E-Commerce for All

Are you feeling that “spring is coming” bug? Well, rightfully so, because right now is the time to plan for your spring marketing and tidy up a bit from the winter sales.

Most ecommerce stores have some season trending. This is very unique to both the store and the product line. So a store selling green widgets can be expected to trend sales in a similar manner to another shop selling green widgets… But not exactly, as they are many additional metrics that influence one’s sales.

So you should be planning for your spring and early summer products, marketing and trends now… So that you are prepared for this period in your business. Even especially if traditionally spring is a low volume period for sales.

Here is a checklist of sorts to help you get started for planning any marketing period, including this spring.

Trending: Unless you site is brand new, you should have some sales and traffic data that you can use to trend or predict the data for the upcoming period. I tend to concentrate on sales and traffic. I use both as they can be very unrelated for some websites. There are clearly some periods where even if the traffic is there, conversions are down… So to properly trend our potential for this upcoming period we should use both. You may even have other metrics such as, bounce, average order or similar that are specifically a target for your store.

Gathering the data is the easiest part, as you should be using a proper analytical stat program to record your data. We will use Google Anayltics for our example, as it is very popular.

When gathering your data, we are looking for specific trends within the matching period from previous years to predict, affect and produce a proper marketing plan for the upcoming period. So login to Google Analytics and lets get to work.

So we will pull data for all of March, April, May and June to cover our bases and provide some overlap. You will want to pull at least on year, more if you have them. I would not be concerned with using more than 3 years as things in your business and on the web change very quickly and it’s not likely to be very relevant any longer.

The example store I am using had a 2009 average daily visits of 279 uniques a day. There conversion rate for the year was 3.87%. You can see by the graph that holiday traffic is a crucial part of this store’s success and that spring is rather soft by comparison. You can also see that our spring period it right at or just a bit above average for them.

2009 Unique Visits

We can clearly see from this data, that traffic could be improved for this period…. Especially because they have a genuine promotable product line for spring sales. Now let’s have a look at conversions in relationship with this traffic… Do they convert well in this period?

2009 Conversions

We can see that last year, while traffic was average, they converted pretty well the end part of spring. looks very much like March should be our focus area.

Next you will determine your trend. You can use data from previous tears to do this… But if you lack that data no worries, this old restaurant manager has the equation to get you close.

Obviously, any data you do have is clearly relevant… But let’s say you have little or none. To determine your current rate of growth in both of these metrics we will poll the last 4 months. This is a weighted process with the greatest weight on the most recent data.

This applies to any metric. Gather the data for these metrics for Nov 2009, Dec 2009, Jan 2010 and Feb 2010.

We will start with March’s data from last year 8,043 unique visits and a conversion rate of 3.13%.

• Nov 2009 8,789 & 4.85%
• Dec 2009 14634 & 4.5%
• Jan 2010 7,604 & 3.67%
• Feb 2010 6,395 & 3.52%

For this purpose, with holiday data so much higher we will exclude Nov & Dec, unless we have 2008 numbers… Which we do. Nov 2008 7,419 & 3.18%, Dec 2008 8,861 & 4.00%, Jan 2009 6,146 & 2.99% and Feb 2009 5,742 & 3.22%.

Here is the math:

The math is easier than it looks….

Step 1: YOY growth, which is simply current year minus previous year.

Step 2: Trend. Like I said we will weight this for the most current monthly data. So 100% being the whole, we will use 12.5% from Nov & Dec, 25% from Jan and the remaining 50% from most current Feb. Something like this:

• 1 part : Nov. 18.49% plus Dec. 65.15% = 83.64 divided by 2 = 41.82%
• 1 part: Jan. = 23.72%
• 1 part: Feb. =11.37%
• 1 part: Feb. =11.37%

= The whole (88.28) divided by 4 = (22.07%) Current Trend

Last year March (8043) apply trend 22.07% = (1775 growth) This year March forecast (9818) unique visits… Into 318 average daily visits.

Check our math:

Last year average daily visits March = 260

This year forecast = 318

% of predicted growth = 22.3%

**Note that rounding changes these just a hair, but not to worry this should be pretty reliable data.

So this “math” can be applied to the entire period as a whole, or each month individually computed. The point here is to have an idea of what to expect, AND and basis to measure the effectiveness of your marketing this spring. For example if you did nothing last spring, and you know (above) what to expect if you do nothing this spring… Then you have a pretty good benchmark to measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign this spring.

admin E-Commerce Marketing, Small Business

Ecommerce Blogging

The need for “fresh” content has sent many shop owners looking for a blog. We have built many WordPress Blogs for shop owners in the last few months…. shop owners who realize the need to deliver content in a more effective manner. So today I want to give you some tips for looking at your planned or existing ecommerce blog.

First off, no offense meant to other blogging software… But I highly recommend WordPress. The features, speed and ease of use is the perfect match for most shop owner’s needs. Add the awesome widgets and other tools to take full advantage of your content for social media, and you have the perfect application for your online store’s blog.

Caution number 1…. I do NOT recommend that you host your blog anywhere else except your OWN DOMAIN. Something store.com/blog is perfect! Subdomains are redundant and unnecessary as well… They are in fact viewed as folders by Google and not a separate site anyhow. Host your own blog as the content is far more valuable to your business than any link from it hosted elsewhere.

Caution number 2…. I do NOT recommend using a module to integrate your WordPress within Zen Cart. Fact is you lose a bunch of WordPress ability and worse the issues caused by the integrations.

I agree that you want your blog consistently branded to look like your shop’s pages, but the level of skill needed to create a good looking, branded WordPress theme is pretty low as far a templating software applications goes.

Here is an example we did recently for a Zen Cart owner to port his offsite blog content in to his own site http://www.horseprerace.com/blog/. Notice that while it’s a blog the navigation on both the store and blog are linked to each other and it’s consistently branded (styled).

Caution number 3…. Do not build a blog unless you have something useful to post. Things like articles about your products alone will not fit the bill. You have to create content that is useful and searchable. A great example is another customer we built a branded blog for, Silver and Pewter Gifts. This Valentine’s Day post is excellent, and EXACTLY the type of content you will need to attract readers, searches and backlinks!

Creating valuable and unique content for your website is a big commitment…. with big rewards. The most effective thing you can do it create 1-5 brand new pages with great content on your site weekly. Google especially respects the frequency of the content and rewards you in rank and crawl rate increase.

But how will you write all of that content? Well, to be honest… you don’t have to write it all.

You can hire a writer to create content on the topics you supply. Make sure to check their copy here so you know it is unique and not copied. Content that has been duplicated… just doesn’t rank well.

You can solicit guest bloggers… Employees, distributors, high school kids… you name it. Find people who are passionate about your website’s theme and let them express themselves. You will find that many more are interested than you think…. AND guest bloggers are a great way to help to promote your blog as well.

You can buy private label articles related to your content needs…. BUT these articles, unless unique will need to be rewritten to remove the duplicate content. However, they are excellent inspiration for the new writer and provide a nice framework for the post.

You can write great blog posts yourself. Just jump in. There are ton’s of great resources availiable to help you get started. Check some of these out:

• Writing great content http://www.problogger.net/how-to-write-great-blog-content/
• What makes great blog writing http://writetodone.com/2008/01/10/what-makes-great-blogwriting/
• One of my all time favorites… Writing great blog headlines/titles http://www.copyblogger.com/10-sure-fire-headline-formulas-that-work/

Some things I would like to add….

Blog with your own voice, words from you with your passion and emotion will be the most effective content and serve to build your readership as well.

Write your posts in 2 steps… If you are like me the ideas are just swimming around in my head and I can’t even type fast enough to get them all down. So when I finish fishing my head for ideas… I have to reorder, restructure and polish the gibberish I have pounded out on my keyboard. I am am really so bad that I will generally have 3 to 4 sloppy copies before I am done… My brain is much faster than my fingers. Read every post in preview view all the way through at least twice before you embarrass yourself by publishing poorly written or unprofessional content.

Lastly… NEVER leave a user comment unanswered. NEVER

admin E-Commerce Marketing, E-Commerce SEO

Everyday I preach the benefits of using natural text within your site’s pages. Aside from the fact that most shop owners will inevitably spam if they dwell to deeply on keywords, it really works. I can give you tons of examples why, but we will cover just a few metrics today.

First and foremost, using natural text helps to grab customers more and high school report researchers less. For example, I was speaking with a customer today who sells engraved silver and pewter gifts. We were making a plan of attack for next year. The primary concern for this plan is to better target his Jefferson cups. While he is on page one for Jefferson cups, he is number 10.

So if you search Google for Jefferson cups, you will see that these very historical cups have many informational pages indexed and presented for this query. My point is, that the search rank for Jefferson cups matters little as these are not shoppers…. So if I was looking to buy one of these I would and most other searchers would use longer and more targeted queries.

• Buy Jefferson Cup
• Engraved Jefferson Cup
• Jefferson cups for gifts
• Pewter Jefferson cup

These are just a few examples of how one may search when the target is a purchase and not just information searching.

These longtail searches are more easily converted and easily targeted by using the naturally related words associated with the products and services in the product’s page copy. Not spam, just high usability and proper search-ability.

Traffic is traffic you may say…. But it doesn’t make it true. Fact is that ecommerce stores are designed to sell, therefore attracting customers is clearly the first order of business. Most information seekers will not be converted in to a sale… They just found the wrong site for the information they were seeking… Additionally, the likelihood that they will return someday to purchase because they remembered the site is store address is slim to none.

Why do you suppose users are searching with longer queries than say 5 years ago?

It’s really not that complicated. The many millions of unsuccessful searches have trained searchers to use longer queries to better target their search results. This isn’t the only thing searchers have been trained to do either. Another huge change is that searchers will read scan the text at the top of the page’s main content container for about 15 seconds upon arriving on a site. Not images… Not videos…. TEXT.

Searchers do this for a very clear and understandable reason… They are trying to very quickly determine if this page is relative to their search. Makes perfect sense… who wants to spend 10 minutes on a page that isn’t what we were searching for?

If I told you that less than 48% of all Google US searches were 2 words or less, would you believe me?

It’s true, fact is that the majority of Google searchers use 3 words or more in their query. In fact I would bet anyone that repeat searches are double and about 80% or better.

Longer Search Query User Data

Source: Experian Hitwise

The need for helpful, descriptive and natural text on your store’s page cannot be understated. Your shoppers need this text to help them find you, identify your page as a good result and better navigate your site.

Melanie E-Commerce SEO

We very frequently do site reports for ecommerce stores and while we see a host of SEO issues and other problems in these sites, there is one problem that will create checkout abandonment like no other….. Have you seen this in your store?

This page contains both secure and nonsecure items. Do you want to display the nonsecure items?

This error is an error referring to an unsecured element within your store’s secured pages…. This is generally going to be most damaging in Internet Explorer which presents the pop up warning shown below.

This page contains both secure and nonsecure items. Do you want to display the nonsecure items

While FireFox and other browsers indeed note this same error… The delivery method is far less daunting. Most recently W3SCHOOLS presented browser usage stats indicating that while FireFox usage is clearly on the rise, over 39% of users still use a version of Internet Explorer.

The greatest issue with this checkout error is that many webmasters miss it. I would comfortably say that most site owners will be using FireFox or another more capable web browser…. So many times this error goes completely unnoticed. Add the fact that shoppers using other browsers will likely miss the very subtle errors delivered by FireFox and similar and still checkout…. Essentially making this the “hidden” error so to speak. It’s tough to see the error in your stats and such as many other shoppers will checkout completely oblivious of the error.

This error is really a simple matter of a unsecured element attempting to be displayed on a SSL/secured page. In truth the problem is that the unsecured element causes the connection to be only partially encrypted with your SSL.

The easiest way to check if your online store has this error is to open it up in IE and go to a checkout or other secured page. Note that checking your main page or other page which is not intended to be secure will likely present a false positive for the error… If for no other reason than the base url being http:

Commonly we see this error caused by images. Images displayed from another website (hot linked) must be either using a secured https: url or you must download them and display them from your own site. Even your own images can present this error if the are using an absolute link which is not secured (http://domain.com/images/image.jpg). These image issues are quickly remedied by changing the link to a relative path (images/image.jpg). If for some reason your web hosting or you have issues with being able to code your image sources in this way you can also try the fix below.

<img src=”//www.domain.com/images/image.jpg” alt=”" />

The second most common time we see this error is running scripts. Let me start by noting that *most scripts have no place on your checkout pages… Checkout pages should be designed “in a tunnel”, most effectively they should be quite simple and completely without distractions which prevent checkout.

For example, we see shop owners with this error caused by a social media button.. Honestly, do you really want anyone to bookmark your checkout? In any case, we also see this in shopping feed button image scripts and even the Google Analytics script as well.

To fix this, any script which is calling out to display an element in the secured pages must also be secured. Scripts for buttons and such will need to have these elements provided from a secured site or removed from checkout. While many of these third party scripts will not outright offer you a secured script, they may have one which you can use by altering the http:// links to be https://… If no SSL is present then you will have to remove these scripts from checkout pages.

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”https://somescript.com/js/widget.js>

Google Analytics is a much simpler fix, as Google provides a properly secured script. To fix this you have only to grab the correct version of the script from Google and replace it.

The hardest part is determining which or what element is causing the issue. Most commonly it will be an image, so searching the source of the page for something like src=”http:// will grab image source and some scripts and other elements as well. Note that you will want to check the <head> of the page as well…. CSS stylesheets and scripts in the head must be secured as well.

Avoid this bit of checkout suicide and check your cart… It only takes a moment and can change your business dramatically. While it may be on your tongue begging to be said that IE is a pain… Realize that for your shoppers unsecured items on these page’s endanger their privacy and security of their online transaction.

Melanie Checkout Improvement