| Welcome to Gate13’s monthly newsletter! Our new monthly newsletter is exclusive to members of the Gate13 community and aims to keep you informed, introduce our clients businesses to each other and provide you with useful tips and expert advice on how to maximise your online business. Many of Gate13’s new clients come to us because they have been recommended by a friend. Recognising that referring a friend is the biggest compliment anyone can pay us, Gate13 would like to say thank you to our clients by offering a free month’s hosting and licensing for clients whose recommendations lead to new businesses joining Gate13. If you have business colleagues, friends or family that you feel could benefit from a Gate13 eCommerce solution, just get them to mention your name when they get in touch or, if you would prefer to have us give them a call, just let us know their name and contact details by emailing us: referrals@gate13.com.au Gate13 is proud to announce that on Wednesday 27 September, it will be launching its innovative new checkout process – a free innovation available to all Gate13 customers. The new checkout has many more custom options and will allow you a much greater level of control over your store. You should have already received an introductory email about the upgrade and detailed instructions will be sent to you on Wednesday to help you with this simple changeover process. Our customer support team will also be here to help with any questions and you can contact them on clientservices@gate13.com.au or 1300 732 603. The Importance of Trust and Loyalty in Online Business Research has confirmed what we have long suspected; shopping online is heavily impacted by trust. Where customers arrive at a site and don’t immediately feel it to be trustworthy, they are unlikely to stay and buy. To help you to gain your customers’ trust, Gate13 payment pages are SSL certified and the credit card details are 128 bit encrypted. This means that your online store is completely trustworthy and your customers can easily see the padlock in the bottom of their screen and know you to be safe. When your customers feel safe at your site, they will stay and browse longer, and ultimately purchase more. The study also highlighted the importance of loyal customers to eCommerce businesses. In fact, the study found that acquiring a new customer costs roughly eight times more than holding on to a current one. Gate13’s online sales solution allows you to run loyalty programs for your customers by having password protected areas where customers belonging to a loyalty group can access and receive special offers such as a 10% discount or free shipping of their purchases. The eMarketing function in the Gate13 solution also allows you to send updates, promotional news and newsletters to your client base to stay in touch with them. Published Research: Mahmood, M. A., Gagchi, K. and Ford, T. C. (2004), “On-line Shopping Behaviour: Cross-Country Empirical Research” in International Journal of Electronic Commerce, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 9 – 30.  The Australian Orchid Nursery is Australia’s largest producer of Indigenous Australian Orchids.
Before coming to Gate13, the Australian Orchid Nursery’s website featured product catalogues in PDF format for customers to download. This allowed for ordering by fax and phone but the files were often slow to download and some potential clients were unable to download the catalogues at all. To remove sold out products, change prices or add new products was also a lengthy process as new files had to be made, converted to PDF and then uploaded back to the site. The Australian Orchid Nursery’s owner and manager, Wayne Turville, came to Gate13 to overcome these problems and turn his website into a profitable business tool. Gate13 set up two online stores to cater for the tens of thousands of exotic orchids on offer and integrated the carts with Wayne’s existing web design. Orchid lovers can now browse through Wayne’s amazing range of flowers from anywhere in the world and Wayne receives their orders and payments in real time. Wayne found the overall experience of moving to online sales affordable and easy and it has grown his small business to a global competitor. In Wayne’s words: “Great staff; Great service; Affordable price. I’d keep you a secret from my competitors.” You can visit Wayne’s two stores at: order.australianorchids.com.au and order.cymbidium.com.au | 
