Archive for the ‘Ecommerce’ Category

Great Methods to Boost Your Sites Profile

Friday, March 5th, 2010

Whether it’s for an ecommerce site or any other, it’s vital to get your name out there. There was a time when businesses got promoted by word of mouth. It still holds true for websites, word of mouth is a great provider for business, but in this case word of mouth most often refers to people posting on forums or from websites linking to you. However getting this to happen requires some work and you can’t simply rely on them coming to you. Here we provide a variety of seller utilised methods for getting your name out there to the right people.

Blog

Blogging is a great way to boost awareness of your business. Firstly it can enhance the profile of your website within Google’s search engine but it can also help bring people to your site in a new way. If you write blog articles regularly which are relevant to your business then you’re providing an alternative point of access for your site. Furthermore, people looking for information on your industry or product will find it very helpful, and who do you think they will look to when it comes time to buy? The website that speaks like an authority in their industry.

Analyse Data

If you don’t have analytics installed on your site, get it. It is an invaluable tool for analysing your sites data and it won’t cost you a thing. It provides you with all the info you will need to understand how users are interacting with your site. Through this you can determine your sites strong points as well as any short comings, this will allow you to make the relevant changes to maximise its potential. Among a multitude of other features you will also find you can track your goal conversions (most often sales) and pinpoint your target market. As a result you will know how to get your site out to the right people.

Social Media

A fairly modern method of site promotion, the effects are currently difficult to measure. However, if you consider that you are promoting to the millions of twitter users then you start to see the potential. By posting tweets related to and answering questions about your industry you can build up a reputation and some followers and hopefully direct some of that back to your site.

PPC

One of the most direct ways of advertising your site is to use a Pay-per-Click campaign. Although there will be some costs involved the rewards can easily outweigh this if it is applied properly. The result is that you will receive adverts listed at the top of relevant searches and pay an amount each time someone clicks through to your site. The end result being, that for a small cost you can get your site a great deal more exposure without extensive SEO.

As an expert on money transfer services, Martin Able knows the best methods for maintaining secure and efficient online credit card processing.

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Top Tools for Making and Keeping Your Site Successful

Friday, January 8th, 2010

With any website there are a multitude of hurdles to get over to get the website up and running. The process of laying down a design for a website and getting development underway can be a somewhat arduous procedure. However, particularly for an ecommerce site, the work does not end there.

Once a site is up and running it is vital to keep it in perfect working order as the alternative is to attract few new clients or start losing the clients you have. Ecommerce is a fickle business and in order to stay on top, promote yourself and most importantly turn a profit, it’s imperative that you take any advantage you can get. Fortunately there are a massive selection of tools available that provide assistance in monitoring and optimising your site. Here are a few of the more vital ones at your disposal. (Fortunately, some of them are free!)

Keyword Analysis Tools

Keyword analysis plays a major part in the search engine optimisation of your site. Good use of keywords will allow you to funnel more specific traffic to your site, filtering out the most likely buyers from the browsers. By determining the right kinds of keywords you can determine what kind of competition you’re up against for search terms and which search terms can separate your site from the herd. Fortunately there are a multitude of keyword tools available on the web. Some of the top ones are Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery and Adwords Keyword Tool. The former two offer more features but a have a paid subscription while the Adwords Keyword Tool is free.

PPC

Pay-per-click campaigns can form the backbone of your websites promotion. Some sites sell advertising space, however the most prominent way to run PPC is through a dedicated service such as Google Adwords, Microsoft AdCenter and Yahoo’s Search Marketing. These major search engine providers run advertising through their own search engines as well as websites who have opted into the program. These services assist you in quickly and easily creating your advert, choosing your keywords, setting your budget and deciding where to display. Alternatively you can turn a profit yourself by renting advertising space on your own site. Just make sure that you don’t allow adverts for your direct rivals!

Website Optimizer

Website optimizer is a free tool from Google that allows you to optimise and tweak your web pages more efficiently. It is important to not only maintain your site but try to constantly improve it. Website optimizer allows you to run two versions of the same page simultaneously by alternating them between users. That is to say that you can compare the success of two variations of one page to determine which is the most successful. Through this, your site can be constantly running comparisons and therefore be ever adapting and improving.

Analytics

Analytics is possibly the most vital tool you can employ to manage your site. It allows you view in-depth statistics on how users are interacting with your site. Through this you can determine which parts of your site are letting you down, which products are drawing the most attention and how people are finding your site among a multitude of other features. You can find out about setting up an analytics account in one of our previous articles as well as several others that provide more in depth discussion of how to utilise analytics for optimising content and optimising for your clientele.

With the use of these tools you will find keeping your site in prime working order a far less laborious process. Furthermore you will be able to make improvements that will help bring more traffic to your site and hopefully generate more sales!

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Displaying and Sorting Your Items for Maximum Sales Impact

Monday, December 21st, 2009

Aside from the obvious functional elements that a good ecommerce site needs it also has to be visually appealing. Furthermore, the visual and layout options of your products must be helpful and easy for your customers to use. If a site appears disorganised and provides too much information contrary to the sites purpose then it will bemuse customers and few will stick around to browse your site further or make a purchase.

While you will want your site to have its own unique feel and style, it is important to follow a few important standards when organising your product search. These can vastly improve a sites quality in the eyes of the visitor and potentially bring in a greater number of sales. Internet shoppers are a very different creature from your common high street shopper. The major difference is that while high street shoppers set out to make purchases, a large percentage of online shoppers are simply browsing and, as a result, are more fickle. This means they are easily put off by poor product layout and a lack of product filtering.

Precise navigation

Navigation is key in so much that if a user can’t find what they want they’re not going to be buying it. It’s imperative that when setting up your product databases you take into consideration how related products will be browsed and what grouping each product is most suited to. Furthermore, each product group must be relevant and you must also consider how sub genres could be applied. A TV for example would fall under the category TV’s with possible sub categories of LCD > Sony > Bravia. If your categories are too broad then a user will struggle to find what they’re looking for amid a mass of irrelevant products.

Provide Search Bar

In the same vein as anchor link navigation it is standard practice now that a user can browse a site using a search box. This is extremely useful as it allows a user to bypass the whole system of links and just look directly for a specific item. However equally as common as search boxes are faults within search boxes, too often users type in the name of a specific item and are returned an assortment of completely irrelevant items. It is essential to set a complex system of filters for your search box so that it is not too broad as this will return to many unrelated items. On the other hand, one that is too strict will be too harsh with user queries and often return nothing.

Refining search options for customer ease of use

There are a variety of other key features that any good ecommerce site should provide to allow easier browsing. When a customer is looking at a selection of items they should be provided with substantial details of the items in question, such as an image (of course), availability, cost and savings, colours and sizes. You want to provide the user with as much information about the product as you can in the small area available. It is often useful to have a feature available that will output the product in greater detail (perhaps a 3D viewer). Features of this sort are more difficult to set up but are massively beneficial in improving the user experience.

It is also critical to allow filtering and sorting of products. These features are vitally important as they allow the customer to be more specific about what they want. Customers should be able to filter products by a variety of features such as size and brand in order to narrow their search accordingly. Sorting should allow the user to put these items in order by price (high-low/low-high), best selling, user ratings, etc. Filtering should always be available on an ecommerce site and is a reasonably easy process to setup.

The point is that you are trying to make the experience for the user as simple as possible. Most important to note is that the user wants to browse the site their way. In order to allow this you must make the browsing of the site precise without making its navigation and filtering methods too rigid.

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Discover How E-Commerce Tracking can Help You Increase Your Websites Profitability

Thursday, November 19th, 2009
E-Commerce Tracking

E-Commerce Tracking

Previously I have discussed the enormous benefits that come from using Google Analytics to monitor statistics on your website, and in particular why tracking your goal conversions is vital.  In this article I am going to look a little more in depth at how you can track not only goal conversions but goal values allowing you to analyse in detail exactly how much revenue traffic sources,  your online advertising campaigns and keyphrases are bringing to your business.

If you have been following this blog I’m sure you will already have set up Google Analytics and added goal conversion tracking.  But if not that will be your first step to implementing a full e-commerce tracking solution.  Once your analytics account is fully set up you will need to ensure that Google is aware that your website is an e-commerce retailer.  To do this choose to “Edit Profile Information” in the analytics settings and ensure that the “Yes, an E-Commerce Site” radio button is highlighted.

You will also need to add a few simple lines of code to the receipt page on your website.  Google provide this code in their online help centre (located here) and it can be copied from there directly into your receipt page.

This code will inject some additional information into the data that is transferred to Google Analytics.  This includes information on both the transaction (for example the transaction ID, total sale value, shipping costs, and the city, state and country that the transaction was generated in).  In addition to the transaction data the e-commerce tracking code also send data specific to each item that was purchased in the transaction.  This includes the transaction ID (in order to track which transaction the item is related to), the product name, the category, the quantity ordered and the price of each unit.

As you can imagine this extra data provides huge scope for further reporting and analysis within Google Analytics.  While knowing which keyphrases are driving the most traffic and which are converting the most often is undoubtedly vital information it is even more important to know how much revenue they generate;  20 conversions on a product with very low profit margins for example may prove less useful to your business than one transaction on a product that is hugely profitable.

For most business owners profit margins form the bottom line, and the only way to accurately know how much profit is being generated from online marketing is to employ an e-commerce tracking system.

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How and Why Your Website Should Track Goal Conversions

Monday, November 9th, 2009

In the last post I explained how to set up Google Analytics and use it to monitor a variety of useful statistics on your website and its visitors.  Today I am going to take a more in depth look at one of the most important, and useful, tools that Google Analytics provides its users:  goal conversion tracking.
Goal conversion tracking is a powerful resource for webmasters to have at their disposal as it allows them to track visitors’ progress through the site and identify both areas that appear to present visitors with problems and those that are working smoothly.  This information can be used to improve the problem areas; hopefully meaning that more visitors will successfully complete the goal.
A goal can be a variety of different things depending on the type of website and what they want to get out of their visitors.  For e-commerce websites the most common goal will be creating a sale, but sometimes it might also be desirable to track other things, such as when visitors sign up to a newsletter or fill out a contact form.

Setting Up Goal Conversions

Setting up goal conversion tracking in Google Analytics is actually a fairly straightforward process and the first step is to decide what the goal funnel is for each goal that you want to track.  The goal funnel is the route that a visitor must follow in order to successfully complete the goal.  In some instances there will simply be one step but the majority will require the visitor passing through a series of steps before the goal is complete; this series of steps is the goal funnel.  If, for example, the goal you are creating is to track sales that are made the funnel will likely involve adding a product to the basket, entering shipping information, entering payment details then confirming the purchase.
After spending time using your website to decide what the goal funnel you wish to track is you will need to configure the goal settings in Google Analytics.  To do this select to edit your profile and then click edit in the Conversion Goals and Funnel section.  Here you will need to set the goal to active and enter the final URL that, when displayed, will indicate the goal has been completed.
Finally you will need to define the goal funnel, to do this navigate to the Define Funnel section and enter the series of steps that you decided each user will need to progress through to complete the goal.

Analysing Goal Performance

After setting up a new goal conversion you will need to wait for a while (how long will depend on how much traffic your site generates) to allow data to accrue.  Once the data has built up log into Google Analytics and select to view the Funnel Visualisation Report in the Goals section.
This report will give you a visual representation of the funnel and explain how many people progress to each step and how many leave without progressing to the next.  Using this data will allow you to discover which points in the process you visitors are leaving, therefore highlighting which pages you need to work on in order to retain the visitors’ interests. For example if  85% of people who start the process progress to the payment page but only 20% complete the purchase there is a clear problem with the payment gateway page.  Perhaps you will need to consider adding more payment options or ensuring that visitors are aware your site is secure and their details are protected in order to try and decrease the number of people that desert their purchase at this point..

Tracking goal conversions should be a vital part of every website; in particular e-commerce websites where tracking sales is necessary in analysing how traffic flows through the site and how to generate a greater number of sales.

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How to Raise Your Customers Confidence in Your Brand

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

credit card

As I mentioned in my introductory blog post one of the major hurdles that online retailers (particularly those who are starting up an entirely new brand) will face is in gaining the trust of their potential customers.  Online shoppers are inherently suspicious due to the potential for credit card fraud that the internet provides, and in order to prove successful in the marketplace it is imperative that the retailer gains the customer’s trust.  In this article I’m going to look into a few ways that you can tweak your website to help demonstrate to potential customers that you are a trustworthy online business.

Allow Customer Interaction

One of the best ways to persuade new customers that your company is reputable is to allow customers to leave feedback, testimonials and comments on your website.  Although this isn’t ideal for brand new companies (who don’t already have customers regularly visiting their website) it becomes increasingly valuable as time goes on and should be implemented as soon as possible.
Many online businesses avoid allowing customer feedback as there is the potential for negative comments; I feel that this is a mistake however.  Most customers are aware that even at the greatest company something can occasionally go wrong and, instead of removing/censoring negative feedback, responding to it in a calm and mature fashion can actually positively reflect on your business.

reviews

Provide Extensive Contact Information

One thing that can put customers off a website is if there is no easy way to contact the company directly.  Alongside the standard email address or contact form (which many consumers view as impersonal) you should also provide a phone number.  Nowadays you can also offer customers the ability to contact you either via a live webchat or through skype.  The easier that a customer feels it will be to get in contact with you should the need arise the more confidence they are likely to have in your brand.

Offer Guarantees

One way for new companies to inspire trust in their services is to offer guarantees.  One good example is the online games retailer shopto.net who guarantees to get new games to customers by release day or they will offer a discount coupon for their next purchase.  This demonstrates to consumers that the company places trust in their packaging, dispatch and delivery system and in turn inspires confidence from them.

Don’t be Afraid to Boast

Where possible you should keep a section on your website devoted to your brand in the press.  If any articles are published about your company, or if you are given any accolades, mention it on the site.  If customers see positive feedback for your company that originates from sources they deem reputable it will definitely reflect positively on your brand.

Emphasise Security

The most important place that you need to ensure a customers trust is during the checkout process.  Online shoppers are often wary of parting with their credit/debit card information over the internet so it is absolutely vital that your payment gateway is completely secure and that this is explained to the customer.  The best approach when setting up a checkout is to employ a recognised payment service provider; if a customer recognises the payment service provider as reputable their level of trust in the business will automatically improve and they will feel far more comfortable making the purchase.

Hopefully these tips will help you to improve your website and increase your sales.  What is it that can ruin your trust in an online retailer?  Do you have any advice that you would offer to businesses beginning to venture online?

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Discover How to Avoid Losing Sales by Optimising Your Online Checkout.

Friday, October 9th, 2009

One of the biggest differences between high street shoppers and those shopping online is in the level of involvement.  While a number of people will walk around a town centre simply browsing stores without actually buying anything, the majority of people will have made the trip for a reason and be planning to make purchases.

Conversely many people find themselves browsing through products online simply out of boredom and/or convenience.  This lack of involvement means that online shoppers typically decide to buy products impulsively, and if something isn’t quite right they can change their mind back just as quickly.  Due to this it is absolutely imperative for an online business to make the process and seamless as possible for the shoppers in order to maximise the number of potential clients that convert into customers. (more…)

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5 Tips For Companies Launching E-Commerce Websites

Monday, October 5th, 2009

Here at Lancore our aim is to help e-commerce businesses get ahead in the extremely competitive online marketplace.  Through our professional payment gateways service we have helped dozens of companies to streamline their websites and have seen some incredible results.

However there is a lot more to success in the e-commerce world than being equipped with the best systems; and that’s why we decided to launch this blog.  Through the posts that we add here we hope to give you advice, pointers and tips on ways you can really optimise your website to unleash its true potential.  For this first post I am going to start out by offering five pieces of advice that every new e-commerce start-up should take into consideration.

1)  Consumer Trust

When setting up an online business you should bear in mind that many potential consumers are still very wary of supplying their details over the internet.  Whether or not visitors perceive your website to be trustworthy is something that will make or break your online business.  Implementing a sleek professional design and using a reputable payment service provider really are the best way to do this.  If the consumer doesn’t have faith in the websites integrity when they are asked for payment details they are very likely to leave.

2)  Monitoring Statistics

This is something that will merit an in depth look in a later post, but for the moment it is worth noting how important installing analytics software on your website is.  One of the major benefits of working online is the ease that an enormous amount of stats can be tracked with very little effort, allowing you to analyse the information and constantly make improvements to your site.

3)  Keep It Simple

When setting up their first online business many people fail to take into account how much more fickle online shoppers are when compared to their high-street equivalents. It is absolutely vital to make the process as easy as possible for the consumer.  Many websites make the mistake of hiding very basic information such as shipping costs or return policies which can instantly turn away online consumers who are very unlikely to work to uncover information.

4)  Information Overload

Like analytics the structure of product, and category pages, are something that will merit an in depth look later; when setting up the business though it is imperative that you consider what information is best for the potential customer.  Many websites make the mistake of offering either a very brief description which doesn’t give visitors enough information to tempt them into a purchase, or they offer huge quantities of technical information, which although informative, many customers don’t bother to reach.

The key here is to strike a balance by offering a detailed description of the product backed up by a list of technical specifications in case they are required.  Additionally, providing reviews can be extremely beneficial; many visitors place a great deal more trust in reviews from other buyers than the opinions of the website selling the product.

5)  Remember to advertise

Another common mistake that many online start-up companies make is failing to acknowledge the importance of online marketing.  Unlike a high street store an online shop is essentially invisible until some promotional work is done on it, people don’t tend to accidently stumble upon online stores instead they are referred there by search engines, adverts or possibly friends/family.

In a later post I will look into the benefits of some online marketing techniques (such as search engine optimisation and pay per click advertising) but for now it is worth bearing in mind not to spend your entire budget on the website leaving you with no funds to promote it.

I hope that you found this advice helpful and will return to check out our upcoming posts which will go into greater detail about how you can run a successful business online.  In the meantime if you have any tips or advice on e-commerce why not leave a comment below.

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