15 Jul

Top 5 Reasons You NEED an Automated Sales Tax Reporting System

By Jim Cahill In Sales Tax Nexus, Uncategorized /   No Comments
computer monitor with shopping cart in blue icon

Courtesy Pixabay | Tumisu

In the world of eCommerce, we know there is great opportunity for growth and success. 

But we also know there is A LOT to keep track of. And last year’s SCOTUS ruling on sales tax nexus has created even more headaches and additional worry for eCommerce brands. 

Luckily, we live in a time where automated programs make tracking important data (such as sales tax reporting) easier than ever. 

At Freestyle, we understand all that data can be, well, overwhelming to say the least. That’s why we pride ourselves on creating solutions that work for order and inventory management and all the other variables that come with omnichannel operations…particularly, sales tax. 

If sales tax compliance has become an issue you just can’t handle on your own, let us help. Because if you’re at a loss for how to create a sales tax reporting and remitting system that works, we’ve got a suggestion for you.

Automated Sales Tax Solutions…

Implementing an automated online sales tax system to track all your sales tax collecting, reporting and remitting can be a lifesaver for anyone selling with sales tax nexus in multiple states. Doing so can effectively allow you to:   

  • Accurately calculate eCommerce sales tax requirements in every state you have nexus
  • Seamlessly integrate with order and inventory management platforms
  • Prepare and file taxes in a timely manner to avoid costly penalties

Still not convinced you need a sales tax solution? Consider the following reasons you need an automated sales tax system before you decide:

  1. You are 100% responsible for adhering to the correct sales tax rules and regulations.
  2. Sales tax nexus definitions are continuing to expand, and every eCommerce brand is at risk of noncompliance.
  3. Not being prepared (and compliant) can result in major, not to mention costly, repercussions.
  4. Excess time, resources and money are often spent when manual management is attempted…and the opportunity for human error with manual systems is huge.
  5. Even just understanding sales tax nexus, let alone staying in compliance,  can be particularly challenging for eCommerce brands.

Industry studies have shown that automated tax systems can save brands time and resources they’ve previously spent managing their processes. They’ve also curbed unintentional overspending on sales tax remittance and helped with passing audits more easily. 

Are you wondering if you need an automated sales tax solution? Our answer? A resounding YES…if you:

  • Sell online 
  • Ship outside of the state you operate your business out of 
  • Have sales tax nexus in multiple states 
  • Are unsure if you’re properly collecting, reporting and remitting sales tax 

Need help understanding all that goes into proper sales tax compliance? We help hundreds of companies just like yours stay consistent, current and correct when it comes to the challenge of managing all-things-sales tax. Let us help you, too!

Learn more about Freestyle’s tax solutions! And reach out today to find out how the Freestyle M.O.M. TaxJar module can take care of your sales tax compliance. 

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07 Jun

Freestyle at IRCE

By Jim Cahill In Uncategorized /   No Comments
Chicago river_Pexels

Courtesy Pixabay | Pexels

Attend our Regional Customer Meeting or book a One-on-One Session!

Freestyle Solutions will be attending IRCE in Chicago from June 25th to the 27th and we look forward to meeting our customers, partners and prospects at the show.  If you will be in Chicago, please consider spending time with us.

We’ll be holding a Regional Customer Meeting on June 25th, and will be booking One-on-One Meetings throughout the show.

Learn about the exciting improvements we are planning for MOM and SiteLINK.

Tell us about your vision for your business.

We’ll be happy to discuss how Freestyle can be a part of your success.

Learn more about Freestyle at IRCE and to reserve your space at the Regional Meeting or book a One-on-One Meeting

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05 Jun

eCommerce State Sales Tax Nexus & Compliance FAQ Page

By Jim Cahill In Sales Tax, Uncategorized /   No Comments
taxes word cloud

Courtesy Pixabay | 905513

Over the past year, we have fielded hundreds of questions from our customers and prospects on the evolving State Sales Tax Nexus challenge. They want to know:

  • How do I stay compliant?
  • What is nexus?
  • How do I know if I have nexus in a state?

In response, we’ve published blog posts, added information to our web site and held Webinars to inform the M.O.M. user community, yet there is still confusion and doubt about the potential impact of Sales Tax Nexus on the eCommerce business community. 

So, we’ve taken an additional step to inform you, our community, about what your sales tax obligations are by collaborating with our partner, TaxJar, to publish a comprehensive list of frequently asked questions (FAQs)…questions about what sales tax for eCommerce really means.

We hope this will be the eCommerce industry’s one-stop resource to learn about State Sales Tax Nexus compliance.  

Visit our new, live Sales Tax Nexus FAQ page and let us know what additional questions you would like us to answer. You can also ask us how Freestyle and TaxJar’s solutions can help your business meet its sales tax obligations by contacting us at sales@freestylesolutions.com. 

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Silhouettes looking at customer
17 May

Love Me Two Times – Why Tracking Your M.O.M. Customer Retention Rate is Crucial

By Jim Cahill In Customer Service, Uncategorized /   No Comments

GUEST POST BY WISEGUYS MARKETING’S BRUCE GREGOIRE

looking at customers through a magnifying glass

Courtesy Pixabay | Geralt

Veteran marketers may remember The Doors – with lead guitarist Jim Morrison and band, one of their biggest hits was “Love Me Two Times…”

“Love me two times baby / Love me twice today / Love me two times / girl I’m goin’ away…”

Now stop humming for a moment – this isn’t time for Karaoke! It’s time to discover how often your customers are loving you just one time, and never again.

If you suspect you have way too many one-time buyers, you are not alone.

Throughout our 20 years of experience browsing customer data files, it still often shocks us to see the prevalence of one-time buyers. In fact, as many as 80% of all customers fall into this category.

Not a pretty sight.

It’s no secret that customer retention rate is one of the best measures of customer loyalty. A wise marketing consultant once said that you can’t really call a first-time buyer a “customer” until the 2nd purchase. Up to that point, they may just be a “tire kicker.”

Who Loves You, Baby?

  • How do you know more about your customer retention rate?  
  • Have you taken the time to figure this out?
  • Do you know there is an easy, seamless way to calculate this number?

There is! Let’s calculate your Lifetime Customer Retention rate, by browsing your M.O.M. CUST table.

Lifetime Customer Retention Rate Calculation:

  1. Open your M.O.M. Cust table.
  2. Filter the table for Bill-to records only (“B” in the ADDR_TYPE field) – but suppress new customers in the last 12 months. Record that count.
  3. For Bill-to’s, filter a 2nd time for a count of repeat buyers (“2 or more” in the ODR_FREQ field), with the 12 month suppression intact. Record that count.
  4. Divide the number of repeat buyers into the total number of “Bill-to” customers. That ratio (converted to a percent) is your “Lifetime Retention Rate.”

Lifetime Retention: Is that helpful?

The Lifetime Retention calculated above is simply the percent of all customers who became multi-buyers in their lifetime.

This may be valuable to you, or not. As we pointed out in our Near Term Value blog in April, most marketers cannot wait a lifetime to establish the profitability of a customer. Thus, a shorter window of time is much preferred. Which brings up a discussion of buying cycle.

Buying Cycle: It gets complicated

If a lifetime is too long, perhaps you prefer “average buying cycle”?  

Knowing the average buying cycle of your customer base (e.g. 2 years) can give you a point in time beyond which a customer could be considered “at risk to lapse.” And from that milestone, you can calculate your “Buying Cycle retention rate.”

Two predictable buying cycles come to mind – consumables and seasonal products.

For consumables, think about selling dog food to a customer, on average, every month. Would a one-month buying cycle be appropriate for measuring repeat dog food buyers?  Likely yes – and those consumers could be easily tracked when they lapse over time.

You may think this would also be true for seasonal buyers – perhaps lawn products in the spring, or gifts over the Christmas holidays. For certain product lines, this may be workable, but the seasonal + non-seasonal mix of purchases would distort your overall retention tracking.  

Unfortunately, for strictly random purchase scenarios, we have also found that calculating an “average buying cycle” is not helpful. When we plot buying intervals (X axis) versus frequency (Y axis), what we typically see is not a bell shaped curved – which indeed would be helpful in establishing an average. Instead, the number of short purchase intervals is disproportionately higher than longer intervals. This makes an average buying cycle meaningless.

Solution: Keep it Simple

We recommend a scheme shown in the display below.

  1. Avoid buying cycle – simply calculate repeat customer counts for both 1 year and 2 year time horizons (results shown in green below). This is done as follows …
    a. Eliminate the “suppress new customers in the last 12 months” criteria in steps 2-4 above.
    b. Then count the repeat buyers within a 1-12 month window from the entry year. Repeat for a 13-24 month window from the entry year.
  2. Lifetime Retention % – note below that this decreases year over year, which is expected as recent customers have a shorter time horizon to repeat.
  3. New Customers – note the N/A designation for years 2017 and 2018. Again, they haven’t had enough time to escape the one-time buyer category. Most will need more time.

 

sample retention report

Summary: Invest in retention reporting

Your M.O.M. database has all the data necessary to calculate customer retention. Turn the data geeks in your organization loose on this project. If necessary, hire the right consultant for this important project. Our staff at WiseGuys Marketing are at-the-ready if you need help.

Next up in our series, we’ll discuss how to boost your retention rate to maximize your profits. If you are ready to learn more about calculating purchase frequency, smile.io has a great piece on the topic.

 

Bruce Gregoire is Founder and CEO of WiseGuys Marketing, based in Falls Church, VA. He is also a guest speaker on CRM in the graduate marketing department of the Carey Business School, Johns Hopkins University. Since 1998, Bruce has assisted more than 100 clients – many with the Freestyle platform – with their database marketing needs.

WiseGuys Marketing
Cell (703) 282-5774 or office (703) 941-8109
BruceGregoire@WiseGuysMarketing.com

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magnifying people in a line
18 Mar

The Art and Science of Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) – Part 1 of 2

By Jim Cahill In Uncategorized /   No Comments
Customer on whiteboard with silhouettes of men

Courtesy Pixabay | geralt

GUEST POST BY WISEGUYS MARKETING’S BRUCE GREGOIRE

Customer LTV, simply put, is the net dollar value of your average customer over his/her lifetime, and it’s a subject marketers love to talk about but rarely implement. The reasons for this disconnect could be many:

  • Perhaps LTV is viewed as a strategic in nature: something you only need to do every year or so. Kind of like doing your bucket list – not something you pay attention to routinely.  
  • Or it may be that LTV is rare for a more practical reason: without an integrated marketing database, marketers have huge challenges bringing the components of LTV (Average sale $, COGS, retention rates, customer acquisition expense, present value of money, etc) together in one place.  
  • More recently, the advent of click-thru product purchasing, most notably via Amazon, has created the fear that your long-time customer is only one click away from switching their loyalty elsewhere.

Why LTV

Every shrewd CEO reserves the right to demand ROI from your marketing efforts. LTV is one important metric to track marketing success (as well as customer loyalty).

In terms of ROI, in the world of digital marketing, consider your PPC keyword charges as your customer acquisition cost. What if you could do your pay-per-click bidding with LTV values at hand? Goodness, what a concept!

What if your bidding was based on the ultimate LTV of a converted customer, rather than just the value of their first purchase transaction?  

What if you found that you can actually justify higher bids on certain keywords – i.e. keywords that represent conversion of high value customers with multiple repeat visits!

How to Get There From Here

To begin your journey toward calculating LTV, the first step is to start with an integrated database – sometimes referred to as a CRM application.

Of the many platforms that our WiseGuys staff has encountered, the Freestyle Solution’s Multichannel Order Manager (M.O.M.) platform has the most straightforward solution. Simple is almost always better, and MOM supports that approach.

Freestyle M.O.M.’s Order and Inventory Management Software

  • Customer File: Freestyle M.O.M. stores the net dollar amount spent for each customer, cumulative for all time, in a single field named, you guessed it, “Net.”Net contains the lifetime gross dollars spent, minus the lifetime cost of goods sold, for each customer. Note that for the sake of simplicity, we’re avoiding customer acquisition costs at this point in your analysis. If you know that number, you can subtract it from your result in the last step below.
  • Filtering: Any customer table is bound to have a mix of outliers that need to be filtered out from LTV calculations. M.O.M. supports filtering, in the same table, with 3 unique customer-type fields.

    For instance, you can filter out your wholesale customers from your retail customers, to prevent mixing apples and oranges.
  • LTV Rollup Display: Since long-time customers will have a higher LTV than newer ones, you will want to build a chart showing LTV since their first order (see sample chart below).Rolling up LTV by entry year (first order) is the ideal way to represent this metric, typically done with a Crosstab report. Even rookie users of MS Access or other query tools can create a crosstab analysis, again using the customer table.


For Freestyle M.O.M. users, the 4 digit year portion of the “EntryDate” field can be cross-tabbed against the “Net” field. From this display, users are encouraged to ensure that your dollar amount in the Net field are close to covering your acquisition costs. Any excess, as they say, is gravy.

Customer LTV graph

With LTV, start simple and get faster results – you may be surprised with what you see. From there, you can do additional filtering to see variations in your results based on your inputs. But you should leave with this takeaway: “The LTV of our average customer is $X.00 – and here is what that means to our company moving forward.”

Be sure to check back for part 2 where we discuss the stepchild of LTV, Near Term Value (NTV). If you’re looking for help finding ways to improve your customer LTV, reach out to Freestyle today to learn more. 
Bruce Gregoire is Founder and CEO of WiseGuys Marketing, based in Falls Church, VA. He is also a guest speaker on CRM in the graduate marketing department of the Carey Business School, Johns Hopkins University. Since 1998, Bruce has assisted more than 100 clients – many with the Freestyle platform – with their database marketing needs.

WiseGuys Marketing
(703) 941-8109
BruceGregoire@WiseGuysMarketing.com

 

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17 Jan

Top Ideas for eCommerce Growth – Lessons Learned in 2018

By Jim Cahill In Uncategorized /   No Comments
2019 on a mountain highway road

Courtesy Pixabay | mohamed_hassan

2018 was an eventful year in eCommerce, one that presented both opportunity and disruption.

Now that we’re in a few weeks into 2019, we wanted to take a moment to share some popular initiatives and concerns we helped our customers address during 2018.

Sales Tax

Sales tax was by far the biggest disrupter the eCommerce industry has faced in several years. If you’re not familiar with the story behind this change, you can read our blog posts from last year about how sales tax regulations changed once again and the historic South Dakota v Wayfair ruling.

In every conversation we had with customers and prospects during Q4 of 2018, sales tax was a concern. With the uncertainty surrounding virtually everything regarding sales tax collection, reporting & remittance, we expect these conversations to continue to dominate eCommerce in 2019.

Freestyle will be making a major announcement regarding a partnership with one of the largest solutions providers in this space, so keep an eye on our blog for more details.

Business Expansion 

Once you move past disruption, the idea of growing revenue was a huge theme last year. There were several topics that received a lot of attention from our customers:

Controlling Shipping Costs – Controlling is only one part of the story. The other aspect is leveraging shipping as an advantage. When every one of your competitors uses reduced or free shipping to entice and convert new customers, how do you respond? Our customers have Shippo, our partner process built right into M.O.M. to provide:

  • rate shopping
  • process improvement
  • comprehensive shipping information, and, most importantly,
  • the ability to differentiate your brand through control of shipping costs and excellent service

Seasonal Stations – Many eTailers see a spike in orders during the holiday season or other times of the year. If you want to add seasonal employees but not the cost of permanent infrastructure, then opting for short term use of seasonal M.O.M. station licenses is a great advantage.

Adding a New Brand – Quite a few of our customers decided to add new product lines last year, and some were different enough that they required separate inventory and/or business rules. The solution to this problem for many was our Multi Company Module. We’re proud to have assisted the successful launch of many new lines last year through the flexibility of the rules within the multi company structure.

Amazon – Need we say more? Whether you consider the eCommerce giant to be a friend or foe, you still need to address how your company responds. No matter what your strategy is, we cover the bases by helping you optimize your processes to compete or with Amazon-specific modules that make it easy to sell on the marketplace.

Mobile is the Standard – For customer experience and business growth going forward. All the predictions about the growth of mobile shopping heading into 2018 came true, and if you haven’t addressed the usability of your commerce site for mobile devices, there is little doubt that you’ll quickly be left behind. Take it from our SiteLINK customers who introduced responsive site design: the return on the effort is significant, and a responsive site is becoming table stakes.

With so much to look forward to this year, we hope that sharing these lessons from last year will offer examples of how you can meet your goals in 2019.

To learn more about these topics and many other ways Freestyle can help you, reach out at marketing@freestylesolutions.com

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08 Jan

Meet Freestyle at NRF 2019

By Jim Cahill In Uncategorized /   No Comments
people at a crowded tradeshow

Courtesy Pixabay | purplegillian

Are you planning on attending NRF 2019? Once again, the National Retail Federation (NRF) is hosting the world’s largest show for retailers, and it is literally right around the corner.

Will we see you there?

This year’s show promises not to disappoint, with Magnolia Co-Founders Chip and Joanna Gaines highlighting their success as they take the main stage at Retail’s Big Show, and a host of other industry experts lend their thoughts on the world of retail in 2019.

From Brandless Co-Founder Tina Sharkey, to Levi Strauss’s President and CEO Chip Bergh, to Poshmark Founder and CEO Manish Chandra, and many more, these are the voices you want to hear to gain insight about the retail world you’re trying to conquer.

Don’t miss out on this opportunity to connect and grow your brand. Need some more convincing?

Last year, by the numbers:

  • More than 36,000 industry professionals attended
  • Nearly 3,800 retail companies were represented
  • About 16,000 retailers participated
  • Over 700 exhibitors showcased
  • AND a whopping 82 of the TOP 100 retail companies went!

NRF 2019 is January 13-15th at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in gorgeous NYC…register today – special rates through Friday, January 11.

Email us at Sales@freestylesolutions.com to let us know if you would like to meet with us there!

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27 Dec

9 Reasons Why You Need Freestyle’s M.O.M.

By Jim Cahill In Uncategorized /   No Comments

Freestyle's M.O.M. Freestyle’s Multichannel Order Manager (M.O.M.) is the industry-leading inventory and order management software solution for small to mid-sized businesses.

Synchronize inventory and orders between M.O.M. and the most popular eCommerce stores and marketplaces with a turnkey integration that doesn’t need any extra programming or software.

But don’t take our word for it…check out these M.O.M. features.

Top 9 M.O.M. Features You’ll Love:

  1. Order Management
  2. Inventory Management & Purchasing
  3. Customer Management
  4. Powerful Integrations
  5. Reporting Options
  6. Omnichannel Capability
  7. Shipping Integration
  8. Compliance & Security
  9. Product Management

Ready to learn more about Freestyle’s industry-leading M.O.M.? Sign up for a free demo today.

 

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