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

Tuesday, 14 August 2012

How to maximise your mobile commerce potential

If you have read any of my previous posts or any other digital marketing blogs in the last few months, you have found that mobile commerce is the next big thing when it comes to online selling. You've looked through all the information, how the this trend will increase and how it can help your business and have now decided that it is time your online store invests resources into developing a mobile platform.

Now that you know mobile commerce is right for your online ecommerce store (read: The future of ecommerce selling and customer engagement if you are still unsure) the next step is to see how you can maximise your efforts on this platform to ensure the best possible results. 

When creating a website for a mobile platform, you need to bear in mind that less is more. A mobile phone screen is substantially smaller than a computer screen, meaning that what you don't want to have is a website that is chocked full of text. All this is going to do is make your mobile site look very unappealing. The key to mobile store success, comes in the ease of use. If you have an online store that allows customers to purchase items, you need to build a mobile store that enables customers to select and purchase the product in the quickest time possible. 

To truly maximise your mobile store and make it an appealing platform for your customers, you should look to do away with the traditional login process where the customer must first make an account to purchase an item. What this means is that you should have a process whereby the customer will select the item they want, enter their mobile number, credit card and delivery address before pressing the purchase button to complete the transaction. This information can then be stored within their mobile phone's browser cookies so that if the customer visits your store in the future to purchase again, all of their details will already be saved, making the process even quicker next time round. As people tend to visit stores on their mobiles when they are on the move, you do not want to ask your customers to tick boxes or confirm different terms and conditions before the process can be completed. Like I said at the start of this post, less is more and ease is everything.

While you want your mobile store to look inviting to visiting customers, you need to always be thinking about the constraints of mobile bandwidth in comparison to an Internet connection. Although there are now a  number of hotspots all over the country, allowing users to connect their mobile phones to the Internet when out and about, mobile phones which are not connected to the Internet will have substantially slower page loading times. What this means is that if your website is rather large in terms of the data it has, it could take a while for the user to actually load up and view your site. A slow loading time negates the whole purpose of a mobile store, damaging your conversion rate rather than helping it. With over 59% of mobile users expecting a web page to load in under three seconds, a slow loading web page is only going to annoy the user and probably result in them being frustrated and leaving the page.

Creating a mobile commerce store is very much a balancing act. While it must have less information than it's website counterpart, you must ensure that the design of your mobile store is exactly the same as your online store. The look of your website is one of the many parts that make up your business's brand. Having a online store and a mobile store that both look different is going to confuse the customer and not give them that instant recognition that it is your store as soon as they land on it. 

While all of these different factors are important to creating a successful mobile store, you must always remember that above everything else, ease of use is the crucial factor which will determine your mobile platform's success. You could have the best looking m-commerce site that loads in seconds, but if the site is difficult for customers to use on their phones, making the checkout process arduous, all that money and time you have spent developing your mobile platform will be for nothing.

eSellution: www.eSellution.co.uk

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Monday, 13 August 2012

Build up customer relationships to maximise sales

Many online ecommerce stores focus on ways to make customers aware of their brand, bring them to your store and entice them to make a sale. While many businesses spend a large amount of their budget on engagement marketing, many businesses fail to follow up on that first contact to establish a strong relationship between you and your customers.

An initial contact between yourself and your customers will involve them visiting your store and possibly making a purchase. However, once the transaction has been completed, you shouldn't look at it as the end of your interaction until that person next visits your store. While there is a strong chance that customers will visit your store again if they found the products and customer service of a good standard. engaging with your customers on a regular basis increases the likelihood that they will return.

This engagement can come in a number of different forms such as newsletters, surveys and other promotional material. Each of these should be sent to your customers possibly once or twice a month, informing them of the goings on with your store such as new products, sales and any changes that are occurring. If you do decide to carry out one of these techniques, what should you include in each one?

Newsletter


 How many people your online store employs and the time you wish to spend creating a newsletter will dictate what you include. If you wish to spend a lot of time making a newsletter that is of a high quality, you may wish to include interviews, advertisements and other information. If you are struggling with ideas for an interview, you could look to interview one of your customers asking them what pitfalls they have found when purchasing online and how they found your overall service. This way they will be providing readers with some helpful information regarding online buying, while still giving your online business some positive PR. However, if you do not have the time to do anything extravagant, you can look to create a simple newsletter which will include basic information about what is going on in your store, promotions that your store currently runs and any new items that you have recently added to your listings.

Whether you decide to create an in depth or basic newsletter, one thing you should include in both of them is substantial amount of links. The more links you have within a newsletter, the more levels of interactivity you are going to create. For example, if you are telling readers about new products in your store, provide a link to the area of your store that has these new items. The newsletter should also contain a link to your store front as well as links to your various Twitter, Facebook and other social media accounts.

Surveys


 This is the bread and butter of customer engagement. After a customer has made a purchase from your online store, you should look to send them a survey between one and two weeks after they have made the purchase. This survey should ask the customer how they found various aspects of the purchasing experience such as customer service, delivery and the product itself. Allowing your customer to give you feedback makes them feel like a much more valued customer, increasing the likelihood of them returning in the future. Not only that, this feedback will also allow you to alter your own store's service to ensure that you eradicate the cause of any negative comments.

If you find that only a small handful of the customer surveys you send out are actually being completed and sent back, you may look to offer some form of incentive to encourage engagement. This could come in the form of a prize draw for everyone who completes the survey, allowing them to receive a free item, store credit or some other prize.

Promotional Emails


While this generally comes under the heading of email marketing, rather than making people aware of your store to encourage new customers, it is trying to encourage your already established customers to keep returning. This email could contain information about a sale which has just been launched on your ecommerce or eBay store, a new range of products that have just been added or items that will be added in the near future.

Like the customer survey, you may wish to offer your already established customers some form of incentive to return to your store. As the email contains promotional information about specific products, you may wish to provide a link in the email that takes customers to a landing page, allowing them to purchase the items at a discount or even purchase the items before they go on general sale. Allowing already established customers to purchase items from your store before the general public, greatly increases customer relationships, making them feel more valued and satisfied customers.

Another form of customer relationship building that should be carried out on a regular basis is social media interaction. Unlike newsletters, surveys and other interaction emails, you should be looking to interact with customers via social media literally every day. What you can post on social media accounts is literally up to you. This form of social commerce allows you to upload images of your products, post articles or status updates that encourage engagement. Social media is a much more open platform than email interaction and is the engagement tool which is going to have the best results as it is something customers use numerous times a day.

While it is important to encourage as many people as you possibly can to visit your store, you shouldn't forget about your customers once they have made a purchase. It is these customers who are going to dictate how many future customers purchase from your store through their feedback and positive endorsements through word of mouth and social media shares.

eSellution: www.eSellution.co.uk

Recent Posts

How to increase your sales with landing pages
http://esellution.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/how-to-increase-your-sales-with-landing.html
Top tips to make more money for your eBay store
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Maximise your business with multichannel management
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Wednesday, 8 August 2012

Why your ecommerce store needs a custom eBay template

Whether you have recently just set up an eBay store or have been running one for a number of years, how your store is perceived by customers is going to dictate whether they decide to make a purchase or not. 

When you first set up your store, you receive a generic template which you can then add products to for customers to purchase. If you are new to running an online store you may think that this is just an easy and time saving feature that allows you to get your store up and running as soon as possible. While this is true, the look and feel of your store has a substantial effect on the number of customers that visit your store and how many of those visiting customers then decide to make a purchase. 

If you have followed the guidelines that I have outlined in previous posts (see related posts at the bottom of this article) before setting up your online store, you will have analysed who your target customers are and how many rival stores are also selling the same products. It is these stores that you will be competing with for customers and sales. This is where the look of your eBay store template is going to have huge importance. If you have say 10 rival stores all selling the same products and 6 of them all use the generic eBay template, from the view point of the customer, what is going to make your store look any different from the other 6 when they first visit it? The answer is not alot. You may have better items, lower prices and better customer service, but the look of your store is going to be the factor that decides whether they purchase from your store. 

How your store looks instantly helps the customer decide whether they want to proceed further into your store or bounce back to the search results. A professional store front with appealing colours, graphics and layout is going to entice the customer into looking through your products to see if there is anything they wish to purchase. Even if someone purchases from your store while you have a generic eBay template, the template will only serve to make your store much less memorable, making it more unlikely that the customer will return again in the future to make another purchase. In the eyes of the customer they will simply be buying a product from a random eBay store they found, rather than visiting a professional eBay store with a established brand image. 

In a competitive market that has a number of eBay stores all using generic templates, it is those stores that have their own customer eBay template that are going to see the most customers and more importantly, the most sales. A custom eBay template sets you out from the rest and gives your business a unique brand identity. This build up in your brand, when combined with your custom eBay store template, creates the image of a professional business that is more trustworthy in the eyes of visiting customers. As all eBay store owners know, trust is probably the most important factor for a customer when deciding which store to purchase from. The more trust customers have in your store, the more sales you are going to have, it's that simple. 

Depending on your own level of website design or coding experience, the ability to create a customer eBay template is going to be easier for some than others. If you don't have any design or coding experience, you can still great a unique and innovative design by purchasing one as part of an ecommerce software package. 

We at eSellution offer over 80 unique, professional eBay templates for you to select from. No matter what your own personal taste is or the products you sell are, there is a template that is perfectly designed for your eBay store. You can click here for more information on eSellution's ecommerce software: eSellution's Custom eBay Templates

With thousands upon thousands of eBay stores in the UK alone, creating any edge to help your eBay store stand out from the rest is going to massively help increase the success of your store. 



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The future of ecommerce selling and customer engagement

Every few years there is the next big boom that is going revolutionise the face of ecommerce selling forever. First it was the creation of a website, then it was the introduction of social media and now it's the growth of mobile commerce. As it currently stands, one out of every ten sales made from an online store are through a mobile device and this is going to continually increase until eventually it surpasses online selling. 

With 27% of all adults in the UK now using smartphones, you should look to invest in mobile commerce for your store if you haven't already. If you don't know what mobile commerce is, essentially it is making your website mobile friendly. If a person goes on a site through a smartphone that isn't mobile friendly, the website is displayed as it would be if they were viewing it through a browser on your computer. Mobile commerce changes how your store will look on a mobile phone, making it easier to navigate through the different pages and purchase a product. 

If a person tries to purchase a product on their smartphone from a store that doesn't have mobile commerce, they are going to find it very tricky to actually purchase the item as they will constantly have to zoom in and go through a number of different pages to actually get to the checkout stage. Having a mobile friendly site allows customers to purchase products much easier without having to zoom in on any pages and only going through a few simple steps to purchase a product. 

Having a mobile commerce option for your online store will great improve your conversion rate on that particular platform as customers will no longer become frustrated and bored by a non-mobile friendly process. With the amount of customers purchasing items items through mobile phones set to continue increasing, it is pivotal that you have a mobile commerce store to truly maximise your sales. 

The increase in the number of smartphone users isn't just changing the way customers purchase products, it is also changing the way store owners target those customers. Mobile marketing allows you to dramatically increase the presence you have in the lives of your customers. The restriction with most other forms of marketing is that, to reach their audience, they would need to actually be sat in front of a computer screen or television. As people are sat within arms reach of their mobile phone for 90% of an entire day, mobile marketing is allowing you to instantly reach your customers at any time. This reach is further amplified through the use of SMS marketing. Although many people consider this form of marketing to be a bit like spam, it ensures that your message is reaching a large audience.  When carrying out an email marketing campaign, your email could be sent out and then placed in the rubbish bin by all of your recipients without them even looking at your message. The benefit of an SMS message is that pretty much all of the recipients will read your message and become aware of your store, even if they then decide to delete the message straight after.

There are many benefits to running and marketing your store across mobile platforms. If you haven't already begun incorporating mobile commerce in to your online ecommerce business, you should now be looking to take steps to ensure you are planning to develop the mobile commerce side of your business in the near future. 



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Tuesday, 7 August 2012

Facebook stores and the importance of having one

As businesses look to sell their products to as many people as possible, they are now exploring new and innovative ways to sell these products across different platforms. This has resulted in the belief that mobile commerce will be the next big thing in online selling. Although this is true, other platforms for selling your products shouldn't be overlooked as they can still provide you with a large number of customers. One of these platforms that has seemed to have gained a particular bad rep over the last few months is the Facebook store.

The general belief of many people is that Facebook stores are only beneficial to large brands who have millions of followers regularly engaging with them. However, while this selling platform is a great addition to large corporate brands, Facebook stores are equally important for anyone running a small online ecommerce store. The great value of Facebook is, and always will be, the enormous amount of people using the social media site every day. While their numbers and share prices have seemingly dwindled in recent months, the number of active users the site has is still substantially higher than any other social media site. 

Now you may read this and think "I already have a Facebook fan page for my business, why would I need a Facebook store?" Well although a Facebook fan or business page does allow you to make users aware of your online store, having a Facebook store will allow you to take advantage of a customer's buying impulse. If you don't have a Facebook store and a customer sees an item of your Facebook business page that they like, they would then have to leave Facebook in order to navigate to your website, find the product in your store and then complete the checkout process. Right from the start you may end up losing customers as they may be reluctant to leave Facebook to go to a third party site. Furthermore, if the customer does decide to leave Facebook to take a trip to your online store, by the time the customer has gone from Facebook to your site and found the product, they may have lost that impulse to buy that they previously had meaning they will no longer want it.

Having a Facebook store means that customers can instantly buy items from you through Facebook. They don't have to visit another site, they don't have to then locate the product all over again and most importantly, they can instantly act on their buying impulse. When they see an item of yours that they like on Facebook, they simply select it and complete the whole procedure without ever leaving the social media site. 


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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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How To Create The Right Logo For Your Business

Having the right logo design for your online store or business is one of many crucial steps needed in helping to establish strong brand awareness. However, due to the need for business owners to get their brand out there into world as soon as possible, many tend to rush out a logo design without giving it the attention it requires.

While it is important to get your brand out to as many people as soon as possible, what you need to remember is that your logo is one of the first things anyone will see in regard to your online ecommerce store. If people see a logo that is appealing in its design, it draws the eye of people and encourages them to click on it. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the same concept applies. If a business has a dull and unimaginative logo, it gives the perception of your business itself also being rather dull. While your business could be the most innovative and imaginative company around today, if your logo doesn't project the right message, it leaves people with the wrong perception about your business, potentially harming your image rather than helping it grow.


When creating a logo you need to ask three important questions:
  • What is it your business does?
  • Who are the people you wish to target?
  • What is the message you want your logo to project?
Once you have been able to fully answer these questions, only then will you begin to be able to create a logo that is right for your business. Each of the answers to these questions allows you to create a logo that projects a specific type of message. Say that your business has a target customer graphic of women between the ages of 18 to 30. When creating a logo for this demographic you would most likely create something that is modern in design and uses feminine colours such as pinks and purples. However, if your demographic was for males between the same ages, the colour scheme and style of your logo would be entirely different.

Obviously, as it's your business, you want a logo that you are happy with and like the look of. While this is important, you shouldn't forget that like all aspects of marketing, what you are trying to do is make it as appealing and inviting to as many people as possible. With the amount of content that is shared by businesses in the form of social commerce, your logo should help your business stand out from the rest and draw in customers. What you don't want to do is create a logo that you think is great, but won't appeal to individuals within your target demographic.



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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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Stock control issues and how to stop them occuring

When managing a small ecommerce business, stock level management is of vital importance. This is because every item you have signifies profit for your business. If you are a recently formed business, or your profit margins are currently rather tight, the profit from just one product can determine whether your figures are in the black or the red for that month.

The high value placed on your items underlines the importance in having good stock management. If you have a business that sells items in a high street store and online across various ecommerce platforms, you may find it difficult to actually keep track of much stock you have left. This is one of the main stock control issues for any business as, if you don't keep track of exactly how much stock you have left, you may find yourself overselling a product.

Overselling means essentially what you are doing is still selling a product to customers despite already running out of stock. This will cause two rather large issues for your business. Firstly, overselling a product is going to mean not only will you miss out on being able to fulfil that particular order, you will also be unable to complete all future orders for that product until you have received more stock. Secondly, if a customer purchases an item only to be then told that they actually can't have it because there is no stock left, despite receiving no notification when they originally purchased the item, that customer is going to grow annoyed with the business and is likely to leave your store to purchase the item from somewhere else.

Poor stock control seriously tarnishes the reputation of a business.  Particularly with online ecommerce stores, the key to success relies on creating a reliable and trustworthy image with your customers. If your store is unable to fulfil basic orders due to poor stock management, it's going to damage this image right from the start and will most likely result in you losing future customers. 

How to solve stock control issues


If you find that you are struggling to keep track of which items are selling where and how much stock you have left, the best option for you would be to purchase some stock synchronisation software for your business. What this essentially does is monitor your current stock levels across all of your sales platforms, so  when one product is sold on a particular platform, your remaining stock levels are then updated across the rest of the platforms. This instant update in stock levels will mean that once an items stock does run out, all of your platforms will notify customers that this item is currently unavailable. However, as a business owner you should never let your stock levels get to that stage. As the stock synchronisation software will allow you to instantly see how much stock you have remaining, you now need to be looking ahead to see when your business will run out of stock. This will allow you to order more stock before you do run out so that once the stock levels do get low, more stock will arrive to replenish your numbers. This way you allow your business to keep selling products, keeping your customers happy with your store. Everyone wins!


Related Posts

Improve Business Efficiency with Data Analytics: http://esellution.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/stop-your-business-becoming.html
Guest Checkouts to Increase Your Conversion Rate: http://esellution.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/guest-checkouts-to-increase-your.html


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Friday, 13 July 2012

A Starter Guide to Online Marketing



Starting your own online ecommerce store but don't know where to start? Well don't worry, help is at hand!

The image below provides you with all the information you could ever need in telling you how to optimise your business's marketing strategy.

Whether your looking to embark on email marketing, social commerce or search engine optimisation, there's everything you need to know to help take your business to the next level.




eSellution: www.eSellution.co.uk
Facebook: www.Facebook.com/eSellution
Twitter: www.Twitter.com/eSellution







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