Why I Love L.L. Bean and How to Follow Their Lead Without Spending a Fortune

Before school started last fall, I bought a new, monogrammed backpack from L.L. Bean for my niece, Roni, for her birthday. She picked it out. It looked great. Lots of places to keep things organized. Pockets, zippers, places to clip things. When I gave it to her, Roni loved it.

Five months later, one of the zippers broke. Bummer. But L.L. Bean offers a lifetime guarantee on its products so I sent it back and here's what happened...

A few days after I mailed the backpack to L.L. Bean, I received an email from their "orders" department, informing me they had received it.

The next day I received another email saying it had shipped. "Okay," I thought. "We should get it early next week." But to my surprise, a brand new backpack arrived the following day!

And that's not all. Five days later I received a refund check from the company in the amount of $4.55 with a note saying the backpack was now on sale so a refund was due.

Now that's customer service at its best!

Obviously, L.L. Bean has an established procedure for handling each aspect of its business, as well as a very robust customer relationship management software program to automate the process.

How would you like to be able to automatically thank your customers for ordering from you, remind them to order again, suggest they order an additional product or two, and keep them up-to-date on your new products and services? Well, you can!

And you don't have to be L.L. Bean to do it.

Surprisingly, all it takes is a good electronic shopping cart. If you'd like to sell your products and services online, keep in touch with your customers and prospects automatically, use the shopping cart to upsell customers to even more products they might not know existed, and do it
with ease, Tom Antion's ebook, HOW TO PICK A SHOPPING CART SYSTEM THAT MAKES YOU MONEY, is for you. You'll be stunned by all the things a good shopping cart can do.

To give you a little "taste" of the information included in the ebook, here's Tom's checklist for evaluating a shopping cart:

==> Will it calculate shipping and tax?

==> Does it handle specialized shipping like FedEx and UPS?

==> Will it deliver soft and hard goods in the same transaction?

==> Does it offer customizable "Return to Shopping" pages without needing custom programming?

==> Does it allow you to make special offers?

==> Does it deliver receipt and confirmation emails?

==> Does it allow multiple order and dropshop emails?

==> Does it have a Web-based administration page?

==> Does it use encryption technology?

==> Does it deliver deasy output to your accounting software?

==> Does it have its own associate program or is it easily compatible with other major brands of associate software?

==> Does it have integrated upsell modules?

==> Does it have an integrated sales and prospect database?

==> Does it have broadcast email capability?

==> Does it have mail merge capability?

==> Will it deliver your ezine/enewsletter and automate the subscription process?

==> Can it handle coupons and other discounts?

==> Can it work for multiple websites with no extra fees?

==> Does it have unlimited and fully integrated autoresponders?

==> Does it have Ad Tracking tied to actual sales?

==> Will it rotate ads for you and tell you which one makes the most money?

==> Can the order form be customized?

==> Will it do automatic recurring billing?

==> Does it give you a variety of sales reports?

==> Does it have a "Tell a Friend" module?

==> Will it allow you to easily make quesionnaires and surveys?

==> Does it have a pop-up box builder?

==> Does it have a printable offline order form?

For more information on how to pick a shopping cart and Tom Antion's ebook, visit http://www.marketingideashop.com/documents/cart.htm