Images Magazine June 2018

www.images-magazine.com 46 images JUNE 2018 PRODUCT PROFILE E commerce is growing fast and purchases made on mobile phones are growing even faster. According to a December 2017 report by market research company eMarketer, overall UK retail ecommerce sales reached £83.55 billion last year, accounting for more than 19% of total retail sales. The company predicts that by 2021, more than a quarter (25.8%) of all retail sales will be digital, with 56% of those sales made using a smartphone. DecoNetwork is well aware of the statistics and trends in the market and the need to provide its customers with the tools that will help them to respond to, and compete in, an increasingly digital marketplace. It’s against this backdrop, then, that the company has developed and launched its latest, updated suite of online design and business tools for print and embroidery – DecoNetwork 8. Responsive sites “We saw the increasing need for responsive sites, for tools that travelled from desktop, to tablet, to smartphone without losing functionality or sacrificing form. All decorators need an online presence that meets their customers where they live and that allows them to do business anywhere and in any format,” DecoNetwork explains. The company notes that seeing the difficulties its clients faced in managing customers, jobs and purchasing is what prompted it to move beyond its Images takes a look under the bonnet of the newly updated, mobile-friendly DecoNetwork 8 suite of online design and business tools for print and embroidery Upwardlymobile roots in online decoration design to create its back-end BusinessHub shop- management suite. Similarly, noting the realities of the increasingly mobile world and the difficulties decorators have with creating and maintaining that critical online presence is what has driven it to completely rethink its front-end, online designer, and its website design toolkit. The result is the entirely new outward- facing site and tools that make up DecoNetwork 8. “We’ve created a new model where all client-facing tools work on any device, and wherein decorators can create, style and maintain sites with the ease of a live, drag-and-drop interface,” DecoNetwork adds. So what’s changed in DecoNetwork 8 and how will those changes benefit your shop’s profitability and productivity? The answer lies in the front-end – that part of your site exposed to your customer, separate from the tools you’ll use to style your site behind the scenes. Freeing the front-end “DecoNetwork has always given your customer the ability to view your pertinent information, shop your catalogue, upload their own designs, add and style text, and even composite and add text to real embroidery files, while creating instant, true-to-scale mock-ups directly on the garment; now it can do so on any device, desktop computer, DecoNetwork 8 makes it easy for customers to create a shirt design on a mobile phone in a few simple steps DecoNetwork 8 provides a full suite of tools that travel seamlessly between desktops, tablets and phones