Our Partner: Webscale

Our Partner: Webscale

Webscale

InteractOne has been working with Webscale for a little over a year now, and several of our mid-market clients have implemented this Cloud hosting solution with great success.

What They Do

Webscale was born in 2013 after the founder, Jay Smith, analyzed how the cloud could be leveraged by using predictive algorithms to scale out data plane assets, giving eCommerce businesses a right-sized infrastructure when a sudden traffic hit or a busy season was upon them. Webscale is a fully managed cloud hosting platform that presents a wide array of benefits for eCommerce businesses: lower costs, faster website performance, and quick cloud migrations. Beyond that, Webscale seeks to remedy some of the common issues that can come with other hosting options.

Firstly, a common hosting problem that eCommerce companies deal with is security. Security issues can wreak havoc in the eCommerce industry and unfortunately, attacks can be incredibly hard to recover from. Security varies from business to business, but web security for an eCommerce business requires a focus on user access management, certification and compliance, and, most importantly, application specific rulesets that can block known exploits through patching and other strategies. Webscale is one of the only multi-cloud SaaS solutions that can offer true 360-degree web application security through securing transactions from the browser, to the Webscale data plane, and deep into the application infrastructure. This includes monitoring and analysis through machine learning, detection, mitigation, and ongoing protection.

Additionally, speed is a major concern when eCommerce merchants are weighing hosting options. Slow storefronts can be detrimental –  according to Google, 53% of mobile users abandon sites that take over 3 seconds to load. Webscale alleviates slow performance with true autoscaling technologies.  Their algorithm is able to auto-detect spikes in traffic and add cloud resources on the fly, thus keeping the site from any noticeable slowing down.  Also, Webscale is constantly monitoring and improving all facets of the web application, from better caching to CDNs to refactoring web pages, in order to accelerate load times.

Lastly, Cloud migration and hosting can seem daunting. According to Gartner, by 2019, more than 30% of new software investments will shift from cloud-first to cloud-only. Cloud hosting offers some serious advantages for eCommerce businesses, including its scalability, reliability, and option to right-size based on the business’ needs. But, with a lack of expertise about the cloud from your current provider, this migration can seem impossible. That’s where Webscale comes in. Webscale was born in the cloud and makes the migration of your storefront fast and simple. Their automated platform handles day-to-day tasks, but they also have a 24-hour support team that is available to assist if issues arise.

As Magento professional solution partners, InteractOne sees the benefits of Webscale’s smooth pairing with Magento Cloud Hosting. While Magento deployments have traditionally been in private data centers, Webscale enables eCommerce vendors to seamlessly migrate their Magento deployments to take advantage of the benefits of the public cloud. Webscale understands the requirements across minor and major Magento versions (1.x to 2.x), and also supports Magento Community and Magento Enterprise editions.

If you want to read more about InteractOne’s various partners, check out our partners page or read our blogs on ShipperHQ and Dotdigital.

Our Partner: Dotdigital Engagement Cloud

Our Partner: Dotdigital Engagement Cloud

dotdigital

Dotdigital Engagement Cloud may sound somewhat familiar to you if you’ve ever utilized the popular marketing tool, Dotmailer. As it turns out, their similarities don’t end there; Dotdigital is Dotmailer, but reimagined to better encompass all of their features and abilities. 2019 sparked the rebrand, but this company has been around since 2002 assisting customers with email marketing and data integration.

What They Do

Dotdigital Engagement Cloud

Engagement Cloud is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) marketing platform that enables companies to create, test and send automated email campaigns. Their “drag and drop” functionality allows you to easily construct any email, and performance data can be tracked immediately after send. Dotdigital technology can also be integrated with key business systems, such as e-commerce platforms (Magento and Shopify) and CRMs (Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics), which provides access to insights in real time.

SME’s (Small-to-Medium Enterprises) can maximize returns with email marketing and scale quickly due to dotdigital’s ease of use and flexibility with features. And don’t worry about useless tools, dotdigital allows customer’s complete access to their directory of partners apps, which can be plugged in and changed as needed.

dotdigital

Dotdigital Engagement Cloud CPaaS

Engagement Cloud CPaaS is a secure enterprise cloud communications platform specializing in messaging. This tool allows companies to send messaging through channels like SMS, Facebook Messenger, push notifications, etc. To enable businesses to use the messaging channels without integrations, Engagement Cloud CPaaS provides a wide portfolio of powerful live chat, conversational commerce and broadcasting tools to assist marketers in better engaging their audience.

Engagement Cloud CPaaS has 156-country coverage and 2-way messaging capability; customers can easily have branded SMS conversations with their contacts, using data to personalize the experience.

Our Partnership

InteractOne has partnered with Dotdigital for over two years after being impressed by their smooth integration with Magento 2 and robust abilities as an ESP (Email Service Provider). Email marketing has been known to increase brand loyalty and is one of the best ways to boost revenue, so if you aren’t already leveraging this tool, you should look into it. We routinely recommend them for mid-market and enterprise level customers, and we look forward to continuing our friendship with them in the future.

Check out our other partners or feel free to familiarize yourself with InteractOne’s mission and abilities. If you need assistance with marketing services or Magento development, don’t hesitate to contact us.

ShipperHQ: The World’s #1 Storefront Shipping Management System

ShipperHQ: The World’s #1 Storefront Shipping Management System

Clear Shipping Details Matter to Customers

Shipping is a critical factor in the buyer’s decision-making process. If shipping prices are too steep or final shipping charges are unclear, many customers will choose to abandon their cart.  In a study from Baynard, 61% of customers said that they had left their shopping cart when extra costs, including shipping, were too high. The study also found that 24% of customers abandoned their cart because they were unable to calculate final costs up front. The shipping time also matters to customers with 16% stating that they abandoned their cart due to slow delivery.

Shipping can be a headache for eCommerce merchants; this is where our partner, ShipperHQ, a Shipping Management System for Magento and eCommerce, can help.  

How ShipperHQ Works

ShipperHQ is a storefront shipping management system that allows merchants to be transparent and show accurate shipping rates when selling online. Its sophisticated rate calculation engine gives merchants the control they need to satisfy their customers while ensuring they aren’t left covering unexpected shipping costs due to miscalculation.

ShipperHQ offers valuable features including:

  • Custom Rules for Rates
  • Dimensional Shipping
  • Date & time Calendar
  • In-store Pickup
  • Multi Origin Dropshipping
  • Backup Carriers
  • LTL Freight
  • Address Validation

The screenshot below demonstrates the many shipping options that are available through ShipperHQ such as different carriers or faster shipment:

Show Live Shipping Rates for a Wide Range of Carriers

ShipperHQ is carrier agnostic, meaning that merchants can show live rates from a wide range of small package and LTL Freight carriers. With ShipperHQ’s advanced functionality, merchants can merely discount or surcharge live and custom rates, set rules to show special shipping options based on predetermined criteria, and offer free shipping and other shipping based promotions.

The rules engine significantly assists merchants with shipping oversized packages, perishables, or hazardous items. The quality of ShipperHQ’s engine helps to conquer challenges of offering large, complex or time-sensitive items online.

The screenshot below showcases ShipperHQ’s unique ability to manage particular box dimensions in order to cut costs and customize the shipping process even further:

Notably, ShipperHQ integrates with many eCommerce platforms including Magento, Magento 2, Shopify, BigCommerce, and others.

ShipperHQ Makes Life Easier

InteractOne has chosen to partner with ShipperHQ because we believe they have the experience, the talent, and the software to elevate the eCommerce businesses for our current and future merchants. The ShipperHQ mission is simple: to make the lives of eCommerce merchants easier through the shipping management tools they’ve created. We believe in their mission, and you should too.

Contact us to learn more about ShipperHQ and how we can integrate them into your Magento store.

Rackspace: A Platinum Magento Hosting partner

Rackspace: A Platinum Magento Hosting partner

With more managed Magento deployments than any other provider, Rackspace is the long-trusted market leader for Magento hosting on dedicated hardware and in the cloud. Award-winning and powerful infrastructure, Rackspace is a Platinum Hosting Partner for Magento and for InteractOne. Learn More 

Hosting thousands of Magento sites doesn’t guarantee anything, but this depth of experience certainly tips the balance toward Rackspace in terms of security, capability and reliability.

InteractOne steps gingerly through the risky business of recommending hosting services to our Magento eCommerce clients; we don’t partner with every service out there. Rackspace has a track record of highest quality and extremely tight processes that help it earn our trust as well as that of our clients.

The Rackspace support network includes an extensive online knowledge base, API Documentation and product forums. Developers, engineers and administrators can access specific “how-to’s” and configuration tips for different hosting setup problems that can arise.

When selecting a Rackspace platform, merchants are afforded access to the company’s Magento certified server architects who can assist in specifying not only the choice of public cloud, private cloud, dedicated hardware or hybrid, but how your environment will built to deal with your site, your catalog and your traffic. Near-infinite scalability is a hallmark of the RackSpace mix of solutions – an absolute must-have for merchants whose growth could be held back by more restrictive arrangements.

Further capabilities and services from Rackspace include:

  • No downtime guarantee for approved topologies
  • Full Compliance with PCI-DSS standards
  • Automated Magento platform configuration
  • Around the clock support
  • Performance monitoring with automated scaling
  • Optimized hybrid platforms

Zerolag: A Platinum Magento Hosting Partner

Choosing Magento hosting for your Magento store should not be approached lightly. As a developer and a Magento partner, we’re cautious to the extreme when it comes to these recommendations. We have chosen to be an industry partner with ZeroLag because of our positive experience working with them. As a developer, we require access and information on behalf of our clients. This is a strength with ZeroLag that can’t be overemphasized. Bottom line: Problems, when they happen, can be resolved more quickly and securely.

Although ZeroLag is a custom hosting solution – offering 24/7 support and Magento-dedicated configurations – they have positioned their pricing on the “value” side of the spectrum, often charging less than comparable hosting vendors.

Hosting Built for Magento

For merchants requiring dedicated Magento servers, ZeroLag has tiered their offering with two different LAMP stacks built specifically to provide maximum page-load speed, indexing, and security for Magento. Both LAMP versions include Debian Linux, Apache, Percona MySQL, and Alternative PHP Cache (APC). Memcached can be added to this service for faster caching and resolution of PHP instructions, along with web nodes to share cache and PHP sessions in muti-server configurations.

Other advanced services available through ZeroLag include Varnish, Solr, Magento Payment Bridge, CDN, or PageSpeed (mod_pagespeed) for Apache.

All ZeroLag Magento server configurations include:

  • RAID Storage Systems
  • Around the clock support
  • Daily Backup
  • Server status monitored every five minutes
  • Munin resource monitoring tool

ZeroLag’s Tier 4 data center is SSAE 16-certified, with security guards on premises at all times, biometric access, N+1 redundancy and three discrete ISP connections on 10 Gb backbones.

Avalara: #1 Choice for Sales Tax Management

Avalara: #1 Choice for Sales Tax Management

As a Magento merchant, you have likely encounterd a tangled mess of sales tax obligations when you sell to customers in various jurisdictions and states. If you’ve tried to set up your cart to calculate the sales tax rates and variables across your catalog for thousands of jurisdictions – you know this is a huge expenditure of time and is ultimately error-prone; this adds risk to your bottom line. InteractOne is an active development partner with Avalara for Magento eCommerce merchants. Avalara products offer merchants the prospect of tax compliance with cloud-based transactional tax solutions that free you from having to become a sales tax expert.

Avalara AvaTax allows Magento merchants to automate sales tax calculations within the cart, based on the customer’s purchase location. We have found that this Magento extension provides the most accurate and affordable way to calculate sales tax within Magento. Secondly, it removes any need for regional limits you may have placed on selling based on perceived tax complications. And finally, the extension generally works well and is not a resource hog on your cart or checkout pages; maintaining speed on these transactional steps is a huge factor in conversion.

AvaTax also helps you manage exemption certificates, file returns, and remit payments across numerous tax regions. The tool calculates rates based on more than 100,000 rules in thousands of locations and applies them within Magento to every transaction.

Magento and Avalara AvaTax integrate via their API’s, calling on powerful logic sets to deliver a host of features and preserve the flexibility of your cart and checkout configurations.

Merchants who use the Avalara AvaTax integration with Magento will benefit from more complete information and a better view into the transaction processes. There is no “batching” process – all of the rules are applied instantly, reducing any possible inventory discrepancies as well as nearly eliminating any ongoing IT issues with your Magento database – related to the extension. Transactions become searchable by document code and type, customer vendor code, and more, all sortable by invoice. The AvaTax interface enables Magento merchants to explore a lot more detail in researching jurisdictional tax rates – and which ones were applied to each transaction.

 

 

 

Listrak Partner: InteractOne

Listrak Partner: InteractOne

Listrak partner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Listrak is the leading provider of automated email marketing for top-tier Magento merchants.

The Listrak to Magento extension features:

  • List Subscription and Synchronization
  • Multipass Messaging
  • Order History Analysis
  • Catalog Synchronization
  • Triggered Messaging
  • Advanced Segmentation

Listrak built their solutions focused on enabling retailers to create personalized digital marketing campaigns. Listrak’s goal? Driving incremental revenue and ROI. The eMail marketing giant can be described as “merchandising-enabled.” Meaning merchants can use Listrak to trigger all sorts of customized follow-ups like upsells and related products. All based on your shoppers’ actions. Listrak relies on industry partners like InteractOne to help merchants integrate and use the tools.

Listrak’s Magento extension offers a single, integrated digital marketing platform. The platform provides omnichannel solutions for retailers featuring acquisition, recommendations, back-in-stock alerts, shopping cart recovery, advanced retail segmentation and post purchase solutions. Listrak’s modules expose data for use while reducing IT involvement through a seamless integration, saving your team valuable time.

Proud to be a Listrak partner, InteractOne frequently recommends Listrak to our Magento clients because of their single, integrated digital marketing platform. Listrak provides deep shopper insights that power sophisticated, relationship-building campaigns. The weak point of any marketing campaign is lack of customization. No one likes to get a “generic” message and shoppers’ ability to detect an automated reply has become more finely tuned as the technology improves. Listrak’s toolset allows you to create automated, yet much more personal communications that feel like “one-to-one.” In this case, the extra effort can definitely yield better results.