E-Commerce for All

In our everyday dealings with our own customers, we instruct, get asked and generally can talk all day about proper content for one’s online store. This has always been a tough thing to properly execute on the part of the shop owner.

We spend our days telling shop owners to write natural language describing their products to their customers, just as they would for example on the phone with a shopper. To this end, we get endless questions about keywords, density, traffic and more….. End result, most shop owners write spam. Why do you suppose that is?

Simple really, its quite hard not to grab a cookie while your hand is in the jar. Shop owners as a whole have a very challenging time being objective in their pursuit for great search rank. Honestly, shop owners who know little or nothing about SEO inevitably write better rankable content. Why?

Simple, shop owner’s who are not trying to learn SEO… cannot be lured to the dark side and when they write, they write for their customers. Fact is, these shop owners are on a whole more successful with their content as well. Their shoppers are more engaged, they trust the store…. and most importantly, they convert better.

We have said to many a client after finishing up an SEO My Zen Cart package, that they needed only to create great content regularly and build links going forward to be successful. You see, once duplication issues and other foundation optimization values are handled…. It’s really just that. Keep up with regular content (Google likes to know the lights are on AND someone is home) and build new inbound links.

If shop owners can manage these 2 things faithfully… Even if many foundation optimization issues exist, they can in fact be more successful.

Let’s theorize for a moment, my desk phone rings… One the other end is a shop owner getting about 100 unique visits a day and converting at say 1.2%. This shop owner hardly ever tends to his content and has probably NEVER even been all the way through his own checkout.

What would your first steps be?

Many will say… Build links, write articles, you need a press release… No you need pay per click.

None of the above is the answer, for those who were playing along. While all of those things in themselves can bring traffic and rank (more traffic), not a damn one of those things will help you make the sale.

So we have this shop, making 1 or 2 sales a day… willing to spend a wad of cash to bring in say another 100 visits so they can then do 3 or 4 sales a day! Isn’t that kinda like putting the cart before the horse?

My answer would be to do a proper usability study of the website, optimize the checkout and trust factors on site and segment their Analytics data to troubleshoot bottlenecks and troublesome areas. Cost, maybe $400… Reward, now you can take those same 100 original unique visitors a day and instead make 4 to 5 sales a day to fund your then convertible traffic campaign! So, small investment, return immediate… and 75% more sales!

Sometimes, we just have to pull our heads out of our little web bubble and use them for the greater good =-)

Melanie E-Commerce SEO

Article Writing

One way of promoting your web store and products can be achieved for free. As an additional bonus, this “free” marketing method can boost your store’s backlinks too.

Article marketing is one of the easiest ways to promote your website in order to generate traffic and increase your earnings.

How does article marketing work?

Write articles relating to your shop and products and submit them to “free content” submission sites. This is easy to do, takes little time and can increase your website traffic, sales and of course, your income.

How can article writing boost traffic and income?

The article on the free content site contains a link to your own website. Readers, after reading your articles, may choose to click on the link and pay you an unexpected visit. Having them on the free content sites is also making these articles available to other webmasters who may wish to publish that article on their site.

If they do pick up your article, your article will include a link back to your online store. And anyone who reads the article on that site can still click on the link to visit your site.

As the list of your published articles grow larger, and more and more of them are appearing on different websites, the total number of links to your site increases also. Major search engines are placing a lot of significance on incoming links to your website so they can determine the importance and popularity of your website.

The more incoming links your store has, the more importance search engines attaches to it. This will then increase your store’s placement in the organic search results.

Promoting a products or services, the links that your articles have achieved will mean more potential and targeted customers for you. Even if visitors who only browse through, you never know if they might be in need of what you are offering in the future.

Search engines do not just index the websites, they also index quality content published articles. They also index any article that is written about your own website’s topic. So once someone searches for that same topic, the list of results will have your site or may even show the articles that you have written.

And to think, no effort on your part aside from writing a decent article was used to bring them to your site. Just your published articles and the search engines.

It is no wonder why many shop owners are suddenly reviving their old writing styles and taking time to write more articles about their site than doing other means of promotion.

Getting their website known is easier if they have articles increasing their links and traffic and making it accessible for visitors searching the internet. Since many people are now taking their buying needs online, having your site on the search engines through your articles is one way of letting them know about you and your business.

The good thing with article marketing is that you can write about things that people would want to know about. This can be achieved in the lightest mood but professional manner, with a little not-so-obvious sales pitch added.

If you think about it, only a few minutes of your time is spent on writing one article and submitting to free content websites. In the shortest span of time also, those are distributed to more sites than you can think of. Even before you know what is happening, you are getting more visitors than you previously had.

If you think you are wasting your time writing these content articles, fast forward to the time when you will see them printed and wide-spread on the internet. Not to mention the sudden attention and interest that people are giving your shop and your products or services.

Try writing some niche related articles and you will be assured of the sudden surge in site traffic, link popularity and interest. Before you know it, you will be doubling and even tripling your sales.

Nothing like getting sales for something you got for free.

Melanie E-Commerce Marketing

Online Retail

When you get right down to it the fusion of the web and business is a bold lesson in abstract thought.

Think about your grandparents and the work they did. Their job could have been on the farm, in the factory, in a store or in the work of their hands.

If your grandparents were business owners most of their customers were met face to face. Customers may have gone to church with your grandparents or attended high school sports events and concerts. They knew each other and that made marketing much less taxing and far more trusting.

Advertising was often in the form of an print ad in a school program or a booster club for the airing of the local high school football games. The advertising wasn’t always essential to the success they had in their business, it was often used as a way to support the local reputation associated with their business.

Your grandparents knew the other business owners in town and often worked together to keep the local spirit of a town alive.

As larger retail businesses began to paint the landscape these small businesses (like your grandparents) often died when no one was really paying any attention. The vast number of empty storefronts in rural America pay tribute to the radical change in the 21st century retail market.

Why has online business created the need for abstract thinking?

Internet stores are composed of graphics and text… Not friends and family. These shopping carts are developed with software and not brick, mortar, glass and wood. These online businesses can operate 24 hours a day including holidays and the owner does not have to be present for a customer to make a purchase.

The business owner cannot see the site’s visitors or customers, they can simply track the number of visitors and some analytical data.

It is this uncommon sense of intangibility that may makes online stores seem more like some elaborate computer game and far less like traditional business.

In order for some businesses to move in to the Internet marketplace there was a need to hire younger more computer savvy employees who were schooled with an insatiable appetite to learn and utilize the skills associated with online marketing and business.

Early on many business owners did not believe the web was even worth their while and ecommerce was never going to be successful. Many of those business owners sat back as time passed, the Internet grew and online sales improved, equaled and then surpassed what the business had previously been able to do with a local brick and mortar shop.

Many brave businessmen were early pioneers in ecommerce, and while they may not have understood everything there was to know about ecommerce, the results were crystal clear – ecommerce was a force much more powerful than they would have ever thought and was the road to continued success and the future of business. Many business owners who could not break out of their brick and mortar box have since had to sell that brick and mortar business.

As time passes more and more online business owners have accepted their new role as Internet marketer, dream maker and web design professional. They have grown accustom to this brave new world where faces are not associated with the sale, where customers probably aren’t your neighbor down the street and where the online store doors are always open.

Online business defies the notion of a simple local marketplace by tapping into something more global and more deliverable. Many small shops around the world have become staging areas for a worldwide customer base. Niche products once lost in a sea of big retail shops can now be the primary thrust of a successful online company instead of just one of many diversified products one might have found in an old general store.

Online business has challenged our way of thinking and changed the way the world does business.

Melanie Small Business

Eye tracking? Heard of that? Know how it affects you and your store’s sales?

Eye Tracking

Eye tracking is defined as  research to track where a user’s eyes look while reading, then analyze the data to reveal behavioral patterns. In essence eye tracking is a core part of usability & accessibility.

So we know that you can drive thousands of visitors to your website a day and not make a dime…. These issues related to the usability of your store are the most common reasons for poor conversions and sales.

We are going to specifically go over some big issues for shop owners in the realm of eye tracking today. I promise to revisit the full usability side when I finish Steve Krug’s, “Don’t Make Me Think” 2cnd Edition.

Recent behavioral eye tracking studies have identified some very useful metrics regarding eye tracking and how user’s navigate your online store. We learn more and more everyday about the user interaction and emotional responses to our content and pages. What I’m covering here are just some basic, fairly unconsidered facts, to help you gain some insight in to your shoppers habits and needs.

Eye Tracking Tips for Ecommerce

• Heading Tags – I have said this before and I’ll say it again… Visitors read text first upon hitting your page about 1 second is spent scanning for text to identify the page as relevant or irrelevant to the visitor’s query or need. Yes, that’s right you have about 1 second to get them interested! Heading tags are a perfect way to grab the attention of these text scanning machines we call visitors. Keep your heading tags, short, logical and highly relevant to engage shoppers more quickly.
• Eye Movement Patterns – Your visitors will averagely read/scan your pages in a particular order (shown below from Eyetrack III). Notice where the user starts his quest to determine if your page is useful… Top Left. Ask any search marketing professional and they will tell you this is one of the most highly effective advertisement areas of a page. While I certainly don’t want to see you with PPC ads in your store, utilizing this space properly is key to visitor engagement.

Basic Eye Tracking Path of Average Visitors

• People scan the first few words of a paragraph and then quickly make a decision to read it or move one. Back to high school with this one. Remember that English teacher teaching you to use a power sentence to start your paragraphs. Creative and visual writing skills have never been more important…. The first sentence is the hook.
• Keep it short! We know from that same high school English teacher that a paragraph is a container for a single thought. In keeping with that shorter paragraphs actually are less daunting and encourage better reading.
• People naturally seem to migrate top and left when seeking navigation. Right hand navigation has its place indeed, many blog surfers have come to expect right hand navigation from the reading they do… This has not yet, however, transferred in to the general reading and shopping ranks. Topside navigation while interestingly more effective according to the study can be a real nightmare for shoppers to navigate in ecommerce applications. In essence the top navigation is only going to work for your simpler menu options… Not 50 categories and children fly outs. So, standard left hand navigation is still going to be more effective and engaging in your online store.
• Categories are the key to every store’s navigation, but also the biggest area of confusion and bottlenecks for shoppers as well. On one hand we know that the fewest number of clicks to get to paying you is most effective, we also know that logical and clearly categorized navigation will yield a better average order value. The biggest issue is when  a shopper is forced to browse through page after page of product index. Most times these products, say numbering 80 can be just 4 pages. However, we also know that the click through drops about 50% from page 1 to page 2 and by the time we get to page 4 only about 3% of the shoppers remain… The rest bailed. So shorter product indexes, ideally one page with your most popular products first will keep the shopper more engaged and on track.
• This I found most interesting, smaller fonts seem to engage readers. So those of you running those 14px fonts are actually encouraging scanning as opposed to reading! The standard is a 10px font, and I would recommend never larger than a 12px. If your visitor profile demands it, then get a text sizer tool for your pages.
• Textual ads within your store will be far more effective than graphics. Aside from the entire banner blindness issue, people are just more willing to click text ads. So just having a neat and crisp “Free Shipping” heading tag will do the trick nicely.
• I have been telling shop owners about the power of color psychology for a while now….. But here you go. In this study a HUGE contrasting red font containing information was completely missed 86% of the users tracked! BAM@!
• How about product pricing? This can really be a heated topic…. But here we see the nuts and bolts of how those numbers came to be .99 and what they should more effectively be .47 or .49 to catch price scanning eyes.

The basic point of this is to establish one thing in your mind… You have no idea what your shoppers need until you ask them. Doing a simple usability study with friends will reveal problems you would have easily missed.

Never stop improving your store, solicit the feedback of your shoppers. Most importantly whether you pay for a usability study, conduct a small usability study on your own or ask for feedback… YOU MUST LISTEN!

Remember, it’s not about what you think… It’s about making a living.

Melanie E-Commerce Design, E-Commerce Marketing