If you’re on our website, you already know about Hara Partners. We’re an e-commerce solutions company focused mainly on building websites in Magento for online retailers.
We provide full-service web builders custom tailored to your business needs, from front-end functionality to complex backend logic. We’ve worked with over 250 Magento-based stores, and are able to service our clients with design, photography, IT services, and hosting.
To read more about us, you can visit our About page. All of the posts that you see here below deal directly with news about our company, such as who we’ve partnered with in the past, our meetups, and who our current clients are.
As a qualified NetSuite-Magento integrator, we are also happy to post the wonders of both systems in these posts. Some companies can say that they’re Magento experts, but we’re the real deal. That’s why most ecommerce companies know that we’re the #1 professionals when it comes to this stuff.
More About Hara Partners:
Hara Partners cultivates a collaborative atmosphere of analytical, business-minded individuals. We’re a smart, young, entrepreneurial company poised for growth and new opportunities. We operate entirely in-house, bolstering one another with complementary specializations. We hold weekly meetings to keep our entire team up-to-date with the latest technologies and performance-enhancing tweaks for online retailers.
Our Project Managers, Tech Leads, Sales Leads, and Design Leads are trained experts in their respective disciplines, each functioning as a single cog in Hara Partners’ team dynamic. This unique four-perspective approach permits a comprehensive understanding of your business and advanced strategizing from the get-go. In other words, we bring e-commerce development expertise to the table in order to position you as the expert in your industry.
Our relationship with you is a two-way street. Foremost in our values are honesty and humility, the cornerstones of our partnership-building efforts. We employ a consultative approach, always addressing your requirements with your best interests in mind. We’re with you every step of the way—planning, execution, finalization, and post-process—and we’ve developed a suite of scalable services to assist you in the process. We speak your language and consider you our Partner.
Google Trusted Store is a program that was designed by Google to help customers shop with confidence on the Internet. Online merchants and e-commerce businesses are expected to meet certain thresholds in order to join the Google Trusted Store program. The merchant’s performance metrics for terms of customer service and shipping/fulfillment speed are gauged before they can become part of the program.
Google Trusted Store
Once a business qualifies for Google Trusted Store, your website can display the Google Trusted Store badge on your website to signal to your customers that you adhere to the standards set forth by Google and that it is thus safe for them to shop with you. Customers will receive some purchase protection offered through the Google Trusted Store program, which is free of charge to the customer and the merchant.
Google Trusted Store helps create a better shopping experience
Shoppers are offered to opt into the Google Trusted Store program after their purchase. Google sends an automated survey about the products and services receives and Google may also facility between the customer and merchant in cases where they cannot mutually resolve an issue.
Google Trusted Store focuses on the merchant and shoppers alike, by helping merchants build up their brand and reputation, while indicating to shoppers that they can buy with confidence. Google provides an objective way for e-commerce websites to verify that the business provides great customer service and fulfills orders quickly and reliably; two things every online shopper has come to expects.
Share your experiences and questions about the Google Trusted Store program with us here in the comments or contact us directly.
Here are 5 simple things to think about for your e-commerce business.
Simple Steps – Customer Service Representative Using Multiple Screens
Get qualified technical help and support for your e-commerce website. It’s important because every e-commerce website can benefit from a group of professionals to help it grow and drive conversion. Professional support can range from technical help over website design and advanced development needs. Other areas include providing security and performance optimizations for your e-commerce website.
Appoint qualified professionals to maintain your website. Merchandising and making sure your store looks welcoming with the latest products on top requires thought and care. Ask Hara Partners what tools can help to streamline and help merchandise products faster and better.
Work with Hara Partners to automate as many of your repetitive processes as possible. And then focus on the remaining customer support cases with your staff to make your customers happy. Your call center or customer care support is often the first line of contact for your customers. Also, leverage live chat systems. If you have difficulty staffing a life chat at all times, consider solutions such as the Concierge service provided by WebsiteAlive.
Get your SEO team involved. You can use customer service calls and incorporate them on your product pages, or build an FAQ, not only for search engines, but especially for shoppers who are looking for more helpful information. Go the extra mile and tie your amazing customer service and newly created content into your social media strategy.
One thing we have seen over the years. Every employee loves to work using good or decent equipment. Think about making sure every staff member has 2 screens. A screen costs about $100-200, and is a one-time investment. If this boosts your employees productivity by 1%, you already made a huge return on your investment. The same goes for computers that load reasonably fast.
Please share issues or things that have affected or helped your business by posting a comment here.
In this era of cut throat competition, companies are constantly striving for newer ways of marketing tools that can ensure to upkeep their contest in the consumer market. Netsuite is one such incorporated business management software that enables business to harness the power of the leading cloud software as a Service technology.
Netsuite connector for Magento
Magento is the foremost professional open-source ecommerce solution that can be customized and hence the merchant can exercise complete flexibility over the appearance, substance, and functionality of their online store. Magento’s users can use Magento’s marketing, search engine optimization and list-management tools to create customized ecommerce sites that can best meet the customer’s business needs. Magento is also the most supported platform for third party solutions that can take your online store to the next level.
While Netsuite is a proven back office application, its integration with Magento can provide businesses with powerful business management portal with state-of-the-art e-commerce features.
However an ideal Netsuite connector for Magento can be a challenge considering the various issues with their type and structure integration. There are various considerations to be measured before integrating Netsuite connector for Magento.
Consideration before integrating Netsuite with Magento
Next, Make business plans depending on the type of industry, such as if an order meets certain criteria, they are imported, its status updated and so on. Proper work flows and control structures should be formalized so that the order amount with all subtotals and line items in Magento get transferred to Netsuite with all detail for further processing.
Proper execution of a Netsuite connector for Magento also requires formulation of an emergency management system that can handle the issues if some exceptional errors occur in the system. A business has to specify a proper product support system and a product roadmap that underlines the product’s features and their outcomes in detail. You will be pleased to hear that we at Hara Partners fully support disaster recovery and fail over scenarios, and that our NetSuite connector for Magento is updated and tested for every new release of NetSuite and Magento. In addition, the development team continues to update the Netsuite connector for Magento on an ongoing basis making it better every day.
There are a number of options available for the integration of the Netsuite connector for Magento available at different rates depending on the complexity of the data mapping and level of advanced automation. While customers are expected to import and export all data between the Magento and NeSuite systems, Hara Partners can help with this process to reduce the time to go live.
There is a new emerging movement in e-commerce called vertically integrated e-commerce. It’s not sa specific sector or product niche, but more of a business model or sometimes even transcends into a movement or philosophy.
Vertically Integrated E-commerce
We always strive to improve and find ways to make things more efficient. Obvious models are based on scale such as Walmart and Amazon. The problem with this is there can only be one number one. The other problem is that the value proposition is very one-sided, often based on availability, price or convenience.
The new model of vertically integrated e-commerce businesses uses a different approach to merchandising. In fact one could say that most vertically integrated e-commerce retailers are the exact opposite of Amazon and the like. Examples include Bonobos, Everlane, Shoe Dazzle, Nasty Gal, or 39 Dollar Glasses, which lead the pack and some time (re-)define an entire industry. It’s not a coincidence that lowest priced glasses retail for $38 at Walmart; in response to 39 Dollar Glasses, and Warby Parker makes buying glasses online trendy and accepted by the masses.
All these brands are web-only (at least to start out) and they are vertically integrating the retail value chain, ranging from manufacturing, branding, sales, fulfillment, and customer service. By eliminating third parties from the supply chain, these companies not only bring their products, but also their brand and with it a life-style and philosophy directly to their consumers. On one hand this cuts inefficiencies of the traditional retailer, and on the other hand also often translates in superior brand execution and higher brand awareness among consumers. The value proposition becomes high-quality products at significantly lower prices while having better customer service. And for the vertically integrated e-commerce business it means higher margins and tighter control of all processes.
The Internet as a tool that drives competition gave rise to retail giants such as Amazon, Staples, or Dell often capturing the high ground in their industry and driving out competition, is now opening these opportunities to vertically integrated e-commerce businesses that capture their audiences with their hearths and wallets.
However, with every upside there is a disadvantage and vertically integrated e-commerce is not an exception to that.
It’s not an accident that almost all successful vertically integrated e-commerce companies have a strong message and recognizable brand. A vertically integrated e-commerce business is not a retailer, and as such cannot rely on existing brands. It has to become its own brand and develop a product and voice that appeals to its target audience. As largely independent business by its very definition a vertically integrated business “starts from scratch”.
What has been your experience with vertically integrated e-commerce brands? Do you prefer to like from these types of companies? Or have you even started or worked at such a company? Share your experience here with us and leave a comment.
Hara Partners has designed the most advanced and seamless Magento Netsuite Integration to date. The Magento Netsuite integration has been designed to let users of Magento, no matter the Enterprise or Community Edition, seamlessly integrate with NetSuite, adding fulfillment, CRM and financial capability at once.
Magento NetSuite Integration
NetSuite Inc. provides one of the most renowned and acclaimed cloud-based financial and ERP software suites internationally, and has rightly received many awards for its software over the past years. Using this advanced suite has proven to help many businesses with modeling their processes and work flows. Using Magento to generate leads and converting them into customers, and then processing orders and servicing your customers out of NetSuite, while maintaining better financial control than with Quickbooks has proven to be a powerful solution. NetSuite’s impressive growth of over 30% year-over-year for a public company and Magento’s over 150,000 merchants speak volumes of the success of both platforms.
The Magento Netsuite Integration provided by Hara Partners can provide you with the benefits of both worlds while allowing you to model the complexity of your business in its entirety. The efficiency and accuracy the users of the Magento NetSuite Connector gain range from eliminating manual data entry and double entries, improved communication with customers, faster and more accurate fulfillment, to a wealth and accuracy in financial data. NetSuite is built primarily as a financial software, every action or transaction leaves an audit trail and is traceable, allowing you to run accurate reports and forecasting models.
Bid good bye to the whole tedious task of manual order processing. And usher in all the benefits the combination of NetSuite and Magento bring to your business: improved internal efficiency, speed, customer satisfaction and accuracy.
Companies that have already started using the Magento Netsuite integration include Blinc, TreeFrog Development, LifeProof, Design for Health, Finis Europe, Aero Design, Live Superfoods, Anzic Records, among many others.
Enhanced efficiency in packing and shipping
There are quite a few advantages for users that Magento Netsuite integration has brought forth. One of the major ones is the improved quality and speed of picking, packing and shipping goods. The bin management service included helps in knowing the location of the goods inside a warehouse. In-built integrations with FedEx, UPS and USPS as well as automated shipping label generation smoothens and quickens the shipping process. And thanks to the NetSuite Order Management, merchants will be able to keep track of the availability of inventories across multiple locations at any given time, from virtually anywhere via the web.
How Magento Netsuite integration helps
The process of integrating NetSuite with Magento is akin to that of any other ERP system. A plethora of end points need to be considered when you decide to go for such kind of integration. Among the various pros of this integration is the automatic updating of accounts and sales data which helps save a significant amount of time and staffing work. Users will be given an exact and real time overview at any time they want. This can aid in the enhancement of marketing focus which will in turn lead to better business intelligence. Since it is possible to control everything from one central point, users will be able to access the required information wherever they are. Another great advantage that users are in for when they utilize the new integration of Netsuite and Magneto is the considerable improvement in their customers’ brand experience. Customer service cost can be significantly decreased since your staff can more easily access all information and is given the tools to manage customers and orders out of NetSuite.
Contact us for more information on the NetSuite Magento Connector or any questions around NetSuite or Magento you may have.
Thank you again for the great turn out last month, on January 8 for our e-commerce Meetup. Our next Meetup is almost here and we wanted to provide a review of the last one.
Credit Card Merchant Processing
Tom Waters from BAMS (Bank Associates Merchant Services) presented what his company can offer to merchants by explaining how credit card processing works and the fees that are associated with different transaction. Tom took a historical take and walked us through concepts and laws that changed the credit card landscape over the years. And the good news is brought down fees drastically over time.
Some highlights from the talk include (and I apologize if these only include the ones we remember, but please post comments and questions below, or contact us):
1. Rates have been broken down into a great matrix of different scenarios. Most people are familiar with AmEx vs. Visa/MasterCard rates, as well as debit cards vs. credit card, corporate or rewards cards, and how the rates differ. However, most people still believe there are only 4-5 rates, or they are given 4 rates by their merchant processor or bank.
Fact is that there is a specific interexchange rate for almost every transaction, which can factors in in-person vs. over the phone, card type, issuer, etc.
Often times the low rates are not passed on by the merchant processor, but pulled together into 3-4 groups.
2. Organizations such as Paypal, Square, even American Express are not banks and thus do not need to adhere to the numerous regulations of banks. This can have a lot of advantages for these organizations, which they can pass on to merchants and customers. Even Groupon launched a service called Groupon Payments to provide savings to its merchants.
What it all means to you?
3. You should not enter into a contract that binds you to a processor, and insist on early termination rights. You may also want to consider these non-bank institutions. Often times they can be very competitive with low transaction volume, while a dedicated merchant processor becomes less expensive with greater volume. BAMS for example charges a small processing fee on top of the interexchange rate, which results in very competitive pricing.
Value-added Services by BAMS
BAMS can help merchants with charge back monitoring and handling. BAMS also offers its IRIS (IRIS – Integrated Reporting is Simple) platform, which can help gain quick oversight of your business and identify problems.
IRIS – Integrated Reporting is Simple
Please add comments to this post and feel free to ask any questions about merchant processing. Tom is extremely knowledgeable and we at Hara Partners would love to provide any answers for you.
Macaron Cafe, a long-time Hara Partners client, was elected to be the coffee destination near Penn Station.
Coffee Subway Map with Macaron Cafe a Hara Partners client
TimeOut New York created this subway map of the go to best coffee places in the city, and Macaron Cafe takes the crown for the 34th Street stop of the 1, 2, 3 lines and LIRR station.
Find out if your favorite coffee joint made the map and let us know.
The new NetSuite Case Profiles feature allows you to maintain different branding or support identities within a single support organization. Customer support preferences that once were set on the Support Preferences page at Setup > Support > Preferences > Support Preferences (or in NetSuite OneWorld accounts on the Preferences subtab of each subsidiary record) can now be set on individual NetSuite case profiles.
When your NetSuite account is upgraded to Version 2014 Release 1, a case profile is automatically created that includes some support settings that were once set on the Support Preferences page. For NetSuite OneWorld accounts, a profile is created for each subsidiary.
Among the preferences that are now set on NetSuite case profiles are Anonymous Customer – Inbound Email and Anonymous Customer – Online Forms. When migrating your support preferences to case profiles, we determined that your account was using invalid customer records for your anonymous customer settings, and as a result, we unfortunately were not able to set these preferences properly on the new profile.
To keep your support processes as they were prior to the upgrade, you should first set up customer records to use as anonymous placeholders and set these in the Anonymous Customer preferences on your NetSuite case profiles.
If you have questions or need assistance, please contact NetSuite Customer Support through the NetSuite Customer Access Portal, or post your questions here as comment or contact us any time.
When it comes to taxes, people never tend to be quite confident about doing or reviewing their taxes. With many taxes such as income tax rates and brackets being rather complex and can be perceived as confusing to ordinary taxpayers, sales taxes are pretty straight forward – you can see the deduction on every receipt. Maybe less know are the state sales tax rates being used in 37 states. They vary from state to state and can produce, despite being a modest tax by itself, a burdensome tax when added up with the overall sales tax. In case of well-known e-commerce platform Magento state sales tax that needs to be calculated can reach in the sky. Magento state sales tax is a good reference to use because Magento e-commerce platform is used throughout the nation from New York to California.
The general or statewide sales tax does not apply in only five states – Montana, Alaska, Oregon, Delware and New Hampshire. These states have different sales tax approaches which can be seen nicely from looking at taxes generated by companies implementing the Magento e-commerce platform. In Alaska in Montana the local sales taxes are in use for the locals. Nonetheless, Alaska being as big as it is has sometimes high local rates of population groups such a Kodiak and Juneau, which can rise upward of 5%, and as such can increase the local average rate. However, living in Alaska will not have a combined rate that would be higher than in any other state covered by statewide sales tax.
If you observe Magento State Sales Tax state to state you might come to the conclusion where the sales tax rates are the highest. The highest combined average rate is in Tennessee, where it rises to as high as 9.44%, followed by Arizona with 9.16%. Louisiana, Washington and Oklahoma hold high sales taxes as well. On the other hand of the line, the states with lowest tax rates are Alaska with 1.69%, Hawaii with 4.35% followed by Maine, Virginia and Wyoming. Alaska in this case is a more exotic state because the heavy leverage of their own state tax system and because they are, of course, not covered by general statewide sales tax rate system. Where you don’t have to live if you generate lots of sales is in Tuba City, Arizona, where the tax rate is the highest for any play on USA soil – astounding 13.725%. This figure is summed up by regular state tax yielding 6.6%, a tribal tax levied by the local government and an additional Coconino country tax. So having your Magento state sales tax levied in Tuba City is financially very stressful.
On the other hand, different kinds of taxes are levied in different kinds of states with varying weight. Basing your decision of building a company or moving to a certain are based on state sales tax alone can be a risky business – as in all thing in life, you are recommended to look at the big picture and base your judgment on that.
If you’re using NetSuite SECPay Recurring Payments you will have to make this update after the NetSuite Version 2014 Release 1 update.
Prior to Version 2014 Release 1, when you used the SecPay credit card gateway, payment authorizations for credit cards that had been successfully processed in the past were automatically flagged as recurring so that the CV2 code would not be required.
After the NetSuite Version 2014 Release 1 a more consistent process has been put in place that requires all recurring payments to have the SECPay Recurring Payment box checked on the sales order used to generate the cash sale transaction.
To continue to process recurring payments for your customers, you must check the Recurring Payment box on each of your recurring payment transactions (typically, sales orders that use the Sales Order – Cash Sale form or memorized cash sales). If your SecPay account is set up to require CV2, marking this box ensures that your recurring payments continue to be processed successfully.
To keep your support processes as they were prior to the upgrade, you should first set up customer records to use as anonymous placeholders and set these in the Anonymous Customer preferences on your case profiles.
If you have questions or need assistance, please contact NetSuite Customer Support through the NetSuite Customer Access Portal, or post your questions here as comment or contact us any time.
