Thursday, 29 November 2012

Pinterest set to boom this Christmas

Last year, in December alone, customers spent nearly £8 billion purchasing products from an ecommerce store. As we at eSellution tell all of our clients on a regular basis, social media plays a vital role in helping your store achieve any long standing success. 

When planning out your Christmas social media attack, you must make sure that you include Pinterest in all of your plans. While many major bands use the social media site to create their own boards containing their own products, you shouldn't just think as a platform only being useful for companies with an established brand image. Whether your business is big or small, there are a number of large benefits to taking the time to establish yourself on Pinterest. 

Especially over Christmas, with many ecommerce stores all vying for the custom of people looking to purchase presents, food and other holiday necessities, standing out from the crowd and getting your products out there can often be difficult. Pinterest allows you to create your own personal boards containing images of all the products you have for sale. When a customer then searches for an image related to one of your products, it displays that product to the user. 

Pinterest is a fantastic way to begin increasing your brand image and product awareness, encouraging more people to visit your site and view the products on your page. While you may have a number of different marketing channels that you devote most of your time to, you need to incorporate Pinterest as for starters is is completely free to create a board and get it up there for people to see and secondly, it,s global exposure with over 10 million active users, meaning it can dramatically increase the levels of traffic your store will see over Christmas. 

Read our article "Pinterest better than Facebook" to see the statistics as to why you need to use this social media platform in order to achieve success this Christmas. With less than a month to go until Christmas, it is essential you begin marketing your store, brand and products across all marketing channels to ensure you get the exposure required to bring in the desired results. 

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eBay alter new multi variation images policy

eBay has made changes to it multi variation images policy after receiving a number of complaints from eBay store owners. 

Recently, eBay made changes to the variation images, displaying a specific variation, such as a certain colour, on the product search results depending on the search query which a user entered. However, many store owners complained about this change as they preferred having the general composite image that showed all of the variations of a product that a store has for sale. 

The problem with the multi variation images is that if a buyer doesn't like the look of the product you have for  sale in the specific variation, the likelihood is that they aren't going to know that there are other variations available. This often results in them dismissing your product as a potential purchase and looking for other search results. 

According to a statement on eBay's UK general announcements, the new multi variation images will be rolled back on December 5th to the original main share product image on all product searches, across all categories. However, the colour variation images will still be used on colour related searches. 

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eBay to give buyers real life social shopping experience

From Friday 30th November until Sunday 2nd December, eBay will be running a social media shopping experience in Covent Garden, London as they look to increase interactivity and sales on the online marketplace. 

According to some experts, Sunday December 2nd is expected to be the busiest shopping day of the year, as  many people look to get a large amount of their Christmas shopping completed well before the anticipated rush. 

The pop up store will contain large screens that will show Facebook, Twitter and Instagram posts which people have placed on the social networking sites of products they have or would like to purchase. It is thought that this will give people an idea of what the more popular gift ideas are this Christmas and encourage them to also purchase these items. 

During a visit to the eBay pop up store, users will also be able to download the various eBay mobile applications on to their smartphones and scan product QR codes using a scanner on their smartphones. This ability to scan QR codes will be the most memorable aspect of the pop up store shopping experience as users will be able to view these scanned products in augmented reality, meaning they can view the products as a 3D image. 

This augmented reality could soon become a main part of eBay's shopping experience, as the online marketplace believe that this technology could bring a £2.4 billion revenue increase by 2014. 

Not the first pop up store

This isn't the first time eBay have tired the idea of running a pop up store. Earlier this month, eBay opened up a pop up store in Toronto, allowing users to browse a variety of items that eBay have placed in the store from the online marketplace place that they believe would be great holiday gifts. 

Using a QR scanner on their smartphone, users will then scan the QR code relating to the product in the ebay store, which will then open up the product on the eBay mobile app for the user to purchase online. 

These stores launched by eBay are seen as an attempt to increase the use of mobile commerce within it's users, allowing them to develop an ever increasing mobile shopping platform which the marketplace has become heavily invested in. 

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Wednesday, 28 November 2012

How to make the most of your social media audience

When running an ecommerce store, no matter what or where you sell, you are going to gain a number of customers who will become happy with your service and will become dedicated members of your various social media pages. Rather than just leaving them sitting there and occasionally posting the odd status update, how can you get these customers to engage with you to not only develop your relationship, but also improve your site to help draw more customers to your store?

Competitions

Running a competition for your ecommerce store is one of the best ways to drastically boost your social media followers and something you should look to do on a regular basis. You may run a promotion giving away a product from your store for everyone who follows your social media page, likes a particular status or retweets something you posted. People will then come flooding to your social media page in the hope of being able to pick up a freebie.

While you will be giving away some products for free, the increased followers you will see on your social media pages make this more than a worthwhile endeavour. as your social media followers grow, you will begin to see more and more people transferring from your social media pages to your store, resulting in you making back any losses from the promotion prizes, as well as a nice profit on top. 

New product ranges

One of the hardest parts about adding new product ranges is deciding which product range to implement in your store and deciding now successful each product may be with your customers. The easiest way to find this out is simply to ask them before you definitively decide to add products to the store. You may come up with 3 or 4 different product lines that you possibly want to add to your store and place them on your relevant social media pages. Your customers will then be able to give you their opinion on which products they like. This will then mean that whatever product line you add to your store, you know that there will be customers out there who will definitely be interested in purchasing what you have for sale. 

New logos and website formats

The look and layout of your website not only plays a major role on your overall brand image, it also can be a deciding factor as to whether a customer decides to purchase from you or not. Just like when deciding to add a new product range to your store, you want a logo and a website layout that will appeal to your customers so just like the new products, simply ask them. 

You could place a number of different logo designs on your social media page and then ask your customers to pick their favourite. Based on whichever logo proves to be the most popular, you can then build a new website design that incorporates not only the logo, but also the colour scheme that the logo contains.

If you have a large number of followers, another idea to increase user engagement would be to create a competition where customers could design a new logo for you, They would then submit their designs and you would pick a winner. Whichever logo won would then go on your ecommerce software and be applied to your site and as an added incentive for people to enter, you may decide to give away some products from your store as a prize. 

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Amazon announce UK sales figures...and they may surprise a few

Recently, online marketplace giants Amazon have been making a number of headlines here in the UK, along with other global brands such as Starbucks and Google, after a number of questions by the British Members of Parliament regarding the amount they have been paying as their UK tax.

According to written evidence published on the Parliament website, Amazon have released sales figures for the last three years, including the amount they in UK VAT. In 2009, 2010 and 2011, Amazon had net sales in the UK of £1.65 billion, £2.36 billion and £2.91 billion respectively. This resulted in them paying £172 million, £262 million and £416 million in VAT. 

While this is a significant amount in terms of generated revenue, to many people, this is much less than they were expecting. With a number of large brand retailers in the UK doing well in excess of £8 billion in sales last year, it puts into perspective that the success of Amazon isn't as great as many people have previously thought.

As there seems to be a constant battle for supremacy between Amazon and eBay for online marketplace success, with Amazon's yearly sales much lower than many expected, it begs the question is eBay equally as over hyped as Amazon seems to be? or is eBay in fact head and shoulders above the rest in terms of generating sales through their online marketplace? 

We shall just have to wait and see...

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Friday, 23 November 2012

Plenty on offer for you from eBay this weekend

eBay are running a promotion this weekend offering free listings to private sellers in an attempt to increase the number of products on the marketplace in the run up to Christmas. 

Private sellers will be able to place 100 auction style listings with a starting price of £1 or more for free. However, any feature fees will still apply. The promotion is only available on the eBay.co.uk website and in order to take part, you must have a registered address in the UK. 

Also, those who use various listing tools will be excluded from the promotion, as will those products listed in the "Cars, Motorcycles & Vehicles" category. 

The free private listing promotion gets under way on Saturday 24th November at 00:00:01am and will last until Sunday 25th November at 23:59:59pm.

The promotion is a great way for users who have never used eBay to give the platform a try by listing a few items which then may encourage them to possible open up an eBay store in the future. 

Sunday Spectacular

Don't forget to take part in another Sunday spectacular from eBay this weekend, that will see up to 75% off a variety of products. The sale has been running the last few Sundays and has proved to be a great success up to this point, with millions of people getting involved. 

The sale kicks of at 8am sharp.

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Facebook putting user phone numbers to use

To personalise your social media page, Facebook have allowed you to add personal details to your profile page, such as your telephone number. These numbers are now being offered to advertisers on Facebook through their phone number retargeting initiative. 

The new advertising feature allows business, both local and global, to target someone linked to their business through a phone number via their Facebook account. To put it simply, say you have signed up for a credit card, entering all your personal details including your phone number, but then decided 6 months later you didn't want it and had the credit card cancelled. The credit card company would look into their database of everyone who signed up with them in the past, but are no longer with them any more, cross reference the phone numbers in their records with those linked to various Facebook accounts and begin placing ads on the news feeds of those individuals, advertising new credit cards or services they provide.

These advertisers can also choose to have the ad tracked, allowing them to see how successful their ads have been in getting users to convert. However, it will come as a relief of many to know that the advertisers don't actually get to see your number, they just use them for the purposes of retargeting. When a business, such as a ecommerce store, undertakes this service, the phone numbers used will be replaced with random characters by the system, making the user whose phone number it is anonymous.

If you are someone who doesn't like the idea of having a business target you with advertisements through your phone details, you should remove any records of your phone number that you have on your profile or any other pages on Facebook.

Facebook have made a rather big play towards providing a number of advertising options for businesses in recent months in order to generate some much needed revenue to improve a share price. While the share price is up to 24.32 from 21.21 at the beginning of the month, it's some way off the lofty 38.23 which the share had back in May.


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Thursday, 22 November 2012

Google+ to transform online sales

When a customer decides that they wish to purchase a product from an ecommerce store, they have first considered a number of different variables that include price, images, the stores brand image and of course customer reviews. On top of most other variables, customer reviews play a pivotal role in deciding for a customer whether they are going to purchase or not. 

Google's social media platform "Google+" is now providing customers with information that is valuable to each specific user through the ability to show that Google+ user any reviews on a product that has been left by any of their friends. The idea is that 1 review off a friend is going to be much more valuable to a user than 100 reviews from random people. 

To see a review left by a friend, you don't have to be on the product. By selecting the "Local" tab on a friend's Google+ profile, you can see all of the reviews they have left. This makes the system a great idea for online sellers as it exposes users to products in your store without them having to actually visit your site.  The feature also allows you to leave reviews yourself to aid your friends in any future purchases they may be looking to make. 

However, it isn't just online stores where this feature is being used, you can leave reviews for restaurants, hotels and any other service as well as providing your own pictures. 

Since it's launch, Google+ has been finding it difficult to compete with other social media platforms and it is thought this new shopping feature could help increase it's standing with many users, particularly those who have a passion for online shopping. 

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Wednesday, 21 November 2012

Is Facebook advertising just one big scam?

Facebook's recent movement towards paid promotion seemed like a great tool for an ecommerce store to help increase their public brand image, allowing them to engage with more users through their Facebook page. However, while on paper is looks like a good idea, in reality is it causing more harm than good?

Due to these paid advertisement options, Facebook have limited the true reach that your posts will achieve. When you send out a status update regarding your business such as the latest products you have, offers you are running or any questions you are putting to your customers, you would expect that everyone who is following you would be able to see the post. The truth is that only around 40% of your total followers will be able to see it. 

So, why would they do this?

 Well the answer is simple really. The less people your posts reach, the less engagement you are going to get and the more it will make you think that your Facebook posts aren't working and something needs to change. The theory is that this would then result in you using some of Facebook's paid promotion channels to increase the number of followers and engagement your business page is achieving. 

It also means that a user's news feed has a set percentage of sponsored posts visible, rather than the news feed being taken up by nearly all organic posts, strengthening Facebook's stance that promoted posts genuinely do work. 

What's the solution?

In order for you to get the maximum possible reach on your posts, meaning that everyone who follows you will be able to see what you post, you need to get your followers to click on "Like" button and then select "Add to Interests List." This will ensure that all of your followers are able to see everything that you post in the future. 

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Two new features to help boost eBay sales

eBay this week announced two new features that they believe will help boost the sales of those running an eBay store; Item Condition Notes and Multi Variation Merger application.

The Item Condition Notes feature allows you to place important information regarding a product at the top of the listing page. In the past many online sellers have had buyers complain that the item they purchased was not as described, simply due to the fact that the buyer hadn't read the item description properly and had overlooked key aspects.

The new notes feature eliminates this problem by ensuring that a customer is able to see all of the key information regarding the product right at the top of the listing, ensuring they have all the facts before deciding  whether to make the purchase. This will help not only increase the number of sales a store achieves by keeping the buyer more informed, it will also most likely result in the number of returns decreasing.

The second new feature from eBay, the Multi Variation Merger tool, allows sellers to create multiple variation listings based on a single listing and what's more, it's all for a single listing fee. While this has already been seen on a number of different categories across eBay, it has only recently been added to the category where it will be most important; fashion. 

Not only will this feature allow you to achieve more sales, it will also allow you to reduce your costs as you can combine, size, colour and any other variations on a product into one listing, rather than having to create separate listings for each variation.

Sellers will also be able to use the tool to keep the Best Match score that you have with individual listings while also allows you to achieve increased visibility for some of the listings you have that haven't performed as well in the past. 

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How to achieve success on Black Friday and beyond

With only two days until the start of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, traditionally the beginning of the Christmas shopping season in the US the day after Thanks Giving, many stores are looking ahead to the anticipated day as they look to achieve a high number of sales and in turn, plenty of profit. According to figures published by software developers Adobe, Cyber Monday alone will bring in around $2 billion to both bricks and mortar and online stores.

However, with these stores all vying for a customer's business, how can you improve your ecommerce store to ensure you give yourself the best chance of achieving success?


Be up early

As you run an online store, it's going to be open 24/7 so you don't need to worry about customers being unable to buy. However, need to plan for it being as busy as possible, which means you need to get up as early as possible. A busy day means plenty of traffic, plenty of questions and of course plenty of sales. You don't want to wake up late and be facing a backlog of orders and queries, this will diminish your overall customer service and make the day extremely difficult for you.

Monitor your competitors

While it's impossible to monitor everyone, you should pay close attention to those stores that you consider your closest rivals. Look at the products they have on offer and any promotions they may be running for this special occasion. If you don't pay attention and your competitor changes their prices lower than yours. it is going to result in you getting fewer sales than you expected as your customers go to your rivals for their purchases.

Advertise everywhere

Although it may be difficult to launch a full on marketing campaign now with only two days to go, you should still look to publicise your products, offers and anything else to do with your store everywhere you can. This means placing information on your social media pages, forums, through emails pretty much anywhere and everywhere you can think of. Advertising your store is going to not only result in a great brand awareness, but once Friday roll around you will begin to see an increase in traffic. 

Offer free shipping

You will be surprised the difference free shipping can make in enticing a customer to purchase from your store. Not only does it encourage them to visit your ecommerce or eBay store and make that initial purchase, the fact that shipping is free often tempts them into making multiple purchases. Yes you may be losing a small amount of your usual profit as you will have to pay for the shipping, but if the promotion results in many more orders, you 

Create a landing page

Whether you are running a promotion for Black Friday, Cyber Monday or for Christmas, creating a seasonal based landing page can play a pivotal role in drawing traffic to your site. Its appealing design, when combined with information regarding any products or services you offer will enforce a positive brand image within the customer and make them more likely to visit your store in order to make a purchase. Just remember to remove the landing page once the seasonal event has ended.

Optimise your site for mobile

On Black Friday, around 25 percent of all sales will be make through mobile devices, meaning if your business doesn't have a mobile store that is fully optimised, you are going to be missing out on a significant amount of sales. Read our guide "How to make your mobile store a success" for an in depth look on how you can develop your mobile ecommerce platform.

While this article may be geared towards Black Friday in the states, there is nothing to stop you from employing these techniques on your own ecommerce store no matter where you may be in the world, in order to give you the best chance of achieving success this Christmas.

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Tuesday, 20 November 2012

How to reduce your bounce rate in time for Christmas

You may sell the greatest products in the world at the most affordable prices, but the sad truth is customers visiting your site don't even get as far as looking specifically at a product, they simply land on the home page and then bounce straight back to their search results.

Depending on what your website is, whether it's a blog, ecommerce store or any other type of site, your average bounce rate is going to be considerably different. It is thought that a good bounce rate for a website is between 40-60%, any higher than that and you need to seriously begin to look at your website as a whole.


While this can't be attributed to one specific reason, there are a number of factors that make up a high bounce rate and a number of things you can do to solve these issues. 

Customer navigation

One of the main causes of a high bounce rate is customers just simply not knowing where to go from your home page in order to find what they are looking for, often resulting in them giving up altogether and leaving the site. Your website should be clearly laid out with categories and headings, to help lead a user to where they wish to go. 

If you run an ecommerce store, sometimes having too many products on a page makes your site seem cluttered, resulting in a customer finding it difficult to locate the specific product they are looking for. To solve this you could try segmenting your products into specific categories, making it easier for customers to find the product they wish to purchase or possibly including less products on a page. However, you need to always bear in mind that a customer needs to be able to make a purchase from your site in either 3 or 4 clicks from when they landed on your home page. While segmenting your products into categories is important, you do not want to put them into a whole host of sub categories as a customer will soon get frustrated if they have to click sub-category after sub-category to find the product they want. 

Look at your website's design

If a number of users are landing on your page and then bouncing straight back, it could just be a case of them finding your website unattractive. If you have a high bounce rate of around 70-75%, you may want to look at  giving your website a complete overhaul in order to give it a new lease of life and lower that all important bounce rate. When deciding on a new design for your website, you need to make sure you always take into account your overall brand image. Changing your colour scheme will have a large effect on how customers relate that website to your brand. If you don't wish to reinvent your brand image, you need to make sure that your new website still employs the same colour scheme but just simply varies in it's design. 

If you are looking for an affordable and professional website design, be sure to get in touch with us at eSellution as we can create a bespoke website, tailored to your own personal requirements for only £500 + VAT. Get in touch with us today at Sales@ecommercesoftwareltd.com to get yours as it really is a great way to boost your site ready for the Christmas rush. 

Check your SEO keywords

It may just be the case that you have a few keywords either in your page title or the page itself that don't really relate to what it is that your website provides. These keywords are then causing users who have no interest in your site to land on the page after searching for that specific keyword. Due to them not having an interest in your site, they are going to simply bounce back to their search results page. While you may not think that one wrong keyword can cause too many problems, you should look at your keywords just to make sure they aren't the cause of an unwanted high bounce rate. 

Offer an incentive

Try offering something that encourages users to click through to another page on your site. If you run an ecommerce store, this could involve having a banner ad on your home page advertising the latest products or a specific promotion that you have on offer. When the user then clicks on this banner, they are then taken to the page that contains the products advertised. While they may still not choose to buy, having them go through to another page on your site ensures that your bounce rate will begin to slowly creep down. 

Note the time of year

Some times of the year you simply always have a high bounce rate than you do at others. For example, while you may have a higher number of sales over Christmas than you do at any other time of the year, this is most likely down to people are frantically visiting various sites in order to find the best deals on presents for their friends and family, many people are going to jump on and off a number of sites as they compare products and prices. This is nearly always going to result in an inevitable higher bounce rate than what you would normally get. To see if it does have anything to do with your site itself, you need to monitor your bounce rate over a longer period. If you still have the same high bounce rate well into the new year, you then need to look at other areas of your site to try and remedy the problem. 

If you have never looked at your bounce rate, either check the tools within your ecommerce software to monitor traffic and sales or use a free monitoring tool such as Google Analytics. 

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Monday, 19 November 2012

It's going to be a mobile Christmas

According to figures published by online marketplace giants eBay, it looks like running around shopping centres on Christmas Eve looking for those last minute Xmas presents are soon to be a thing of the past as they expect eBay mobile transactions to exceed £10 billion for the year after a 200 percent year on year increase in Q3. 

However, this increase in purchases through mobile devices isn't purely through smartphones, eBay's applications can be used to various phone and tablet devices, opening up a whole new number of ways for buyers to easily complete their transactions on an eBay store. With more advanced tablets and smartphones, such as the iPhone 5, released on a regular basis, buyers making their purchases through these devices is going to increase more and more as the years go on until we get to the point where is makes up the vast majority of all sales.  

From the perspective of an ecommerce store, this underlines the necessity for a store to have a fully optimised mobile store, enabling you to take advantage of some of the customers venturing into mobile commerce, with over 2.5 million people shopping on a mobile store for the first time on eBay alone. 

Checkout our post "How to make your mobile store a success" to see how you can improve your mobile store and if you don't yet have a mobile store, sign up with us for free and get one now.

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Friday, 16 November 2012

How to improve your business with inbound marketing

When running an ecommerce store, getting customers to become aware of your store is the hardest part. Many people, when they set up an ecommerce store, think they can just set it up and leave it there for people to visit without them having to do anything. Sadly, this is far from the truth.

We at eSellution tell our customers that having an ecommerce store is like having a bricks and mortar store that is miles away from the high street, down a small darkened street that no one ever goes down. If no one knows your store is there, no one is going to visit. One of the ways to increase public knowledge of your store is through inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing allows you to not only increase traffic, but also turn these initial visitors into strong sales leads. Depending on the size of your business there are a number of different things you can do to help improve traffic to your store.

Search Engine Optimisation

The bread and butter of all websites and something which is a must if you are to achieve the levels of traffic that you will need in order to be successful. However, depending on your budget, there are varying levels of SEO that you can undertake. If you don't have much to spend on SEO, the basics you can look to cover are to make sure your products and your pages are all optimised to provide the best search engine results. This includes:

  • Ensure all of your titles have keywords included that a user will search for. Generally you want your keywords to be within the first few words of the product title as these are what a user will search for. The closer your product title matches a users search engine query, the higher up the search results your product is going to be ranked and the more traffic your website will achieve.
  • Place meta tags on your products and your categories. Just like optimising your product titles, you need to place all of the meta keywords and phrases that are to do with your business and the individual products you have on sale. This should be very straightforward to do no matter what ecommerce software you are using. When selecting keywords, you want to choose words and phrases that has had the most search engine queries in the last month. You can find this out either by using a keyword tool such as the free one provided by Google or simply by typing a keyword into the search engine search bar and looking at the related search phrases that are popular with users.
  • Place keywords related to your business through your page content and in your page titles. When Google crawls across various websites, they pick up keywords in order to relate those keywords to a particular search engine query. For example, if you sell womens clothes, you should have keywords such as womens clothing, womens dresses, etc. That way, when a user enters one of these keywords or phrases into a search engine, your page will be shown as a result.
Even after you have made all of these changes to your site you need to be patient. In order for your pages to be ranked by a search engine such as Google, you need to have those pages crawled by search engine spiders in order to pick up all of the keywords and phrases to do with your site and then have them indexed within the search engine. It usually takes between 4 and 6 weeks before you begin seeing results in search engine queries. 

Blog

Following on from carrying out SEO for your business, a blog is a great tool for not only increasing your search engine ranking through backlinks, but also drawing in an audience and then converting them into customers. When creating content for your blog, you should look to write about anything to do your ecommerce store. Users will then visit your article in order to read about that particular subject. You can then place links on the page giving these readers information about how they can access some of the products you have on sale. While not all of these users will visit your online store, you will get a few who will take a look at the products you have on sale.

In terms of backlinks within your articles, you should place hyperlinks on keywords in your article to pages on your site that relate to that particular page. For example, if you wrong womens dress in your article, you may create a backlink from those keywords to the page on your store that has the womens dresses you have on sale. 

Social Media

As we have stated in the past, social media is the best tool to allow you to regularly engage with your customers and other followers. To ensure you help them create an active interest in your business which results in them visiting your store and possibly making a purchase you need to:

  • Post content on a regular basis including links to your ecommerce store
  • Answer any questions your followers may have
  • Post images of various products you have for sale
  • Tell your followers about any promotions you are running
  • Make each of the users you engage with feel valued, building up that initial relationship that will hopefully develop into them becoming a customer.

Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click is a marketing tool that some businesses use to help drive traffic to your store and increase your overall conversion rate. It works by having adverts about your business appearing on search engine queries to do with specific keywords that are related to your business. In order to have your advert appear, you must bid on these keywords, the higher you bid, the higher up the search results page your advert will appear. If a user is interested in your advert, they can then click on it and be taken directly to your site. Based on the price you have bid, you will then pay Google or whatever provider you are using for the cost of the click. You can also set a limit for how much you want to spend each day. For example, you may only want to spend a total of £10 a day with a cost per click on 50p. Once your ad has achieved 20 clicks for the day, the advert will be disabled from the search engine until the next day The benefit of this is that you know the people who are adverts are appearing to will have an interest in the products you have on offer as they have searched for keywords related to it. 


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http://esellution.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/ebay-revamp-top-seller-status.html
http://esellution.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/ebays-much-anticipated-international.html


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Wednesday, 14 November 2012

From eBay with love

If you missed out on eBay's Sunday Spectacular last weekend don't worry, judging from information on eBay's site it looks like they will be running another one this weekend. 

The sale event will begin on Sunday 18th November at 8am and will last for the entire day. The offer boasts up to 75% off RRP, but is only limited to one purchase per deal. 

Last Sunday's sale saw a surge in sales across the marketplace with all of the products within the promotion, such as iPads, iPhones and other equipment selling out quickly. 

For an eBay store not part of the promotion but sells similar products to those within eBay's Sunday Spectacular, if you were planning on running an early Christmas promotion this weekend you may want to leave it until another time as you may find it difficult to compete with some of the prices that will be on offer for buyers this weekend. 

For all buyers it's a case of set your alarm clocks for early Sunday morning to make sure that you take advantage of all these promotions before they quickly run out.

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Recent Posts

http://esellution.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/how-to-measure-social-media-success.html
http://esellution.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/ebay-revamp-top-seller-status.html
http://esellution.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/ebays-much-anticipated-international.html
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How to measure social media success

Every business, whether big or small, has their own social media pages in order to increase their brand image, engage with customers and promote various goods and services that they have on offer. While everyone is doing it, how do we measure if you are doing it right?

Well, the obvious way to check how successful your social media page is would be to look at the number of total followers you have on your various accounts. The more followers you have, the more successful you are. However, you can then break that down into a number of different areas. For example, if the total number of followers gained over the last few months is less than you have seen in previous months, it is possible that you are now doing something that you weren't a few months ago which is limiting the number of followers you are gaining. 

Another way to see how effective your social media presence has been is through the number of users who have actively engaged with you. While you may have a large number of followers, having users engage with you by posting things, sending you messages or commenting on things that you post is a great way to see that not only are they interested in your ecommerce store, but are also engaged by the various content you post. 

If you primarily use Facebook as your social media platform, you can use the built in analytics system to monitor various statistical data regarding your business page. This information looks at who is following you and their demographical information such as age, location and gender as well as looking at how many people are talking about you and how many of people were exposed to your content. 

To find out what people across various social media channels are saying about your business ,whether they follow you or not, you can use websites such as Social Mention and carry out a global search. You simply enter a keyword phase such as the name of your business and the page will scour the web and bring back all posts that mention these words. This will allow you to gauge public opinion regarding your business and also allows you to see users who you could potentially engage with to encourage them to follow you. 

Klout is another great way to measure your overall social media success. Based on your engagement, reach and amplification regarding your social media posts, your account is given a Klout score of 0 to 100. The higher your score, the more social media success you are achieving. Klout links your various accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Blogger and many others to give you one combined score. While many people doubt the relevance of Klout in determining your true social media power, it is a great way to get an overall idea of how successful you are on some platforms and which others you may need to improve.

If all else fails you can't go wrong with using Google Analytics. The free platform from Google allows you to monitor a range of webpage information and while many primarily use it in combination with their ecommerce software to see data regarding their online store, you can set it up to also record all of the information to do with your social media pages. 

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Tuesday, 13 November 2012

eBay revamp Top Seller status

eBay have released a brand new badge for some of it's top rated sellers that meet a specific set of requirements. 

The badge will begin appearing on eBay store owners who have not only have the usual top rated seller requirements, but also offer no more than a 1 day handling time and a money-back returns policy of at least 14 days. 

If you are an eBay seller who is currently a top rated seller, you need to update both your policies and your overall purchasing system to ensure that you now reach these new requirements. If you are someone is the sole worker for their business, reducing handling time can often be difficult due to the influx of orders you receive  especially over the Christmas period. To try and give yourself the best chance of achieving as low a handling time as you possibly can, ensure you have the basics covered. 

These basics include:

  • Having your packaging system all set up and ready
  • Drafting in help if orders get too much
  • Make sure you have enough stock to cover all orders
  • Get the products to the couriers in time for one-business day handling

Achieving the top seller ranking will not only make your profile look nicer with a bright new crest on your eBay templates, but it will also instil confidence in your customers, increasing the chances of them not only visiting your store, but making a purchase.

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