Showing posts with label ecommerce. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ecommerce. Show all posts

Monday, 8 October 2012

What 4G means for your ecommerce store

With cities up and down the country rolling out new 4G capabilities within the next few months, what will this  new high-speed data service mean for your online store?

4G will allow mobile devices to have download capabilities up to 100 megabytes per second, that's more than double the speed on current 3G mobile devices. This means that in terms of your ecommerce store, mobile commerce has never been more important. This significantly increased download speed will mean that your online store will load on smartphones much quicker, resulting in customers being able to carry out their shopping experience faster than ever. Not only will this make customers happier, it will also result in you being able to take more orders over a shorter period of time.

However, looking at 4G as simply a way of allowing your current ecommerce store to load quicker on mobile devices is limiting it's true capabilities. Rather than looking at what it can do for your current mobile store, you should be looking at how it can help you have a more advanced mobile store. Currently, a number of mobile stores are limited on the amount of data they can have. The bigger your store in terms of data, the longer it is going to take to load on a mobile device. 

This drastically increased speed that 4G provides means that a mobile store on a 4G network can hold much more data and still load quicker than your current 3G store. For this reason, you should be looking at what you can do to in terms of making your store more appealing to your customers visiting through mobile devices. This could consist of having more detailed designs in terms of layout and buttons, having more images to entice customers to purchase your items, insert videos or having a complete overhaul, creating a new, more efficient mobile store from scratch. 

Another benefit comes in not only the ability for a customer to view your store's pages quicker, but also find your store quicker through other methods. If a customer is using a mobile app to find the cheapest price for a product they are looking for, they will either use the app itself or the search engine capability on their smartphone to trawl through a number of different ecommerce stores looking for the best deal. On the current 3G data service, due to some sites loading slower than others, a customer may grow tired of the process after searching through four or five different online stores. What this means is that if your store is low down in terms of search engine ranking, the likelihood is that they won't come across your site. Increased speed through 4G capabilities means customers will be able to go through more online stores at a quicker rate, greatly increasing the chances of a customer actually coming across your ecommerce store during their search.

However, even with the 4G data service, if your store is on say page 10 of Google, no matter how quickly a page loads, a customer just isn't going to spend the time searching through all the preceding pages until they come across yours. For this reason, you need to look at your store's SEO as well as your mobile store capabilities. For help on improving your online store's search engine ranking, check out: 'New businesses guide to SEO success' 

If you have yet to set up your own mobile store or are looking to upgrade your current model, you can sign up with eSellution and get a free mobile store in time for the 4G boom. 

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Wednesday, 3 October 2012

Selecting the right keywords to make your business a success

Making your website search engine friendly is key in helping lift your ecommerce store up the search engine rankings, allowing you to increase your brand image, drive more traffic to your site and increase the number of sales you can achieve.

If you have only recently started running an online store or are unsure as to how SEO words, selecting the right meta tags and keywords for your pages and products can often be a difficult task. Inserting the wrong word or even the wrong letter can make the difference between having a keyword that gets thousands of monthly searches and a word that gets very few.

See how the keywords perform locally and globally
In order to see which keywords are more popular than others in search engines, both locally and globally, you can use a number of different keyword tools. If you are a small business and do not have much money to put towards your store's SEO, you can use Google's free keyword tool. This tool allows you to enter various keywords or phrases and then will show you how many people have searched for that phrase on Google in the last month. The tool also gives you a list of similar key phrases which you may want to use. This allows you to look through a list of key phrases that relate to what it is your business provides and select the most popular keywords for each. 

This tool shouldn't just be used for the keywords for each of your webpages, you should look to use it for every single one of the products your store has no sale. Having popular meta information for each of your products allows people to come across your products through search engine queries, rather than coming across a page and then stumbling across your product on that page. Furthermore, if you have no yet decided on a domain name for your business, you can also use a keyword tool to help choose the right one. This allows you to include the most popular keywords within your domain name, enabling you to have your site start off as high up the rankings as possible, while also allowing you to increase the number of people who will come across your site. However, when selecting keywords for your domain address, you must always bear in mind that it should make sense and be something a user would search for. There's no point having a bunch of popular keywords as your domain name when it all likelihood a user wouldn't enter all of these keywords into a search engine. 

After you have entered the keywords for all the different aspects of your online store, the worst thing you can  do is just leave it at that. Like all aspects of public interest, most things come and go out of fashion, meaning one month your key phrase may be highly searchable, but the next month it may have very few searches. Atleast once a month you should look at all your keywords to see how they are performing in both local and global searches. If you find that some keywords are going down and there are other you didn't use that are on the rise, you may want to think about switching out your falling keywords for the ones that are on the up.

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Tuesday, 2 October 2012

Time management for your small business

If you run your own online store and are the sole employee, you may not have all the time you need to efficiently run your business as you may have other commitments such as a full time job.

As you have so much to do in order to make your ecommerce store a success each and every day, how can you manage your time effectively to ensue you make the most out of every second.

Plan out a schedule

Everyday you should have a clear schedule of what needs doing on that particular day. In addition to planning everything out, you should also prioritise which are the more important tasks. For example, you may have a backlog of orders that need to be completed that are a much higher priority than say writing the latest article for your blog. Having a schedule allows you to have a clear direction regarding what needs to be done each day. If you are unorganised then your business will be the same and you will limit the success your business can achieve.

Stick to it

Creating a schedule is one thing, but actually sticking to it is another thing altogether. This is where your own self discipline must comes in to play. Your self discipline will reflect how much you want your business to be a success. If you badly want your business to a success, you will put as much time into it as you need to in order to make this happen. The best way to stick to a schedule is simply through repetition  Once you have created a daily system for your online business that works well, it becomes easier to stick to that system because you are used to it. 

Work weekends

No one likes to do it but sometimes if there just isn't enough time during the week you have no option but to work on a weekend and obviously when running an ecommerce store, weekends are when you are going to carry out a large number of your transactions. However, if you do have a quiet weekend with very few transactions, there is no harm is carrying out some of the minor tasks that you would usually do during the week. These are tasks such handling all of your correspondences that won't take up all of your weekend but allow you free up a few hours during the week. 

Organisation Tools

While these won't complete any of the tasks for you, you can use organisation tools to help sync up the various processes for your business, allowing you to keep everything you do organised and structured making the tasks easier to complete. If you have a smartphone another option would be to sync up all of the emails, social media and other correspondence for your store on to your phone so that when you have a few minutes free at work or are on your lunch break you can quickly answer them all, keeping your customers happy and freeing up time for you to spend on other areas when you do get home.

Get some help

Although you may want to keep your total costs down to the minimum, sometimes your workload is just too much that it begins to affect the overall running of your business and you have no option but to hire someone to help carry the load. However, you don't have to hire them on a full time basis. Depending on how badly you are struggling with the workload, you may find that you only need some help a few hours each week to help complete orders or carry out other tasks.








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Friday, 28 September 2012

Looking at a new way to sell online

When setting up an online store, many users go through the same channels of selling on eBay or having their own ecommerce store. However, due to recent funding from seed fund accelerator, 500 Startups, Shopinterest looking to be a newly growing platform for users to sell their products online. 

Shopinterest allows users to create their own ecommerce store out of any Pinterest board they may have. For example, you simply need to add all of the images of products you have for sale on to one Pinterest board and you would then be able to transform that board into an ecommerce shop that has a fully functional shopping cart. Even if you don't have a Pinterest board, you can add the product images to your account and turn them into a store.

The service underpins the ever-growing trend of social commerce and while it is currently only available to residents in the US, Shopinterest are expected to make it available to other countries within the coming weeks. However, you need to be aware that this is not a free service. Once a user signs up they are then able to take part in a trial, but once the trial is over users will be required to pay for the service. The amount you have to pay will depend on the number of sales you make and products you have in your inventory.

While this seems to be a step forward in terms of developing social commerce to a new level, the fact that users have to pay for the service in a similar way that they would do on other marketplaces like eBay, may be a draw back for a number of online sellers. If a user already has an eBay store, they are going to be reluctant to pay a whole new set of fees to a different platform in order to have their products display on that site also. Furthermore, many users pay eBay's fees because they know the site has dedicated customers as well as a high volume of traffic and sales, so they know they will be getting value for money. Shopinterest is a rather new ecommerce platform and some users may be reluctant to commit to the platform until they are able to see a real growth in traffic and sales within the site.

As I touched on yesterday, developing new channels to sell online is always the right way to go for your business. However, which platforms you choose to move on to is entirely dependant on the products you sell, your customer base and how comfortable you yourself are with using that platform. While Shopinterest could prove to be very successful in helping to enhance a store's sales through social commerce, if you are reluctant to pay for an unproven service, you may look to take advantage of a number of free ecommerce shopping cart platforms that are available to day. Such as the free multichannel platform we offer here at eSellution, integrating an ecommerce, Facebook and mobile store with an eBay store you may already have.  

Get your free ecommerce store now: http://www.esellution.co.uk/pricing.html

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Tuesday, 25 September 2012

eBay selective in latest promotion offering

eBay are continuing their current rise in promotions by offering some users the chance to have free listings on all fixed price items for a 5 day period. However, the promotion is only available to those who have received an invitation from eBay.

This news has disgruntled some eBay store owners as they believe that this promotion is only being sent out to sellers who have little or no feedback. This has resulted in a lot of sellers creating second eBay accounts in an attempt to try and receive an invitation for the promotion. 

However, there are two sides to the argument that are both valid. If the promotion is indeed sent out to only those with no or low feedback (which has not been proven one way or another) then it could be a great way to help people essentially get their online selling presence off the ground and possibly progress into having an online store. Having these users take a more active role within the eBay marketplace makes it better for not only the customers, who will have more choice in terms of where to shop and what to buy, but it will also help generate more traffic to the site which will be a boost for all stores.

On the other end of the spectrum, if the promotion is only aimed at low feedback users, many feel it deprives the more active users on the site from really making use of the free listings, leaving them to simply not be touched in accounts that people probably don't even use anymore. No matter what side of the fence you lie on in the argument, both views can be seen as valid. 

The promotion began yesterday and will run until Friday with users paying no listing fees on up to 5000 listings placed on ebay.com. If you are unsure whether you have been invited to take part in this promotion, check your messages within the "My eBay" section to see if you have received an invitation. 

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Monday, 24 September 2012

eBay release new selling feature

eBay have seemingly improved the ability for eBay stores to sell Internationally through the release of their International postage rate tables. 

As we explained a few weeks ago, the International postage tables allow you to customise which countries you want to ship your products to by specifically selecting as many or as few countries as you like, with over 200 countries to choose from.

The feature also allows you to provide added shipping information to your customers regarding each order such as postage costs, weight-based costs and any surcharges that they may be required to pay. This allows any customers visiting your store, to make a more informed decision as whether to purchase an item from you. 

If you have never sold Internationally, there has never been a better time for you to give it a go. However, before deciding whether to undertake in International selling, you should full research that it will definitely be a profitable endeavour, meaning you have determined that there is not only a high demand for the products your online store sells, but also that the market is not over crowded with a number of other stores also selling the same products. 

If you do currently run a domestic eBay store, but would like start selling Internationally, you can do this in a few simple steps: 

  • Go to "My eBay" and then select "Account" and then "Site Preferences." 
  • Locate the postage and pricing preferences and then select the "Show" option. This will bring up the postage rate tables section.
  • Next to the "Use postage tables" option, select "Edit." 
  • Change the domestic and International postage rates that you would like to offer to your customers. Only enter the postage information in a specific country if you want to have that country as a destination to ship to. 
  • Once you have made all the changes to your postage rates, click on the "Apply" button to save the changes.

When you list a product on your eBay store, it will now add these International postage options.

However, eBay have warned customers that if they use a third party tool, you should check with your provider to ensure that this new postage rates table will working correctly within their tool. 

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Thursday, 20 September 2012

There has never been a better time for your business to use Pinterest

There has never been a better time for small businesses to take advantage of Pinterest as, according to research carried out by Shareaholic, Pinterest has recently moved ahead of Yahoo as the 4th biggest source of traffic on the Internet. Since May, the site has doubled in size with more users than ever taking advantage of the platform.

If you are a run an ecommerce store, you should be looking to take advantage of Pinterest in order to create an extra marketing stream to promote your products to users. If you have never used Pinterest or are unsure what it is, essentially Pinterest is a virtual pinboard for images. When a user visits the site they can click on the search bar and enter a keyword related to images they would like to search for. They will then be shown a list of images that relate to the search parameters. The user then has the option to click on an image to view it in greater detail, comment on the image, like it or repin it. 

How can this help my business?


When selling through an online store, the more places you can display your products, the more chance you are going to have of making a sale. Pinterest allows you to add all of your product images to their system, meaning that if a user searches for something that is related to one of your products (e.g. women's shoes) the image of your product will be placed within these search results. If a user clicks on your product image, they can then see your profile as you are the one who originally "Pinned" it to the site. When the user lands on your profile, they are able to not only see all of the other images you have added to Pinterest, but they can also click on one of the external links to visit your store or view other social media accounts. 

Even if the user looks at your product but doesn't visit your online store, they may decide to "repin" the image meaning it then appears on their own Pinterest board for a whole new set of people to see. You can see the snowball effect happening here as more and more people will see your product and become aware of your overall brand, increasing the traffic your store is going to generate. 

How to get started?


Using Pinterest is pretty straightforward, what you first need to do is visit the Pinterest website and create a new account for free. Once the account has been created, you will then need to click on "Add" at the top of the page and select the image on your computer that you would like to place on the site. If a number of your products fall under one category, such as a specific product range, you could look to create a new board to place them all on. With over 10 million registered users on the site, it is a great opportunity to establish an extra marketing channel for your products, increasing the traffic and sales you will generate. 

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How to get your local business to the top of Google

All businesses, whether they are a large corporate brand or a small online store, spend a substantial amount each year on trying to get their business to the top of the rankings through search engine optimisation.  

No matter what type of business you run, due to the substantial amount of ecommerce stores that are all selling the same products, it is going to be difficult to get your business at the top of a search engine using any keywords.

However, if you are an online business with a local address, you can look to increase the sales your business can achieve locally simply through your geographical location. When someone is looking for a particular product or service within their local area, they will look for services in their area using a search engine. For example, if someone is looking for car repairs and live in Preston, they will type "Car repair in Preston." The search engine will then crawl through the webpages and bring back all the sites that fit this search query.

As the user has searched for services within a specific geographical location, the search engine will also bring up a list of businesses related to the search through the maps feature on the first few search results. When each business ranks within this feature is dependant on how close the a business's address is to the centre of that particular location. 

So if you are small business struggling to establish an online presence, you can look to take advantage of this feature by moving your business as close to the centre of your town or city as you can. That way when someone searches for the service you provide within your area, it will ensure that your business appears on the first page of the search engine results. This will result in not only an increase in online traffic, but also will probably result more walk in sales for your store. 

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Wednesday, 19 September 2012

International Selling - Where to sell? [Infographic]

If your online store has achieved reasonable levels of success selling domestically, you may decide that you want to try your hand at selling Internationally. However, if you do decide that you want to spread your wings and try to sell across foreign shores, do you try and sell anywhere and everywhere or do you focus on certain countries?

An infographic produced by marketing company, Search Laboratory, has taken a look at which countries currently spend the most when shopping online and which countries are set to grow in the next year. 

If you are looking to branch out and sell online, the two biggest ecommerce countries excluding the UK is the US and Japan, with £174 billion and £50 billion spent respectively. However, when deciding which countries to sell to Internationally, you shouldn't just focus on the biggest grossing countries. Where you sell depends entirely on what products you sell. Some products will do better than others in various countries. For example, if you sell cartoon animations and other graphics, you will probably find that Asia will be your most successful International market to sell to and it might not do as well in say France, even though France is one of the biggest ecommerce countries with £26 billion spent.

If you aren't looking to sell Internationally right now, but may look to do it in the near future, which country should your ecommerce store be looking to target for the future? While China currently only has around £11 billion spent on ecommerce shopping, it is expected that the number of Internet users in the country will grow by 140 million to 626 million. While all of these won't be selling products online, there will still be a rapid growth in the number of Chinese people purchasing items online that you can take advantage of with a projected increase in ecommerce spending of £3 billion. However, while China is projected to see the biggest growth in terms of Internet users, the projected biggest increase in ecommerce spending belongs to India, who will have an ecommerce spending growth of £4.7 billion by 2013. 

Although you may wish to begin selling Internationally, you shouldn't forget about the vast number of sales that can be made in the UK. While the US spends the most as a country, it is the UK that is ahead of everyone else in terms of the amount spent per person.


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Tuesday, 18 September 2012

Behavioral targeting and why your business needs it

With the vast number of online stores looking to draw customers to their website through cheap products and offers, exploring ways in which you can bring customers to your website is going to make the difference between your store is successful or not. One of the ways to encourage customers to return to your store in order to make a repeat purchase is through behavioral targeting.

There are a number of different types behavioral targeting available for a business which are based on keywords typed in to a search engine, content read by users and websites a person has visited. However, the most important part of behavioral targeting for a business is retargeting. 

How does it work?


When a customer visits your ecommerce store and begins browsing the products you have for sale, the information regarding which products they have looked at is then stored within the data for that particular browser. When this user visits different websites, this is where retargeting kicks in. Even if the website they are viewing has nothing to do with your business or the products you have for sale, your items will still appear within the banners of the site. This will then expose the customer to the products in your store that the user would be interested in. For example, if the customer visited your store and viewed a pair of shoes, the retargeting advertisement will show all other shoes in your store that are similar to the original pair they viewed. This then gives them the option to click on the advert and be taken directly to your website to make a purchase. 

Benefits of retargeting 


There are a number of different reasons why retargeting is an important tool for any business, big or small: 

  • It allows you to increase the reach that your business and products are having. Even if a customer makes a purchase from your store and then never returns or views another advertising promotion you run, they will still become aware of your products through retargeting. 
  • The real benefit for any small business is that it improves your advertising performance by reducing your waste and increasing your ROI. Unlike other advertising methods, retargeting ensures that the customers your adverts appear to will definitely have an interest in what you are selling as they have already previously viewed them. This means that you will have a greater chance of drawing them to your website and will result in a much higher conversion rate than you previously had.
  • Even if a customer decides that they don't wish to purchase an item from your store, the fact that your products have appeared in their browser through rebranding means that they have gained further exposure to your business and products, increasing your brand image.

When running a small business, it can often be difficult to stand out from the rest and draw in the customers you need to keep your business afloat. Retargeting can be an affordable way to not only help increase your brand awareness, but improve your conversion rate by bringing back customers who already have an interest in what you have to sell. 

However, don't just rely on retargeting as your only advertising method. While this is a great way to bring customers back to your store, you must first use other advertising techniques to draw them to your site for the first time. Read 'The complete small business guide to marketing' to find out about other marketing methods you can use to advertise your products to users.
Get your free ecommerce store now: http://www.esellution.co.uk/pricing.html
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How to follow in eBay's steps with a business revamp

In the wake of eBay's new logo revamp after 17 years, have you ever thought about giving your own online store a redesign in order to help increase sales or develop a new image? 

When selling online keeping up with your competitors in product pricing, service and layout in all important. If you have great products but a poor brand image, it simply doesn't matter how good your products are, people just won't visit your store. However, the image of your business isn't just the layout of your website; it's also the logo, advertisements, blogs, social media, pretty much anything that is available for the public to see. Whether you run an eBay store or another ecommerce store, refreshing your overall look can play a large part in helping give your business a new lease of life. So if you have decided that you think your business needs freshening up, where do you start?

Well before you make any drastic changes, you first need to look at how your business is currently performing. While you personally may have grown bored with how your website looks, if the site is effective in generating customers and achieving a high conversion rate, it may be a case where the effectiveness should outweigh your own personal taste. What I mean by this is that if it's not broke, don't fix it. The next factor you should consider is how drastic do you want your redesign to be and could it potentially alienate some of your current customers. Sometimes a business will look to have a complete overhaul by not just changing the website and logo, but also changing the name of the business. If you decide to do this, you need to make sure that your old customers are aware that your new business is essentially your old business, just with a different name. The last thing you want to do is lower the total number of sales your redesigned business will achieve as some of your old dedicated customers were unaware that your business is now under a new name.

The easiest way to solve this is to carry out two simple tasks:

  • Send out an email to your current customer list, informing them of your redesign. This means giving them all the information they will require such as the new name and URL of your ecommerce store so that they cna easily access it. You may also wish to offer them some sort of relaunch promotion to help further entice them to your store.
  • Use your old web domain as a landing page to your new site. While you have left your old address form a new home, you don't simply want to leave it with no ties at all. This will just result in customers visiting your old website, finding nothing there and being left with no place to go. Using the old web domain as a landing page ensures that even if a customer is unaware of your rebranding, they will still be able to access your new site when they visit your old one. 
Now while a complete rebranding is very much at the extreme end of the spectrum, you may decide that they are just one or two minor aspects of your business that you would like to freshen up.

Website Layout - Probably the best way to give your online store a new lease of life. This means changing the colour scheme, design and also the layout of your store, making it much mire inviting for your customers, but also easier for them to find the products they would like to purchase.
Introducing New Stock - If you find that your sales have declined in recent months, you may look to try and increase the number of customers who would be interested in your products by offering a completely new line of products for sale. However, when introducing a number of new products to your store, you need to make sure that they still have something to do with what you currently sell as it will just create a confused brand image. What I mean is that if you are a company that sells sporting goods, you don't want to add a new produce line selling gardening equipment.
New Logo Design - If you have had your new logo for a while, you may look to take a leaf out of eBay's book and create a new one. When deciding how to change your logo you may design to just give the current design a more modern look, or you simply may decide to create a new one from scratch. If you do decide to make a completely new logo, like I mentioned earlier in regard to a full rebranding, you need to make sure that your customers are still able to relate the new logo to your current business.
Blog - Very much one of the lesser forms of rebranding, but could allow you to drastically increase your search engine ranking. In terms of an overhaul for your blog, I don't really mean change the design layout, although this is one thing you can look to do. What I mean is that you may change both what your blog articles are written about and how many people contribute to them. Broadening your blog subject, when combined with a number of additional or guest bloggers, gives you the ability to broaden your audience base, enabling you to produce more content over a set period, increasing your readership as a result.
Social Media - While you cannot redesign the look of your social media accounts as you are working within the set boundaries of that social media channel, you can look to reinvigorate your social media accounts by changing your overall strategy. If your number of followers or overall engagement is lower than you would have liked, you should look to change how often you post content, what content you post and how you interact with your followers in order to give yourself a more established social media presence. If you are looking to play a bigger role in your business's social media output, read our recent post 'Beginners guide to social media' for a few simple tips about what you can post on your social media site to engage with your customers.
Advertising Content - If you decide that you would like to redesign either your logo or your website layout, you must make sure that all your advertising content such as banners and other material are designed to match. This may mean adding a new logo or changing the colours on the banners so that they match the colour scheme you have chosen for your website. Having your old banners and content out there on forums, social media sites and other areas creates a confused identity for your business as you will seemingly have two different public images.
  
Get your free ecommerce store now: http://www.esellution.co.uk/pricing.html
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Monday, 17 September 2012

Looking at the bigger picture when it comes to advertising

When setting up an online store, while the products themselves are going to be what ultimately makes a customer's mind up as whether they make a purchase or not, you can help nudge them in the right direction by having the right promotional material.

If your ecommerce store is running a special offer or has recently added new products to it's inventory, you may look to create some promotional material to help drive traffic to your site. This material will generally come in the form of banner advertisements. These banner advertisements can be placed on your ecommerce store to not only make it look more inviting, but also help develop your overall brand image. 

While placing these banners on your store's home page is a must, you should also look to place them in a number of different places, such as all of your social media platforms and any forums that are related to what your business sells. However, you will generally find that to place a banner on a forum, you must have some form of sponsorship with the site. Although this generally isn't too expensive, it's up to you to decide whether it is right for your business. 

Although, some people may be able to create their own banners, others may just not have the time or the capabilities to develop one to the standard that your business requires. If you are someone in the latter, you can look to pay an ecommerce or design business to create a banner solely for your business. While you may think that creating a banner is a cost you can't afford to make when your business is just starting out, it is a great way to help generate traffic and sales for your site, allowing people to access your site who may not have become aware of your business through other methods. 

Looking at the bigger picture


It isn't the cost you should look at, it's the potential return on your investment that the banner will bring. For example, if you have a banner created for £100 and you sell products from your store for £25, the banner only needs to bring in 4 sales for you to get back the money you paid for the banner. In the bigger picture that isn't much and when you factor in the added sales the banners could bring in through social and mobile commerce, it's definitely an avenue that any business should be looking to explore in order to develop their brand image and sales. Like all aspects of online selling, the key is to look at the biggest picture as look at what the investment will return rather than focussing on how much it will cost. As the old saying goes: "You have to spend money to make money."

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Amazon giving online sellers a helping hand this Christmas

Amazon are looking to help sellers increase sales for their online store by hosting two web seminars within the next two weeks. 

The first seminar will be held on the Wednesday 19th September from 10am to 11am and will look at how you can increase your brand exposure and conversion rate for your ecommerce store through improving your listings. The idea behind the seminar is to try and improve your listing details to make it easier for customers to find your products both on product searches and when browsing the marketplace Internationally. 

The second webinar will be held exactly one week after the first one Wednesday 26th September at the same time and will look at how you can take advantage of the busy Christmas selling period focussing more so on being prepared for the busy customer traffic through monitoring your stock and data through analytics and stock control. The online seminar will also look at some of the problems you may encounter during the festive period and how to overcome them. Check out 'Royal Mail looking to help businesses through the Christmas rush' to get some more information about many of the problems you may experience over the Xmas period.

Over the Christmas period more than any other time of the year, stock control is of the utmost importance. With literally millions of people looking to purchase products online for friends and family, running out of stock during this period is going to result in you missing out on a large number of sales. If you have a number of online selling platforms or are just struggling to keep track of your stock levels, you can use some stock synchronisation software to keep track of all your stock levels across all of your platforms. As we at eSellution are currently offering users a free ecommerce store, you can sign up now with eSellution and get this stock synchronisation for your online stores for free, well in time for the Christmas rush. 

While both of these seminars are aimed at improving your conversion rate through Amazon, the techniques and information you will gain through this seminar can also be applied to all other forms of online selling such as your eBay store or other ecommerce selling platforms.

Register for the web seminars using the links below.

Improve your listing quality to maximise your exposure and conversion: http://go.amazonservices.com/webinar474041344.html

How to maintain a good performance for the Chrismas period and beyond: http://go.amazonservices.com/webinar474041344.html 

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Useful tools to increase your followers

When running an online store, your engagement through social media is important in not only allowing you to generate added traffic and sales for your business through social commerce, but to also allowing you to engage with your customers and create a unique brand identity. However, if you run your own business, with the number of social media posts and updates you receive every day, it can often be difficult to keep track of all your different accounts. If you are struggling to monitor your social media presence, you can look to use a social media tools in order to give you a helping hand. 

Twitter Lists - While this is simply making use of the Twitter "List" feature within the social platform rather than an separate application, it is a great tool for filtering out your followers in to separate categories. What I mean by this is that, in order to create a brand identity for your business, you may have followed people who are to do with your field of interests, but whose Tweets you don't really care about. You can use the Twitter list feature to segment those people whose Tweets you would like to see into one specific list, meaning that you won't longer have posts you don't really care about taking up space on your feed. The only downside to this is that a list can only contain a maximum of 20 users, meaning that if you have a few hundred followers, you are going to have to filter down your followers into specific lists that relate to what they Tweet.

Crowdbooster - A social media application that you can link to your Facebook and Twitter accounts allowing you to gain an insight into the analytics of your platforms. This enables you to see which of your posts had the best effect on each platform, giving you a helpful look at how you can alter future messages to increase their effectiveness. The application also gives you recommendations about who you should follow that are related to your ecommerce store, while also giving you further tips on what time of the day you should post your messages. One of the key features of Crowdbooster comes in it's audience insights feature. What this does is group your followers into specific categories related to things that they are interested in. If you find that a vast majority are interested in one particular topic, you can look to tailor your content to target these individuals.

Klout - Although many people constantly question how effective your Klout score is, the tool can be useful in allowing you to generate more information regarding your social media posts than you would get through the platforms themselves. A recent overhaul in Klout's layout allows you to see people who have mentioned and engaged with you as well as how each of your posts have performed on each platform. There are a total of 12 different social media platforms for you to link together. Depending on your engagement across the various social media sites, you will receive a "Klout score" that is generated out of 100. The higher the number, the more socially effective you are. 

Social Mention - One of the better social media tools that you can use. If you run an online store looking to promote your brand then this is definitely an application you should be using. How is works is that you visit the social mention website and enter the keyword or phrase you would like to search for. This would most likely be the name of your business. The application will then search across all social media platforms and bring back a list of all the posts which have mentioned that particular word. This is a great way to constantly keep up to date with what it being said about your business or products. 

Postling - Another social media tool that allows you to monitor all of your social media accounts from one user interface. Rather than having to post content on each of your social media accounts, you can use the tool to simply write out your post once and have it placed on each of your social media pages, allowing you to maximise your reach and engagement. Like other tools you can also group together contacts into specific categories, while also allowing you to see instantly what people are saying about you and your posts. However, one of the main benefits for small businesses comes in the ability to instantly see any reviews about your business that are left on Yelp or CitySearch. If you run a small business that is based heavily on public opinion, a number of bad reviews could cripple your business. This feature allows you to become instantly aware of any reviews posted and enables you to respond to one bad review, stopping you from receiving numerous bad reviews for the same issue. The only downside to this is that you must pay to use it, starting at $1 the first month and then $5 for each month after that. 
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