Ecommerce Success Checklist

Professional web shopping cart – Check

Keyword research – Check

SEO – Check

Appealing ecommerce template – Check

Products uploaded and in stock – Check

All well and good – but what’s next?

You’ve done everything correct so far – you’ve signed up with a website ecommerce hosting and you’ve made sure it’s a web hosting shopping cart at that. You done all your keyword and SEO homework, so now it’s time to modify the page marketing aspects of your store.

If you take all your cross-selling cues from Amazon, you might not get the same results as them. Amazon bases their cross-selling decisions on a LOT of constantly updated data which is processed by experts – constantly learning and constantly tuning their recommendations. A relatively large number of web shopping cart merchants do not have the resources to try to replicate this. For the rest of us, it’s better to play by a few simple guidelines when it comes to cross-selling.

Below are 4 basic guidelines to assist you make the most out of your cross-selling efforts:

Keep To A Limit

The idea of cross-selling is to claim products that a customer may be interested in or may not have realized that they need. Advising too many products may irritate some customers as well as confuse others. The ideal number of recommended products should be between 3 and 5. Remember, make it easy for the customer to make a decision. Remove all other unnecessary factors that might hinder this.

Keep Them Related

Blindly introducing products might relay a sense of desperation or seem unprofessional. As mentioned earlier, a lot of merchants are not privy to the latest information on buying trends that the big players have so it would be a risk to claim products that are unrelated. The closer the products are linked the easier it is to sell the “need to have” angle.

Product Credibility

Showing product ratings by customers and experts can go a long way towards building product credibility. People like to be rest assured that they are spending money on something that is worthwhile. Assurances by other people who have already purchased the product can aid here.

Provide Enough Useful Information

People research before they buy nowadays – not just to see if they can get a great bargain but also to find out if the item is best for them. Many merchants have product information in abundance but most of the information is useless. Always keep in mind that any information that you put up must be geared to assist you close a sale. The information that you present should be answers to questions you predict your customers would ask.

Example, a customer looking for a pair of sports trainers would probably want to know the type of shoe (basketball, running, tennis), what type of gait it suits (neutral, overpronator, supinator), the weight of the shoe, and the expected mileage it offers before it is retired. Be sure to tailor your product information to cater to what you expect your potential customers will want to know.

So you’ve signed up for an ecommerce shopping cart software system and you’ve got a store running. You also have a healthy pool of loyal customers and everything seems peachy. Sales are perfect..but they can always be more impressive.

A lot of merchants don’t usually check out the obvious when trying to improve sales figures. Always start with the resources you have because they are most probably free, familiar, and do not need much effort.

Statistics have proven that people tend to buy more from a store they have previously purchased from. In fact, merchants can boost their sales by as much as 30% by concentrating on existing customers alone. This is not to say that you should abandon all efforts of getting new customers. Targeting existing customers is merely another avenue to boost sales.

So what can you do to improve your sales figures with what you already have? A typical ecommerce shopping cart providers usually provides ecommerce solution shopping carts software that comprises a few helpful selling functions. A lot of merchants overlook these functions because they do not understand the possible impact they might have on their sales. Of course an ecommerce shopping carts software system provider will not have included these features if they didn’t think it would be useful to their merchants.

So what should you do?

Cross-Sell

Amazon are experts at this. To mere mortals, it may not make much sense to cross-sell, for example, a DVD to someone who has just bought a bar of soap but as it seems it makes a lot of sense to Amazon. Who are we to argue? The point is, cross-selling items encourages impulse buying from customers. It tries to milk the “Since I’m already here, I might as well buy this too” frame of mind. It probably can play a role to pitch customers products that are related to what they already have in their shopping carts, though. Try to provide cross-sell items that could be useful in combination with whatever your potential customers are showing interest in.

Up-Sell

Up-selling is a bit of a challenge as it demands persuading a buyer to purchase items which are sometimes more expensive than the item they’ve just bought or are interested in, in order to render the sale more profitable. These items are typically from the same product category and include upgrades, add-ons or non-tangible items like insurance, service packages, apps, or extended warranties. Merchants usually provide the argument that purchasing the items suggested at this juncture will cost less than if a customer buys them separately.

Re-Sell

As mentioned earlier, once a person buys from your store, they will most probably shop there again. If the product is a consumable or needs to be consistently replaced (e.g. contact lens cleaners, vitamins, magazines or shaving blades) you can actually make it more simple for the customer by using the recurring billing/product subscription function. This function allows you to re-sell and re-bill the customer for the same product on a fixed timescale. This saves the customer from having to repeatedly re-order products manually each time they need to replenish their supplies.

All the methods above are not only great for getting revenue from existing customers but also help develop the image of your store by making it seem more customer-friendly (one-time related product purchases and product subscriptions save time and money) as well as help build a long term customer following.

There are lots of shopping cart software providers out there (3d shopping cart software, Agora shopping cart, to name a few). But whether you are using a low cost shopping cart solution or one that costs a bomb (or better alternative: you’re getting InstanteStore), a newbie online merchant might get lost in all the ecommerce jargon strewn across cyberspace. It may appear that everyday new terms are being invented. Some terms remain but many more are forgotten just as easily as the were coined. Here are 5 terms which have been here been with us for a while.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a way of driving quality traffic to a site without any financial outlay. This natural or organic method requires tweaking the site’s content, coding and HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) to raise its relevance to particular keywords and make it easier for search engines to index and subsequently increasing the site’s visibility on a search engine’s result’s page (SERP).

SEM

Search Engine Marketing or SEM is a way of advertising a site via the use of paid placements or paid inclusion. This form of internet marketing can raise your visibility in SERP’s much faster then SEO alone, but at a cost of course. Before engaging in an SEM program, make sure you carry out a viability study. Ensure the returns can justify the investment before you go out and spend your hard earned cash.

Hard Goods And Soft Goods

An online store may sell a variety of goods that are generally divided into 2 categories – hard goods and soft goods. Hard goods are tangible items like books and MP3 players. Soft goods are products that exist electronically like MP3’s, software and ebooks – items that can be downloaded. The good thing about soft goods is that you need not ponder about packaging, shipping and storage. Literally every process involved in the sale and delivery of soft goods may be done who are already running more than one online store but do not plan to increase their manpower.

Internet Merchant Account

An internet merchant account assists the receiving of online payments, generally by credit card. If you have hassle obtaining an internet merchant account, you can consider the services of a merchant broker. A merchant broker would then charge a setup fee and provide the software and hardware necessary either by lease or sale, as necessary.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate has nothing to do with religion. But rather it pertains to the percentage of visitors to an online store who are converted into buyers. Conversions do not happen automatically and depend on a few factors to help capture a visitor to buy from a certain store. The clever use of images, content and call to action phrases all play a part in this process of conversion. All content should be concise and to the point. In actual fact, everything on a online store should be geared to convert traffic, whether directly of indirectly. Web pages should be clear from clutter and all elements that could distract a visitor for the actual converting into a customer.

So before you sign up for a feature-rich yet cheap shopping cart solution like InstanteStore, ensure you brush up on your ecommerce jargon.

Shopping bots are also known as price comparison sites. Consumers use shopping bots’ search engines to survey for particular products and then compare prices and other available particulars such as consumer ratings and reviews.

Shopping bot and price comparison services are developing at a rate of over 30% per annum. Such services have become so popular that many have been bought up by industry giants like Microsoft.

Traffic arriving from such sites is targeted and the likelihood of a visitor ending up buying something is high. Which is why many online stores register with shopping bots. If you are an business opportunity who has just started a web store with an online business opportunity to make more money and you’re seeking for an easy shopping carts, making use of shopping bot and price comparison services could be very useful.

Is Your Store Prepared?

Registering your store with shopping bots can be a good way to get targeted traffic to your site but only if visitors see your store as providing quality products with alluring benefits and services along with competitive prices. This is because most shopping bot sites display results along with ratings. Visitors generally stay away from sites that are rated 2 and below out of a possible 5 stars. Because of this, it’s essential to ensure that your products are always of a certain standard and that your before- and after-sales customer service is beneficial and efficient.

Registration

Once you are confident that your store and products have what it takes to compete with the competition, you can then register your store with shopping comparison sites. Most price comparison sites have a very easy registration process. Once you have identified the appropriate category listing for your store, you can then upload your product feed. Shopping cart solutions like InstanteStore provide easy exports of product feeds for various different shopping comparison sites. Though some price comparison sites are free, a lot of sites charge on a per-per-click (PPC) basis or a flat rate for product placement.

SEO/Traffic Benefits

Comparison sites also work hard to make sure that their sites rank well with search engines. These sites put a good deal of effort into search engine optimization as well. Having your store and products listed on comparison sites offers your store and products with additional outlets for traffic and potential customers. Another good thing about comparison sites is that most of them are affiliated with a few other sites. The truth is, if you register with one site, your store or products could be advertised on the others for free.

Concerns

There are some concerns about shopping bots. The most common issue is that some bots do not update products feeds often enough. This has resulted in some shoppers landing on products pages only to discover that the product is out of stock or that the price has changed. To remedy this, submit products that have more or less stable pricing and stock levels, and/or update your store products at the comparison sites that you’ve registered with when your product catalog or prices change.

So if you are choosing for an shopping cart, shopping bots are a valid option. Just take note to make sure that your store’s services, products and customer service are up to mark before you start signing up.

Viral marketing, just like any category of online marketing campaign, aims to drive as much traffic to a site as possible. It actually leverages on the numbers game: the more traffic that ends up at your site, the higher the possible number of conversions.

Needless to say a viral marketing campaign has to work hand-in-hand with other factors of the page in order to convert visitors.

But what actually is viral marketing and how can you formulate a campaign yourself to assist drive traffic to your store?

Even a problem free shopping cart web store software powered by a dependable yet free shopping cart web store needs help in the marketing department. It takes a bit of work to let people out there know that your store exists (and is worth visiting).

Online Marketing

Online marketing has a lot to do with content. And so it has been said that content is king. But the content has to fit the medium in which it’s used and it has to seize viewers’ interest in order to be of any value. The subject of an online marketing campaign does not entirely have to be a product or service or something that is already being sought-after. It is possible for ad campaigns to generate interest about new products as well as improve brand awareness for existing ones. The wonderful news is that an online marketing campaign need not cost you an arm and a leg.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is not a hard concept just as long as you know what you are doing. Viral marketing makes adequate use of existing resources on the Internet. This potentially include micro-blogging sites like Twitter, social networking sites like Facebook, video sharing sites like YouTube, and of course e-mail to get the word across. All these resources can get “interesting or worthy” news out fast at an exponential rate. Take the viral marketing campaign for the movie Cloverfield for instance. The marketing team opted for an indirect approach by producing teasers and micro sites instead of just a traditional movie trailer. That created such a buzz that the marketing practically took care of itself after just a few weeks. Keep in mind, the campaign was spread out over a year. Every few months bits of information were released, rumors were spread and theories suggested for the sole purpose of raising awareness and keeping people hooked. Obviously, the strategy proved to be a success.

Of course, this road may not be for everyone. You need to know your target market and what would appeal to them.

What Makes News Or Updates Worthy Of Being Repeated?

Conventionally, people like free stuff and they also like heavy discounts. Needless to say, these free or discounted items should have a high perceived value among the masses for your campaign to garner any interest at all. Let’s say you want to announce a mid-year sale for your online ladies shoe store. You need to remember that many other stores might be doing the same thing as you. You could use the resources mentioned above to promote your sale, while always making sure your titles and descriptions are SEO-friendly. Now, women love shoes. And I would guess that they love free shoes even more. Why not come up with a contest that challenges people to guess the size or weight of a certain pair of shoes. The first 10 correct entries will be given gift vouchers worth $100 each and the next 50 correct entries will be rewarded with a 50% discount coupon. Done correctly, word of mouth about your store and its offer can spread quickly to more and more potential clients.

Another perfect example is a recent viral marketing campaign by an online camera store that is giving 2 very desirable cameras for free to participants at random. The catch: in order to be eligible for consideration, participants must first Retweet or publish on a blog the ad line containing a link to the store. A sneaky way to get links as well as get the word across, isn’t it?

Cost

You don’t have to develop a teaser video like the one for Cloverfield to spread the word. Many artists and companies on a shoestring budget have produced successful viral marketing videos of varying degrees of quality. For instance, The Blair Witch Project (whatever you may think of the actual movie) was a small-budget movie with one impressive viral marketing campaign. The bottom line is that if your marketing materials are captivating enough and you have fully utilized the channels we mentioned earlier, then you can look forward to a bombardment of visits in a relatively short period of time.

Viral marketing is perfect for marketing a new web store. Just make sure you have all your bases covered first. Make sure you’ve first signed up for a worry simple ecommerce shopping cart solution. A feature-rich, easy-to-use free shopping cart e-store like the one from InstanteStore is a good bet. Once you’ve got all your basics done and you have your store set up and tested, you’re ready to allow the world know you’re in business. Good luck!