Red Moon Catering has been offering catering supplies and furniture to hotels, pubs, restaurants, healthcare, local authorities, schools, and more, for over 20 years. Whether you need refrigeration, crockery, cutlery or cooking machines, Red Moon has it covered.

To launch their new eCommerce site, Red Moon teamed up with prestigious design firm KP Studios. KP Studios is certainly one of the best design firms we’ve seen in a while. They definitely strike a nice balance between design as well as conversion optimization. Check out their portfolio here.

Red Moon keeps their customers coming back with a rewards campaign that to match their design. Points are earned on virtually every purchase and can be spent in the shopping cart during checkout. We really like their dedicated rewards page - simple, well designed and easy to understand in a matter of seconds.

Here’s what Red Moon had to say about Sweet Tooth:

“For an online retailer who wants to retain customers, Sweet Tooth is superb. It offers so much flexibility with the ability to customize our campaigns to suit our promotions. It really was a no brainer.”

Check out Red Moon’s website to see their great design and loyalty program created by KP Studios.

Sweet Tooth Secures $2.25M in Seed Financing

OMERS Ventures, the MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund and Points International to Invest $1.5M

First Off...

I can’t start a blog post about Magento Imagine without first saying thank you. Thank you to the community that planned several meetups, the Magento staff that planned and ran the event for what must have been really long days, the attendees who participated actively both at the conference and on Twitter, the sponsors who had great swag (ahem, #MageShades), our partners Points.com, the speakers who had great content - everyone was a critical piece in making Imagine a conference that is different because it is fun. Everyone had a story and every story was unique.

We had been planning and looking forward to this event for some time now. Planning something as fun as #MageShades for months without being able to talk about it is tough! That added to the fact that we flew the entire Sweet Tooth North American team to Vegas for a celebratory vacation and the usual hype around Imagine made for a very excited Sweet Tooth team in the weeks prior. It was like waiting for Christmas when you’re a kid.

Off to Vegas!

For most of the team the flight was only 4 hours (which we found out is still enough time for a quick game of Age of Empires II on a wifi network hosted on a smartphone - note the fear in my eyes and Mike's grin of victory) and most of us landed on Friday or Saturday. Some of those that landed on Friday saw a Noel Gallagher concert that kept them out later than they should have been before the next morning’s run.

10K Race & Pre-Imagine

Most of the Sweet Tooth team spent their Saturday morning at Lovell (Magento) Love Canyon to attend a Magento community event organized by Brent and Susan Peterson, Vinai Kopp and of course Sweet Tooth superstar Sherrie Rohde. The race was painted orange; Mage::run shirts keeping us feeling cool and MageShades keeping us looking cool. Coming in first for not only the Magento runners but also overall was Ashley Schroder with a superhuman time of 43:39.4. After the race Ashley tested clean for steroids, but was significantly over average human levels for Magento love. The first Sweet Tooth runner to finish was Mohsen with an impressive time of 58:36.2. The run was a great time, and absolutely nothing went wrong at all (Bill says thanks to Roy and the Magento team for the thoughtful gift, card and call - you guys are amazing).

Sunday’s #Preimagine was an absolute success and most definitely one of the strongest networking events of the conference. Many thanks go out to the sponsors for the drinks, as well as to Kimberley Thomas for organizing; this was one of our favourites. Being the first real event of the conference, this was one of our rare opportunities to meet up with all our international friends that we usually only get to speak with on Twitter & email. The event started at 2pm - right when the Las Vegas sun was at its brightest. It was hot. Everyone was squinting. If only there was something they could wear to cover their eyes from the bright sun...

Following the Preimagine event was an event hosted by Orange Collar Media: Techies on the Strip. We couldn’t make the bus to the event, and weren’t able to get another one sent back, so we decided to hang out with some others from the Magento community before the first day of the conference. All in all a great day!

Imagine Day 1: Monday

The first day of the conference saw the Sweet Tooth team doing quite a few things: some developers were taking the Magento Certification test, we set up the booth, attended a partner meeting + reception, checked out BarCamp and had a great opening night.

We’d like to officially congratulate Kalen Jordan & Jay El-Kaake for achieving their developer certification - we’re proud of you guys! We really believe in the Developer Certification program (blog here) and we’re now up to 4 certified developers total. To every developer that took the Developer Certification course: congratulations!

Jay and Mike were at the partner reception - which later turned into the opening night networking event. What an opening event! We weren’t sure who was a better dancer - the girls who were dancing in “Vegas” form, or James from Balance Internet (we’re joking, James took it by a long shot).

Imagine Day 2: Tuesday

Bright and early for the second day at the conference! Some people might call this Tuesday, but for those of us that attended Magento Imagine 2012 this will always be known as "the day I was blasted by several dozen Angry Birds". Opening keynotes with Bob, Roy and Matthew were great. We really liked the short video clips that told the story of different faces in the Magento ecosystem.

Notable breakout sessions were Bastian Ike’s talk on Magento security (I can personally vouch that this guy is brilliant), Ashley Schroder’s recommendations on Magento API’s and a personal favourite of mine from FitForCommerce, Balance Internet and C.Wonder on “omni-channel commerce” (myself and Mike did a talk on the same topic at Meet Magento UK in October 2011).

Wrapping up the day were the keynotes delivered by Stephen Messer and Heroes’ Tim Kring. These were interesting because they were presented in an unconventional manner for an ecommerce conference. I thought Tim Kring’s talk on mutliplatform storytelling was parallel to a merchant's perspective on multichannel retailing - even if he didn’t make that connection directly during his presentation. This topic which goes hand in hand with Stephen Messer’s talk on why we need to macroscopically define our decision models when collecting large amounts of data rather than get stuck in the granular details.

Before the evening event, our team had a nice Italian dinner at Marinelli’s, overlooking the M resort. After some bread & oil, pasta, seafood and a few bottles of wine, we were ready to head out. Some of us attended the evening event while some of us had our mind properly freaked at a Cris Angel show.

Magento put on a great show for their last night event. A proper Las Vegas experience was delivered: Frank Sinatra style live music and band, Magento cigars, some dancers (including a "bubble" girl in a pool), some Bob Schwartz antics, some drinks and a whole lot of community! We would trade 4 hours at a booth for 1 hour at an event like this any time.

Imagine Day 3: Wednesday

Waking up on the last day of Imagine is just as bittersweet as waking up on the last day of a vacation (for most of us, it was). You feel excited to have another great day, but you know that things are ending soon. Although this feeling can be trumped by others, depending on how much you enjoyed the open bar at last night’s Magento event.

Wednesday’s general session opened up with Jim FitzGibbon’s talk “Culture as a Competitive Advantage”. This one really resonated with us at Sweet Tooth. We believe that a happy customer always starts with a happy, motivated and passionate employee. If you don’t love working somewhere, your customers won’t love working with you. Simple as that!

Some notable breakout sessions of the day were Alistair Stead’s “Ensuring Quality Project Delivery”, the Gorilla Commerce session on Magento Enterprise Tips & Tricks, and the Social Media session.

The closing keynote, PEAKonomics by Alison Levine, was absolutely astounding. An excellent speaker with an amazing story that has even better lessons behind it - Alison’s session was motivating and by far my personal favourite. I think most of the conference could say the same.

Let’s End How We Started...Thank You!

Sponsoring this event was definitely worth every single penny. We were able to see those familiar faces of the Magento community again and introduce ourselves to the many new members who have joined since last Imagine. It will be interesting to see what next year’s Imagine will be like. One thing is certain...

We’ll need a bigger venue.

On behalf of the entire Sweet Tooth team, Thank You for such an amazing community.

#MageShades

We’re pairing up with Metrics Marketing to make sure that all of Imagine is ready for the hot Las Vegas sun - so we’re bringing some #MageShades to keep you protected and looking great. Visit our booth to get a pair of these sweet #MageShades - don’t forget to tweet your picture with the hashtags #MagentoImagine & #MageShades to show off your Magento style. Metrics Marketing is giving away $50 to anyone caught wearing or tweeting @MetricsMrktg including #MagentoImagine so make sure you tweet some pictures.

Note: bonus points if you tweet a picture with #MageShades AND Magento’s famous M hand sign.

Famous Sweet Tooth Chocolate

Imagine 2011 saw the birth of a staple Sweet Tooth giveaway: Sweet Tooth chocolate! We’ll be bringing more of the famous Sweet Tooth chocolate to Imagine 2012. We can’t guarantee that everyone will get one - they never seems to last very long - so make sure you visit our booth early to satisfy your Sweet Tooth!

Free Big Brand Points/Miles

Using Sweet Tooth, you have the option to give custom points or Big Brand points such as American Airlines Advantage miles, Best Buy Reward Zone points and more. Our awesome partners Points.com are also sponsoring Magento Imagine this year, and have an awesome free miles giveaway. They’ll be handing out unique codes that will have free miles - each one is a winner! A total of 100,000 free points/miles are going to be given away at Imagine, and one of the cards is a grand prize of 50,000 free points/miles! Make sure you visit their booth to get a unique code for your chance to win the grand prize!

Sweet Swag

There will be so many great presentations and breakout sessions at Magento Imagine - one that we’re looking forward to is Mark Shust’s presentation on “Modifying Core Code Correctly”. With so much knowledge sharing it might be overwhelming and hard to remember. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered: make sure that you check your conference swag bag to find a Sweet Tooth pen to take all your notes.

Labor of Love 10K Race

A few Sweet Tooth members will be running at the Labor of Love 10K race alongside the Magento community. We’ll be sure to tweet pictures and race updates on our Twitter handle @sweettooth. A community that runs together, stays together!

See you at Magento Imagine 2012!

Here's why they're awesome:

Magento Certified Developer on the Magento Blog.

I was reading an article titled “Only One Half of Brands Can Identify Their Most Loyal Customers” on one of my favourite blogs, Marketing Profs. Just as I had finished scrolling to the bottom and finish up reading, something absolutely astounding happened: a pop out appeared. A small, white and blue pop out containing a link to another article showed itself in the lower right hand corner of the blog. Amazing, right?

Since most of you reading this won’t find a pop out, in itself, amazing, I should probably go into a more detailed explanation.

I had just finished reading another great article that I believed to be valuable. The article summarized the relevant findings from a much longer winded (but still great) report from Loyalty360. I didn’t have to enter in my contact information on Loyalty360’s blog to get the (free) report, I could simply read the most relevant content on this blog post instead. Not having to enter in my contact information was something that I found value in.

The pop out only appeared once I hit the bottom of the article, right before the comments. If it appeared earlier, it would surely interrupt my reading and I most likely would have bounced the website and valued the experience significantly lower.

The pop out’s colours matched the website. They weren’t distracting or over-the-top. They didn’t steal my attention so I could continue reading the article. Similarly, the size of the pop out was appropriate - not too big to steal the screen and interrupt my reading. If the pop out was anything close to modern call to action buttons, it would have stole my attention and reduced the value of my experience.

The article that the pop out was linking to was actually an article that I had previously read. In fact I had read it, thoroughly enjoyed the content, and decided it was worth tweeting to my followers, forwarded the article around the office and posted it on Facebook. The article was based on a Forrester report which claimed that new corporate roles dedicated to customer experience were gaining popularity. But back to the pop out; knowing what I’ve just read, the content suggestion was spot on - this was another article that I (coincidentally already had) found value in.

So what does all of this have to do with customer experience and loyalty?

You may have noticed a recurring word I used while recounting my experience: value. It is the core concept of customer experience and loyalty!

In order to create a loyal customer, we need to deliver an experience that they find valuable. That valuable experience can be brought about in many ways: making them feel special or appreciated, engaging them to make the process more interesting, giving them status based rewards such as VIP shopping events, giving them a reward just because it’s their birthday, or something as simple as giving them a small discount because they’re loyal customers.

When we are designing our loyalty program, we need to keep this value in mind. It isn’t enough to just give our customers the ability to interact with our store - we need to make sure we’re asking them to interact with us the right way, at the right time and for the right reason.

Try to view your loyalty program from your customers’ point of view. When designing your program, try to take into account where your customer has been, where they are and what they’re trying to do, and what an appropriate next step is. We can’t just throw points at customers and expect them to all respond - we need to be empathetic in loyalty design.

If you’re considering implementing a loyalty program keep this in mind when you’re initially designing your program. If you already have a program, take a second look at it - this time with your customers’ eyes. Consider the pop out, and the various ways it fit my experience perfectly in order to augment- and not interfere with - a valuable experience.

Do you think about your customers when you design your program? What are some things that you do to make sure your customers find your eCommerce experience more valuable than your competitors?

Here we’ll show you how to take a new visitor and turn them into a frequent purchaser and source of new customers.

First, let’s determine what our customer process is, and rank customers in each stage according to how valuable they are to us. Once we do this, we can observe our customers as a funnel from least to most valuable over a lifetime:

Visits the site once

Visits the site often - but doesn't buy

Makes one purchase

Makes one purchase, considering second purchase in the future

Makes multiple purchases

Makes multiple purchases and refers other customers

Now that we are able to rank the value of a customer, our goal should be to take a customer from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel. How do we do this?

By giving an exceptional reward for their first interaction, you can significantly increase the probability of a second purchase.

By immediately giving your customers a reward that they perceive as exceptionally valuable, you are increasing the likelihood of a customer moving from Stages #1-4 to Stages #5+, and are therefore increase the value of that customer.  This may seem trivial at first, but this simplicity sometimes gets lost in a loyalty program’s initial planning phases.

Here are some examples of how you can create an exceptional initial reward and increase the value of your customers:

Reward for sign-ups

How much would you pay to develop your email list? How much is a gold lead worth to you? By acquiring customer information you gain some powerful remarketing options. An anonymous guest user is nowhere close to the value of a customer with an account - even if neither have purchased. So capturing this information is extremely important. You can reward for sign-ups with Sweet Tooth by creating a customer behavior earning rule that gives customers points when they sign-up to the store. Make sure your visitors know about this rule by actively promoting it somewhere prominent on your website so every new visitor sees it. Make it a flashy with a great call to action and watch your customer accounts skyrocket.

Multiply the amount of points for the first purchase

You can advertise to your new vistors a 10X bonus points for their first purchase at the store. Your customers perceive that they are being exceptionally rewarded for their first purchase. While these kind of multiplier campaigns are usually used to promote the initial purchase, they can also give customers interest in making the second purchase - in order to spend their newly acquired points balance. Make sure that you give them something that they can almost purchase with their new points. With Sweet Tooth, you’ll need to set up two rules to do this. First, set up your base rewarding rule. This will be the rule that every customer gets every time they purchase. Then create an Earning Rule that earns 9X the regular points amount (this is the bonus), make sure you set the maximum customer uses to "1" to reward only the first purchase. Now your customers will earn 10X points on their first order and 1X points on every subsequent order, and feel exceptionally rewarded.

Show a dollar amount value for the first purchase

Your new visitors might not the value of points. One technique we've seen many stores using is to actually display a dollar value of the points being earned on first transactions. This might look like "Earn $20 in store reward dollars when you make your first purchase". You can accomplish this with Sweet Tooth by creating an earning rule, then modifying the design templates to display monetary currency instead of points. Alternatively (and less expensively), you can just advertise the dollar value of the credit they are going to receive. Either way, if you effectively communicate the value to your new visitors, you will see an increase in purchases.

Try rewarding for the first AND second purchase more

Instead of just exceptionally rewarding customers for their first purchase, why not reward them more for their second purchase as well? That might be just enough to get the customer in the habit of buying at your store. In fact, you can set up a tiered earning system so that your more regular customers, who already love your store, aren’t taking too much away from your margin. With Sweet Tooth, this type of campaign can be configured by creating Earning Rules and setting the maximum customer uses to "2", then “3”, etc. Note: don’t just set up linear points earning rules and forget about your loyalty program - make sure that you keep things interesting by having special points promotion weekends, and double points items, for example.

Decrease the spending points cost for the first purchase

Once we have customers purchasing multiple times, we need a boost in customer experience in order to get them to our #5 position. To do this, we will give them a full customer experience - one that includes spending their points. Give customers 2x the discount the first time they spend their points, and ensure that the first full customer engagement (discovery>purchasing>rewarding>spending) they have is a positive, enjoyable experience. This will incentivise customers to come back to the store a second time to spend their points on another purchase. Sweet Tooth can allow for an increased first spending discount by creating a spending rule and setting the maximum customer uses to "1", similar to the way we set up the earning rules.

Ask your customers for referrals

Now that our customers have had a full experience, and are completely satisfied with our products and services, it’s time to motivate them to become the most valuabe customer: #6 (a referring customer). 75% of customers trust recommendations from their friends & family more than any other type of advertising. This means that an effective referral is the most effective type of marketing. Setting up a referral program is easy to do with Sweet Tooth. Make sure that you not only reward for a referral’s first purchase, but also for a referral simply signing up (remember what we said in “Reward for sign ups”). If you want to create a full affiliate program (where every referral purchase is rewarded), you can also do this here. Regardless of how you choose to reward referrals, they’re important. This brings us back to where we started with this article: customer acquisition. Organic growth via referrals and word of mouth are an underused tool for most eCommerce websites. If we invest in a positive & complete customer experience, we can reap the rewards of a growing customer base. Companies like Zappos are perfect examples of organic growth by turning their existing customers into promoters.

There are several other ways you can reward customers for their initial interaction. If you can think of any other creative ways, be sure to share with us by commenting below. It's clear to see that the initial interaction is an important one, and if it's handled correctly by the merchant, it can result in a long term, massively valuable customer.

PrestaShop landed in the U.S. this past week with an intimate conference in SOHO, NY.  While it may have been a smaller event than some other shows, it had an energy that seemed larger than expected (especially from their own people!)

Barcamp.5’s latest feature on the French-based five year-old company PrestaShop was meant to be their stake in the ground in the North American market, but it was also used as a team-building event for the company.  They brought the whole gang to New York on Saturday, giving them a few free days to explore the city, before getting down to business on Tuesday.

To me this was symbolic of the strength with which PrestaShop intends to merge into the North American market.  More on that later.

When I arrived early to set up my booth I was greeted by no less than four employees with genuine, welcoming “Hello’s” (not to mention some charming French accents).  This right away was a different start than any other conference I’ve attended.  Usually its hired event staffers who meet you with the warmth of a big box store greeter.  It was unique.

Who am I?  Why was I there?  Glad I asked.

I’m Nathan Ciprick, Director of Consumer Products for Points.com.  Very briefly, Points Intl. powers key parts of the loyalty business for many of the world’s largest airline, hotel and retail chains.  Chances are if you hold one of their cards, we play a part in it.  Points also has a corporate program which allows companies to purchase volumes of points/miles to distribute to their customers or employees to reward behavior.  Lastly, I head up Points.com, a consumer portal which allows users to track their balances, trade or exchange points/miles, and redeem their balances for gift certificates, online subscriptions, and more (more = points/miles converted to PayPal money, the first of its kind).

Also in that ‘more’ category is Points.com’s entry into the e-commerce space, and the reason for us to travel to New York from Toronto to the PrestaShop show.  Internally called, “Distributed Earn” and part of ongoing move into an externally focused e-commerce plan, Points.com now gives merchants of any size the ability to reward their customers with loyatly currency from some of the world’s largest loyalty brands.

Such as?

Ok, since I asked: Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan, American Airlines AAdvantage, Best Buy Reward Zone, Frontier Early Returns, Hawaiian Airlines Hawaiian Miles, Icelandair, Priority Club Rewards, U.S. Airways Dividend Miles, and Virgin Atlantic.  And more to come.

Points.com has partnered with Sweet Tooth Rewards as the platform that merchants install through PrestaShop.  With that single install, they then have the choice of loyalty currency: either create a white label self-serving brand through Sweet Tooth, or use Points.com’s integrations to the above mentioned loyalty brands.

My intent at the PrestaShop show was to hear what they and the other speakers attending had to say about the e-commerce space, to meet with merchants who are PrestaShop users or looking to be converts, and to see the landscape of other service providers circling the PrestaShop world to see how we can interact.

For what was available I felt I had success; so thank you PrestaShop.

This Barcamp presentation was put together quickly, within 90 days, and they’ve already stated they intend to have a larger show presence later in the year with stronger marketing support.

North America is in their sights to conquer.  Where their geographic stamp stands right now is: 14% North America, 6% South America, 66% Europe, 1% Africa, 12% Asia, 1% Australia.

Prestashop has impressive growth: 200 stores in 2007, and now 120,000 stores so far in 2012.

They have varied leadership: Founder/Co-CEO Bruno Leveque as the young brain behind the original idea and code, paired with Christophe Cremer with a strong business acumen to lead [I’m missing the accents on their names; apologies].

They also have big plans.  I paraphrase, “This Barcamp session is held in the same building where Facebook first announced themselves to the world.”

So lets get into the show, who was there, and what they were saying.

“PrestaShop is very easy for a merchant to get up and running with limited technical barriers.”

“I only develop for PrestaShop.”

“PrestaShop’s has proven they’ll keep innovating to provide me more to give to my clients.”

I spoke to a few system integrators who work solely with PrestaShop.  Personally, I am not handing them the crown just yet.  They have steep competition from others who are already doing a fantastic job delivering e-commerce solutions to online merchants.  I’m also not saying that just because Points.com works with these other merchant networks as well.

We are agnostic and want everyone to do well.

Different problems have different solutions.

PrestaShop knows they need to impress themselves upon the Enterprise-size companies to make a quick and noticeable dent in their competitions lead.  They know they need to gather many (many) small to medium sized merchants to organically grow their N.A. presence.  They know they need to put on a grander show to really splash into the scene.

But I also know that Points.com and Sweet Tooth intend to come along with them.

While I wish there were more merchants to show off our Points.com solution to, I know I saw lightbulbs go off over the heads of the other developers there when I told them of our offering.  The wheels turned on how we could work together.

I also appreciated the intimate setting/opportunity of the event to personally get to know some of the staff, community managers, and developers that will also help me succeed along with PrestaShop.

Authorize.net, their Platinum sponsor, gave an insightful talk on notable trends in e-commerce.  Templatemonster.com demonstrated how they believe in this space as well, since they lead the innovation of making it easier for companies with small budgets to become online players.

There was also a nice presence from System Integrators like komilfo and Carolina Custom Designs who are experts at bringing merchants into the PrestaShop e-commerce space.

I left the show feeling I achieved my goals. I know I gained a greater insight into PrestaShop’s world, and world domination plans.  And I am increasingly encouraged that Points.com is continuing to play a significant role in loyalty and the evolving e-commerce space.

Watch for Sweet Tooth and Points.com to be major players in your purchasing power, today and tomorrow.

We can't wait for Magento Imagine this April! We're sponsoring the conference, and hope to have a blast with the whole Magento community. We'll be giving away some awesome swag (hint: you'll be much cooler with them, except at night).

We're also running in the Pre-Imagine Run with the rest of the Magento community runners. To get ready for this some of us are running on treadmills and outside, while others prefer to eat hamburgers to "carbo-load".

In addition to training for the Magento run, we are also training for the Las Vegas lifestyle. A film crew documented our Vegas training...watch it here and let us know if you think we're ready!