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Why Gourmet Food Mall
Why
should I choose Gourmet Food Mall?
I already have a website. Why do I need Gourmet Food Mall?
Why are "category floors" important for my products?
What is "dynamic product merchandising"?
Will online shoppers be able to find my webstore using
search engines?
Managing My Webstore
Will GourmetFoodMall help me set up my online store?
How often can I change my product listings?
What if my webstore sells the same products as another
store?
How long will it take to get my webstore online?
Where is my
webstore hosted?
Do I need to know HTML to maintain my webstore?
What will my store's URL be? Can I use my existing domain
name?
How do I
receive my orders?
Security
What kind of security do you have for online transactions?
Why do I need a "card not present" merchant account?
Can I receive my orders via email and then process them through my POS terminal
in my store?
How do I get a "card-not-present" merchant account?
General
What is the difference between GourmetFoodMall.com and
GourmetFoodMall.net?
How much does it
cost?
Who can I call if I have a problem or question?
Why should I choose Gourmet Food Mall?
Gourmet Food Mall is the first and only
completely integrated e-commerce platform for the gourmet products and specialty
food industry. Gourmet Food Mall provides you with a state of the art
platform to do business on the Internet; the location
where your webstore and products can be seen by your targeted customers; and the
customized strategies that you need to use to be successful and
profitable in this online channel.
Benefits of our platform include:
- Qualified online traffic
- Web-based point and click
interface
- No HTML knowledge required
to maintain and update your webstore
- 24/7/365 access to your
webstore to manage and update
- Low cost, pre-paid store
maintenance plans
- Participation in online and
offline marketing programs
We are actively
selecting companies with unique products and a great story to
tell to be featured on the
award winning Gourmet Food Mall website. To find out if your company
qualifies to be a Gourmet Food Mall merchant, fill out our
Prospective Merchant Form, or call
one of our Business Development Managers today at 800-903-7553. We will
contact you immediately with more information.
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I already have a website. Why do I need Gourmet Food Mall?
First ask yourself: How effective is my
present web site? And, is it as effective as I would like it to be? On the
Web, your store needs to be in a visible location where your target customers
can find you. Gourmet Food Mall provides the prime real estate that gives your
store and products the online visibility they need. Our huge collection of
webstores in over 40 product categories and online marketing and promotional
strategies will draw qualified gourmet food and gourmet product shoppers from
all over the world. We attract your target customers and place them in the
perfect buying environment where they can Browse and Shop
in one convenient and easy-to-use location.
In turn, Gourmet Food Mall manages the
complexities of e-commerce, allowing you to save time and money by focusing on
your business, not the technology. In a nutshell, we simplify the process.
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Why are “category floors” important for my products?
Gourmet Food Mall is very similar to a “real life”
shopping mall or a large department store. Our Mall is structured to replicate
the way people generally shop at their local mall, except we make the process
much easier, informative, and more convenient. Our “category floors” are a
convenient way for online shoppers to browse the Mall and discover your
products and webstore.
Most of the time, online shoppers may only have a
general idea of what they are interested in. By having products and webstores
grouped into category floors, shoppers can more easily browse and see
what’s available. If your webstore has several types of products, this gives
you a greater opportunity to merchandise to these shoppers. Gourmet Food Mall
currently offers online shoppers over 40 category floors to browse. Your
Gourmet Food Mall account manager will assist you in selecting the most
pertinent category floors to ensure that you are positioned properly to
merchandise to our online shoppers.
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What is “dynamic product merchandising”?
Gourmet Food Mall’s “dynamic product
merchandising” technology allows you to feature products that are relevant to
the interests of each individual online shopper. Each webstore has the
capability to feature four (4) products on the home page. With dynamic product
merchandising, these 4 products change to fit the interests of the shopper
according to the path that they arrived at the webstore. For instance, if a
shopper was searching for coffee and tea products and they clicked your
webstore, they would see your coffee and tea products featured on your home
page. If another shopper was browsing on the candy and chocolate category floor
and then clicked to your webstore, that shopper would see your candy and
chocolate products featured on your home page.
Our dynamic product merchandising technology is a
powerful feature that allows you to merchandise to the individual online
shopper.
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Will online shoppers be able to find my webstore using search
engines?
Yes. An additional benefit in being a Gourmet
Food Mall merchant is that we optimize your webstore and products for all of the
major search engines. Each merchant is assigned their own unique URL address (www.mystore.gourmetfoodmall.com).
If you already have a domain name, you can easily transfer that address to your
Gourmet Food Mall webstore. Either way, your products and webstore will be
accessible directly from search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, AOL, and more.
Contact your Gourmet Food Mall account manager or our technical services
department for more details.
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Will GourmetFoodMall help me set up my online store?
Yes. The only way to tell your story online
and communicate your value proposition is through your own branded webstore.
The look, feel and functionality of your webstore are critical to the success of
your online business. We are experts at what works well online and
what doesn’t. Our professional design staff will assist you in
developing the best webstore solutions for your online objectives. Please
contact our sales department for details by calling 1-800-903-7553 or by
our
Prospective Merchant Form
.
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How often can I change my product listings?
You can update your webstore as often as you want,
from any internet-connected computer, through your Merchant Console. While we
have made it easy to make changes to your webstore, we realize that many of our
merchants have neither the time nor inclination to make these changes
themselves. That is why Gourmet Food Mall offers an inexpensive Pre-Paid
Maintenance program where we handle all of your webstore maintenance quickly and
professionally. For more information please contact our technical services
department.
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What if my webstore sells the same products as another store?
Because there will be hundreds of merchants who
list thousands of products on Gourmet Food Mall, there will be some overlap in
products and brands. We do not assign exclusive rights to offer particular
products. There will be competition, just as in any shopping mall.
Why do your customers buy from you right
now? It is not about being the cheapest. Each
successful business has a distinctive value proposition or competitive
advantage. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t stay in business very long. Gourmet
Food Mall works with you to translate your value proposition to the online
environment. The Web is the most ideal communication channel ever devised and
the companies that will be the most successful are the ones that view the
Internet as a complement to their traditional ways of competing. In addition,
Gourmet Food Mall offers many different ways to merchandize your products and
webstore to create added awareness and visibility.
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How
long will it take to get my webstore online?
Most of our webstores can be created in just a few
days. It all depends on how many products will be added to your store database
and if you have all of your information readily available. You will need all
product information, all graphic images (in jpg format), and an e-mail address
so we can send information to you. You also need to set up your
“card-not-present” merchant account in order to accept credit cards and use our
“mall-wide” shopping cart. Allowing time for you to get your information
together and setting up your merchant account, we can have your webstore up and
running in about a week.
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Where is my webstore hosted?
In order to ensure a stable and reliable shopping
environment for our online shoppers, all of our webstores are hosted on our
platform and servers. If you already have a website, we can replicate the look
and feel of that site in your Gourmet Food Mall webstore.
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Do I
need to know HTML to maintain my webstore?
No experience with HTML or related technologies is
required. Our easy-to-use Merchant Console takes care of the formatting and
automation for you.
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What will my store’s URL be? Can I use my existing domain name?
Each webstore has its own unique URL or internet
address such as www.mystore.gourmetfoodmall.com . And, YES you can use
your existing domain name. For example if you owned the “salsa.com”
domain name, you can continue to use that domain name and it will take your
online customers to your Gourmet Food Mall webstore. To obtain the greatest
benefit from Gourmet Food Mall we highly recommend that you transfer your
current online address to your Gourmet Food Mall webstore. It is easy to do and
our technical services department will help you.
For larger brands that have invested heavily in
their current website, please note that we do not require exclusive
arrangements. You can continue to maintain another website outside of our
Mall. However, for the majority of our merchants, there is no practical reason
to maintain two websites.
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How do I receive my orders?
Currently there are two ways that you can receive your
online orders:
- You will receive
notification of your orders via email. This notification will include all of
the necessary information to process that order, and
- You can access your orders
online through your Merchant Console.
Coming soon … you will be able to retrieve orders
as database files in a choice of common formats. This allows merchants with a
large volume of orders to integrate their web orders directly into their
existing ordering system.
By providing several ways of receiving your
orders, it minimizes the risk that an order will not be processed due to human
error or technical disruption.
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What kind of security do you have for online transactions?
Online security is a priority to Gourmet Food Mall.
We use a secure transaction environment and industry-standard SSL encryption
wherever sensitive information is required to be used, such as during the
shopping cart checkout process. SSL provides privacy protection by encrypting
the channel of communication between Gourmet Food Mall, you - our merchant and
your online customer. Through SSL, your customers can complete transactions at
Gourmet Food Mall with confidence that no one else can read, change, or fool
with their payment information as it travels over the Internet.
Gourmet Food Mall gives your customers the most
comprehensive protection available on the Web today. Only Gourmet Food Mall’s
Safe Shopping Guarantee protects online shoppers when they shop any of the
webstores in our mall:
- We guarantee their
Credit Card Safety,
- We guarantee their
100% Satisfaction when ordering products from any or our merchant
webstores, and
- We guarantee their
Privacy by not releasing personal information to any 3rd
party.
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Why do I need a “card not present” merchant account?
All bankcard companies (i.e. Visa and MasterCard)
contractually require merchants to have “card not present” merchant accounts for
all online transactions. Card-Not-Present (CNP) merchants are targets for
bankcard fraud. Scamsters take advantage of the fact that they can operate
anonymously. They know that many of the bankcard features (such as checking the
cardholder’s signature on the sales draft against the signature on the card)
that prevent fraud in the physical world do not apply in the card-not-present
environment. Mail order/telephone order (MO/TO) and e-commerce merchants who
choose to process transactions in the card-not-present environment must
understand that there is greater need for protection against fraud exposure and
associated losses.
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Can I receive my orders via email and then process them through
my POS terminal in my store?
No. Email works independently of any security
software, such as SSL and is not protected. Email is vulnerable and should
probably never be used to send or receive sensitive information such as credit
card numbers. In our email order notification to the merchant, the purchaser’s
credit card number is not included for these security reasons. Gourmet Food
Mall’s shopping cart and order processing system provides a secure and robust
payment infrastructure. In addition, Visa and MasterCard prohibit the use of
card-not-present transactions processed through retail POS terminals. Please
contact your merchant account provider for details.
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How
do I get a “card-not-present” merchant account?
Gourmet Food Mall requires all merchants to have an
approved “card-not-present” merchant account prior to activation of their
webstore. Gourmet Food Mall has partnered with Paymentech, the nation’s leading
processor of e-commerce and direct marketing payment transactions to offer a
preferred merchant account program. As the preferred merchant account provider
to Gourmet Food Mall, Paymentech offers low prices and great service for Gourmet
Food Mall merchants to accept credit cards in their webstore.
Please contact your Account Manager for costs and
details. You can also log-on to your Merchant Console to apply for your
merchant account or set-up an existing merchant account. If you already have a
“card-not-present” merchant account or would like to choose a different merchant
account provider, you are welcome to use any bank that is compatible with the
Authorize.net platform.
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What is the difference between GourmetFoodMall.com and
GourmetFoodMall.net?
GourmetFoodMall.com is our retail or
direct-to-consumer (B2C) website and GourmetFoodMall.net is our wholesale or
trade only (B2B) website. If you are interested in selling wholesale,
please contact your Account Manager
or send us a
Prospective Merchant Form for more information.
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How
much does it cost?
GourmetFoodMall charges a monthly rent
based on the size of your webstore. Your rent will be charged to your credit
card each month and you will receive an e-receipt (email receipt) on the same
day. You can obtain a fee schedule by contacting a Gourmet Food Mall account
manager at
(954) 978-3311.
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Who can
I call if I have a problem or question?
Shortly after registration you will be
assigned a personal account manager. Our account managers are there to help
you get the most out of your GourmetFoodMall webstore. Having access to this
valuable resource is included in your monthly rent. You can reach your account
manager by calling
(954) 978-3311.
In addition, our technical services department is
available to answer any technical questions that you may have. You can
reach technical services during normal business hours M-F 9am-5pm EST at (954)
978-3311 or via email by clicking here
Technical
Services Group.
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