There is that joke – “making a weekend off the Internet means updating Facebook status via your phone”. But let’s have a close look at this. Being up-to-date is one of the key values, not only in eCommerce but in our reality in general. Variety of ways of communication are not a coincidence but a sign of a modern lifestyle.
A few know that a history of text messages is not that long as it may occur to us. The first SMS was sent 21 ago, in 1992 by Neil Papworth from Vodafone (it was Christmas wishes sent to his collegues). First, SMS were supposed to be a strictly technical functionality – not a widely accessible service. Fortunately, the inventor thought of business application of his idea. The popularity of text messages is growing ever since. Multitude of ways of using SMS is yet the best benchmark.
In eCommerce there are also a few ideas to use SMS to support on-line sales and pruchase process. Quick notification about your order status change, short information about season sale or tracking your package seem to be the most “wanted” functionalities in eCommerce reality. This is why we thought it would be good to have a fine SMS module for Magento platform. This would allow Magento e-shops to give to their customers a new service in order process.
We created 2 new modules, based on 2 different API. Their functionalities are similar: sending chosen type of messages to the chosen group of customers. It means that e-shop administrator may send information about online sale. Another option is to inform customer about every (or some) status changes of the order. Thanks to this kind of solution the ideology of being always up-to-date is now easier to achieve.
You can check out SMSAPI and StoreSMS on Magento Connect. Feel free to leave a comment – every feedback is important to us.
