Archive for the ‘Ecommerce’ Category

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Has There Ever Been a Better Time to Start Doing Business Online?

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

Other than during the initial cyber bubble in the 90’s, no.

So far in 2011 UK consumers have spent a whopping £10 billion online. The figures of approximately £4.9 billion spent in February alone are up 20% on the same month in 2010. This is a strong indicator for anyone who had been thinking about moving their business online that now is the time to get on with it.

The figures for e-retailers have never been rosier with the equivalent of £79 per person being spent in the UK online in February and with a wealth of assistance available to all kinds of businesses to make the most of what they have to offer by utilising online opportunities. But why is it that consumers are now spending more online than ever before?

Trust

One of the major factors that have given online shopping such a boost is that people trust online stores more now. With more investment in user experience design by websites people find them easier to use. With more recognisable security measures people feel safer, and just through peoples gradual increase in trust as their orders have made it to their homes unhindered and because they haven’t seen their credit card details sold to third parties. In fact the reliability of payment gateways for e-commerce sites and evolving money transfer services mean that the security of online purchasing has dramatically improved in recent years. Trust really is a huge factor and if you can get your customers to trust your site, you will have won half the battle.

Strong Adoption

The UK stands out when compared to our neighbours France and Germany as we spend more online than they do combined and 10x as much as people spend online in Italy and Spain. The UK has evidently adopted online retail with a passion and thanks to strong links in other media, in-store promotions and investment in internet marketing the trend looks set to continue. If you get your own online store set up, you can be certain that there are customers out there who will pay you a visit if you have your marketing in place.

Cheaper

Of course one of the big reasons why people shop online more now than ever before is the fact that it is simply cheaper. With less over heads an online store can charge less for the same items that a high street store would have to charge. Plus with most major supermarkets offering a free home delivery service people can strap on their lazy slippers and save money on petrol, bus fares and shoe leather by not having to go to the shops at all.

Your online future is bright so what are you waiting for?

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Would A Tablet PC Make Any Difference To Your Productivity?

Thursday, March 24th, 2011

Since the launch of the iPad in 2010 it has met a generally favourable response from users, reviewers and businesses. Time Magazine even listed it in their top 50 best inventions of the year 2010. There are now many copies (though some say they had the idea first) of this product which certainly shows that it is being bought in high numbers. But aside from it being a great invention, how can it help your or your business’ productivity in the real world?

The reason the iPad (and now iPad2) has been so popular in the real world is partly just because it is an entirely new type of device: like a huge smartphone or a stripped down laptop and people like to own the latest gadgets. But some people have argued though that there is no benefit of this product over either of the others.

Bad for Productivity

One of the major things it has been criticised for is its lack of connectivity options. While it is certainly capable of Wi-Fi data sharing, it lacks a USB port, an Ethernet connection or a memory card slot. This will seriously dent productivity for businesses that need to be able to share information quickly and don’t have a Wi-Fi connection to hand. You don’t want to be ready to seal a deal but be unable to take the data onto your computer because your client only has a USB stick. For this reason you should be wary about adopting iPads until they have better connectivity.

Also, some consider tablet PCs to be a bit ‘show-offy’ which may alienate you in certain situations.

Good for Productivity

Having said this, having an iPad is certainly a boon in the style stakes in some areas of business. If you whip out a sleek gadget like that at a meeting you can be certain of impressing some people, maybe convincing some people to make a deal which is good for business if not good for productivity. Many a payment service provider has seen changes in how customers interact with online stores and increasing visits through smartphones and tablet PC’s means many are looking at new ways to enhance payment gateways into this blossoming market.

The iPad has found itself most productive in areas where people need to be able to use PC functions, when a whole laptop would get in the way. For example, doctors have found that using a tablet is great for using in patient exams as it prevents them from creating a barrier between them and the patient and can be used to quickly show images. More specifically for businesses, some have found that it cuts down on paperwork and has increased productivity through the tablets ease of use, its portability and because it is very lightweight.

So will a tablet make a difference to your productivity? The short answer is that it depends on what you intend to use it for, e.g. if you need to connect stuff: no. If you want to move faster: yes. Think hard before you invest in this trendy device.

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Who has the Next Big Mobile App for Your Business?

Thursday, March 24th, 2011

Do you have a Twitter account for your business? Chances are that you probably do (if you don’t, you should) because you heard that along with other social media applications, For any business selling online, having a good payment service provider isn’t enough to get the profits flowing into your site. Twitter is a great way for you to interact directly with your customers and to show that your business is a forward thinking tech savvy entity.

Now what you may not know is that Twitter launched all the way back in 2007 and had its big break at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive festival in Texas, a hot pot of opportunity for entrepreneurial developers. They lined up along with all the other hopeful tech start-ups praying that some influential people would see the genius behind their idea. Luckily for them the right people did and started a wave of adoption for their app. Now every corporate hegemony, commercial franchise and corner shop is Twitting, Tweeting and Twooting to great effect every day.

So what is the next big mobile app?

Since Twitter has done so well on the back of this event it stands to reason that maybe the next big app will come out of the same event. Here are some of the names being hollered from the stands at this year’s SXSW:

Hashable – Digital networking tool

This networking tool is described as being the replacement for the business card. This application allows you to post, through a Twitter style sharing platform, everyone who you meet and are introduced to. You can check in with people, track your meetings and calls either publicly or privately. You can swap information just like swapping business cards using their email address or Twitter ID. Plus you can see who your friends are networking with to help expand your network.

This app if it is widely adopted could become very popular very quickly.

Scvngr – Don’t just check in – Interact with your customers in a new fun way

Scvngr (pronounced ‘scavenger’) is on the surface a lot like the check-in functions offered by Foursquare and Facebook, to let people know where you are. What Scvngr does is go a whole lot further. Not only does it allow you to check in to your location, it also offers a new level of interaction.

Let’s say you are a restaurant business and you have signed your business up to Scvngr. Your customer comes into your outlet and checks in. You then offer them things to do at this location. Quick fun things to do which they can complete in order to gain points that add up to a reward of something like a free drink or a discount or whatever you want to offer. All of the things they do are posted online and all improve the notoriety of your business.

Both of these apps are a hot tip for the future and by getting your business signed up soon will give you a good chance of taking advantage of their success and importantly boosting the payment processing capacity of your business.

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Is Your Smartphone A Good Inflation Indicator?

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

‘Inflation’ is basically the rise in prices of general goods and services over a set period of time. When inflation is said to be high, it means that everything you buy is generally more expensive than it was before. So let’s say you could buy a chocolate bar for £1 and then the price goes up to £1.10: that is when inflation has gone up, and your pound is still worth the same amount and no longer stretches to the price of a tasty snack.

The way the Office of National statistics works out the rate of inflation is by regularly compiling a rather large ‘basket’ of goods (650 items) which they consider to be those most commonly purchased by a ‘typical consumer’ and keeping track of how each ones price fluctuates. They use a big formula to come up with the annual percentage rate inflation which normally comes out at something like 3.2%, meaning that inflation has gone up that year. (Consumer price inflation is currently at 4%…in case you were wondering.)

What about my smartphone?

Yes the point is that smartphones and downloadable apps have now been added to this basket of goods and services, along with hair conditioner, dried fruit and MDF. While vending machine cigarettes, rose bushes and the price it costs to have your kitten sprayed at the vet, have all been removed. This means that your smartphone is now deemed to be one of the things a typical consumer buys and that their apps are also now such a common purchase that they get a place in this giant basket.

What you should take from this information is that if your business has not taken into account the importance of having a presence on smartphones in the shape of apps, you really should think about doing it now. The more powerful smartphones get, the more sophisticated apps are able to be, meaning that whatever your business there will be something you can offer in the shape of an app that will be of benefit to people. Some more complex apps can even allow your payment service provider to handle purchases and payment processing meaning there’s plenty of scope to make profit from smartphone apps.

Interestingly another thing that has been added to the basket is dating agency fees. This shows a trend that more people are using dating agencies than ever before. I guess this means that if you have a dating agency and you want to find some way to increase your clients, you should seriously consider getting an app made. With £400m a year spent on every item in the basket, you can be assured that you will find plenty of takers.

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What Fundamental Aspect of Your Website is Wrong?

Friday, March 11th, 2011

Website FixWhen a visitor or potential customer arrives at your website for the first time, they form an opinion of your site and your company as a whole in a few seconds. This means that you need to make sure that every element of your homepage (primarily) and all the deeper sections of your site are completely tailored to give your visitor the best emotional response and first impression. Think about the last time you arrived at a site that looked odd, was unappealing, and made you feel awkward in some way…did you stick around? I doubt it. You don’t want to be in their shoes.

One of the key elements that are so often overlooked by people designing their company website is the colour scheme. Every colour has an effect on the emotions of your visitor, which as we have learned, will have an overriding effect on their perception of your company and your brand. A common way to approach the design of a company website is to use the company brand colours. This could be a real problem if your company colours do not emotionally appeal to your web visitors. What you can get away with on a letter head may translate into a colour scheme that scares away online customers.

So what’s best for your website?

Business

With a business or corporate website you generally want to convey that your company is professional, trustworthy and indeed holds an element of power. To give this impression immediately to your visitors, the best colour to use is blue. Blue naturally produces a calming effect and is a common colour used by royalty. Incorporating blue as a major theme in your business website will help visitors see you as an intelligent authority figure, but if you have anything to do with food you may want to use it more sparingly as it acts as an appetite suppressant. This colour scheme coupled with a clear indication of secure payment gateways and professional money transfer services will show your company in a very professional and distinguished light.

E-commerce

When choosing colours for your website if you are basically an online shop, what colour you choose should be decided by what products you sell. For example, if you are selling products for children then you are best to base your colour scheme on red. This colour is proven to catch their eye, is cheerful, energetic and will provoke a positive emotional response. Use sparingly though as red can also be associated with danger.

Use this same theory to pick your colours appropriately and you should be able to get this fundamental element of your website right from the start. Your visitors will be appropriately emotionally charged and, in turn, be more likely to reach one of your websites goals i.e. a sign up or a purchase.

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UK Consumers Look to Online As the Economy Shrinks and Project Merlin Stinks

Thursday, March 3rd, 2011

Chained Up 10 Pound NotesTimes are tough for small businesses. Technically the economy has not literally shrunk, but the fact it stayed the same as it did for the previous quarter, a flat graph if you will, means that there was zero growth, which is as good as shrinkage. This has raised fears that despite some sectors showing signs of growth, overall we may be heading back for another round of recession.

Also Project Merlin, the agreement that banks will be lending billions of pounds to businesses, £76bn of which to small firms this year, seems as if it will not really help boost recovery that much as despite there being more money loaned, the cost of borrowing will remain too high for many small companies.

In light of this uncomfortable situation, many small firms are turning their attention to the internet to help them find alternative sales routes. The internet can offer small firms a way to encourage sales through a much cheaper form of advertising that will mean they can reduce their overheads as well as staff levels. This option is increasingly valuable as internet use is rapidly increasing around the world with the ease of developing a site and simple secure ways to handle payment processing. Websites are becoming smarter and more usable for the visitor and security overall is improving dramatically. With the assistance of a quality payment service provider a website can very rapidly start making sales and vitally become profitable online.

For those who may see some of that Project Merlin cash, choosing the internet as your major lead generation may mean that you can borrow less, reduce your borrowing costs and be a step ahead of your competitors in the online race for visitors.

Don’t forget your app!

One of the most important things you can do at the moment as you think about going online is to develop an app which you can offer to mobile customers. This is because the number of people who make purchases online via a smartphone is accelerating, and offering a user friendly app will make it easier for them to make the most of what you offer online. Apps have the advantage over mobile websites in that they can be downloaded to a smartphone and used even when the smartphone has no signal. Also, they can place an icon of your app on their home screen so that they see it every time they look at their phone.

Whatever your businesses relationship with the current economic situation is like, making a move to online would be a good move. Can you picture what your website will look like?

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How to Make an Effective Landing Page

Friday, January 28th, 2011

Landing Page SuccessEvery online business, if they are at all serious about making their website profitable, needs to be thinking about their visitors when they create landing pages. Landing pages are where your users arrive at your website – depending on where individual pages appear in search results, it could be one of a number of pages and not just your homepage. You can more accurately direct your visitors to particular landing pages by using search engine optimisation techniques.

Your landing page (or pages) is the most important page on your website as it is the first moment your visitor gets to see what you are like and first impressions really count online. If you don’t grab them with this page they can easily click away in a split second, never to return again, but if you do grab them, you at least have a chance of getting them to make a purchase. It takes a lot to get a customer from landing page to payment processing, but by putting your best foot forward at the start you multiply your chances exponentially.

Grab their Attention

First thing you need to do is grab their attention. You need to let them know instantly that they are on the right page for what they are looking for and why you are the best and they should stick around and use your services. Create a solid heading which is clear and eye catching that does this then use a sub heading to elaborate a bit more. Having a high quality image right next to or underneath your headings will help to catch the eye and (if the image is right) reinforce what your headings say. Follow this up with some nicely worded copy that offers a slightly more in depth explanation of what your site is for and how it can benefit the visitor.

Reassure your Visitor

If your visitor has stuck around long enough to find out that this site does what they you need it to, next you need to convince them that this is the best site for them to use for this service and that they can trust it. After all they may well have looked at a dozen other similar sites. You can do this by providing good testimonials on your landing page and following it up with security certificates that show your site is safe. You could also include some examples of popular products to try to spark your visitor’s interest.

Get them Moving

Final step: you now need to get your visitor moving forward onto a page with products that they can buy. You can do this by basically demanding that they click on something. By providing a clear, bold and brightly coloured button with an encouraging message on it, you should hopefully get a large portion of your visitors to take the next step into your site and to be on track to make a purchase and make a discernable boost to your internet merchant account.

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Get Ready For the Bounce Back After Catastrophic December Retail Figures

Thursday, January 27th, 2011

2011 Profit GrowthStatistics recently announced across the national press have shown just how disastrous both the coldest December in 100 years and the lingering atmosphere of the economic downturn has been for the UK retail sector.

In a depressing report the Office for National Statistics explains how retail sales volumes have overall dropped by 0.8% from November and how the regular December spike in spending basically didn’t happen this year. What’s more, there doesn’t seem to have been a rush by consumers to try and beat the VAT rise which many retailers had hoped would have filled a significant shortfall.

All sectors have been affected too including fuel, clothing, household goods and food so no matter what business you are in; the chances are you have not had a happy December. However, what traditionally happens after a big fall, is a big (or at least a significant) rise in sales, just because people tend to need stuff and will feel more inclined to spend their money when conditions change and retailers lower their prices to entice them back.

So what can you do to make the most of this situation?

Assuming you have a website already (if you don’t, stop reading now and go get one) there are a number of things you can do which will help you capture disaffected customers looking to spend without spending too much. Ensuring that your website has secure payment gateways provided by a respected payment service provider is also critical.

Improve PPC Budget

Pay per click (PPC) is a great way to target highly motivated customers in a place where you can appeal to their desires directly. Basically, paying for a link to appear at the top of search engine results pages for keyphrases which people will be typing in if they want your product cheaply will give you a greater chance of pulling in traffic than by many other means. By increasing your budget in this area you can make sure you are at the top. All you need to do is write an advert that appeals to tired consumers looking to start spending again and keep tweaking it until you get results.

Social Media

Social media is the modern day word-of-mouth, and word-of-mouth is an important way of getting your products out to the right people. By developing a social media marketing portfolio, including Twitter, Facebook etc, and by offering incentives, you can open up a large network of potential customers in a short space of time. Timing your incentive offers just right will help you to ride the wave of consumers flocking back to their traditional spending levels.

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Which Social Media Network Is Worth Tapping Into Most?

Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

Which Social Media SiteDid you know that social media locations have become the number one place for people to spend their time online? As people find staying in touch a more and more enjoyable experience and a better place to hang out than in front of the television most businesses have wised up, got themselves a website and payment gateways and started to try to build a social bridge to their customers.

Big companies will have the budgets to attack every social network they can find and draw all their customers on there too. But for a smaller company they may have a limited amount of money to spend on social marketing and may be forced to choose a couple, or even just one network to address.

Here is an outline of some of the big social networking sites and whether you should pick them as your social network of choice or not.

Twitter

Twitter is a micro blogging site that limits users to small amounts of text to make their point. While this may not sound like an ideal way to get your carefully worded marketing message across it has become a medium which holds a lot of weight. If you can get enough people following your twitter feed you will have a lot of people with eyeballs on your message that could potentially buy something or even send your message on to someone that they think will. In essence get the mob to do your marketing for you in a highly targeted way.

Facebook

Facebook is the biggest social network which has infiltrated the lives of billions and is a rapidly expanding place for businesses to meet face to face with their customers. The main problem Facebook faces is that people don’t really go on Facebook to buy things; they go on to hang out with friends. What you can do with Facebook is incorporate it into your website. Giving your visitors the chance to see what their friends think of your products at a glance may well sway their opinion. Plus, you can encourage people to become ‘friends’ with you on Facebook using incentive schemes that builds your network of followers and increases your chance of sales.

Google Me?

One massive company which has been dipping its toe in the social media waters for the last few years is Google. They have tried and failed before to launch social services but as yet they have not worked, allowing Facebook and Twitter to get where they are. However, if Google does succeed one day, their already established place as an organic and paid advertising medium may mean it will be the best network for you to be a part of.

Getting socially active with your business is reaching the stage where it is practically as important a prerequisite of being successful online as employing a good payment service provider. Basically get out there and get interacting with millions of potential customers. It only takes a few minutes.

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How Can You Help Reassure Customers While Using Your Ecommerce Store?

Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

Assuring CustomersSo you have built and launched your ecommerce store. You have perfected your product range and created an excellent website that gives them all the information they could want to know about each product with great pictures. You have spent money on search engine optimisation and pay per click campaigns and have a steady flow of motivated traffic arriving at your site every day. But, your sales from your website are still low and through analytics you can see that all but a few of your customers leave the site as soon as they get to the payment stage. What gives? Your prices are highly competitive.

The answer in this situation is usually something to do with how you reassure, or are failing to reassure, your customers once they have decided to make a purchase. Convincing a user to make the move to hit the ‘buy now’ button and start the payment process is the just the beginning. What you need to do is not leave their side until they confirm their details and leave your site.

You may find that at present your site abandons the user as soon as they start this process. Here is some things to include that should keep your customer reassured all the way to the final payment processing stage.

Give Them an Escape Route

Customers tend to be a bit skittish when it comes to parting with their cash and like to know that they can get back to the homepage or go back and look at the details of the product again just to make sure before they finally buy. Instead of locking them in an inescapable sales page, which will only make them more likely to leave and never come back, give them as much opportunity to go back and check things. You can do this with clear and obvious navigation or breadcrumbs so they can easily click back to see what they want.

All Information on One Page

Try to give your customer all the information they could want to know on one single page. This should include, all their charges including delivery and VAT etc, their delivery and charge address details, all the payment/card details, options to change all their details from the same page and anything else they might want to check or change. Doing this will not only reassure the customer but by keeping them on one page, they are less likely to get distracted and much less likely to terminate the sale.

Once you get these things sorted you should adequately reassure your users and see a significant reduction in the number of people leaving your site at the payment stage. Add this to an assured and secure payment service provider for your site and you’re on to a winner with customers.

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