Let's kick this off with polled data ...

"How frequently do you use the following tools when shopping online?"

Note the green and red areas where I have noted what I believe to be expected growth/decline of these metrics in the coming year.

I think, and this is my own opinion (take it or leave it), that the areas noted will grow or decline for many reasons, not withstanding the new push among search engines for real time results and the weight they do and will carry in the future.

Coupon sites will continue to grow as they continue to gain authority and social media love from their users... As they rank better, they will be used more frequently. Look for many of these higher ranking sites to start offering "premium" paid types services and exposure.

Emails advertising I believe will decline for a good many reasons, mostly because people are generally irritated by spam mail. Shoppers are even afraid to create accounts on websites for "fear of spam". Secondly, your email shoppers are far more likely to be a one hit wonder. They shop for price and have little or no loyalty.... IMPULSE

Product reviews is a tricky one.... and while they can be very effective, I believe they will soon be so abused that no one will trust them. Face it, how do you know a "real shopper" said that instead of a savvy marketer? You don't, and just like many other diseases the web has caused, "fear of fake reviews" will in my opinion join the "fear of shipping" eBay disease in record time.

Shopping comparison sites and portals will continue to grow. Here shoppers can get what appears to be a fair representation of products to compare, see and get information about them in a comfortable... No pressure setting. Everyone will have a favorite, and we will see these continue to grow.

Social networking for ecommerce is still a baby, but expect its effectiveness to grow. Right now for **most ecommerce sites, this is just something you do. However, as we see the decline of reviews and other sharing platforms like gift tagging, this will become the safe way to ask a friend about a product they bought, or compare products for sharing. People on Facebook will seem more "real" and believable, thus more effective. Niche sites are already and will continue to kick ass here!

Product Titles

Ranking your ecommerce store is a very specific task. Your online store has the same needs.... But in many cases different techniques are used to meet the need. One of these highly important optimization techniques is creating great product page titles. Your page title is the single most important on page optimization element of any page, yet still the technique for creating a engaging and relevant title for ecommerce products is quite different from standard pages.

Take the title of this post as an example, while this is a great title for a blog post, it would be very poor for a product page. In your product page titles there are more possibilities and more specific needs for searchers. Relevancy is still the key, as an irrelevant title will not perform for you. So we have some simple and easy to implement tips below for creating highly effective product page titles which will help you rank and supply the searcher with the proper product information as well.

Product Page Title Tips

1. Relevancy : Everything is lost if your page title is not relevant to the page's content. The BEST practice is to create great, unique and descriptive text on your product pages and then craft a highly relevant title from the page. So if you want the page to rank for "green bananas", then you write about "green bananas".... Not "green tomatoes". Your page text must be unique, do not copy others page descriptions... Write great content about the product for your customers and you will be right on.
2. Length : Shorter is better.... Avoid stop and poison words like (cheap, and, if, or, the). You need to be 65 characters (including spaces) or less. This is NOT a keyword list. The words you choose should accurately describe the product and be reflected in the page text.
3. Product Info : If your prices are competitive, then including the price in the end of the title is very effective for searchers to pick the best deal directly from the search page. If your products are "Big Brand" and have a well known or searched model, SKU or MPN then include it for specific and high converting searches. Do not include your own product ID or stock number as its clearly not search able.
4. Call to Action : Your products should contain a short and relevant call to action. Adding phrases like "Free Shipping", "Guaranteed" or even things like "Eco Friendly" are great for a call to action. In lieu of these types of action phrases, phrases like "Buy Now" or "Online Ordering" are good too.
5. Ordering : The most important items are first and less important are last. The search engines read left to right also. So the product name is going to be first... then moving right the information is less important. See example below.

Apple iPod Touch 8GB MP3 Player $229.00 MB528LLA - Free Shipping

The point here is not only to deliver highly relevant title to searcher and search engines alike, but also to choose your searches better.

A great example of this is to search for "how to buy ipod apps", this is an information seeking query.... Not a good bet for a conversion. So titles like "How to Buy iPod Apps" may bring some traffic they are not looking for your products. These titles are better suited for your information and help pages within your store.

For your product pages you want to use very descriptive information in your page and titles to grab searchers who are trying to buy... or researching prices and options.... Buyers. Your product page titles are the first step and a key element in creating a highly converting ecommerce website. If they land on the right page... they are simply that much closer to buying from you. The right kind of traffic makes all the difference.

"People often say that motivation doesn’t last, Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily."
– Zig Ziglar

Humanity is impatient and desires acknowledgment, we’re not used to delayed gratification. We want what we want – and we want it right now... Yesterday even!

There is an unfair proposition in online marketing and commerce as a whole. This inequality can be found in list building, blogging, search engine marketing and virtually every other area of establishing a web presence.

Delayed Gratification

For the website owner there is no such thing as instant gratification. You are not likely receive the feedback you’re hoping for initially and it can seem as if you are improving your website for only one person and quite frankly you’re getting tired of impressing yourself.

Many times it can seem like establishing your ecommerce store is a bit like being asked to fill the Grand Canyon with a teaspoon. You persevere, but it’s hard to see the results.

The silver lining is while you keep working to establish your web store and its position you are finding better ways to describe your products, better content/copy to present, and all of the rough edges are slowly getting smoothed out. Still you have great difficulty measuring your progress.

Ecommerce is really a thankless job that is best suited for individuals that understand the true virtue of patience and are willing to work grievously hard to envision a future when the present doesn’t look so great.

"The ability to discipline yourself to delay gratification in the short term in order to enjoy greater rewards in the long term is the indispensable pre-requisite for success"
– Brian Tracy

We live in a modern time when immediacy is so important to so many people, that a significant number of businesses come and go simply because the owner failed to understand that delayed gratification is the payoff for perseverance, hard work and patience.

In 2006 there were 671,800 new businesses created and 544,800 businesses closed according to the U.S. Small Business Administration.

We know that many of these small businesses did not have a clear understanding of the long term trench warfare that comes along with the territory of a new business start up.

This post is actually plotted to encourage you to think long term. Your ability, as a small business owner, to look further ahead than the next sale is crucial if you want to succeed.

Ecommerce can certainly provide a substantially improved market for your products, but you still must do the hard work, and put your best face forward even when your website statistics may seem as if your playing in an empty concert hall.

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts."
– Winston Churchill

Business Blogging

If you run a small company, like an ecommerce store, you may find that the world of blogging for business owners is a great tool that you want to make use of. Blogging is a excellent way to get the word out to consumers about your products or services, and it can even be surprisingly useful for inspiring employee participation. If you are looking for a way to take your business to the next level, consider what starting a business blog might be able to do for you and moreover for your store.

Blogging for business owners has a great deal in common with other types of blogging, but it has its own unique pitfalls and independent strengths. The key to having a successful business blog as a store owner is keeping your goals clear and solid at every step of your new blogging adventure. It can be all to easy to get sidetracked and even single tracked, especially if you are just learning about the exciting possibilities and benefits of blogging technology, but if you want your blog to succeed you need to stay focused and think about your visitors. Write up a detailed plan for how often you will post on your blog, how you will promote your blog and retain readers, whether you will feature photographs or video,  and then stick to it with the same kind of determination that you use to promote your store with other tools.

Blogging Block

Right out of the gate you will find yourself drawn in by that magic word : KEYWORD. While I can certainly tell you you need to blog about topics related to your website.... I really hope you will think about your visitors a great and less about the search engines. A blog can definitely enhance your website and its content, but spam is spam, even if you call it a blog. Sure, you can use your blog to promote sales and special offers.... But, these types of posts cannot be the meat and potatoes of your blog if you are going to be a success. Blog about niche related topics, tips and useful advise, so that your visitors have a reason to share your blog with others and return.

Setting a schedule for posting and sticking to it is every bit as important as the content you post. Do overdo yourself and attempt to blog everyday... I did this for a year and was so burned out I then went 3 months without a post, which basically destroyed the fruit of my years worth of all out effort. The key is consistency... Blogging or adding any content to your website on a regular basis will bring the search engines back more often and raise your index rank to boot. Once again, however, this has to be a sustained effort to be successful.

Stuck? Now idea what to blog about? The best cure for bloggers block is reading. Reading about topics related to your business will give you ideas for your own topics and expand you own knowledge as well. The last bit of advise is really something very close to my heart.... BE YOURSELF! If you blog reads like a dictionary or phone book visitors will bounce like a super ball right out of your site, never to return. Write with some passion and with some approachability and you can be a great success blogging for your store.

So you want to be a Shop Owner Series Conclusion

By this point your new ecommerce store is in the final development stages and you will soon be able to add products and begin to sell your products. No doubt this is an exciting prospect, but the final development stages and adding your products and categories is by far the most crucial piece of any e-commerce store's development.  The decisions you make now regarding the category structure, navigation and layout tweaking for your online store can easily make or break any shopping cart project's success.

Lets get started with adding products and categories.  Whether you or a store development company is adding your products and categories to your store matters little... There are some extremely important decisions to be made in categorization and product grouping.  The biggest problem with this organizational stage of development is the "lack of forgiveness" for mistakes.  You see, once your category structure in laid out and indexed by the search engines, you really do NOT want to change the structure.  Not only do changes of this magnitude cause "flux" for your site's search rank in Google, but MANY times changing a product category, name or group will cause the page's url to change.  This can be VERY bad, especially on a large scale and can cause your site to be temporarily pulled from Google's index or sandboxed.  This sandboxing period in which Google attempts to digest your content and determine if it is trusted can last a very long time. The longest sandboxing I have seen was 90 days.

About the sandbox: While in the sandbox, all or some, of your store's pages will be pulled from Google's index.  This "Sandbox effect" seems to be occurring less and less, but for new and low authority site's the danger still exists. They are not only not search-able, but not in the index at all.  Large scale content and page changes can easily cause this and there is no clear way to remedy it.  The length of time in the sandbox is directly related to many factors within Google's ranking algorithm.  I believe the most weighted ranking conditions are related to the site's index score and TrustRank.  In a nutshell, does Google trust your site?

If you happen to get yourself sandboxed, again little can be done but wait.  However, you might build some strong, organic, one way links to the sandboxed pages.  Build and submit a new sitemap to Google and check that you have good PCI compliance type metrics in place, such as privacy page and a proper SSL.  If you are not accepting credit cards, shame on you, but... You do not need an SSL.  However, IF you are going to use one, DO NOT use a crappy shared SSL... This only hurts you in the long run.  Many times, shoppers are presented with the broken lock or a pop up regarding your SSL, which genuinely disrupts that shopper's desire to checkout... No SSL would be better, as at least they are not alerted to the site's inadequacies.

So while naming your products, sorting the category structure and making url re-writing and dynamic content choices... Please make well thought out choices from the beginning to avoid headaches later.  Some quick notes to consider when setting up product page titles and navigation....

1. Do not include YOUR product number in your product titles and urls, as this is garbage content for the search engines and has ZERO search volume.
2. Do not include the price in your urls and product titles... While this may have its merits, the ability for it to bite you in the ass is far greater as search engines don't update the search results as quickly as you would like and for many days/weeks searchers will get the wrong price in the search results.  Lets just say for example your distributor raised your prices 5% and you will have to obviously follow suit... Hopefully you have a nice administration tool like quick updates to make this change site wide, so you make the change easily.... But you have now changed every single product page title for your entire site!  See Google flux and sandbox above!
3. Try to keep your product purchase or add to cart page within 3 clicks of your main page.  Now, shopping cart software has really evolved in this area, and I will update this long time rule of thumb to say.... Keep your buy or add to cart page within 3 clicks of its landing page.  So what I mean is, gadget 3 shares many attributes and information in common with gadgets 1, 2, and 4, so they will ideally have a sub-category page which has great content to promote all 4 gadgets in the group.  Very likely, since this content is specifically targeted for gadgets 1-4, searches will be presented the sub-category page and are not likely to draw your main page as its content for gadgets 1-4, as it is far broader.
4. Kill the next button! This is really simple stupid, but shoppers are not going to click through a broad category page after page using the "Next" button.  If you CANNOT get the product for a category or sub-category on one presentation page, then break them in to subcategories as shoppers just DO NOT click through page after page of broad category content searching for their widget!
5. As we mentioned before use good, logical navigation to your products. This is often a big boo-boo area for new shop owners as well, they tend to either over categorize or use category and navigation language that only they understand. Unless you plan to do the shopping for your customers use language that is common, easy to understand and logical in your navigation.  Best practice here is, if a 12 year old can understand the navigation then you're good... If not, back to the drawing board.
6. Take care not to disrupt your menu style with excessively long category names that cause the line to drop down or hang off the edge of the menu.  Remember... Confused, lost and frustrated shoppers do not buy things often.

While your new store may be small now, you must leave yourself room to grow and add additional products in your navigation and category structure now... or pay with a headache later. Just like any other business, to get big you must think big! Couple of notes below from my buddy Tim Nash after his read of this post....

1. Never use a "under construction" or "coming soon" page on a live site.  Just don't.
2. A newsletter or email list on your site can help you promote your site better and Google likes the fact that you are providing an opportunity for users to interact.

Before you launch your new online store I want you to click through your product pages and checkout process quite a few times and get a feel for your site's flow.  Ideally, you will either employ or invite some others to do so as well.  This is called usability testing and can open your eyes to issues and problems in your store, you would have never identified otherwise.  When choosing testers, try to pick a few different statistical groups to really get a full understanding.  A woman, a man, a 12 year old, another business owner, your buddy who just learned how to turn on his PC and an older adult is a nice combination for a test group. Assign them a product to buy and develop a list of questions to ask them AFTER their visit, things like...

1. How did you locate the product?
2. Did the pages load fast enough?
3. Do you like the colors?
4. Was there enough product information?
5. Did you find the add to cart button quickly and easily?
6. Was the checkout fast and easy?
7. Did you receive your order confirmation and receipt emails?

These things and more will really help you drill down in to your site's usability and more importantly its ability to convert shoppers to sales.

When you are getting close to your launch date you must start thinking about how you will promote your new store initially.  Many avenues can be very effective and will not only help your store gain popularity, but help Google to find and index it as well.

1. If you have an email list of previous customers, send them an invitation with a coupon and solicit their feedback.
2. Have a marketing company or you yourself do a nice "Grand Opening" type press release.
3. Have a blogging friend or related company blog about your store opening.
4. List your store with the local directories for Google, MSN and Yahoo.
5. List your store with free business directories.
6. Write an article about one of your products or services and submit it to article directories with a link back to your store.
7. Submit your products to Google Shopping, which is free.
8. Submit a coupon to some free coupon portals.

Are you curious about where to find free product listing, coupon directories and local business listing opportunities? I will be sending our "start up" list of these promotional opportunities to all of our Zen Cart Tips & Tricks newsletter subscribers on Friday August 22cnd... So drop your email address in the newsletter box in the right column to get your free copy as well!

Good luck with your new store, and remember, any successful business requires hard work and dedication!