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

Wednesday, 29 August 2012

Monday the best day to sell?

According to a study carried out by Play.com owners Rakuten, the day when the British population buys most of there items online is a Monday, based on traffic and sales made through their various marketplaces.

There are a number of theories as to why this could be. It could be because people are disappointed to be back at work on a Monday after having time off over the weekend, so they look to purchase items online in order to make themselves feel better. Another theory is that they have more energy at the beginning of the week than they do at the end, so they are more willing to make the effort of browsing through online stores in order to find a product they want to purchase

While these are only figures taken from platforms owned by Rakuten, it gives you an insight into the buying behaviour of certain individuals. So if you run a small online business how can you take advantage of this?

Although you can't directly control when a customer will purchase from your store, you can have some influence on their decisions through your marketing. If you currently look to send out your email campaigns and other marketing tools during the week, you may want to start looking to send these out during the weekend, with a focus on Sunday evenings to target these shoppers first thing on Monday morning. 

The study also found that the British were the most impulsive taking shoppers on average around 40 seconds when deciding whether to buy a product or not. This underpins the need for all online stores to have a streamlined purchase process which allows customers to easily navigate through your store, find a product they wish to buy and complete the payment process. 

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Friday, 24 August 2012

Facebook features that can give your business an extra boost

Everyone knows that to take full advantage of social commerce and increase your business's brand identity you need to have a Facebook business page. However, this is not the only way you can increase your brand exposure through Facebook. There are a number of other features that you can use to display your content to people who don't necessarily follow your fan page.

Promoted posts allow you to pay to have your content displayed to users who do not follow your business. While this is currently in the testing phase, it is a great promotion platform for a small online business who are looking to increase the number of fans they have. However, this option is only available to small businesses who have between 400 and 1000 fans. If this feature does get implemented into Facebook, they will then appear in the newsfeed Facebook users. To ensure that these adverts do not appear in the newsfeeds of people who have no interest in your business, you can choose specific parameters for your adverts such as geographical location, age and gender.

You can also pay Facebook to sponsor search results. This means that when a user searches for something related to your business, your business will appear at the top of the search results as a "Top Hit." This allows a large number of people who are interested in things to do with your business to become aware of your company and possibly visit your business fan page. However, if a user does not wish to see your sponsored link in the future, they can simply click on the 'X' next to the sponsored link and tell Facebook why they no longer want to see it.

Trending articles is another way that you can increase your business's exposure. When numerous friends on Facebook read the same article, that article will appear at the top of a newsfeed as a trending article. If you produce a blog for your business or write articles related to your field of expertise, that article could appear as a trending article, meaning that everyone else on a person's friends list will become aware of your article and may then read it. If they find your article interesting they could then visit the Facebook page or travel to your online store.

 eSellution: www.eSellution.co.uk

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Tuesday, 21 August 2012

Create the perfect SEO and user friendly website for your business

When building an online store from scratch, the layout of your store is everything, not just to appeal to visiting customers, but to also make your website SEO friendly, bringing more customers to your website through search engine rankings. Generally, when people look to set up an online store, they are eager to set it up as quickly as possibly in order to begin selling straight away. While getting your website up and running as soon as possible is important, it should be done in conjunction with ensuring your site is well designed rather than in sacrifice of.

As most people are now aware of, the most important part of on page SEO for your website comes in placing keywords that relate to your business throughout your site while still making sure all of the content is readable. If you are unfamiliar with keywords and how they can significantly help your website move up the rankings, check out my previous article on basic SEO for everything you need to know. (New Businesses Guide to SEO Success)

However, while SEO on your website is of vital importance, you need to make sure that the aesthetics of your website are as appealing to visiting customers as your keywords are to Google. It's no good having great SEO which moves your site high up search engine rankings, bringing a number of new customers to your site, only for those new customers to then be put off by the layout. When a customer first visits your site, they spend just under three seconds quickly scanning the whole page from top to bottom. This means that they spend around 180 milliseconds on one area of your site before moving on to the next. This emphasises the importance of making a good impression right from the get go or else they may leave your site and never return.  

Generally, people tend to read a screen the same way they would read text, moving from left to right. Therefore, you may want to have your business's logo placed in the top left corner of the page, meaning when customers visit your site, the logo is the first thing they see. This instantly creates a brand identity for your business as customers will become familiar with your logo. 

Although you want to have as much information as you possibly can on your pages to keep your customers informed, you simply do not want to flood your page with text. You may think "if I have a lot of text, it means I can put a load of keywords in there for SEO making it a good idea, right?" If you look at all major brand websites, their layout tends to be clean and uncluttered, meaning they have only the most necessary information on a page. As a person spends 2.6 seconds scanning a website before focussing on a particular area of interest, having huge chunks of text through the page is going to be rather off putting as they don't want to have to read through reams of text pick out the information that is of interest to them. 

As the only saying goes  "A picture paints a thousand words" and this is never truer when creating a website for your online store. If you run an ecommerce business that sells products such as clothing, electronics and other goods, images of your products and promotional animations are going to be much more appealing than text, as they instantly tell customers information that may have taken you a couple of paragraphs to relay through text. 

What most websites tend to do is have one focal image at the top of the page, underneath the navigation bar. This works as an appealing image to draw the viewers eye, encouraging them to work their way down through the page.

This idea of making your website as easy to navigate as possible should also be taken into account when displaying images of your products for customers to purchase. While it would be easier to just lay out your items all on one page and have customers choose from them, in terms of navigation, it can make it rather difficult to find the item they want. Breakdown your products into different categories in terms of what you sell with a separate page for each category and links to those various categories placed on either the top of side of each page.

First IMPRESSIONS of your website
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Monday, 20 August 2012

eBay's grand gesture or cunning advertising ploy?

eBay have announced that they are making all sports collectable items free to list until the end of the year. This will come as great news to some online stores as these items can be listed for free on both auctions and buy now listings.

The sports collectibles section on eBay contains items such as signed photographs of sports stars, shirts, match day programs and various other sporting memorabilia. 


It has been touted for many months that eBay could drop listing fees from some items in an attempt to gain an advantage in their battle with rival marketplace, Amazon, who have seemingly been improving their standing with sellers as of late. 

The new setup for sports collectable sellers means that store owners under the "Basic" account setting can list up to 5,000 items without having to pay insertion fees, with "Premium" and "Anchor" packages able to list up to 10,000. Sellers who do not have an online eBay store are able to list 500 sports collectable items without having to pay the listing fees.

However, while this does seem like a grand gesture on the part of eBay to offer some online sellers the chance to list products on their eBay store for free, other believe that this is part of a greater revenue scheme. One theory is that the removal of the listing price for this item category will result in sellers listing more items. The more items that are placed on eBay, the more advertisements that are going to be seen by buyers, which in turn will result in great advertising revenue for eBay.



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Monday, 6 August 2012

Keep Your Business Running Smoothly While on Holiday

With the summer period in full swing, many people are looking to escape the damp British weather for a holiday away to sunnier climates. For online ecommerce store owners, while a week or two away could be a much needed break from the stresses and strains of work, it is two weeks where you won't be to keep track of customer orders and sales in your store. However, if you do decide to take a trip away, there are ways to ensure that your business doesn't suffer.

Take a laptop with you - I know the whole idea of a holiday is to get away from the stresses of work, but not knowing how your store is doing can be a stress in itself, making it difficult for you to relax. Working on a laptop as you relax by the pool is not only going to annoy the people you are on holiday with, but could lead to your equipment becoming damaged. However, there's nothing stopping you from quickly checking your orders and sales when you have 10 minutes free on an evening. That way you keep yourself in the loop while still being able to enjoy your holiday. 

Clear your workload - The last thing you want to do is return from a relaxing holiday and find that you have mountains of paperwork that you need to complete. Before you go away you should complete all your paperwork, handle all of your correspondences and set up and automated email to go out to customers letting them know when you're going away and when you're returning.

Set up holiday mode - If you are using some online ecommerce shopping cart software to help run your business, many of them now offer a holiday feature designed especially for when you go away. Essentially what this does is places a message on your store to let your customers know that you are away and their orders will be processed and dispatched upon your return. Although customers will still have to wait for you to return from holiday to receive their products, they won't become annoyed thinking that your store is just being incredibly slow in processing and distributing their order. 

Employ someone to run your business - When you are planning to go away, you can look to employ someone to run your store for the week or two that you are away. However, this option does leave you with a number of issues that you must address. When going down this route, you must make sure that the person you choose to run your store is someone you trust. This person will be solely responsible for running your store while your way as well as handling as problems, queries or concerns that crop up while your away. As they are only a temporary worker, any issues that do occur over this period are going to great impact you buy damaging the image of your business that you have spent years creating. Make sure that you are 100% happy that they can not only do the job, but do it well before you employ them for the temporary cover.

After exploring all of the options you may decide that it might just be better for you to not bother with a holiday in order to focus on your business. However, what you must also consider is that if you are stressed and tired from work, your own relationship with your customers may suffer. Regularly taking a break from work allows you to relax, unwind and come back to work feeling refreshed and more willing to meet the needs of all your customers. 

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Build Your Business on Olympic Foundations

As the entire country is gripped in Olympic fever with team GB achieving no less than 16 gold medals in the first 9 days, it really shows how good preparation and strong execution can produce exception results. While the Olympics showcases the world's sporting elite, employing this attitude can also reap great rewards for your online ecommerce store.

Preparation



When any athlete steps up to the start line, they have spent the last four years honing their skills and achieving peak fitness, to ensure that they can give the best possible performance. For any business owner, running your online store should be no different. The key to success with any store comes in great preparation. As we have touched on in a number of articles over the last few months, you need to ensure you identify a store that is unique, offers great service and has affordable prices. When deciding on what products to sell, you need to carry out extensive research to ascertain how many stores selling the same products are there already out there, will your products have a number of customers interested in buying them and how much should you be looking to sell each product for. 

Spending time preparing every aspect of your business is going to make sure you have all of your bases covered. In addition to identifying key areas and how to achieve the best success in each, you also need to come up with a number of different back up scenario plans. These are basically contingency plans to allow you to alter your game plan if you haven't achieved the desired results from the start. For example, if after the first few months of trading your sales and profit figures weren't as high as you would have wanted, your contingency plan may involve purchasing ecommerce software to help improve the traffic and sales figures for your store.

In business, like in any sport, doing as much work as you can during your preparation is going to make the execution phase not only easier but also more efficient, bringing the best chance of success for your store.

Execution


After carrying out extensive research and preparation to give your store the best change of success when competing against your rivals, next comes game day. This is when you open up your store and welcome your first customer. No matter how much preparation and planning you have carried out, if you make mistakes when it actually comes to running your store, all that hard work will have been for nothing. 

First and foremost, as explained in detail in one of our previous posts (eBay Store Owner's Guide to Success), every customer should be well cared for throughout the entire shopping process and beyond. Although this may seem like common sense, you will be surprised by how many businesses believe that their products are so good they will literally sell themselves, without the store owner having to make any real effort. While your products could be some of the best on the market, customer care and attention is what is going to bring them to your store and keep them coming back time and time again. This demonstrates what I highlighted earlier, you could plan out a great customer care initiative, but if you don't take care of your customers right from the start, all that preparation will be a waste of time. These first few customers are going to determine whether your store is a success or failure. If these customers have a great experience then positive opinions will begin to spread and your customer base will grow. 

While this example only highlights the need to prepare a strong customer care initiative, this same process should be applied to every facet of your business such as marketing, store template design and delivery. Covering all of your bases and leaving nothing to chance is going to ensure the best possible results when it comes to executing your game plan. Poor preparation is only going to leave your business at the start line with your opponents sprinting out ahead, and you still stuck in the blocks. 

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