Tips for Online Shop Success

Posted by On Filed under Creative, E commerce, Ecommerce - Shopping cart

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Developing an effective and productive web-based application requires practice, persistence, proper planning and determination. It leads to a success of any eCommerce business. Once your online shop is designed and running, the key to your success is to know your online business insights.

Following are some tips you should take into the consideration before you develop a website for your Web-based business or should re-visit if you have already established an online store:

Online URL:
Check with your organization name and discover how it can best be used in your E-store web address. Your web URL is a crucial element in your marketing and branding efforts.
You may not get exact url name as your company name but a variant if it.

Registration:
Log in  for an eCommerce Web hosting package that will grow with your online store,  includes features such as facility to provide secure transactions, reliability, shopping cart functionality, etc  you will need to operate an online business as well as provides Internet marketing tools.

Payment options:
Create a vendor account so that your online showroom can securely process credit card and other transactions. Your vendor account should be able to accept the credit cards,  PayPal, and accept other payment methods.

Easy Navigation:
Build your E-store  with the help of  a professional Web designer in order to design an attention-grabbing eCommerce website providing an easy to navigate the facility for your customers.

Lucrative marketing strategies:
Brand your business and boost your internet marketing campaigns, like dedicated mailboxes for each product line and targeted mailing lists for a particular group of customers.  Standing out in the crowd can play a vital role in your online success.

Track promotions:
Track the success and efficiency of your Internet marketing efforts by creating specific codes that distinguishes each promotion. This is the easiest way you can measure the most effective  promotions.

Use Internet marketing tools to work for your online shop:
Make use of suitable Meta Keywords and description that will place your online shop in search engine results. Submit your business website to the leading search engines that will surely help people to find your online shop whenever they are looking for an online product purchase.

Grand Launch:
After final completion of your online store design, you can launch your website on a specific date. Make use of Email marketing campaigns to promote your eCommerce website grand launch. So more people will get to know about your online shop and business.

Know your products:
If you are familiar with the products or services you are selling, you can easily guide the customers and promote the products.

Know your customers:
In this technological marketplace, it is easy to track your customer’s orders so you will get an idea about what exactly customer is looking for. It will help to serve customer needs in a better manner. Based on the customer’s orders, you are being able to recommend some new products to the existing customers, which will certainly keep you engage with them and enlarge your web shop.

Know your competitors:
Every niche that exists on the Internet typically has more than one online shop  serving that niche. You need to always be on the look for potential and actual competitors, and  notice how they are  actually reaching their customers. You can learn from their techniques and adopt new methods or changes if necessary.

By paying attention to the above tips, you can be successful in developing an eye-catching and productive online shop.

How To Build A B2B Online Marketing Strategy That Generates Leads ?

Posted by On Filed under Creative, E commerce, Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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It’s been difficult for many B2B companies to make a move to online marketing. Nowadays, most of the B2B customers search the web before making any purchase, So this is the right time for B2B businesses to build a more effective Internet marketing strategies.

Buyers are changing as they prefer to shop from their desk than they would travel and visit the shop. This article outline some of the most effective strategies to develop the foundation for your B2B online marketing strategy.

Well-designed and well-written website:
According to web credibility research from Stanford, many of the users judge a company’s reliability based on its website design. Your website should make first impression of your company and offerings. And, it should have educational content that entices and teaches your prospects.

Know your target audience:
Develop a crystalline vision of who your content is destined to motivate. When you   closely understand your core audience, you can easily create website pages and effective targeted content.

Start blogging:
In growing digital marketplace where you are making an effort to get more visibility, blogging is the best option to connect with the customers. Creating an original and unique content is one of the Internet marketing strategy that every business can use. It will make your sales process simpler and helps to establish your company as subject matter authority.

Make start with LinkedIn:
LinkedIn can be a powerful social networking tool which helps to lead B2B conversion. By optimizing your personal profile and company page, You can make strong presence on LinkedIn and attractive to new connections. You can actively share some valuable content with your network to make your business more interactive.

Always be building new highways to your site:
There are a many ways for you to drive traffic to your site. The most basic way is to make sure your website and blog URL are incorporated in your communications materials. That includes your email signature, printed & digital marketing materials, building/vehicle signage, packaging, and published articles. You can also drive people to your site via social media channels.

Target industry publications:
Your industry and trade associations are robust publishers of online content – all directed at your prospects and customers. Many of my clients have had great success developing a relationship with the editors of these organizations and offering expert advice to their readership. This can take the form of articles, webinars, podcast interviews, and blog posts. This is a powerful way to establish your authority with your target audience, build your company’s brand recognition, and drive new traffic to your site.

Unique Content:
Many of the visitors used the website content to differentiate your business from competitors and help them make buying decisions. Unique and valuable content also help your website rank better in search engines. Website content can be in the form of articles, case studies, videos or webinars.

The above tactics are the fundamentals for a robust online B2B presence. Use this as a checklist to build and enlarge your Internet marketing efforts. Above mentioned points will definitely increase the number of qualified leads to your website.
There are a many of other Internet platforms to reach your target audience such as Google Plus,Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, and so on. All these are responsible to drive more traffic to your website and boost your business ROI.

Common mistakes in E-commerce design

Posted by On Filed under E commerce, Web Design

E-commerce websites open up vast new markets for numerous businesses. While shopping on e-commerce websites, customer expects an easy and effective functionality. Complex design and functionality will lead to lower the sales and harm your long-term acceptability.
There are many things to consider while designing an e-commerce website. Following are some of the most common design mistakes to avoid which improve the customers shopping experience to a great extent.

Only one product image:
Customer might not feel comfortable about the product they are looking to make a  purchase as you provide a single image. You should include more than one images of each product offering enough views (front, back,sides) for the them. It will help the customer to take a quick decision toward making a purchase from your site.
Lack of detailed product information:

Most of the e-commerce website does not provide the complete description about     the specific product. You make sure to answer all the queries a customer may ask about the product which help for them to enhance the in-store shopping experience.

You need to provide as much product information as you can such as dimensions,     material, size, weight and any other relevant information depending on what the     product is. Focus on the product benefits using descriptive words rather than  just      technical terms. For example, in an online store, for clothing product you might     include colors available, size chart, fabric type, care instructions and much more.

Hiding contact information:
Prior to make a purchase, customer desire to know whether they are dealing with the reliable and trustable company as they have to mention their credit card information. If your website doesn’t provide any contact detail, customer are less probable to trust your website resulting in losing interest to do business with you.

Make your contact information clearly noticeable to the customers, which will help to increase the level of customer trust. They will be relieved that they can contact you whenever they have an issue.

Lengthy and confusing checkout process:
You must avoid the lengthy and confusing checkout process, by giving too much time  to the customer to reconsider with long forms. The ideal checkout process contains a only single page for customers to check their order, billing and shipping     information with confirmation page prior to submit their order.

You can combine checkout pages by using two-column layouts such as putting billing and shipping information next to each other to make pages seem shorter.

An inefficient website search engine:
Most of the sites turn out  with inadequate search results proving poor site search     facility. Sometime visitors know exactly what they want to purchase, so they opt to use a search engine rather than navigating through categories.

You need to make sure that the your website has an effective built-in search engine, and enables users to search by keyword and refine their results based on the categories your site includes. Provide the user facility to sort their search results based on criteria like new arrival, highest or lowest price, most popular etc. And eliminate the products that don’t fit within a certain category.

Minimal set of payment options:
Most of the sites allow customers to pay only with Credit cards, or to pay with a PayPal account. What about the customers who wants to pay by net banking or doesn’t have a PayPal account? Providing the limited options for payment for the customers will lead to decrease the number of sales.
You can expand customer base offering multiple payment methods to them as different customers have different preferences when it comes to making online payments. It will increases the choices your customers have while checkout, making them more likely to purchase from you.

Not showing related products:
You can design an e-commerce platform displaying all related products grouped together like any brick and mortar store look which can increase the add-on purchases for your business. For example, You can show mobile phone cases and other accessories in  the mobile phone categories. You can customized an ecommerce platform that enables you to manually choose related products and include them on product details page.

Confusing navigation:
If customer fails to find out the product they are looking for in a few clicks, you may lose an opportunity to keep them on the site. You should carefully design the navigational links and product categories to increase the site effectiveness.
Make sure that each category contains atleast a few products in it. You should make it easy and simple for customers to find out their preferred item, or move around your site.

Missing shipping rates:
When shopping online, customer intend to complete the order processing all at one time, without having to wait for an email with an exact shipping quote for approval     before processing your order. You must include your  shipping rates on your site.
You can use plugins or widgets which are available for shopping cart systems to evaluate shipping charges on your site. You can also make use of shipping  calculators offered by most of the companies. You can include a freight surcharge in the price for the particular  heavy products.

Missing store policies
Most of the customers pefer to know about your store’s shipping policies, return policies etc. prior to the purchase process. You can save a lot of annoyances later on from consumers who are not much happy with an order they’ve placed by making your store policies clear and upfront.
You should use FAQ or policies section on your e-commerce site to explain your rules in simple terms which can save lots of problems of the customers.

Open Source platform for E-Commerce

Posted by On Filed under Creative, E commerce, Web Design

OpensourceE-commerce platform allows you to build business related to selling of products and services. You can choose any e-commerce platform among various Open-source e-commerce platform to develop an online store. Finding the right platform is not an easy task.

We provide you the list of some Open source e-commerce platform having their own advantages and disadvantages. These platforms are designed by keeping different types of users in mind.

Zen cart: Free Open-source e-commerce solution

It’s mainly useful for the complex sites. If your business involves in selling of a variety of products likes Perfumes, Accessories, Men’s clothes, Women clothes, sunglasses on a single website. It is PHP- based application requires knowledge of PHP programming. There are Plenty of add-ons available to customize their online store. It includes basic feature which is more expected such as discount coupons, newsletter, gift certificates and so on.
CMS is not available in the Zen cart application, so one has to integrate the separate system for CMS.

Magento:  Free

It is the fastest growing open source e-commerce platform in the market mainly suitable for complex websites having a variety of products including books, electronics, software all on a single website. For Enterprise Edition, one has to pay as it includes highly useful features like CMS useful to customize the website whereas Community Edition is mainly for developers is Free.

Ubercart: Free

Ubercart e-commerce platform is designed to integrate with only Drupal. This is mainly designed to sell things such as event registration and tickets, file downloads, etc. Drupal users feel comfortable while designing the store using this platform since the they are familiar with the features but people who are non-Drupal user may find it difficult.
Open API is also not available so you will unable to integrate your store with other systems.

OpenCart

OpenCart is a PHP-based E-commerce platform having very much active community for user support. It includes the features such as more than 20 payment gateways and 8 shipping methods. It allows you to use multiple languages, add numerous categories, selling loads of products and so on. It is user- friendly as consumers are allowed to write reviews about the item from your store. It is full of having around 2,700 themes which makes it look much better.

VirtueMart:

VirtueMart is also a popular open source shopping cart designed to work with Joomla. In VirtueMart, you can add numerous products and categories as well as you can map products to multiple product. It also allows different payment gateways. VirtueMart doesn’t provide the hosting support so owners     have to purchase a separate hosting package with other vendors. It is suitable for small businesses.

PrestaShop:

It is a PHP-based open source eCommerce solution provides a high level of customization. Using this application you can manage your orders, shipping, inventory and customers in real time from baking. It mainly comes up with more than 3,500 modules and templates and have 600,000 community members.

Oscommerce:

Oscommerce is the extremely popular platform which provides around 7,000 free add-ons to customize the store. They provide the Live chat Room facility for direct communication with other members of other communities.

There are many more open-source E-commerce platforms are available, including above, so one has to try more than one platform before making a final decision and integrate into the site.

How to Improve Your E-Commerce Website ??

Posted by On Filed under Creative, E commerce, Online - Internet Marketing

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In rapidly changing internet technology, it is not easy to make a profit through your business website. There are small technicalities that could notably affect how your business flourishes on the web. You can’t just put up an ecommerce portal and expect customers to come rolling in.

Following are some guidelines which will help to improve your ecommerce websites:

  • Display the benefits of your products:There are buyers which are unaware about the things they exactly want. New arrivals and special deals are also good to work with regular visitors to buy. Your goal as an online dealer is to hit in that market and show them what they are missing out on.
  • Make Your Website Visitors Trust You: Make sure that you have provided the appropriate link to the pages from your home page. Such perception will save much of your support team’s time, and reduce the number of customer’s pre-sale help requests. People lookout only those products on which they spend on; so it’s obvious they want to know everything about the product they are going to buy, the buying process, payment options, the delivery system, warranties etc, that will help them to take a secure decision and commit to a purchase.
  • Deals and free shipping:Most of the people prefer to shop during sales and discounted periods at low cost. Free shipping is also the main attractive factor for the visitors. You are now selling your products across the globe, not just to the limited market, so you should take the shipping costs into account.
  • Branded and most popular products :You can display the branded and popular products to upfront for the sale. It is the most eye-catching way with the first-time visitors who are not much sure what they want to buy. You can provide the opportunity to the visitors to ‘shop by brands’. It will be easier for targeted for customer to find out an exclusive deal.
  • Payment systems icons: E-commerce websites deal with many customers across the globe and each has their own chosen payment system. It would be better to make clear about the payment options in advance. E-stores mostly use credit and debit cards, gift vouchers, cash on delivery, PayPal, etc. as their main payment system. You should place these icons so customer can easily find payment options and move to the checkout page which displays all the payment details.
  • Social media links:Nowadays, Social media channels like Facebook,Google plus and twitter are the one of the fastest source to get the information about anything. Social media links bring the finest opportunities for web-promotion of your business website. You can keep customers well informed with the latest news or special deals which are concerned with Facebook and Twitter followers only. It will surely help you to find the most active influential customers.
  • Phone numbers and online chats:E-commerce website provides the facility to shop round the clock to customers. So there is a need for the store support team to solve customers pre-sale and after- sale. Live chats are highly treasured of value-added customer service.