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

Wednesday, 7 November 2012

The American Presidential race provides top ecommerce tips

With Barack Obama comfortably defeating Mitt Romney in the race for the for US President, the Hawaiian is set for another four year tenure in the White House. In his victory speech, Obama promised American citizens  that "the best is yet to come."

While Obama will focus on improving health care, reforming immigration policies and the safety of troops abroad, how can owners of an ecommerce store follow in the footsteps of the re-elected President and improve their online business to make it more successful than ever.

Engagement


Obama spent months travelling around the states, meeting many people, shaking many hands and kissing many babies all in an attempt to create a more favourable public perception. While you can't spend your time travelling around promoting your business, you can use social media platforms to engage with your current customers and have them do the work for you. Regularly engaging with your customers on Facebook, Twitter and all other social media platforms ensures that they have the best possible experience when engaging with your business. This positive experience will then result in them telling their friends and family about your business, further developing your brand image and traffic.

Values


When setting up your own online store, you will have a number of ideas and values that are dear to you in helping you achieve long and short term success. As your business grows and your brand identity develops, it's important to not only hold on to these values but also take into account the values of your customers. Developing a business that meets the values of the customer is going to improve their shopping experience and ensure that they return to your store in the future to make another purchase.

Promises


Like all political campaigns, what a candidate promises they are going to do in the future plays a big role in whether they decide to vote for that candidate or not. The same principle applies to your business. When running your ecommerce business you want to regularly inform your customers about any offers you are running through your ecommerce software or any new product lines that will be added to your store in the near future. These promises keep the users engaged with your store on a regular basis. However, failing to deliver on these promises will not only damage your public image, but will also result in many customers perceiving your business and untrustworthy and refusing to buy from you.

Teamwork


While President Obama is considered the most powerful man on the planet, it's important to remember that it wasn't just him to go him there. He has a large team behind him, not only his family, but the campaign team supporting him and countless volunteers who worked diligently to help him achieve another term in business. Setting up an ecommerce business from the ground up makes it very personal to you and while you may want to be the sole person to make your business a success, just like Barack Obama, it is important that you draft in help. Whether it's someone to improve your social media presence, handle your orders or to develop your website, extra hands working hard to improve your business is not only going to allow you to achieve more success. it is going to help your business and brand image grow considerably. 

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Thursday, 25 October 2012

How to handle to negative comments

No matter how successful your business is, you are always going to find that there are people who are going to either have a bad experience or just put a negative comment on your site for the sake of it. Particularly on your social media pages, one negative comment can have a detrimental affect on your business. However, it is how you respond to the negative criticism that is going to determine it's affect.

Don't respond straight away

If you are the person who set up your ecommerce store and spent hours and hours building it up from the ground, any negative comments people have about your business is going to be taken more personally by you than it would anyone else. When you do come across a negative comment, don't respond to it straight away. Give yourself to take in what they say and relax. You don't want to act on your emotions and say something that may harm your business in the long term.

Don't just delete all negative comments

As you want your business to have nothing but positive feedback in order to give it the best chance of being as successful as possible, it's easy to simply delete a negative comment as soon as you see it. However, just simply disregarding someone's opinion is one of the worst ways to handle the situation. Firstly, if that person is commenting on a problem they found when using your online store, just deleting the comment doesn't allow you to potentially solve the issue, meaning more people in the future will also come across this problem. 

Secondly, there is very little chance you will be able to delete a negative comment before anyone else has seen it. Deleting a comment will not only annoy the original poster, compelling them to post again, it will damage your credibility in the eyes of your other customers as just deleting the comment makes you seem much less trustworthy.

Provide alternatives

If someone leaves a comment either on your store itself or on your social media pages with a problem they encountered or an issue they had while visiting your online store, do your best to try and remedy this problem for them or find suitable alternatives. Not only does this give you the best chance of having the customer return to your store in the future to try and make another purchase, it also allows everyone else who either views your store or followers your social media page to see that you have made every possible attempt to solve the users concern, improving your business's public perception. 

Remember who's watching

Particularly on forums and social media sites, you need to always remember that, although you might be answering the concerns and issues of one individual, there are many other people who haven't commented who are also watching. When responding you should be professional and courteous, having one person posting negative comments about your business is one thing, but other people taking offence because of something you have said in response to a comment is a problem you want to try and avoid. 

Carry out some research

If someone has left a negative comment about your business or service on a forum for example, check not only your ecommerce software to see what transactions they have carried out on your store, but also see what other things the user has commented on within that forum. You may find that isn't just your business the individual has commented on. If they have left a number of negative comments about a number of other businesses then you know that person is just writing a negative comment for the sake of it and you can simply discredit it.

Personalise their issue

When you get someone leaving a comment regarding a genuine issue they are having, you don't just want to essentially brush them off, giving then the usual script and leaving them to go on their way. When someone has a concern you want to try and make them as valued as possible, meaning that you may decide to contact them personally through their email or give them your own personal email address for them to contact you and give you more information about the issue, rather than just asking them to send a message to your generic sales address and wait for a reply. While this may not help you keep that user as a customer, it limits the amount of negative publicity that user will give about your business to their friends and other social media followers.

Sometimes don't respond at all

While you want to try and respond to all comments in a polite and professional way, sometimes it is better just not to respond at all. Especially on your social media pages, people write negative comments about your business just because they can and nothing you say in response is going to change that. The more you comment, the more other people become aware of it and before you know it the comment has escalated so much that it begins having an affect on your brand image. Sometimes it's just better to let it die and for people to forget about it, rather than attempting to change their opinion.

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Monday, 15 October 2012

Google and the key to ecommerce success

Working with a number of different online stores on a daily basis, we always advise our clients that the key to success comes in not only being able to sell in as many places as possible, but also have your products appear in as many places as you can . The more places your products are visible in, the more chance a customer has of stumbling across your products and visiting your site to make a sale. One of these places you should look to have your products appear, is within the Google Shopping section. 

No matter if you sell on eBay, Amazon or run your own ecommerce store, Google shopping is one of the best comparison sites around in not only helping customers locate the products they want, but helping online stores achieve a greater number of sales. A survey carried out earlier this year by CPC Strategy found that out of all of the search engine comparison sites, Google ranked highest with a click through rate of 2.78% during the first quarter. The study looked at over 4 million clicks, which cost $1.16 million in advertising spending and brought in $7.87 million in revenue.

The top 10 comparison sites based on click through rate are as follows:


  • Google - 2.78%
  • Nextag - 2.06%
  • Pronto - 1.97%
  • PriceGrabber - 1.75%
  • Shopping.com - 1.71%
  • Amazon Product Ads - 1.60%
  • Become - 1.57%
  • Shopzilla - 1.43%
  • Bing - 1.35%
  • TheFind - 0.71%

All of our free ecommerce stores here at eSellution come with the ability for users to verify their domain with Google, ensuring all their products appear not only within the various shopping channels we provide, but also appear within the Google product search section. While this on its own will not ensure that your business achieves wide brand awareness, it should definitely be included in an marketing strategy you plan on implementing. 



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Friday, 12 October 2012

eBay's new home page and what it means for your business

By the end of the year, eBay will have switched over all eBay accounts so that they all contain the new home page layout. Currently the page is in the testing phase, with around 10% of all account currently having the new format. 

The new format will have an opt-in feature meaning an eBay user can choose to have the new layout or just keep the old eBay homepage. If they choose the new layout, they will have the eBay banner at the top of the page but then the rest of the page will be based on the new feed system. The feed system collects data from your account based on your own personal interests and some of the products you have viewed and purchased from eBay stores in the past. The feed then displays a stream of products within the eBay marketplace that they believe you will be interested in. However, should the feed contain products that you do not want to appear on your homepage, you can customise the layout so that the products appearing on the page are exactly what you would like. 

The real benefit of this will be for stores who sell products that are based within niche categories with less competition than some of the other major sectors. Users can not only filter their product results by category, but also by specific keywords within that category. The less products online stores within the category  the better the chance of your products appearing on a user's home page. This will not only make more people aware of a specific product in your store, it will increase traffic to your store and most likely result in increased sales.

The new layout also shifts the focus primarily to the product image. In the past, the image was just another aspect that entices the user along with the title and product description. Under the new feature, as the homepage will now just display images of various products you may be interested in, having the right picture is going to be incredibly important. If you have a product on someone's homepage that has a poor quality image in comparison to the other products near it, it stands to reason that a user is going to be less likely to select your product over one in another ecommerce store. 

Take a look at the new feed layout below.



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Wednesday, 10 October 2012

Using rivals to help your business

When setting up an online store, all stores have rival competitors that they essentially must outperform in order to make their store a success. While some of these rivals are bigger than others, you can use all store rivals to your advantage in being able to not only improve the quality of your business, but increase the number of traffic and sales you can generate.

The first thing all businesses should be doing is monitoring their rivals on a regular basis looking at not, just what they have for sale and how much their products cost, but the layout of their site, their overall brand image and any promotions they may currently be running. Basically, you want to look at every different aspect of their business that could potentially persuade a customer to purchase from them rather than you. Once you have gained this information, you can then look to make changes to your own store in an attempt to get these customers back. For example, if a rival store is selling the same product as you but at a cheaper price, you may look to lower your price in an attempt to undercut them. 

However, before you look to do this you must consider that you still want to make sure that you are making a good profit from each sale, so you shouldn't look to lower your prices too much. You also need to remember that there are a number of aspects that make up a successful ecommerce store, not just the cost of the products. If your overall service is much better than your rivals, in the long term you are going to achieve much more success as you will develop a much stronger public and brand image. 

When looking to develop your brand image, you can also look to take advantage of their social media following in order to help develop your own social media identity. For example, if one of your rivals has a large social media following, you may decide that you yourself will follow them also, not only to keep an eye on their status updates, but also allows the large following they have to see your account and possibly decide to follow you. The benefit of this is that you know the people who are following your rival are interested in the type of products you have for sale. However, before doing this you must remember that following your rival means that people who are following you are then also made aware of this other business. You should consider this before making any decision as potentially, following a rival competitor could result in one of your customers coming across their store and deciding to have a look at what they have to offer.

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New eBay delivery program set for UK launch

eBay are set to launch the Fast 'N Free delivery program in the UK during the second half of October. 

The program has already been launched in the United States and Australia and has been tested on the site throughout September. In case you are unsure what the Fast N' Free is, it's a  program that allows an eBay store to have the Fast 'N Free shipping logo appear on their products if they offer free shipping. This logo is a guarantee to customers that their is a high probability that they will receive their order within 4 working days. 

To qualify for the Fast 'N Free program, you must offer free postage and have an estimated delivery of 3 working days or less. To be able to have your ecommerce store deliver a product within 3 working days, you either must offer 1 day dispatch or use a next day delivery service. If you have products that fulfil this criteria, the logo will automatically appear on the relevant products. 

Having the program released well before the Christmas rush allows online stores to increase their traffic and sales by ensuring to their customers, that if they purchase a product for their store before a certain cut off date, the Fast 'N Free program makes sure that they will get their products in time for Christmas. 

While not all eBay stores will want to offer free shipping, if you do rely on customers finding your products through the search feature, you may want to look into the possibility of changing your shipping procedure in order to qualify for this program. Although not all customers will do this, some may opt to simply look for products that display the Fast 'N Free logo, as they know it is a product that they will be able to receive as quickly as possible. 

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Tuesday, 9 October 2012

Digital marketing on the rise for ecommerce stores

The number of online stores investing in digital marketing has never been greater, according to figures released by the Internet Advertising Bureau. 

The survey, carried out by accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), found that ad spending on the Internet and for mobile phones, rose 12.6% to £2.6 billion when compared to the same point in 2011. 

A specific breakdown of the figures found that:

  • Mobile advertising is up 132% to £181.5 million
  • Video advertising is up 43% to £69.8 million
  • Social media banner advertisements are up 36% to £134.2 million
  • Paid advertising is up 15.9% to £1.527 billion, accounting for 59% of all digital advertisement spending
So what does this mean for your ecommere store?

Well, the first obvious thing you should take from this is that if you aren't really putting in the time to develop a strong digital marketing campaign, you may want to do so in an attempt to not only help boost your brand and sales, but to also keep up with your competitors as these increased figures indicate that many online stores are making use of this digital marketing platform. 

Where to start?


Although paid advertising makes up around 59% of all digital advertisement spending, you may want to try other avenues before delving into channels such as retargeting and adwords. As pretty much 99.9% of all businesses have some form of social media presence, social media banner advertisements may be the way to go to begin with as not only will it allow you to increase traffic and sales for your online store, it will also allow you to build up a greater social media presence and increase any social commerce your business may have.

Once you have developed strong marketing engagement through these channels, you may then look to branch out and take advantage of other channels such as mobile marketing and other paid advertising as mentioned above. There are a number of different things you can do to help effectively market your business, both for free and paid. Read 'Marketing tools for the big, the small and the just getting started' to find out a variety of marketing techniques, both digital and non-digital, that you can incorporate into your marketing strategy.

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eBay tweak search listings to aid small stores

eBay have made a few alterations to their search results, opting to remove the 'New Shopping Experience' product cards and simply sort results by the best match only.

The 'New Shopping Experience' launched in 2011 was originally intended to rival Amazon's product layouts by placing product cards within the various search results that have the title of the product and then states how many of these are available to buy new, refurbished, used and in the next auction. 

The problem many eBay stores found with this feature was that the search results were rather top heavy with the bigger store's products, meaning that new or not as established online stores often saw their traffic and sales suffer as a result. While it was seemingly good for the customer in terms of grouping a particular product for sale together, it meant that some online stores may have their products appear high up the search results even though they may not have merited it.

The removal of the 'New Shopping Experience' now means that for all ecommerce stores selling within the eBay marketplace, their product ranking within search results will now be entirely dependant on how closely they match the search criteria that the customer has entered. Read 'A detailed guide to increasing your sales on eBay' for detailed information on how you can tailor your eBay products to ensure you have the best chance of appearing as high up the best match search results as possible. 

According to an email sent out by Michael Jones, eBay's Vice President of Merchant Development, the removal of the 'New Shopping Experience' feature is an attempt at "simplifying the path between a buyer's search for popular products and your listings." However, the question many people are now asking is that, now the product cards have been removed, should sellers still use the catalogue feature in order to list their products? The answer in undoubtedly yet. While the product cards feature has been removed, it is thought that eBay will continue to develop the catalogue feature, allowing sellers to specifically link their products to the correct categories, allowing customers to come across the product easier if it is something they are searching for. 



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Monday, 8 October 2012

Add an extra dimension to your store with product videos

When running an ecommerce store, the more you can inform a customer, the more likely they are going to trust you as a seller and be willing to purchase from you. 

Traditionally, the best way to provide information about a product is through a number of different images showing the product from different angles and having a detailed description included. While this has been an effective tool for both people who run an ecommerce store and others who may have other stores such as an eBay store, with growing levels of convergence across all media platforms, you may want to start looking at how videos can help provide a different experience for the shopper. 

Not only do videos on your online store allow you to give your customers a whole new shopping experience, a video allows you to provide your customers with much more information than they would get from just images and text. A video allows you to not only show the customer the product, but also shows it in action. For example, if they product was a lawn mower, you may want to show a video of someone using it to mow the lawn. Whereas, if it was an item of clothing, you may want to show someone walking around with the clothing item on. Also, rather than having a text description, you can place a voice over on top of the video, providing the audience with added information while they watch the video. 

One of the main benefits of a product video, apart from the obvious added product information, is the ability to help build up brand trust in the eyes of the customer by allowing them to actually see what they are buying and for them to hear a friendly voice. While they can't actually see the person who would be talking on the video, hearing the voice gives your business a personal identity and reassures the customer that they would be purchasing from a trustworthy store.

If you currently just sell on eBay, who do not offer this feature, you may want to think about expanding your business to have an ecommerce store that would allow you to take advantage of this marketing medium. As we at eSellution are currently offering a customers a free ecommerce store, when you sign up with us, you will also be able to add a video on to each of your products by simply inserting the embed code.

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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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Marketing and the absolute necessity of active self-promotion

When someone sets up an online store for the very first time, they sometimes believe that all they need to do is add products to their store, have an appealing design and upload a logo and the customers will come flocking. Well, with literally millions upon millions of people running ecommerce stores worldwide, what are the chances of a customer somehow stumbling across yours? The answer is very little.

You need to think of a new ecommerce store in the same way you would if you were running a bricks and mortar store that was down a small, dark alleyway that no one ever goes down. You may have the best store in the world, but if no one knows that it's there, they aren't going to visit it.

In order to have your site achieve the levels of traffic and sales that you desire, you need to be actively promoting and marketing your store across a number of different channels. However, as I have said a number of times throughout various articles, you should first begin by entering all of the relevant meta keywords for your pages and products to help improve your search engine standing. While this does require some effort to actually input the keywords, monitor their success and alter as required each month, this is the closest form of marketing that is going to allow you to simply sit back and watch customers come to your store. However, if you are setting up a new online store, you shouldn't expect these results to be instantaneous. Once you have inserted the keywords for your pages and products, it will take a few weeks for various search engine spiders to scour the Internet and come across your pages and keywords. Once these words have been located and indexed, you will begin to see a rise in traffic levels as more and more customers come across your website through the keywords that you have entered. 

With the shear number of online stores being set up each and every day, if you don't promote your own business in order to create that initial brand awareness, you're not going to get anywhere. Although you may think asking your friends to help promote your website is like tossing a pebble in the ocean, you will be surprised how quickly it will begin to snowball and simple maths can give you an insight into this. Say you ask one of your friends to promote a link to your online store on their social media page. That one link is then seen on the newsfeeds of the 500 friends that your friend has. Of those 500 friends, three are interested in your store so much that they decide they also want to share it with their own friends. As they each have 500 friends too, it means that in the space of a few minutes, your store has been exposed to 2000 people and that was only through one of your friends generously helping give your business a hand. 

While you may have a Facebook business page or a Facebook store, you should also be actively promoting your online business on your own personal page, as I would image that at this early stage of your business, your personal account will have many more active followers than your business. What you need to understand when setting up a new business is that self promotion is everything. You may feel that your business is good enough to stand on it's own merits and that you are too proud to actively promote it yourself. If you do feel like this, for the sake of your business you need to get past this and quick. Self promotion is an absolute necessity in helping make your business a success. If you yourself, someone who is incredibly passionate about your business, refuses to actively promote your store and what you have on offer, why should other people do it? 

This means that you should be regularly placing content regarding your business on both your personal and business social media pages including the relevant link to your store numerous times to ensure that your message is able to reach as many people as possible. On top of this, you should be looking to create banners, send out emails, engage with forums and pretty much do anything else you can think of that will allow you to help get your store name out there and get as many people as possible to visit your ecommerce store. If you are struggling to think of ways to help market your business, read our post: 'Marketing tools for the big, the small and the just getting started'

If you want to make your online store a success, you need to be willing to put all the hard work and effort that success requires. If you sit back and do nothing waiting for the sales to start generating themselves, you are going to be waiting a very long time. 

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Friday, 5 October 2012

Why 1 billion Facebook users is good for us all...

Yesterday, Facebook announced that they had finally reached the one billion mark of users who were actively logging into their accounts each month. Looking at it globally, that's around a massive 1 in every 7 people on the face of the planet logging into the social media site.

Although the majority of these users use the social media site to interact with friends, post status updates and add photos, within Q2 , around 84% of the site's revenue was generated from advertising and with the number of new advertising features that have recently been added, this figure is set to increase in the coming months and years.

While you may only be able to reach a small percentage of these people, a small percentage of 1 billion is still a significant number and having your brand exposed across this platform is a great way to not only make people aware of your online store, but also increase the number of sales you can achieve, helping your business become a greater success.

In recent months, the public troubles Facebook have faced in terms of their falling share price and waning customer satisfaction, many people have questioned the sites future and it's ability to truly help any business. However, the recent introduction of added marketing platforms within the site, serves as a great way to help give your ecommerce store that much needed boost in brand awareness.  

The truth is while people are growing annoyed with the new timeline feature and the new advertising additions, many users both store owners and customers need Facebook to still be a huge social media platform. For startup businesses that doesn't have much to spend on advertising and marketing, having a free social media platform with 1 billion users to target is invaluable, making the difference between whether your business gets of the ground or struggles to do anything at all. 

From the perspective of the consumer, the more users actively getting involved with Facebook each month, the more resources brands are going to put into making the social media platform a success. This means customers will be exposed to more stores and come across more great value prices as well as find out about the various offers that are running across different stores. In terms of business promotion, Facebook is a win-win situation for both buyers and sellers alike. 

While everyone knows that in order to achieve either social media or social commerce success within Facebook, you must first create your own business page. However, in terms of self promotion, that is just the tip of the iceberg. Facebook also boosts a number of different added marketing channels to advertise your business such as promoting your ads so that they appear at the top of the search bar and or within users newsfeeds, having users share your relevant pages with their friends and having any articles or content you produced appear within the trending articles feature on users newsfeed page. 

Although some of these added marketing features require you to actually pay from them, as opposed to only having a business page that allows you to post status updates and content for free, these added features allow you to advertise your brand beyond the people who follow your business page or are people who are friends of people who do. The features allow you to reach people who you may have struggled to reach through other methods and while these definitely aren't for everyone, they are just things you should consider when running your online business. 

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Thursday, 4 October 2012

What not to do when starting an online business

When setting up your own online store, you have an idea of how you want the business to be and various targets as to what defines success over specific periods. While many people like the idea of giving it a go and learning from the mistakes in order to make a more efficient and successful business, there are a number of things you should look to avoid doing right from the get go in order to help your business start on the best possible footing.

Jump Straight In


The excitement and adrenaline you feel when thinking about getting your ecommerce store up and running encourages you to try and get your store open and selling as soon as possible. However, this eagerness to get out of the gates often leads to you overlooking a number of significant aspects that result in your business not achieving the success you would have hoped for. In order to ensure you are giving your business the best possible success, sometimes it's better to control your excitement and think rationally about every single aspect of your business. Being prepared and making sure everything aspect of your business is to the standard that you require, ensures that once your business does open, you won't be surprised by any serious issues that have been overlooked and you will be able to hit the ground running. 

Spread Yourself Too Thin


When you decide to set up your own business you have these dreams of your business being a huge success making you a substantial amount of money each year (it's okay, we all have them.) These dreams encourage you to believe that in order to have your business achieve these levels of success, they need to be marketing yourself and selling across as many different platforms that you can possibly think of in order to create high levels of engagement and sales. While this is true, when you first start your business, it may be better to concentrate on one or two channels such as your ecommerce and eBay store, rather than spreading yourself across many. Spreading yourself too thin means that not only will you create substantial amounts of work for yourself as you will need to monitor, market and handle orders across all platforms, the time it will take you to handle all of these tasks will mean that the interaction with your customers will be fairly limited, damaging not only the relationship with that particular customer, but also your entire brand image. Selling on one of two channels to begin with allows you to focus all of your efforts on making those platforms a success, creating a strong brand image through go levels of customer satisfaction and high sales figures. Once you have established long term success across these particular channels, you can then look to branch out and expand your business across new platforms. 

Not Fully Considering Your Location


If you are running an online store, you may think that the geographical location of your business in not important as you can literally sell your products from the comfort of your own home if you wish to do so. However, if you do wish to open up a bricks and mortar shop in addition to having an online store, you should look to place your store not only in a place that is not only business with people each day, but is also as close to the centre of that specific as possible. This will allow you to increase your brand awareness not only from the people travelling past your bricks and mortar store each day, but also your centralised location will result in high search engine awareness through the maps feature in various search engines. 

Not Looking Closesly At Your Margins


When setting up your store, obviously to begin with the costs you are spending to set up your business are going to massively outweigh the what you are generating from sales. However, the problem some people have is that they believe the key to making your business a success is to just throw money and it and wait for it to achieve a high number of sales. This often leaves many startup businesses with a huge deficit that they cannot make up and it forces them to close the business. When setting up a new business you need to keep a very close eye on exactly what you are spending and making each money. For a new business, rather than spending money to set up your ecommerce store and marketing your brand, you should look at what cost effective methods are available for your business (such as a free ecommerce store from us here at eSellution.) This allows you to reduce the costs you have giving your business the best chance of achieving both short term and long term success.  

Not Considering Your Demographic


Depending on what your business is and the products you have for sale, your target demographic is going to be different. The problem some businesses have is not considering what their target demographic is and instead trying to target their products to anyone and everyone. The problem with that is that you are unable to create a marketing campaign that is aimed and a specific target audience, instead you opt for almost a blanket effect. The problem with this is that as your message needs to be generic in order to appeal to everyone, you are essentially doing the opposite of what you originally wanted as this generic message results in you engaging very few people, resulting in a very low click through rate and low ROI. When setting up your online store and setting up your marketing strategy, you must consider who your target customer base is and what specific message you want to project in order to engage these customers and turn them into buyers.  

Using Basic Templates


Following on from the idea of business owners wanting to get their online store set up and selling as quickly as possible, especially if you sell on marketplaces such as eBay, you may not care about the look of your store and just want to get it up and going. While it is important to take advantage of possible sales as quick as possible, the look of your store is going to play a major role in enticing a customer to purchase from your store and also in helping project your store's image. Using a generic template, such as those available on eBay, seemingly groups your store in with all other stores using the same template making it difficult for you to stand out from the crowd. When setting up your store, you should take the time to develop a unique and appealing layout. The more original and appealing your store is, the more enticing and memorable it will be to the customer. While many web design companies charge a large amount to have a unique website created for your store, when you sign up a free ecommerce store from eSellution, you will get an appealing layout for your website absolutely for free. 

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Paypal's mobile marketing mission

With mobile commerce becoming an increasingly popular platform for customers to purchase goods online, many ecommerce stores have now begun attempting to take advantage of this platform to the fullest, not only by having a mobile version of their online store, but also by using every mobile marketing technique that is available to them.

Payments business Paypal have announced two new mobile marketing techniques for the medium called GeoMetrics and GeoAudience. 

GeoMetrics allows an ecommerce store to compare the success of their various mobile marketing campaigns based on the different geographical locations. This allows a business to see specifically where customers are geographically when they engage with your store's brand. This means that if you find you have a number of customers who are engaging with your brand in one specific geographical location, you may decide to input more marketing resources to this location in order to take further advantage of this growth in mobile engagement. The more information you can be given regarding success and interaction of each of your mobile marketing campaigns, the better your performance will be, as you will be able to tailor your tactics to create the highest level of engagement that you possibly can. 

GeoAudience uses both the online and offline data which has been gathered to allow you to leverage one specific geographical location in order to get the best possible results in terms of engagement and sales for your online store. The feature allows you to either target a specific audience group which may be interested in the products you have to sell or you can focus on targeting a specific group of people who will be in a specific geographical location at a specific time of day, such as people leaving a football stadium at 5pm on a Saturday afternoon. 

The idea behind these two features is to not only provide the business owner with more statistical information to make a successful mobile marketing campaign, but also allows you to tailor your content in a way that will engage and appeal to specific customer groups, allowing businesses to establish those initial relationships that will bring customers to your store, turn them into a buy and then hopefully continue that engagement by having them become repeat buyers in the future. 

If you are a small business who doesn't have the funds required to just give different mobile marketing techniques a go and see how they do, it may be worth having a look at these services to see how you may be able to get a better ROI for your business's marketing campaigns.

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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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