"NetSuite securely passes the required information to Google Checkout and automatically updates once the transaction is complete," explains NetSuite. "NetSuite ecommerce merchants gain a fast and convenient checkout process that will attract more customers and simplify how they buy, while enabling cost-effective order processing and payment by credit or debit cards."

"We’re excited to welcome NetSuite, a leading vendor of on-demand and integrated business management software, as one of Google Checkout’s featured ecommerce partners," says Gina Del Vecchio of Google Checkout Operations. "NetSuite offers a seamless integration with Google Checkout, making it fast and easy to add Checkout to your website. Plus, NetSuite’s platform provides real-time visibility into key business operations in one system — including inventory, fulfillment, shipping, marketing promotions, and customer buying patterns for up-sell and cross-sell analysis."

In an explanation of the benefits of Google Checkout support, NetSuite plays the "Google Checkout users click on ads 10% more when the ad displays the Google Checkout badge" card. I seem to recall a similar figure from Google when discussing AdWords ads and use of the badge.

They also say that a fast, convenient checkout process helps users convert 40% more than shoppers who don’t offer such an experience. Google Checkout also provides a Payment Guarantee that protects Checkout orders.

When a user enables the Google Checkout option, it displays the Google Checkout button next to the Proceed to Checkout button in the shopping cart, or on the checkout landing page. Customers can then click on it and go right to Google Checkout, with NetSuite providing the items in the shopping cart, the selected shipping option and tax information.

After a payment has been completed in Google Checkout, a sales order is automatically created by NetSuite. When the Google Checkout order is processed and fulfilled in NetSuite, any order status changes are automatically updated to Google Checkout.

Conversion data from users’ Google Checkout orders automatically get captured and shared with AdWords and Google Analytics. Analytics integration is always a plus.

Yes, say goodbye to the previously announced $13-$16 range; $16-$19 is now the price on 6.2 million shares.  NetSuite is still selling the shares in an auction that’ll allow average investors a chance to buy them, however.  (In a normal IPO, institutional investors have all the fun.)

"While not common, auction-based IPOs have been used for some high-profile IPOs," notes Lilla Zuill.  "Options-trading firm Interactive Brokers Group raised $1.2 billion earlier this year, and Google Inc used a modified auction format in its 2004 offering."

So is NetSuite guaranteed some sort of victory due to its imitation of Google?  Well, not really.  The search giant’s stock is now at $673.51, having started out at $85.  But Interactive Brokers Group began its publicly traded life at $30.01, and is now hanging around $30.15.  Not bad, but far from impressive.

We’ll just see how far NetSuite’s ties to Oracle can take it, then; Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is a top (though mostly silent) investor, and NetSuite intends to serve companies that are too small for Oracle’s tastes.

“NetSuite is an ideal business management platform for sellers to
efficiently manage their businesses," said Max Mancini, Senior Director,
Platform and Innovation for eBay. "By using eBay Web Services to offer
listing management capabilities from within the NetSuite solution, NetSuite
is able to deliver a great value to small and medium-size businesses that
want to list on eBay, offering them a complete solution to help them grow
their online businesses."

The partnership also offers users the ability to manage a wide variety of business operations such as inventory, warehouse management, accounting, direct sales, telesales, keyword marketing, email marketing and site hosting.

As eBay sellers grow from a home based business to a small-to-midsized business, processes that worked well in the early stages can quickly become outdated. Listings management, inventory management, and order fulfillment become increasingly important for small businesses.

For businesses that are established, distributors, manufacturers and retailers who have not used eBay as a sales channel, the challenges include optimizing listings and listings management. The listing process takes time and knowledge of the market.

"The synergy of the eBay marketplace and NetSuite’s on-demand business
management solution, especially with NetSuite’s ERP capabilities, supports
an online merchants’ entire business operation," said Dean Mansfield,
President of Worldwide Operations for NetSuite. "With such a complete
solution, merchants do not need to spend time and money to tie different
software applications together to run their online business; one solution
from NetSuite does it all."

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… that Salesforce.com beat them to the punch…

Link: Salesforce.com, news, launched their own offering

“We obviously didn’t write this code overnight, and we have released announcements about our earlier versions of this technology last year. Salesforce.com’s acquisition is an attempt to catch up with NetSuite in this space,” said the company.

Meow!

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

Google AdWords and Yahoo Sponsored Search campaigns can be managed from the module provided by NetSuite for its customers. Their unveiling comes a day after rival Salesforce.com announced its deal for Kieden, a company that makes a similar product for Salesforce users.

Price is the big difference here. NetSuite and NetSuite CRM+ customers have the Keyword Marketing Module available now, for free. Salesforce will charge $300 per month for Kieden users.

NetSuite described its module as a tool that will help gain a clear picture of what keyword marketing dollars produce at every sales stage. That will include tracking leads generated from keywords, through conversion, to revenue, profits, and ROI gained.

Google has contributed on the education side to the NetSuite initiative. A webinar on paid search features Chris Valle, Senior Manager of Sales at Google, along with NetSuite’s Jay O’Connor, VP of Marketing.

Both the NetSuite and Salesforce moves reinforce the need and value of such measurement tools. Online advertising provides a very measurable vehicle for determining just how well, or poorly, a campaign delivers for the marketer.

Their moves also demonstrate the competitiveness in the on-demand software segment. NetSuite uses Salesforce.com as an example in one slide of its paid search presentation, where they describe CRM and Marketing Automation as one piece of a fractured puzzle of traditional software management.

For an entertaining exchange between Salesforce and NetSuite, Silicon.com picked up brickbats thrown by both companies with regards to their keyword management efforts. Someone get Marc Benioff and Larry Ellison (NetSuite’s majority owner) in a cage match, please.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

A major new feature, touted by the company as the future of CRM platforms, will be the integration of Ajax into aspects of the main Oasis CRM interface.

KnowTia is aiming its latest software upgrade “at corporate clients and those who have outgrown their small business applications.” With previous versions, they have tried to be competitive with corporations such as NetSuite and salesforce.com.

KnowTia has asserted in the past that these companies’ offsite hosted CRM models “act as a paid service instead of a true CRM investment.” KnowTia proudly proclaims their own products as “100% Web-based CRM.”

With Oasis CRM 2.0, KnowTia hopes to remain a contender. New features such as Ajax dashboards, blanket order management, and an enhanced user interface (as compared to the previous version) will be employed in conjunction with their existing real-time integration with BusinessVision 32 and QuickBooks Pro.

Other advertised features include contact-based (as opposed to account-based) CRM, complete order management (including fulfillment), “easy to use and customizable” web-based interface, and “comprehensive” contract and complete inventory management.

Ajax should allow users of the Oasis CRM software to pull data from the server to the interface without web page refreshing or any other disruption. This would permit for simultaneous and refreshing dashboard graphs in a web environment, which KnowTia believes will be a major selling point.

The integration with BusinessVision 32 and QuickBooks Pro (which the older versions of KnowTia software, KnowTia Professional & Corporate Editions, also featured) lets users access information about their clients’ finances without giving up their own company’s financial information.

According to Oasis officials, this will allow “for a constant loop of client data which is consistently flowing throughout Oasis CRM and their accounting system.”

Oasis 2.0 comes in the midst of a number of developments, both in terms of technology and news, in the CRM world. SAP recently made public the first on-demand/on-premise CRM suite, known as SAP CRM 2006s. But salesforce.com, which the KnowTia Corporation considers a direct competitor, just released some rather mediocre first-quarter financial numbers. Although the former tidbit presents itself as a huge obstacle for KnowTia, the latter could give the company a comparative advantage.

The Oasis CRM tagline is “your True Total Business Solution.” Their website reveals plans to make that become true, telling of product integrations with Sage PeachTree, Microsoft SB Financials, Microsoft Great Plains, QuickBooks Merchant Services, and Quickbooks POS 5.0 in the coming months.

The features afforded by Ajax, in addition to these impending integrations with popular accounting packages, should help KnowTia protect its corner of the market with Oasis 2.0 CRM.

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NetSuite Mass E-Mail Marketing enables companies to send hundreds of thousands of e-mails a month, and millions a year directly from within the company’s flagship NetSuite and NetCRM on-demand applications. By comparison, Salesforce.com only allows companies to send 100 e-mails at a time and recently announced expanding to 250 (source: Salesforce.com Customer Update, ), and Siebel On-Demand and Microsoft CRM offer no integrated e-mail marketing capabilities. NetSuite includes 120,000 marketing e-mails free of charge for each customer.

In addition, because NetSuite Mass E-mail Marketing generates e-mails directly from within the application, many other first and only integrated capabilities are also offered including:

— Group creation based on purchase history

— HTML or text e-mail templates with merge tag personalization

— Real-time, on the fly campaign adjustments based on target response

— Real-time statistics including receipt metrics, click-thru rates, response rates, and actual revenue generated

— Reports on ROI by channel, offer, item or any custom data point.

E-mail marketing is the lowest cost, most targeted and personalized marketing tool available. While other CRM systems may provide some basic marketing campaign management, all require a third party solution to manage actual generation of the e-mail and any content beyond basic HTML templates. However, relying on third-party e-mail providers for these capabilities results in loss of control during the time when the e-mail is sent, weak analysis of results following a campaign, no native ROI tracking, and added cost from beginning to end.

The new NetSuite Mass E-mail Marketing breaks down these barriers and allows users to manage, optimize and analyze large volume E-mail Marketing with a single system:

Millions of E-mails Served — NetSuite and NetCRM now have the ability to handle large-scale volumes of campaign e-mails sent. In the past year alone, NetSuite users have generated more than 10 million e-mails, and the new capabilities will allow individual customers to send millions of marketing e-mails per year without the pain and excessive costs of coordinating third-party systems and services.

From Outbox to Order — Embedded within NetSuite Mass E-mail Marketing is seamless planning, target group creation, e-mail merge, sophisticated data cleansing and de-duping capabilities, execution and wrap-around performance measurement. Built-in reports allow analysis of campaign statistics as well as ROI thanks to patent pending no-click e-mail integration and tracking of the campaign promotion through to final purchase transaction.

Would You Like Fries With That Order — Target group creation and e-mail personalization is optimized with NetSuite customer intelligence. NetSuite Upsell Manager gives users a stepwise tool to profile and segment target groups based on statistics of customers’ buying habits and purchase histories including the option to create push campaigns around highly correlated products.

Hold the SPAM, Please — NetSuite Mass E-mail Marketing automates the process of complying with ever-changing SPAM regulation. NetSuite includes best practices guidelines to help users conform to SPAM regulations. Automated unsubscribe technology ensures that when a customer requests to be taken off an e-mail list, they are taken off that e-mail list. In addition, e-mail headers have been optimized to reduce the likelihood of a campaign e-mail being flagged as SPAM, so messages are delivered as targeted.

Lead Management On Steroids — New opportunities generated via NetSuite Mass E-mail Marketing (or any other vehicle) automatically take advantage of NetSuite’s multi-tier lead management technology. Whether based on simple territory assignments or complex scoring algorithms, NetSuite gets the right lead to the right rep or sales partner at the right time.

“In an age where e-mail is the preferred communication vehicle of customers and prospects alike, it’s amazing that a function as basic as e-mail marketing is an after-thought in other CRM applications,” said NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson. “By embedding rich e-mail marketing and analysis capabilities directly within NetSuite, something that is traditionally painful and expensive to manage is now a breeze. More importantly, now our customers can monitor in real-time not just how many new opportunities their e-mail activities have generated, but actually how many orders have resulted.”

“We know from experience of working in the nutrition industry that most people who begin an exercise program quit after three months,” said Dave Cadoff, director of marketing, NutriScience Corporation, based in Hermosa Beach, Calif. “Using NetSuite, we can target old or lost customers with specific e-mails based on what they used to buy. These campaigns are simple to launch. We set up our 14-day campaign in less than an hour. Prior to NetSuite, we would lose customers without knowing about it. Now with NetSuite we’re able to keep track of these customers and capture revenue we used to leave on the table.”

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