E-Commerce for All

Starting an online store has become the popular thing to do recently, however, most new shop owners are misguided, make rash decisions and lack the understanding and research necessary to be successful.  This series of 5 posts will hopefully serve as a guide to developing your own shopping cart website as painlessly and successfully as possible.  Lets get on with it…

So you want to be a Shop Owner Part 1

The first logical decision needed is a solid determination of your company’s need, ability and budget to build a web store.  There are many factors to consider…

1. Are your products really salable in a shopping cart environment?
2. Can you provide the stock and manpower necessary to fill orders from the web?
3. Does your business answer the phones for extended hours?
4. Can you afford the development and maintenance cost involved to develop and build a great online store?
5. Can you and your co-workers manage the high dedication and demand of a great shopping website?

Does your company have products that can be properly ordered online or are they far to complicated, perishable or fragile to make it a good shopping venue?  There are in fact many products, regardless of their great profitability are just NOT suited for a shopping cart format.  Sometimes a nice informative static site with great content and a strong funneling or flow control to generate email or phone leads is just the ticket!

E commerce  is short for electronic commerce, and it seems like everyone has or wants an online store. Online stores are popping up for all different products types of industries… Its really amazing what you can buy online these days!  Many consumer based products are a  good line to sell on an e-commerce shop: all types of clothes, household gadgets and decor, all kinds of supplies, lighting and electrical, pet supplies, consumer electronics, and even cookies. However, as I eluded to earlier… Not all products are at all suited for the web shopper.  Very high dollar purchases that buyers will want to test drive and overly complicated items with many  of options and information requirements just do not have the potential to convert shoppers in to sales.

#2 Can your business fill the web orders in the event you are successful… Or will shoppers just complain about your service and delivery.  You see, even if the store obtains only minimal sales you and your staff have got to plan to deliver the expected level of service for your company… Even on the web.

I have seen very highly organized companies hit the web and fall on their proverbial asses.  You must develop the proper integration and procedures to connect you cart to your existing business.  This is not an area to work around, the integration needs to be seamless.

Absolutely plan to extend your phone hours.  Just because your store is on the web does not mean shoppers don’t have questions and problems.  That lie perpetrated by many e-commerce schemes “Make money in your home just 2 hours a week and gross 100k”.  If that’s what you think… Then play the lottery your odds are better.  The simple fact is this…

One of the singular most important things you can do for your online store is define a clear easy to follow navigational structure. The benefits are really astounding. Today I will cover a few common mistakes, and some very easy and logical fixes. You will see that the results can come very quickly… So in a couple of days you will be able to tweak any obvious flow issues still existing or that you may have created.

First things first, if you are running a Flash or Java menu while they look cool, the search engine’s spiders cannot effectively follow the links out from them. You don’t necessarily have to get rid of them, just make some hard links with great anchor text somewhere, like in the footer.
The rule of thumb seems to be 3 clicks… Anything more than 3 clicks from your main page is going to have to have serious promotion and flow of it’s own to develop properly. People just don’t statistically click that far out without becoming sidetracked. So its just good practice to stay within 3 clicks when possible. I generally like to use a “landing” or “category” page type scenario from the main page, this helps your shoppers find the location in your store containing the most relevant information for what they are seeking. I would advise against tricking users in to clicking into areas, I really think if they click once and find what they thought they would…Then they are far more likely to click again.

Linking all of your products from your main page is not recommended. Google itself recommends less than 100 total URLs on any single page. Yes… Perhaps they should improve GoogleBot, but until then you want a good crawl. There is much navigational value in the “landing” page or “category” page setup, not to mention these types of pages will likely have higher Ad scores in your PPC (Pay per Click) campaigns as well. These “Category” pages which are likely linked from your main page navigational menu, act like little web stores all of their own. Give them rich textual content, unique Meta and title information and tight relevant content to reflect the category’s product line. You will start to see these pages ranking for their content without your main page and this is exactly what we want. A little on page attention and they will gather some organic backlinks for themselves too. If you really want to boost this process, submit these pages to some deep link directories for their page’s theme using concise yet keyword rich anchor text. Remember to vary the titles and descriptions a little to make your scope broader and more effective. Stay away from the reciprocals… Building links is hard work, why would you do the same work for less than full link value?

Another very serious consideration and issue with e-commerce platforms is the amount of products or listing in any given category. When you have too many products in a category and users are expected to click that next button 14 times you might as well just hang it up because they won’t!

So you have your store up and running and hopefully you are watching those conversions closely. Today, we are going to hit some not so blatant discrepancies about online conversions that you should know. I have said this before, but it bares repeating, every store is different. Even store with the exact same flow and product line will convert differently. So lets did in to some conversion dirt.

First of all, and certainly unnecessarily, lets define a conversion…

In marketing a conversion occurs when a prospective customer takes the marketer’s intended action. If the prospect has visited a marketer’s web site, the conversion action might be making an online purchase, or submitting a form to request additional information. The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take the conversion action.

So you see a conversion or the act of converting a visitor to an action, not just about a sale. It is in fact a general term referring to getting them to do what you want such as sign up for a newsletter or click an Ad even. Now lets dig in…

I really hope you are using a great Analytics program like Urchin or Google Analytics which tracks conversions (completed sales and funnels) for you. Without these types of analytical tools you are pretty much popping caps off in the dark. We will assume you are using Google Analytics for our purpose.

On your main account stats page, the “dashboard”, you have several statistical summary boxes. We are going to concentrate on your “Ecommerce Overview”. In this summary box within your dashboard you get very basic conversion information. While I would never argue that your overall conversion rate is important, its just not enough information to grow your business. So click the “view report” link and lets dig deeper.

Before we go any further I want to debunk a very common misconception, something I hear far too often…

No, we always sell more beta widgets… That’s always been our top product. The alpha widgets just don’t sell, so lets concentrate on the beta widgets.

Personally, I really don’t care in the least “what you have always” sold more of historically. Have you considered the search rank, volume and potential sales of the other widgets? No, probably not. Here’s the thing, ALMOST 100% of the time when a customer tells me that, their lack of sales/conversions for the under performing widget is related to either their site or its lack of rank and therefore search phrase traffic. Only one time that I can remember was this actually related to a “bad” product. So throw everything you think about your products and whether you think they will sell out the window and rely on the data.

Ok, so we have or page one Ecommerce view up in Analytics. Some cool stuff here and some things I want you too look for…

1. In the top graph is about 30 days of conversions. The blue vertical line indicates the weekly separation, by default this is a Monday.

Very likely one of the most important decisions you will make in your store’s development is the selection of a domain name.  Your domain name will be your calling card, brand and synonym for your business name.  Defiantly not something to be taken lightly.

While I would advise against pumping your brand /company name in things like page titles, there is a very long reaching value to marketing your brand in your domain name.  While your brand name very likely does not carry any search volume or notoriety yet, you cannot exclude your brand from your development.  If you for example go with a keyword rich domain name and fail to register your brand of company domain names and derivatives you may find yourself with a traffic sucker in the future.  Certainly for the traffic sucker or domain flipper there are valid reasons for registering domain names like your business name.  How would it suit you to have a spammy Ads page at a domain name which seemingly represents your company?  This WILL happen if you do not register them.

Since this is such a big decision we have some pointers below to help you make a solid domain name choice for your store.

1. If the .com and .net versions cannot both be registered to you then move to another name.
2. If you are going with a keyword rich domain name… Dashes are NOT required most of the time.  Google and other search engines will pull or stem these keywords from other connecting letters as long as there is enough volume in the keyword’s search volume.  If you want to know for example, whether Google stems your keywords simply search for that keyword by itself and look to see that Google has bolded it in urls or domain names.  If you find it anywhere in the url in the search query, then Google knows this word.
3. Plan on registering a few domain names.  Misspellings, product based, brand/company names, and your second choice/runner up domain name as well.  This is like an insurance policy for your company.
4. Domain names as a rule are now required to be 3 or more characters.
5. Skip the dashes and underlines.
6. Shorter is better and snappy is awesome!
7. The terminology should be natural.  If you are looking to register “store4u”, then you would also seek to register and redirect “storeforyou”, “store4you”, and “storeforu” in both the .net and .com versions.  Again, do not become easy pickens’ for traffic suckers.
8. Avoid “my”, “your”, etc and other pronoun based domain names suggested by tools.  These will only send traffic to the name that does not use the pronoun as users will frequently forget these.
9. Register your main name (at least this one) for more than one year, as the search engines tend to favor the investment with a small bit of trust score.
10. If you are in the US your REALLY need to have the .com, it is the most common and recognized tld extension.
11. Avoid very hard to spell or commonly misspelled words, unless you register those misspelling also.

Domains that are easy to remember will fare better in all of your marketing campaigns.  If a shopper is using email or a social media type venue to convey your “Great” store to another…