E-Commerce for All

What is the purpose of your online store?

Let me guess… You want to spend hundreds of dollars on PPC and not convert the visitors? You want to build your traffic up so you can brag, then do things to prevent the shoppers from buying anything? Seriously, we all want to make money.

Business: A continuous and regular activity that has income or profit as its primary purpose.

Ok now we know why, but how on earth are we going to convince people to buy… Better question yet, convince shoppers to buy more, more often and more easily. The way I see things is this, shoppers have become “web experts” (at least they believe so). The average online shopper is in fact far less likely to be tricked or misled.

“It only takes on bad apple to spoil the bushel”. Fact is, as a very generalized whole, we the webmasters, shop owners and SEOs have brought this suspicious Internet surfer to their present un-trusting and un-loyal state. Lack of transparency, tricks and general shenanigans to take advantage of visitors has caused an Internet disease among web surfers. All the squeeze pages and spamming has honestly cast a shadow on all site owners in the eyes of the public. So how do you exclude yourself from this group?

There are some very specific techniques to improve your shopper’s trust, but generally speaking you only have to earn their trust… Hmmm just like any other business. Before you read on clear your mind of what everyone else does, what you used to do and most importantly put yourself in the shopper’s position.

1. Can customers easily find your contact information? Or do you look like your store is a scam? There is no valid reason in this age of technology for a shop not to display a contact number… Shoppers know this too.
2. Do you display “Trust Seals” yet fail to offer simple trust to your shoppers in return? This is simple, if you feel you need such symbols to elicit a visitors trust, then very obviously you have put a band aid on your trust issue and tried to take the easy way out. Seal or no seal if your store has less than honest elements shoppers will still find you unable to be trusted, seal or not.
3. Spam is a big one and in fact some of the spamming techniques used by site owners borders on criminal. How pissed is a shopper searching for “red blocks” and clicks in to your site to fine “blue blocks”… Oh yeah pissing off shoppers will convert them, right?
4. Are you one of those shop owners cross selling 16 unrelated widgets on every product page? Internet users are not only hip to this, but you come off like a car salesman in a brown plaid coat chasing them around the site.
5. Can shoppers find your products without have to click through 10 pages of what they don’t want? Keep you navigation within 3 clicks to product and sorted in a fashion shoppers can understand. TIP: shoppers are not search engines.
6. This one really get me… I will leave a store for this one.

Many seasoned shop owners are only too aware of the peaks and plummets in their sales volume with seasonal factors. To succeed you have to effectively make profitable use of peak sales seasons and improve off peak sales times. Today we will cover some great tips, plans and ideas for improving both peak and non-peak sales periods.

Let us concentrate on your peak sales season(s) first. You will find below that this is not only extremely important, but requires a great deal of preparation and planning as well.

1. Generally speaking, web traffic is highest will be winter months per region. The chart below indicates the amount of traffic percentage regionally for March, 2008. So the first thing you must do is determine where your traffic comes from.

   

2. Planning is everything! New products, good supply veins, navigation, conversion improvements, marketing, design and indeed, optimization also.
3. Re-designing your store is usually a very good move, as technology changes and better platforms and functions arise constantly. However, this should be TOTALLY completed 3 months before the arrival of your peak sales period… So you have ample time to test and complete usability studies.
4. Send out a marketing newsletter to previous customers, sorted by the shoppers during your peak season (if you can). Invite them back, offer them a special discount or sale item. Do this about 30 days before you begin to pick up in traffic and sales.
5. Get new products, no one can grow their rank and sales effectively without the addition of new content… Your content is products. Keep the new products relevant to your store, if you get too far away from your main product line it will only dilute your content. The best opportunities are usually items that compliment your existing inventory, like accessories and replacement parts.
6. Give your page titles and content a SEO freshen up. Are your page titles targeted and highly relevant? Do your pages have enough content to rank effectively with?
7. Test your PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns and tweak them well before you want them to perform in the peak season.
8. Answer the phone! Obviously, you should have a customer service number on your website… Staff it well for your upcoming peak sales. If you haven’t already, get a toll free number and post the hours you will answer customer service calls with the timezone.
9. Test your site and optimize your checkout, you only get one chance to make a first impression.
10. Pull your annual stats for the sales period and plan out your rate of sales increase. You see ideally, your sales are improving… So determine your rate of improvement and plot is against last years sales to determine about how busy you will be. Add 5 or 10% for good measure.
11. Call your suppliers and reps, let them know you expect a large increase in your sales and when. Sometimes you can even negotiate a better price with larger expected sales for a certain period. Make very certain they will be able to supply your site appropriately in the upcoming sales boost.
12. Offer free shipping, gift wrapping and other amenities to bring shoppers to your site… And hopefully share it with others also!
13. Deliver, deliver, deliver…

There are so many marketing opportunities available to shop owners, but none are as dependable and residual as your own local market. Have you even checked out the potential sales in your back yard? There is little doubt that the Internet provides a incomparable mass marketing opportunity, but these shoppers are rarely loyal to your site consistently. You see the mass shoppers on the Internet have so many choices, they are easily swayed from your shop’s search results over pennies. What value does a strong local marketing campaign offer your Internet business?

Referral sales convert higher and are more consistent than any other sales technique. Additionally, the local sales market is far more likely to deliver dependable residual sales. I am certainly not saying you should concentrate solely on your local market, but neglecting it is passing up a valuable sales opportunity.

What do you have to offer the local market? How about no shipping costs as they can pick their item. Pride is a big one, believe it or not many Americans would much rather do business with a local merchant over a larger faceless business. Many times shoppers will even pay more to shop locally.

There are some very specific optimization techniques to help your store better attract a local market as well as your www mass market. Very simply put, you can optimize your site for both, very easily.

1. Always display a toll free and a local phone number.
2. Use your address in your template pages.
3. Register your business with Yahoo Local Directory, Google Local Business Directory, and other local offerings. Most are free.
4. Offer local free pickup of purchases, or even deliver them yourself!
5. Link out to local attractions and community sites.
6. Advertise on local sites.
7. Offer a price break or coupons for local shoppers exclusively.

These are just a few great ways to better get your store noticed in web search by your local market. Do be afraid to think outside the box, the ONLY bad marketing idea is the one you don’t try. Some of the greatest marketing success stories of all time were expected to fail.

Local hands on type marketing can be very labor intensive, but I have some easy ways to get your name out there for little or no cost and very little work!

1. Get business cards, and not home printed card either. Put your picture and location on these cards, and spend the extra 5 bucks to include a local coupon or special deal on the back.
2. Ask businesses you normally patronize to display your cards… Hell, give then a link in return as it also benefits you. Do this right, buy some cardholders for .50c a piece and display your business in a professional light.
3. Leave a couple of cards on the hand dryer in the bathrooms you visit. Okay, I know this sounds crazy, but folks who find them assume you put them down to wash your hands and forgot them. Hmmmm, they were valuable enough for you to pick up, so they are given the impression that the cards were important to you…

Very often as we complete store reports and consult we find online stores that have made modifications and other development tasks which clearly inhibit the ability to gain the shoppers trust. You can pay thousands of dollars to develop an online store and get the very best SEO, but if your store does not enlist the shopper’s trust you are dead in the water.

Overall Internet users have become more sensitive and aware of the factors which are considered “trust” violations. Surfers are quite skilled in identifying a “bad site” and are reacting accordingly. No longer do droves of Internet users mindlessly click ads or provide personal information, those days are gone. We are in the dawn of a far more savvy Internet user.

Some mistakes we see are in fact very common and very out of date, others are just plain lack of foresight. Today we will cover some of the most common trust reducing metrics we have found in the stores we have analyzed. You may well know that we develop and optimize Zen Cart, so some factors will be directly related to the Zen Cart software, but most of these store trust issues are very common in other e-commerce platforms.

• If you are using a shared SSL or none at all, you are sending a message of distrust to your shoppers. Even full PayPal or other off site processing accounts should make use of a private SSL. Customers don’t even want to provide their email address without one. Honestly for the cost involved there is no valid reason not to use a proper secured protocol for your users.
• If you are using a private SSL, the battle does not stop there. Many times we visit a site and the secured pages include outside non-secure links or elements. Shoppers have no idea that these links or elements are generally just part of your template, and they don’t care either. They only know the lock is showing broken and they feel unprotected.
• Let shoppers know you have installed an SSL to protect their transaction and what to look for to assure it is working. This is really not necessary as most know already, but it sends the message that you personally have taken steps to protect them.
• Collect as little information as possible on checkout. Shoppers do not want to answer unrelated personal information questions. Questions of this nature only lead them to believe you are somehow hording and using their information for other means.
• Enhance your checkout with helpful tips and notes to let shoppers know where they are in the checkout process and that they are on track. This includes a clear shipping policy for rates and delivery. They should know their shipping choices in the very beginning of checkout, as sites like eBay and such have burned shoppers with inflated shipping charges and they are very wary if they do not know the shipping cost before the begin to checkout
• Send ALL customers a receipt from YOUR store’s domain email address and provide tracking or an update of shipment to EVERY customer without fail.