner, marketer, or developer you are well accustomed to seeing fake or bot form submissions, which can be quite an annoyance and potentially time intensive depending on the severity. Luckily there are proven, modern solutions to this sort of problem: form captchas. There are many types of captchas but in the basic sense; a captcha test is designed to determine if an online user is really a human and not a bot. The most popular captcha is reCAPTCHA by Google. reCAPTCHA is a free service from Google that helps protect websites from spam and abuse. A “CAPTCHA” is a Turing test to tell human and bots apart. It is easy for humans to solve, but hard for “bots” and other malicious software to figure out. You may recall older (v1) versions o the reCAPTCHA looking something like this:

These were quite frustrating because they were often difficult for humans to resolve. The V2 reCAPTCHA has been improved [continue reading…]

Why Should You Care About Microdata?

Before we get into more detail, you should probably be asking yourself why you would even care about microdata as a business owner, the answer is – Rich Snippets & Google Shopping.

By adding hidden microdata tags to your pages, products and other entities of your site, you make them more attractive to the user in Google search. For example, a regular search snippet looks like this:

Whereas a page with microdata will appear as a rich snippet and look more like this:

A lot more attractive, right? Which one would you rather click on? By making your products and pages more attractive, you immediately increase your clickthrough rate and your overall site visitors.

To add to the importance of microdata, it is an important component to Google Shopping. Google Ads (formerly Adwords) allows you to create shopping campaigns based on a product feed that you send to them (which we can help with if needed), and they want to verify that the data is correct by checking your product pages. Google uses your microdata tagging to confirm price and other important data, a necessary part of a successful shopping campaign.

Microdata and schema markup might be the single most important thing you can do to increase sales and visitors to your site.

What Is “schema markup”?

Schema (schema.org) is a structured data vocabulary that defines entities, actions, and relationships on the Internet founded by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex and widely adopted across the web (over 10 million sites use it)

This vocabulary makes it possible for search engines to understand the meanings behind subject matter (entities) on the web, and in turn, serve a better user experience for users.

As Google continues to build a more semantic web, these markups become increasingly valuable in effective Internet communication.

Welcome to 2019

What Is “Responsive Design” ?

Responsive design in a nutshell is when your site automatically fits within the user’s device. Thus, if the user has a small screen (width-wise), the elements will rearrange to show you what really matters (CTA buttons, other actionable items). You’ll often see bigger buttons, more blank space between the various web elements in hopes to avoid accidental user actions, smaller font-sizes, etc.

This Fix is Required to Ensure Safari Conversions are Tracked

Why Was This Change Made?

In June, Apple introduced Intelligent Tracking Prevention, a major change to the way Safari handles third party cookies, which is the main way advertising companies gather data about users. The main goal is to limit the ability of large data mining companies to build extensive web history for all users using hidden tags that they don’t even know about. ITP mostly targets pervasive retargeting practices rather than disrupting advertisers’ ability to track ad campaign performance. In my opinion, this is a good thing for users, although it also reinforces the near monopoly of online ad market share for Google and Facebook. Due to the change, there are specific consequences for NetSuite websites.

What it Means for Site Builder and SuiteCommerce Advanced Websites

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