Mobile Commerce Research for Online Retailers

Keeping track of mobile trends, research and statistics gives small business ecommerce site owners a solid foundation to plan a mobile commerce strategy.  The following mobile commerce research and statistics are from trusted industry sources and experts in the field of mobile devices and electronic commerce.


Mobile Commerce Shopping Research & Statistics (2010 - 2011)

Mobile shopping research and statistics offers an in-depth look at mobile devices; including smartphones, iPads and tablets. With these facts and figures you can learn how consumers are using these mobile devices for online shopping-related activities.

The most common mobile shopping activity is researching products and comparing prices, which 15 percent of mobile phone owners now do every month.  (Source: Experian Simmons; 2011 Mobile Consumer Report)
48 percent of mobile owners surveyed had made a purchase via their mobile phone. Although mobile shopping was most popular with 18-34 year olds, more than one third of respondents aged 55+ also made a purchase via mobile. (Source: Lightspeed Research; Mobile Shopping Revolution)
Males 30-49 years-old tend to be the most active content consumers and mobile purchasers; men outspend women, with 31 percent having spent $499 or more through their mobile device in the last 12 months, versus 23 percent of women who did so. (Source: Adobe Systems, Omniture; The Adobe Mobile Experience Survey: What Users Want)
30 percent of tablet owners have used their device to shop online, while currently only 25 percent of smartphone owners have used their phone to do the same. (Source: eDigitalResearch; eCustomerServiceIndex)
In 2015, shoppers around the world are expected to spend about $119 billion on goods and services purchased via mobile phones. That number represents about 8 percent of the total ecommerce market.  (Source: ABI Research; Mobile Commerce Study)
In the United States, purchases attributed to mobile online shopping -- excluding travel -- grew from $396.3 million in 2008 to an impressive $1.4 billion in 2009. In 2010, mobile online shopping excluding travel in the U.S. had more than doubled again, to total more than $3.4 billion by year’s end. (Source: ABI Research; Mobile Commerce Study)
Apps and music are the most common purchases, followed by clothes and electronic books. (Source: Lightspeed Research UK; m-commerce prepared for Figaro Digital)
Consumer usage of mobile coupons will see users exceed 300 million globally by 2014. (Source: Juniper Research; Mobile Coupons & NFC Smart Posters)
The study of more than 1,400 consumers shows more than half of consumers use their smartphones to enhance their shopping experience, especially people under age 35. (Source: Chadwick Martin Bailey; How SmartphonesAre Changing the Retail Shopping Experience)
Retailers report that 21 percent of all mobile traffic comes from tablets; amazing considering the iPad was launched barely a year ago. (Source: Forrester Research; The State Of Retailing Online 2011: Marketing, Social, And Mobile)
Mobile Commerce Payments Research & Statistics (2010 - 2011)

Mobile payments (m-payments) are when consumers make a purchase using a mobile phone instead of using cash, credit card or debit. Types of mobile payments include direct billing, SMS transactions and mobile Web payments. These mobile commerce research and statistics will help you understand what’s happening in the mobile payment industry.

Worldwide mobile payment volume is forecast to total $86.1 billion, up 75.9 percent from a 2010 volume of $48.9 billion. (Source: Gartner Inc.; Market Trends: Mobile Payments Worldwide, 2011)
PayPal raised its 2011 Mobile Total Payments Volume (TPV) projections to $3 billion. (Source: PayPal Blog; PayPal Doubles Mobile Payments Predictions to $3 billion in 2011 by Laura Chambers)
Overall, mobile payment services are expected to reach $245b in value worldwide by 2014. At the same time, mobile money users are expected to total $340m, equivalent to 5 percent of global mobile subscribers. (Source: Ernst & Young; Opportunities for telcos in mobile money: 2011)
E-payments and m-payments collectively accounted for an estimated 22.5 billion transactions in 2010. E-payments (online payments for e-commerce activities) are expected to grow globally to 30.3 billion transactions from 17.9 (in 2010-13), while m-payments are expected to grow globally to 15.3 billion transactions from 4.6 billion in the same period.  (Source: Capgemini; World Payments Report 2011)
It is anticipated that this will begin to change in 2011 as the number of mobile payment users starts a significant run up from 116 million to over 375 million in 2015. (Source: In-Stat; Mobile Payments: Is the Market Ready?)
The potential for mobile payments is huge. Estimates for the volume of those transactions vary widely but share a consensus that mobile payments will see sizable growth this year and accelerate rapidly in 2012. (Source: eMarketer; Mobile Payments -- Moving Closer to a World Without Wallets)

Ecommerce - Boost Your Business ROI

Did you know that over 90% of all online orders are processed by credit cards and that web sites that offer customers the ability to pay with credit cards can achieve up to 300% more sales than those that do not?

It's a fact. Not only do more customers buy, statistics prove that customers actually buy more when given the option to pay with their credit card. Here are some recent trends that will reinforce the need to sell your product or service on the internet- if your business is not yet doing so:

-At the end of 2000, over 400 million people worldwide had Internet access. That number is expected to reach over 1 billion by the end of 2005!

-Almost 100 million people in the U.S. are now making a purchase after using the internet to conduct their research.

-U.S. Consumers spent a record $13.7 billion in online purchases during the 2003 holiday season. A follow-up study conducted jointly by Goldman Sachs, Harris Interactive and Nielsen/Net Ratings pegged sales during the 2004 holiday season at $23.2 billion, up 25% from the previous year. This comes at a time when traditional retail sales are growing in the low single digits.

-Forrester projects that total e-commerce sales in the U.S. will increase by approximately 20% per year, growing to $229 billion in 2008, making online retail transactions 10% of total U.S. retail sales by 2008.

In addition, in a survey conducted among more than 500 small business owners, the overwhelming majority indicated that they were either very satisfied or at least somewhat satisfied with their company's e-commerce return on investment
(ROI).

It's no wonder- when compared to traditional forms of direct marketing such as mail order catalogs, the cost of establishing and maintaining an e-commerce website is minimal. Additionally, new affordable, user-friendly storefront applications simplify the task of establishing and maintaining a professional e-commerce website. It is now affordable and doable- even for the novice small business owner- to convert their brick-and-mortar operation into a click-and-mortar operation and triple their revenues in a very short period of time!

What’s more, if your company sells products to consumers or businesses and you don't have a fully automated e-commerce website, your business is simply not operating at its full potential and you're sending customers to your competition!

It is no longer a luxury for the small to mid-sized retailer to have an e-commerce enabled site-but a necessity to stay competitive in the marketplace.

Blogs, Podcasting and RSS | eCommerce Impact

Blogs, Podcasting, and RSS Overview You probably have heard all these terms an awful lot lately. You wonder about what these technologies do? What value to they provide? If you aren't up to speed on these new applications and how they are impacting online interactions then read this brief further. Will these technologies impact you? To be honest, it's too early to tell - but awareness will drive innovation and maybe your team will develop an idea/application that utilizes these technologies to enhance a portion of your eCommerce business.

Here's the rundown: Blogs What they are: Probably the most well known of the three, blogs allow everyday people to quickly develop a website presence and distribute any type of content that they desire. Look at the metrics relating to blog penetration. * 7% of the 120 million U.S. adults who use the internet say they have created a blog or web-based diary. That represents more than 8 million people. * 27% of internet users say they read blogs. * Only 38% of all internet users know what a blog is. The rest are not sure what the term "blog" means. What a "blog" actually means is weblog. In basic terminology, it's the ability for someone to update web content directly though the Internet, using a web browser as the publishing mechanism. This makes the creation of content easy and many people are using blogs to establish authority sites within unique business and hobby/interest niches. Where blogs impact online retail most is within these targeted online communities. Certain blog authors develop a large base of specific visitors, hence the site becomes a potential target market for viral marketing efforts. Many web entrepreneurs us this functionality to develop affiliate hubs within niche markets, and use search popularity to beat out larger retailers within corresponding natural search results.

By integrating your brand image within the site experience at that SPECIFIC blog, you as an online marketer are able to segment your marketing PRIOR to converting someone as a customer. It is a place to communicate with current and potential customers about current offerings/promos while boosting the credibility of the brand. Should you care: If you have a very unique value proposition, or sell to a very specific or high-value customer segment, blogs can be a great way to increase overall brand awareness. You can better connect with your customers and provide detail into the current happening within the business (ex. Current sales on XBOX 360). Potentially, one person within your organization should own the monitoring of blogs within
your vertical and look to post new content to meet the needs within the unique blog community.

Podcasting What it is: Pocasting should be just called mobile video broadcasting. However, Apple's marketing/development team did a great job with branding their device to a type of emerging media - hence the term podcasting! Similar to traditional radio and television, mobile video broadcasting delivers branded content in either a paid/free environment, on someone's mobile media player (Apple only does video currently, but that will change shortly). Retailers can potentially use this communication channel to deliver targeted content to their customer base, while integrating advertising within the video content.

Should you care: Not really. Until video podcasting penetration increases, it's still a limited channel for advertising. The best application available right now would be an online audio content segment that is digitally delivered to an opt-in list. As technology advances, you can potentially do this from your current opt-in page on your website and not from Apple's iTunes platform.

RSS RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication and is a method for electronic content distribution. RSS is transmitted via the internet, but what makes it unique is that no downloading efforts are needed by the end receiver of the content. The content streams instateneously within a webpage.

Advanced consumers have RSS news readers on their computers, either integrated into an email client, or utilize an aggregated web application such as News Gator. This essentially saves them time in aggregating all new and updated content that meets their interests. Already gaining steam in the travel industry and within comparison shopping engines, RSS seems to be a valuable way to push news and time sensitive offers to customers. Travel companies are able to provide a streaming supply of last minute airfare offers to their customer segments, without that customer having to open an email or visit a webpage.

Should you care: It completely depends on the nature of your business. Do you consistently offer new prices? Do you obtain new products to your assortment consistently? Do you have a customer base that is extremely loyal that you want to reach out to with messaging? If so, RSS may another channel to help build your brand. Call us today to learn more about these technologies and the potential impact they can have in reaching your customers with targeted messaging and fresh content.

An Ecommerce Internet Merchant Account

Small business owners and home based entrepreneurs sometimes reach the point where they realize their company is ready to grow, and then they begin to consider the advantages of an ecommerce Internet merchant account. Those who accept merely cash or check payments may decide to increase the ways in which a customer can pay for goods or services. A merchant account will let business owners accept credit card payments in many different ways. That is why so many business people opt to apply for an Internet merchant account.

If you do not already have an Internet Website to promote your business, this would be a good time to put one in place by opening an Ecommerce Internet Merchant account. More and more, consumers are looking to the Internet to find companies that offer the products and terms they want. Conducting business on the Internet or through technological means is called "ecommerce," sometimes spelled as "e-commerce," and it is growing at a tremendously rapid rate. Once your Website is operational, you will want to update it often with your latest product lines and descriptions and price lists. Once customers from any other computer in the world know where to find you, chances are they will return time and again if they like your site; they might even bookmark it. To keep customers coming back, get an Ecommerce Internet merchant account that will let you accept credit card payments. That way, customers can buy things at your store locations, whether online or at a physical site, and pay for them instantly. You won't have to send out statements or wait for checks to arrive in the mail. Instead, your credit-processing feature will let them pay with a credit card, and your underwriter can facilitate the payment by converting currency and deposit profits in your account, using real time.

An ecommerce Internet merchant account can put you leagues ahead of other companies in your industry. While they still take just check or cash payments, you can be busy processing credit card payments that could push your sales volume to new record heights. Naturally, you will want to keep your store looking attractive, and your Website should offer helpful information that will make guests want to return and possibly even bookmark your site for frequent reference. When the word gets out that you are accepting credit payments, more customers may browse your Website to check out your wares and plunk down a credit card in payment. One of the nice things about using credit is its convenience. Customers don't have to worry about carrying enough cash or making an account deposit before going shopping. They can browse spontaneously, and when they find something they want to buy, they need not be constrained by a lack of cash on hand or forgetting to order new checks for the checkbook. Why not apply for your merchant account services account soon so that you can enjoy the status and benefits of attracting customers who prefer using credit when they hear about your ecommerce Internet merchant account.

Accepting Payments Online: An ECommerce Web Site Overview

There are a seemingly infinite number of choices and configurations to accepting payments online. Choices range from almost total "do it yourself" programming to turnkey packages.

You can accept online payments from an ECommerce Web site in two general ways:

1)Through your own online merchant account and/or
2)Through a third party online payment processor.

Accepting Payments Online through your own Internet Merchant Account

Accepting payments online via a merchant account puts you in control and limits your reliability on outside payment acceptance services. This approach can also seem like a jigsaw puzzle. Besides an Internet merchant account, you will need shopping cart software, a store or site host, a processor, and a secure payment gateway.

You may fit these pieces together in several different ways. On one end of the spectrum, you can choose the provider for each piece individually. On the other end, you may choose a turnkey solution, where a single provider has completed the puzzle for you.

There is no single best solution. Your choice will depend on your particular needs and experience. Among other considerations, you should factor in your own comfort with the technologies, customer convenience, providers' service levels, available technical support, reliability, costs, and time commitment involved Fees
There are a myriad of potential costs and fees involved in accepting payments online, making it difficult to compare different options.
Potentially, you could be charged fees by each provider involved in helping you accept payments online - application fees, set-up fees, yearly memberships, monthly statement charges, monthly minimums, gateway access fees, statement fees, fixed transaction fees, variable transaction discount rates (processing fee for each transaction), and cancellation penalties are all common.

Often, it is easy to misinterpret the fees you will owe. Rarely are all costs revealed in one place. If you are reading about a merchant account, for example, the quoted costs may not include gateway access, hosting,
and/or shopping cart. Because you may be comparing "apples to oranges", options that at first appear low-cost can - upon implementation - turn out to be pricey. Similarly, expensive-sounding solutions may actually be reasonably priced.


Accepting Payments Online through a Third Party Online Payment Processor

If you are not ready to set up your own online merchant account and/or you want to offer additional online payment options, you can turn to a variety of third party online payment processors.

Third party online payment processors provide a way to accept payments online without the extra cost and obligation of a merchant account. To compensate, transaction fees and/or discount rates are significantly higher than for merchant accounts.

Each program is a little different and no single third party payment processor is right for all situations. Clickbank, for example, helps you sell digital products online. At last check, CCNow processes payment for tangible items only.

Deciding What's Best for You

Whether you accept payments online through an Internet merchant account, through a third party payment processor, or both, read all agreements carefully before committing. Do not hesitate to ask the providers questions if information is unclear or incomplete.

There is more information about accepting payments online - including explanations of merchant account fees, finding the right ecommerce providers, and third party payment processor overview - on the ecommerce information site Take-Payments- Online.com, http://www.Take-Payments-Online.com .

Put together the "puzzle pieces" for accepting payments online and your ecommerce Web sales will flourish!

Cost Effective Ecommerce Solutions.

Ecommerce use to be about spending thousands of dollars on setting up your shop and hundreds of dollars on getting a merchant. My, how things have changed over the years. Now anyone with a few hundred of dollars in their pocket(or less if you have the time to learn it yourself) can have a great working ecommerce system up and running in the matter of days. This also includes the full ability to accept payments from Credit Cards, manage customers, create invoices and more.

The most cost effective ecommerce solution on the market today is Oscommerce.com . Why is it so cost effective, well because it is free. All you need to do is learn it yourself or get someone who works in the web world(a web designer or programmer) to set it up for you. This can run you anywhere’s from $500-$900, give or take a bit depending on the features you want and if you want it integrated into a custom built design. In a all in one solution you can set up products to sell, have a visitor sign up and pay via the osc(oscommerce) payment section, create an invoice for that client as well as deliver the product(if it can be transferred via email) or create a packing slip to be mailed out. These are just some of the features located in oscommerce.

Another great feature about oscommerce is that you can integrate it to fit right into your site design. If you view my site at www.Logo2D.com and click one of the links at the top(such as logo templates) you can see that it fits snugly into the design. You can customize any part of oscommerce including the buttons for the shopping cart. It is a really great program to use.

One of the hassle before with ecommerce was getting something that would process payment. Payment was a
big issue as before it was very costly to get a merchant account, which usually cost around $400USD. Also you had to pay a % of every sale you made, which can really add up.

Today there are two great forms of payment that can be added to Oscommerce as your payment modules, they are Paypal.com and 2Checkout.com . These two options are a great way to go. Paypal.com is free to sign up, has over 78 Million accounts, only charges a small % of each sale/payment, can be funded by your credit card or bank account if you want to purchase something online and any sales you get you can take straight down into your bank account. Though the user does have to have a paypal account to pay you, but with 78 Million Accounts, you can see that is no problem.

2Checkout.com doesn't offer as many features in the way as you being able to purchase products offline, but it is great if someone is purchasing products off of you. It allows you to take payments via credit card and the customer doesn't even have to have a 2checkout.com account. It only takes a small % off when you take money down into your account. The only down side to 2checkout.com is that there is a one time fee of $49 to purchase a membership and they only send payment out twice a month(the middle of the month and the end of the month). So really not much of a downside at all.

So combine these three options and you can have a fully functional ecommerce website up for only a few hundreds of dollar!

Ecommerce & SEO

The purpose of any business website is to promote a product or service online. The purpose of an ecommerce website is to take it one step further and to allow your visitors to purchase your products or services directly from your website. This model has many great advantages over the non-ecommerce website in that it allows for the generation of revenue with little-or-no time spent in selling past the cost to have the website designed and maintained, and it does not require the visitor to call you during business hours thus helping secure the sale to an impulse buyer. If your website provides all the information that the buyer would want, you can save significant money in sales time spent in that the visitor can find all the information they need to decide to buy from you without taking up your time or that of one of your sales staff. But ecommerce sites have a serious drawback as well; very few of them can be properly indexed by search engine spiders and thus will fail to rank highly.

A non-ecommerce website may have the disadvantage on not being able to take the visitor's money the second they want to spend it, however if it can be found on the first page of the search engines while your beautifully designed ecommerce site sits on page eight, the advantage is theirs. The vast majority of visitors will never get to see your site, let alone buy from you, whereas a non-ecommerce site may lose sales because they don't sell online but at least they're able to deliver their message to an audience to begin with. So what can be done? The key is in the shopping cart you select.
SEO & Shopping Carts

The biggest problem with many SEO-friendly ecommerce solutions is that they are created after the initial product. Shopping cart systems such as Miva Merchant and OS Commerce are not designed with the primary goal of creating pages that will be well-received by the search engine spiders. Most shopping cart systems out there today are not in-and-of-themselves even spiderable and require 3rd party add-ons to facilitate even the lowest form of SEO-friendliness. The money you may have saved in choosing an inexpensive shopping cart may very well end up costing you your business in the long run, especially if you are using your shopping cart as the entire site, which we have seen may times in the past.
What Can Be Done?

There are essentially two solutions to this problem. The first is to create a front-end site separate from the shopping cart. What this will effectively do is create a number of pages that can be easily spidered (assuming that they're well designed). The drawback to this course of action is that your website will forever be limited to the size of the front-end site. Which brings us to the second option: choose a search engine friendly shopping cart system.


Finding an SEO-friendly shopping cart system is far easier said than done. There are many factors that have to be taken into account including the spiderability of the pages themselves, the customization capacity of the individual pages, the ease of adding products and changing the pages down the road, etc. While I've worked with many shopping cart and ecommerce systems, to date there has been only one that has truly impressed me in that it is extremely simple to use, it allows for full customization of individual pages and the product pages get fully spidered to the point where they have PageRank assigned. A rarity in the shopping cart world.
Easy As Apple Pie

Mr. Lee Roberts, President of Rose Rock Design and creator of the Apple Pie Shopping Cart, was kind enough to take the time to speak with me regarding how he developed his system. Trying to get an understanding of how this system was born I inquired as to what differentiated their system from others. Without "giving away the farm", Lee pointed out that his system was unique in that the search engines were a consideration from the birth of this project. Rather than trying to jerry-rig a system that was already in place, he initiated the development of a system whose first task was to allow for easily spidered and customized pages. A significant advantage to be sure.
In further discussions he pointed out a few key factors that should be considered by all when choosing a shopping cart system. While more advance shopping cart systems that provide for SEO-friendly pages may seem more expensive, they save you the cost of developing a front-end site, maintaining the pricing on a static page if one goes that route, and of course - if all your site's pages are easily spidered and you can then have hundreds of additional relevant pages added to your site's overall strength and relevancy you have a serious advantage in the SEO "game". If a shopping cart system costs you an extra $100 per month to maintain but it's use provides you with an additional $5000 in sales that month did it really "cost" you $100?

What Lee has effectively done is to provide a shopping cart system that enables search engines to fully read and index every page. Additionally (and perhaps because of his history as an accessibility expert) the system is extremely easy to work with as a user and as an SEO. And of course that's our primary concern at Beanstalk.
Conclusion

It is not to say that the Apple Pie Shopping Cart is end-all-be-all of SEO for an ecommerce site, if it was Lee wouldn't be in the process of building a new version that will include many new features for Internet marketing and tracking, and we would be out of work. That said, if you've got an e-commerce site or are looking to have one built, one must consider what type of marketing strategy will be taken with the site and if SEO is one of those, insure to find a system that provides the same advantages as this one.
It may cost a bit more up front but doing it right the first time is far less costly than building a site that can't be marketed properly and to it's maximum potential.

A Successful eCommerce Website - Part 1

So you want to succeed at eCommerce? Welcome to a very large group. First off, let’s be clear that there are a lot of ways to do business on the internet - and a lot of ways to both make and lose money. No way can I cover all of them in a few fairly short articles.


This article is going to assume that you have some of the fundamentals, that you understand the language and that you are serious. I’m not going to tell you how to set up a web site or get a decent hosting account. We’re a bit beyond those basics. The basics here have to do with factors which will influence the success (or failure) and the degree of success an eCommerce web site experiences.


First and foremost, you need to provide value for your customers. Absurd as it seems to have to repeat that, a lot of so-called eCommerce sites provide no or very little value for their visitors. Pretending to offer value is not the same thing as providing value. Promoting miserably written, hackneyed, cloned ebooks filled with questionably useful and/or outdated content doesn’t make for a high value site. Sure you can make some money. Once. And you’ll likely have a high refund rate. Essentially you'd be taking advantage of the inexperience of your customers and abusing their willingness to trust you. Not a good path to a long-term business with steady repeat customers.

Value on the net is not very different from any kind of off-line retail sales -- a quality product line that will attract potential customers and a competitive price that will lead to purchases. An honest, quality product that will meet the expectations you’ve created in your buyers. Hyped junk won’t do it.

Next, you’ve got to have a smooth, user-friendly, easy to follow process all the way to your thank you page. The simpler, cleaner and clearer you can make the process, the better. Where it makes sense you can augment this user-responsive site profile by adding live-response chat.

If you do use call-in or live chat, it’s imperative that your operators be well-trained, understand your products and your system and BE customer friendly. This can be a difficult job if you outsource. The less expensive out-source


alternatives can be a bad investment. You’ll need to check very carefully and be certain the operators do actually speak and understand the primary languages(s) of your targeted customer group. You’ll need to provide extensive background information and highly flexible, well-written scripts. You should also collect customer evaluations of these services - separately, and carefully monitor your results to be sure you are getting a decent return on the investment.

You need to have an attractive website. Some can do well with an ugly site, but, in that case, you need to really understand what you're doing and why it might work. The ugly site tactic is not for the inexperienced and very few individuals truly have the grasp of marketing and customer psychology that can lead to a successful "ugly" site.

To provide a pleasant experience, you need to be careful in what you use - colors, text-size, graphics, animation and white space can add value to your site or turn it into a user nightmare. Test your site with people who will tell you the truth. Just because you love it doesn't mean anyone else will. In general, aiming for a professional appearing site is your best option.

Wherever you can, provide incentives for customers to buy and to return. The return factor is a critical piece of a long-term strategy for success. Anyone who buys is your best possible future customer. Keep them, track them, make them special offers. Use coupons, discounts, special deals, customer-only offers and back end sales. Your customer base is your gold mine. They have at least some faith in you, enough to have purchased. Do your utmost to never damage that faith and treat them with the care they deserve.

The next article in the series will discuss factors such as personalization, security and assisting your staff in dealing consistently with customers customer support.

A Successful eCommerce Website - Part 2

Succeeding with an eCommerce website is a dream for many these days. It can be done no matter how difficult it may sometimes seem. this series covers some of the basic success factors - things you must consider in creating, implementing, managing and developing a quality eCommerce web site. There are a multitude of ways to do business on the internet - and a lot of ways to both make and lose money. Primarily these articles focus on eCommerce sites intended to sell products of various kinds, Not every factor will apply to every site, but since a major failing of many internet entrepreneurs involves the lack of multiple income streams, you should carefully consider all factors and apply them as needed in developing alternate revenue streams.

On examining your eCommerce web site, think carefully about how you can provide personal attention to each visitor. The idea here is personalization through which each visitor, if they wish, can develop a unique experience of your site.

Provide options through which the user can alter layout, colors, etc. Give customers the capability to create their own personal pages on your site. Perhaps offer a simple and easy to provide service to registered customers, such as free email accounts.

As well as building loyalty and stickiness, such features also build your customer database. Scripts are also available which will allow on-the-spot personalization based on responses to a series of questions. You can also use this kind of script to focus your sales message more tightly to the user's expressed interests.

Free services which can be provided on autopilot can be a virtually endless source of targeted customers. Everything from free email to blog hosting, opt-in list building to free advertising forums, all operate on the same principle as building a list through a newszine, white papers, free ebooks or whatever. In return for registration, e.g. name and confirmed email, you provide a service. Careful structuring can allow you to collect significant marketing information on your registered users which would allow well-targeted marketing campaigns.

Never lose track of a customer. Maintaining a database of customers with any of their prior purchases, interests, and so on, allows you to provide personalized purchase suggestions and special offers. The life-long value of a happy customer may be difficult to estimate accurately, but it’s far easier to sell to existing customers than to be continuously forced to acquire new ones.

Even if you only have a single product now, you have to eventually expand your product line(s). Don’t throw a buyer away. Stay in touch, offer information, occasionally recommend a high quality product you use and value. Build trust through value and quality.

To further expand the human dimension, you can add forums and chat rooms. Provide a variety of means to
 acquire visitor input. On site surveys and questionnaires, email surveys and opinion polls can not only increase your customers' sense of being in contact with real people who value their opinions and ideas, but also provide exceptionally useful information for refining your marketing and sales tactics. Loyalty programs and affinity networks can also help.

This is a lot like beating a real dead horse, but... Reliability and security are crucial. If your eCommerce site is big enough and busy enough, multiple parallel servers, redundant hardware, use of fail-safe technology, fast technical support service, high quality encryption, valid certificates, high quality payment processors and excellent firewalls will all allow you to ensure your customers that their data is safe, their orders are handled properly and nobody's getting their credit information that shouldn't.

Right now you may not need (or want to pay for) parallel servers, redundant hardware and fail-over technology, don’t ignore the rest. You depend on your ecommerce hosting provider to keep your business running. So think carefully and do some serious research. Overloaded servers, lack of redundant network connections, slow technical support, poor backup procedures can create a nightmare situation for both you and your customers

As this part’s final idea to consider: smooth out your customer contact and support procedures. If multiple staff might come into contact with your customers (chat, phone or email) , providing all of them with the same (and useful) information about the customer, prior orders, any previous or current problems and so forth, can avoid a lot of potential frustration - and lost orders or, worse, a customer lost forever.

It can be incredibly irritating to have to tell the same story over and over, getting bounced from one person to another when no information ever seems to have been recorded. While it may cut down on repeat complaints, that’s usually because the customer is gone forever. Construct your systems so that no information is lost and so that the data needed to be responsive and helpful is instantly available. You may want to restrict some information which customers may not feel comfortable about everyone knowing.

Doing these things right can add significant credibility and usability to your online business, as well as build a loyal customer base which actually enjoys dealing with your eCommerce business. And that's a winning situation for everyone.

Advertising Your eCommerce Web Site

8 Tips for Increasing Your Online Sales

Once you’ve launched your eCommerce web site, you’ll need to show it off to the online world. Whether you’re paying someone to submit your site to all the major and minor search engines and directories, it’s still up to you to continually advertise your eCommerce site in order to keep attracting business.

Many online business owners will tell you that within six to nine months of your launch date you’ll start seeing increased orders for your products. However here are 8 things you can do to lure people to your site now!

1.Advertise on http://www.Craigslist.org . This entry will only last for 10 days and you must submit to one city and category at a time. You can include photos and/or advanced HTML in your ad.

2.Write a press release and send out for free to the following sites: http://www.prweb.com [this one has been around for several years]; http://www.prfree.com and http://www.openpress.com Paid submissions will get you more views, quicker listings in the search engines, and the ability to post photos and keep track of your statistics.

3.Submit your site[s] to http://www.isedb.com/html/Web_Directories [You’ll discover loads of directories here, from the highly specialized to the mainstream. Many of the sites have ratings; indicate whether they’re accepting new submissions, and if there’s a fee for submitting].


4.Search engine positioning. When advertising your eCommerce site, always have the following information on hand: A. Your Web site title. This should be approximately 7-12 words. B. Description. Have 3 different descriptions of varying lengths. 15 words, 25 words, 100 words. Have them summarize the essence of your site. C. Keywords. 10 – 50 of your most important keywords arranged in order of importance. Again, some online directories will allow you to contribute more keywords than others.

5.Write articles about your products/service. Be an online expert. What makes your site so unique from the thousands of others in your chosen category? Is it your customized service? Your low prices? Your high quality? Don’t over promote your product, but concentrate on what will help others. It’s highly recommended you include at least two or three testimonials.


6.Exchange links with other sites that have quality information and are related to your field in some way. For example, I sell a lot of soap so I link with mostly gift basket, crafting and candle sites.


7.Free classifieds. These can sometimes get you listed in the search engines, but don’t expect too much response from them.


8.Offer a freebie. For example, if you have an eBook for sale, you won’t give the entire book away, but having a chapter or two online will increase interest – and sales. If you make or sell a product, offer a free sample with a paid order. Or free shipping on sales over a certain amount.

Follow one or more of these helpful tips and watch your online business bloom!


Blocking and Tackling |A quick look at eCommerce fundamentals

Blocking and Tackling | A quick look at some eCommerce fundamentals


eCommerce can be VERY complex.  To offer a world class customer experience, retailers must incorporate technologies and functionality that exceeds rising customer expectations.
eCommerce can be VERY complex.  To offer a world class customer experience, retailers must incorporate technologies and functionality that exceeds rising customer expectations.

On the flip side however, site fundamentals still play a very large role in converting visitors into customers.  Many retailers surprisingly lose sight of these site basics and leave significant sales on the table.  This brief examines 4 quick “fundamentals” every eCommerce manager cannot afford to lose sight of.

Think Fast

Speed has become less of a problem due to the penetration of broadband, but don’t forget that a significant number of people still shop by a dialup connection.  When creating a site framework, designers and e-commerce teams should ensure that the site is developed with pages loading in less than 9 seconds (over a dial-up connection).  

Our recommended page size is within 60-70k in bytes.  At that amount, sites will likely load within the maximum wait time of 9 seconds.  Online retailers should avoid flash at all costs within their transactional site.  Flash’s artistic aspects may help you establish a brand presence – but it will likely lose potential customers before they have even searched within your store.

Image is important

Images are a very important aspect of selling online and are often neglected.  All product images should be of the highest resolution possible, be much larger than the product page original, an
have

multiple views.  Dynamic imaging capabilities can improve the user experience to an even higher level by increasing interactivity (zoom &

rotate).  At a minimum – retailers should have at least two additional views outside of the product page image to help build emotion.

Be my guest

Shoppers do not like being forced to do anything, especially when they are ready to open their wallets.  Forcing a shopper to register on your site before purchasing is a sure way to drive a portion of your traffic to your competitors.  Too often, shoppers do not have the time or the inclination to fill out a lengthy form explaining what types of information they desire.

Always offer the ability to checkout as a guest.  You will see less customer leakage within the checkout process and can still offer the option to register when the sale is completed.

Make sure it’s “above the fold”

Your homepage is the most important page within your eCommerce store.  It sets the initial tone for the shopping experience and offers your best promotions and products to your visitors.  Users typically visually scan a web page from top to bottom and then from left to right.  All critical content and navigation options should be obvious to the shopper without having to scroll down.  If you have your best promotions “below the fold” –  you can bet that a large percentage of browsers are not scrolling down to see it.

 7 Tips To Increase Sales With Your Ecommerce Web Site

7 Tips To Increase Sales With Your Ecommerce Web Site

Ecommerce is just exploding right now on the Net. More and more people are doing their shopping online. Some Internet retailers are even beating out their offline counterparts. So what does this mean to you? It’s important that you are taking full advantage of your web site to get your share of the billions of dollars spent online every year. In this article we are going to cover 7 tips that you can put into practice immediately to increase your sales and revenue with your ecommerce web site.

1: Introduction
Make sure to have a brief introduction on the homepage of your web site. Your introduction should be concise and clearly identify the benefits of your visitors shopping at your site.

2: Navigation
Make sure that your site has clear and easy navigation, such as a visible search box on the top part of your web site, clear categories to browse through, a FAQ page that clearly explains your shipping and return policy, and etc.

3: Gift Certificates
People love getting gifts at certain times of the year, so make sure that you have gift certificates that your visitors can purchase right on your web site.

4: Customer Loyalty
Instead of just focusing on getting new customers why not take advantage of repeat business? Why not give your customers an incentive to come back and do business with you again? You can easily do this by offering coupons and special discounts to ones who have already purchased something from you. This is a lot easier than acquiring new customers since they already know you and feel comfortable shopping at your site. You can also add more value to your customers by adding live
customer support to your site.

5: Special Offers
Make sure to have a section on the top part of your home page devoted to featuring your current special offers and sales items. In fact if you happen to have a lot of special offers you can just feature the most popular ones and then make a separate web page that shows all of your sales items.

6: Shopping Carts
People want the checkout process to go as quickly and smoothly as possible, so make sure that your visitors are always just one click away to checkout. Try to reduce the checkout process to as few steps as possible. Make sure to offer multiple payment options such as credit cards, Paypal, online checks, mail orders, and such. When you no longer have a product in stock make sure to either remove it from your site or clearly mark it as “out of stock”. There is nothing more irritating for a customer to go through the whole checkout process only to find out that you no longer carry the item they ordered.

7: Affiliate Program
Do you have your own affiliate program? The most successful web sites have one and you should too. By starting your own affiliate program you will develop an increasing online sales force where you only pay them when a sale is made. There is really no risk and it is one of the best low cost effective advertising methods that you can use.

If you put these tips into practice you will notice a drastic increase in your sales and web site revenue.

Building eCommerce Websites - Part 3

Building eCommerce Websites that work - Part 3

An interesting eCommerce success factor that isn't precisely overlooked, but which is often thought about more in terms of being a way of feeding the search engine spiders has to do with providing content. In a very real sense the customer's job is to consume. That's why you're in business.

Think in terms of providing the information your customers need to do their job of consuming. What does that mean? Consider what you sell. The content on your site needs to focus on your products - whatever they happen to be. Reviews and comparative information on the items available through your web site can help focus and direct your customer to what they need, want and can afford.

Too often eCommerce sites use only marginally relevant information as content - or content that may match the general theme of the site but has nothing to do with what's being sold, promoted, etc. That could be more or less adequate as spider food, but it isn't going to help your customers do their job of consuming your products.

The better you combine these two goals - informing your customers and feeding the spiders - the better you'll do at both. Irrelevant search listings are pretty much a waste of your bandwidth. What you want is highly targeted customers interested in what you're offering and since the search engines love focused content and integrated sites, make that work for you.

And I'm not suggesting blatant repetitive hyped up sales copy. You want to inform, compare, offer added information that will help focus your customers. Use your content to develop desire and provide comparative information on similar products at varying price levels. Remember: desire not need.

While we all need things - and while you may be convinced everyone absolutely needs your product - we mostly buy based on desire - because we want it. The better you do at turning that need into immediate desire, the better your site will perform.

Again, not a fevered sales pitch. That's likely to turn off a large number of customers. Examples, stories and carefully chosen (and real) testimonials can support the process, too. Using video and/or audio can have a dramatic impact. Let your customers draw the obvious conclusions.

Along with providing plenty of comparison and review data, good search facilities are essential for a large eCommerce site. This also means that if you use a
searchable product database that your keys and descriptions must be well-chosen and the links from search results to pages work smoothly and easily.


While we've talked earlier in this series about the importance of providing various ways to enhance the social aspect of your site, it's also important that customers be capable of using it without assistance. Never over complicate your site or your processes to the point that it's no longer obvious what to do to buy something (or complete whatever desired action you are focusing on).

A typical customer should be able to go from front page to product page to order page to thank you page easily and without hesitation or confusion. The simpler and cleaner the process, the better for you.

If you can manage it, test with 4 or 5 basically internet illiterate people. Watch carefully what they do, where they hesitate, what seems to cause confusion - but don't talk or help during the process. Then go over everything with them in detail working with your observations and their thoughts and feelings. Your site may be obvious to you, but is it obvious to anyone else?

And when you think you've covered anything, a few pairs of new eyes (or checking out your competitors' sites) can give you a whole new to-do list.

Your eCommerce site is an intentional business creation. Every aspect should be organized around what you want the site to do, what kind of visitors you want and what you want them to do. Everything on your site should be there for a specific reason that contributes to your goals for the site. And everything should be tested to be certain that it actually does contribute.

It's your site and your business so never take anything for granted, never assume something works if it can be tested. And never stop testing. With careful attention to detail and on-going testing you'll be able to make incremental improvements over time that will vastly improve the productivity of your eCommerce web site.

An Arm & A Leg for eCommerce?

As a site designer myself, I realize how much time and effort goes
into registering, setting up, and designing a site; not to mention the
creation of content and seamless navigation. But it is unbelievable
how complicated and expensive this process has become!

Let's face it, very few entrepreneurs and small businesses can afford
to spend hundreds of dollars to set up their dot-com presence without
knowing how successful it will be! We've seen the results of high
expectations and over spending with the demise of many well-known
companies as reported in the news recently.It doesn't have to be this way!

Are you planning to sell products or services?

You do NOT necessarily need expensive shopping cart software or
merchant accounts to sell your products or services. You can begin
your online venture by setting up a few of your most popular items or
services that can be purchased online. Once a customer has made a
purchase, you can then follow up with details on how to purchase
additional items.

There are low cost ecommerce solutions that can help you start
conducting business online without breaking the bank.

First, determine exactly how sophisticated your ordering process needs
to be. Then decide which of the following options best suits your
business needs.

Option A - PayPal

Set up a Premier Account with PayPal. PayPal is a stable and secure
company that has been around long enough to establish a credible
reputation. I can personally vouch for them, I use them consistently.

Benefits:

Doing Business As:
You have the option of using a business name or your personal name,
regardless of how your bank account is registered.

Low Cost:
There are no monthly fees and no set up fees. That’s right - it’s
free.
A small fee is with-held each time a transaction (purchase) is
processed.

Hassle Free
They process all orders and notify you when payment is received.

Referral Bonus
You can earn a small cash bonus for qualified referrals you send to
PayPal.

Features:

Shopping Cart

Premium members can set up a shopping cart that links directly from
their site to PayPal.

Send an Invoice
If your services or product prices vary, you can send customers an
invoice from PayPal once the purchase price has been established.

Option B - eBay

Consider selling your products or services through eBay. You can
accept checks and money orders by postal mail, or you can accept
credit cards and checks using PayPal, or eBay’s version of PayPal -
BillPoint. You can provide links to your site with each item you
list for auction. You can also set up a reserve amount - the least
dollar amount you will accept for your service or product.

Ebay also offers an affiliate program.

Option C - ClickBank

Sign up as a merchant with ClickBank.net. There are some fees
involved, plus you have to determine what percentage of each sale that
you will allow the referring site to earn. Affiliates with ClickBank
can choose merchants they like (higher commission percentages do
better) and then place links on their sites. There is a setup fee for
merchants, but you'll also be providing your site a great deal of
exposure. Plus, ClickBank allows you to accept credit cards and other
methods of payment. You'll be setting up your own affiliate program!

ClickBank also offers an affiliate program:
http://zzz.clickbank.net/r/?abelle

Option D - Find a Host that provides Shopping Carts

Many hosting packages are set up with shopping carts with a buy
feature. Do your homework. Check on the setup fees and the monthly
fees. Make sure it’s a reputable company so you aren’t worried about
your money transactions.

These are just some of the options that are available for setting up
shop without going broke. I'm sure that there are many more options
available - it just takes some net research.

Building eCommerce Websites - Part 1

Building eCommerce Websites That Work - Part 1

You want to succeed at eCommerce? Welcome to a very big family. Right off, let’s be clear - there are lots of ways to do business on the internet. And lots of ways to both make and lose money. Successful eCommerce websites come in all shapes, kinds and colors and while I can't cover every type of site in this series, I will present the basics you need to consider and apply for an eCommerce web site to be successful.

Let's begin by assuming you have some of the fundamentals, that you understand the language and that you are serious. I’m not going to tell you how to set up a web site or get a decent hosting account. We’re beyond those basics. The basics here are the factors which will influence the success (or failure) and the degree of success your eCommerce web site experiences.

First and foremost, you need to provide value for your customers. Absurd as it seems to have to repeat that, a lot of so-called eCommerce sites provide no or very little value for their visitors. Pretending to offer value is not the same thing as providing value. Promoting miserably written, hackneyed, cloned ebooks filled with questionably useful and/or outdated content doesn’t make a high value web site. Sure you might make some money. Once. And you’ll end up with a high refund rate - and an unhappy credit card processor. That path means you're taking advantage of inexperienced customers and abusing their willingness to trust you. This isn't the way to a long-term business with steady repeat customers.

Value on the net is not very different from any kind of off-line retail sales -- a quality product line that will attract potential customers and a competitive price that will lead to purchases. An honest, quality product that will meet the expectations you’ve created in your buyers. Hyped junk just doesn't cut it.

Next, you’ve got to have a smooth, user-friendly, easy to follow process all the way to your thank you page. The simpler, cleaner and clearer you can make the process, the better. Where it makes sense you can augment this user-responsive site profile by adding live-response chat.

If you do decide to use call-in or live chat, it’s imperative that your operators be well-trained, understand your products and your system and be customer friendly. This can be a problem if you outsource. The less expensive out-source call centers can turn out to be very expensive in terms of lost sales and customers who never come back.

You’ll need to check very carefully and be 100 per cent certain the operators actually speak and understand the primary language(s) of your targeted customer group. You’ll need to provide extensive background information and highly flexible, well-written scripts.

You should collect your own customer evaluations - separately. Don't rely exclusively on any monitoring or customer satisfaction
surveys provided by the call center. Track your ROI to be sure it's money well-spent. Don't stop monitoring just because the results looked good for the first two or three months. Things change. Make sure you're tracking desired actions linked to the call center separately from those NOT related to call-in or live chat. Mixing outcomes leaves you in the dark about what's really happening.

You probably should have an attractive website. An ugly site can work, but to do that you need to absolutely know exactly what you're doing and why it should work. And you'll have to test like crazy to optimize (of course, you should be doing that anyway). The ugly site tactic is not for the inexperienced. Very few individuals really have the grasp of marketing, market and customer psychology that makes for a successful "ugly" site.

To provide a pleasant experience, you need to be careful in what you use - colors, text-size, graphics, animation and white space can add value to your site or turn it into a user nightmare. Test your site with people who will tell you the truth. Just because you love it doesn't mean anyone else will. In general, aiming for a professional appearing site is your best option. Look for the highest ranked, busiest sites in your business area and study the layouts they use. Extract the common features that you see on those sites. While other factors heavily influence traffic and ranking, appearance has a strong effect on visitors and sites that do testing evolve toward optimizing visitor behavior.

Keep in mind that a site's desired actions affect the design and layout. You'll want to study sites where those actions are most similar to the desired actions you target on your web site. If your goal is direct product sales, there's not much point in emulating a site that's optimized for newsletter sign-ups or AdSense.

If your main goal is direct sales (and if it is, then you need backend products too), provide incentives for customers to buy AND to return. The return factor is critical to a long-term strategy for success. Anyone who buys is your best possible future customer. Keep them, track them, make them special offers. Use coupons, discounts, special deals, customer-only offers and back end sales. Your customer base is your gold mine. Since they've shown enough faith in you to buy, do your utmost to never damage that faith. Treat them like the priceless resource they are. Think long-term: successful eCommerce websites are all about value and customer service.

Building eCommerce Websites that Work - Part 2

Succeeding with an eCommerce website is a dream for many these days. It may seem nearly impossible at times, but it can be done. This series covers some of the basic success factors - things you must consider in creating, implementing, managing and developing a quality eCommerce web site. There are many ways to do business on the internet - and, not surprisingly, a lot of ways to both make and lose money. Mainly, I'm focusing on eCommerce sites intended to sell products of various kinds. Not every factor is going to apply to every site, but since a major failing of many internet entrepreneurs is the lack of multiple income streams, you'd do well to carefully consider all factors and apply them as needed in developing alternate revenue streams.

On examining your eCommerce web site, put some serious thought into how you can provide personal attention to each visitor. The idea here is a process of personalization through which each visitor, if they wish, can develop a unique experience of your site.

Provide options through which the user can alter layout, colors, etc. Give customers the capability to create their own personal pages on your site. Perhaps offer a simple and easy to provide service to registered customers, such as free email accounts.

As well as building loyalty and stickiness, such features also build your customer database. Scripts are also available which will allow on-the-spot personalization based on responses to a series of questions. You can also use this kind of script to focus your sales message more tightly to the user's expressed interests. This technique has been reported to substantially increase conversion rates.

Free services which can be provided on autopilot can be a virtually endless source of targeted customers. Everything from free email to blog hosting, opt-in list building to free advertising forums, all operate on the same principle as building a list through a newszine, white papers, free ebooks or whatever. In return for registration, e.g. name and confirmed email, you provide a service that your visitors desire. The exchange of value is critical. The more valuable the service that you offer, the more willing people are to provide their information. Careful structuring can allow you to collect significant marketing information on your registered users which would allow well-targeted marketing campaigns.

Never lose track of a customer. Maintaining a database of customers with any of their prior purchases, interests, and so on, allows you to provide personalized purchase suggestions and special offers. The life-long value of a happy customer may be difficult to estimate accurately, but it's far easier to sell to existing customers than to be continuously forced to acquire new ones.

Even if you only have a single product now, you will eventually have expand your product line(s). Don't throw a buyer away. Stay in touch, offer information, occasionally recommend a high quality product you use and value. Build trust through value and quality. It's nearly impossible to over-emphasize this point. Look to the long term and plan ahead. Every serious marketer needs to do this.

To further expand the human
 dimension, you can add forums and chat rooms. Provide a variety of means to acquire visitor input. On site surveys and questionnaires, email surveys and opinion polls can not only increase your customers' sense of being in contact with real people who value their opinions and ideas, but also provide exceptionally useful information for refining your marketing and sales tactics. Loyalty programs and affinity networks can also help.


This is a lot like beating a real dead horse, but... Reliability and security are crucial. If your eCommerce site is big enough and busy enough, multiple parallel servers, redundant hardware, use of fail-safe technology, fast technical support service, high quality encryption, valid certificates, high quality payment processors and excellent firewalls will all allow you to ensure your customers that their data is safe, their orders are handled properly and nobody's getting their credit information that shouldn't. Many people still are extremely hesitant to purchase on-line because of fears of identity and/or credit card theft. You can't ignore this issue and hope to succeed.

Right now you may not need (or want to pay for) parallel servers, redundant hardware and fail-over technology, but don't ignore the rest. You depend on your eCommerce hosting provider to keep your business running. So think carefully and do some serious research. Overloaded servers, lack of redundant network connections, slow technical support, poor backup procedures can create a nightmare situation for both you and your customers

As a final consideration for this part, smooth out your customer contact and support procedures. If multiple staff might come into contact with your customers (chat, phone or email) , providing all of them with the same (and useful) information about the customer, prior orders, any previous or current problems and so forth, can avoid a lot of potential frustration - and lost orders or, worse, a customer lost forever.

It can be incredibly irritating to have to tell the same story over and over, getting bounced from one person to another when no information ever seems to have been recorded. While it may cut down on repeat complaints, that's usually because the customer is gone forever. Construct your systems so that no information is lost and so that the data needed to be responsive and helpful is instantly available. In doing this consider that some information which customers may not feel comfortable about everyone knowing should be restricted to those who would actually need it.

Doing these things right can add significant credibility and usability to your online business, as well as build a loyal customer base which actually enjoys dealing with your eCommerce business. When you reach that stage, you're there - the true win-win situation that's makes an outstanding eCommerce web site.

Find your Future

this site will explore the future trend of e-commerce around the world.