Something very common in the eCommerce industry is online promotions. So popular are coupon codes, online discount vouchers, and gift certificates that there are entire sites dedicated to promoting promotions. That’s right! Sites like fatwallet.com, couponcabin.com, and others create online user forums or setup affiliate programs with specific products and plan their business ranking high on the search engine results page (SERP) for commonly search terms.

I’m sure you are offering types of gift certificates and promotions using vouchers or coupon codes on your shopping cart but are you measuring the effectiveness of the promotions? Even more important are you loosing potential online shoppers because they are confused or frustrated with out of date or inaccurate coupon codes they found on another website not partnered with you? Well here are a few tips to make sure that your shopping cart promotions are netting you new business not customer frustrations and abandoned carts.

• First off if you are going to offer promotions you need to have a page or section on your site with all currently available vouchers neatly organized and that page needs to be highly SEO’d or optimized for search. Some eCommerce merchants will actually direct their PPC campaigns like Google adWords to their coupon page. This ensure higher conversion rates for one but more importantly, if done right allows your page to rank on the SERPs when a customer searches your product and coupon together.
• Using alternative naming conventions is another nice way to curb the frustration potential shoppers have when they reach a site with outdated coupons. You are less likely to show up on their page if you don’t have traditional “coupon codes” . Why wouldn’t you want the free traffic you ask? Well let’s say that a potential customer is searching for your widget on discount. They may end up on one of these pages feel like it is a potential spam site and bounce immediately. Even if they do make it to your site the chances are the coupon is old and not working and they are now frustrated.
• If you are already dealing with the dilemma of shopping cart abandonment after coupon code errors try building a custom page for these customers and offering a different promotion. This obviously applies if you have a low conversion rate after an error on the checkout page but most likely it is low. Offering even a small discount with an explanation that the promotion they thought they were going to get has expired makes online customers feel special. This is very effective at salvaging sales.
• Eliminate coupons all together and find alternative ways to market discounts and promotions. Let’s face it coupons are a great marketing vehicle but adding it to your checkout page is clearly not a checkout optimization feature. Just by having the box there for a customer to fill a code in most cases prompts them to go to Google and search for a promotion. How likely are they to come back after a frustrating search. Or how likely are your competitors to be found with a similar or better promotion on similar products? This is something to take into serious consideration.

So moral of the story is coupons can be great for eCommerce business but they can also be a potential threat to your revenue if not analyzed and monitored effectively. You should have a very sharp method of tracking every promotion you’ve run. Knowing what customer profiles respond well to vouchers also allows you to better market to them in the future. For example, customers who first bought from you via promotion may very well be waiting for that next opportunity to save 10%. If you use email marketing campaigns maybe you want to select just those customers for a special? That’s it for tonight. Happy selling!

First it was a deal with Power Reviews Inc. a few months back. July actually. Recognized as the top review website destination for eCommerce shoppers on the web to date Google is planning on leveraging this platform to drive product reviews. Now we have the purchase of like.com a major comparison website that online customers use to browse millions of products visually.

Combine those two business relationships with the fact that Google has start ramping up it’s own product search functionality allowing searchers to not only read reviews, compare products and prices, and find specifications before they enter any shopping cart website and you have a pretty powerful e-commerce solution.

Does Google want to become a serious competitor to say Amazon or eBay both of which are known as the top eCommerce companies on the web? Likely, or hopefully not but this does change the game for you and any other e-tailer trying to run their small online business. Here are a couple of tips that you can bank on being critical for future success.

• Secure quality and unique images for all of your products. Google is keen on image recognition and their acquisition of like.com who also focuses on their own picture recognition tool only strengthens the fact that you need to have good quality images on your shopping cart’s product catalog. The more images per product the better you stand to rank in Google’s SERPs as well.
• Product definitions will also be key. That’s two partnerships Google has made are both in the review and comparison category. Having strong definitions for your catalog’s products is the only way you will have a chance of making yourself unique in these over saturated market conditions. If you are making your own products then you are writing your own product descriptions so keep it very detailed. If you are reselling products on your hosted shopping cart then disregard the manufacturers descriptions and write your own. Describe the product in a way that your potential customer would search for it. Brand names are good but model names may not be something searched as much as product description.
• Tag it good. Not only do you need excellent product descriptions but you need to provide very detailed and high quality tagging properties. In order to hit high on the SERPs take a key from the blogging industry. If you are selling belts then think more than just a tag for belts, think: leather belts, dressy belts, womens / mens belts, etc… Make sure Google can crawl through this information easily as well if you want your e-commerce store located on the first page.
• Start looking at alternatives your alternatives. Obviously, Google is king in the search world but Bing is creeping up. There are other locations you can pull your customers from and if you’re not prepared or don’t have the time to flex with the new potential challenges that Google jumping further into the e-commerce game offers you need to make sure you’re getting your customers from somewhere.

This is a dynamic market and just like anything else on the web there is a lot of saturation. That makes changing your strategy all the more critical. Some of those may complain that the infamous Google is making their life a living hell but they are a business just like you and they’re eyes are on the money. Keep up or top them right? I’m pretty sure none of us have a multi-billion dollar search engine to compete anytime soon so if you want to play in the online shopping cart world then you need to step up your game.

Now would be a good time to look at doing a complete overhaul on your shopping cart, it’s catalog templates, your product templates and descriptions, images, checkout page, etc… If you have a very large presence then start with your highest margin products and work down from there. If you have multiple e-commerce websites then start with the highest converting one. Talk on the forums and blogs and reach out to an e-commerce consultant if you are feeling lost or overwhelmed. Happy selling!

Something everybody is familiar with as a shopper but maybe not as an e-commerce e-tailer professional. When we speak about persistence we are not talking about pressuring your customers into buying, even though that’s what I’m sure we all want to do. We’re speaking about persistent cookies.

Keeping track of what your customers look at, almost order, or have ordered is key to return sales and increasing revenue per sale on your shopping cart. Take a hint from the eCommerce leaders. When you log into your Amazon profile you will not only know everything you’ve ever bought but you’ll be constantly reminded that “you may like this since you bought that” or “you forgot to buy such and such”. You know it works because you’ve bought from those lists.

So the question is how do we use persistence to our advantage as an online sales organization? Well here are a couple of tips for using cookies to improve sales.

• Let your customers know. Upon checkout you have the ability with any serious shopping cart software to inform customers that you will keep their order for a set amount of days. Some may view this as a potential threat to order commitment rate increasing cart abandonment rates but if you’re secure with your product and your on-page optimization this is an effective way to keep customers who may not have the money at the moment coming back to what they wanted with minimal effort to purchase on say, pay-day.
• Mini Shopping carts / Side cart. If you have an online store that generates plenty of return visitors or customers keeping track of recent orders and recently browsed items and placing them conveniently to the side of the target page they are on is an excellent idea. They may be browsing but if you keep what they’ve really wanted in front of their eyes long enough you’re bound to get an order.
• Persistence in cross selling. Related products can easily be cross sold. Let’s say your customer or potential customer has looked at item x yesterday. You keep track of their visit with a cookie and now their back looking at items y and z today. Upon checkout running a special buy both for this price offer not only has the potential to double your order size but get’s the emotional commitment needed on your eCommerce site to begin with.
• Some customers look for the prize, others run from the threat. Letting a customer know that something they’ve looked at in the past is running low on stock, about to become unavailable, or is in great demand threatening to delay their potential order has the ability to turn a potential order into an order. That’s leveraging their fear of losing out on something to get a commitment otherwise known as creating urgency. Don’t simply focus on the fear though. If a customer has been looking at something multiple times it may be time to let them know that there is soon to be a special or bonus. This drives revenue up on your shopping cart.

So there are a few ideas. If your eCommerce platform doesn’t support these type of functionality well you need to move on. The old saying holds true. You get what you pay for and if you’re not using these tools on your shopping cart website you’re leaving plenty of money on the table. Maybe setting some of these things are a little too complex or tricky to setup on your hosted shopping cart? If so, have no fear there are plenty of E-Commerce consultants out there hungry for your business. Make sure you relay your requirements and goals though when using the service. Happy selling!

Wanted to write about something that’s been on my mind lately. How has e-commerce changed over the last 2 years, 5 years, and 10 years. Taking a look at analyst reports from agencies like Forester and Jupiter Research forecasts are looking to be in the half trillion $500,000,000,000.00 dollar range by 2012. It’s not just in the united states but across the globe. In Europe alone sales transactions completed online via shopping carts and micro payment are expected to be over 200 Billion Euros. Even sales completed offline are now majority influenced by online activity. To top that, a recent report noted that 50% of all online sales are influenced by social media outlets like Digg, Facebook, and Twitter. Wow has the internet commerce world changed in the last ten years. I recall the days when e-commerce meant a banner on somebodies website. Let’s take a walk down memory lane for a minute. Take a look at the following time line:

• 1991 NSF (National Science Foundation) lifts restrictions on eCommerce
• 1994 Netscape Navigator launched
• 1994 First eCommerce transaction – NetMarket
• 1994 Pizza Hut offers online pizza ordering
• 1994 CDNOW sells music online
• 1995 Amazon.com launches as an online bookstore
• 1995 Versign offers Secure Site SSL
• 1995 Craigslist is launched as an online classifieds site
• 1995 eBay is launched as an online auction website
• 1997 Dell makes $1 Million in online sales
• 1999 PayPal launched
• 2000 Google AdWords and AdSense launched forever changing search
• 2002 eBay buys PayPal
• 2003 Amazon becomes profitable
• 2003 Facebook is launched as Facemash
• 2003 CAN-SPAM ACT adds restrictions to email marketing
• 2006 Google Checkout is launched
• 2006 Shopify is launched
• And on and on and on…

A lot has happened. What started as online billboards has been molded not only by eCommerce pioneers like eBay and Amazon or the mighty Google and their AdWords advertising program that dominates the internet but primarily by the users that search and purchase product and services from online catalogs and shopping carts. The industry is shifting again and terms like F-Commerce or FaceBook Commerce are emerging as eCommerce migrates with social media popularity. Then there is the whole mobile scene. It’s estimated that nearly 24% of all online sales transactions will be completed via a mobile internet enabled phone. Say thank you to the Apple iPhone.

So what I find interesting in all of this is how so many small e-commerce retailers are making it and doing it very successfully as well. Sure there are the giants that dominate the internet but the mom and pop shops are thriving too. For now that is. What are you going to do to keep your edge up. How are you going to keep sales on your website from drifting to the major sites on the internet? This is something I will be covering over the next few weeks. How to compete in the e-commerce world making sure your website design, shopping cart, and merchant tools are constantly on competitive edge with the best of breed marketers out there. Until later, happy selling!

Something brought up to me over the weekend. I was enjoying dinner with a good of mine who is a VP of Sales for a major software company. We were discussing his latest quarter and I started in on eCommerce and shopping carts. Something came from the conversation that made a lot of sense.

You see there are a lot of ways to sell a product whether it’s B2B, B2C, or whatever. You have your retail storefront typically utilized in a B2C or business to consumer sales model. This is a physical location that you draw customers into with advertising over the most effective media of your choice. Once customers are in the store your sales person is a combination of sales people and (or) customer service representatives and the in store advertising generated by you or in combination with your product manufacturers marketing efforts. You see, every product is a miniature commercial. The packaging that is. The way you stock your shelves, the way you place key products on the end caps to draw customers down an aisle, the small items you attempt to up-sell at checkout. They all are very effective at gaining the interest of a potential buyer.

How do other businesses make sales?

In a more effective situation you have more sales people manning the sales floor. Think of an electronics store or just take a walk through the mall. There are always a ton of well informed sales representatives either commissioned or not making sure that you know every advantage of the products and services they are selling. In B2B these sales people usually set meetings with key people in an organization to peddle their wares but I think most e-commerce websites are targeting consumers with their products and services so we’ll focus on that.

Take that information home

Now go to your website in your mind and tell me where are your salespeople? That’s right, unless you have one of those extremely ineffective and annoying talking websites you really don’t have a sales person. That’s probably part of the reason your potential customers are visiting your online catalog in the first place. They want to shop discreetly, comfortably, and quietly (no sales person breathing down their throat) and have chosen the web to do so. You don’t want that freedom in your customers though do you? If you are trying to earn their business you need an effective way to drive them to your key products or earn the most money per visit. You also want to avoid a high bounce rate on your hosted shopping cart. So how do you accomplish this?

Deploying sales tactics on your e-commerce website

If you want to earn the most possible from your visitors and increase the amount of sales on your shopping cart you need to think like a sales person. Never been in a sales position? Sure you have. How did you convince yourself to start your online store? How did you convince others to invest with you, your product vendors to sign on, or any aspect of your business? Sales is a normal part of everyday business no matter what job you have or business you run, especially eCommerce businesses. Here are a few tips on employing powerful sales strategies on your e-commerce site:

Optimize your pages

• Make sure that your home page or front end catalog is very clean and simple. Think usability. If it is difficult for your website visitor to find what you want them to find in less than 5 seconds you’ve already lost a majority of your potential sales.
• Keeping your product pages informative is key but don’t overbear the consumer with information. Most online shoppers are looking for a product but will easily go into comparison mode if you give them that ability. You don’t want to burden them with too much information or they’ll feel compelled to search around the web for more information.

• Checkout should be fast, lightning fast! Have you ever been in a store and saw a line too long to make it worth the effort to buy that useless item that caught your eye on a casual shopping expedition? I have and most people will. Same thing applies to your shopping cart’s checkout page. Keep it smooth, simple, and fast. Eliminate unnecessary steps from the process and if your hosted shopping cart solution does not allow for simple editing of the checkout page’s templates start looking for a new provider immediately.

Don’t tell about your product, Sell it

• E-Commerce is about selling online not product advise, unless that’s what your selling of course. If you are reselling products talk to your vendors about what information they typically use to sell online. Check out comparable e-commerce sites and see what strategies they are using if you know they are successful then barrow some ideas and put them to work on your shopping cart.

• Don’t outsource the content on your product pages or use generic statements. Avoid outlandish claims and keep it looking professional. If you can write your own product descriptions do so. If you can import your own photos or real life product photos and video demonstrations you are going above and beyond and it will make a difference. When consumers bounce from one online store to another they are looking for something that makes them go yeah that’s what I want. Think what it would take for you to pull the trigger.

Learn to use E-Commerce analytic tools

• If you don’t know how to use Google Analytics or another website analytic program talk to an eCommerce consultant or a third party service that will help you set goals for individual catalog pages, products, checkout rates, etc. You need to know what potential customers are doing or not doing.
• Experiment with your website but do so carefully and in small ways. Don’t attempt to change the entire look and feel of your eCommerce website overnight and expect good results. Keep in mind that SEO can be affected by altering your website and other drastic changes could greatly impact your business. Use multivariate tools to compare small sections of change at a time. Play around with your product positioning and see what strategies are working for you and which ones are costing you money

If you learn to think like a sales person you will guarantee your eCommerce storefront to be more profitable for your company. If it is your company then you’d better start fast. If this is something of a challenge for your mentality then don’t hesitate to reach out to friends and family in the sales profession or hire a sales consultant to look over your website, product pages, and checkout page. Take their advice and deploy carefully with analytic tools to learn what will be most effective. If this is overwhelming prepare for lackluster results. Happy Selling!

You’ve all been there and most of us have done it. Have you put something on your website that you absolutely hate just to see if you can get an extra sale or two per month out of it? You know what I mean, you’re afraid that even the most naive customers might walk away but hey let’s try it anyway? Well today I wanted to post what I see as the top 5 reasons e-commerce sites majorly screw up and piss customers off during the search or checkout process.

1. Don’t pop a want to chat bubble in my face.

If you want to use this type of tool there is a right way and a very wrong way to do it. Adding live chat functionality to your website can mean a very high percentage boost in conversion rate in your shopping cart especially if you are selling a technical product or one that promotes a lot of questions from potential buyers. However, going about it the wrong way can spell disaster and grow your bounce rate in turn driving up your cost per acquisition (CPA). If you are going to add this functionality to your website take into consideration the following points:

• Keep it on all pages but in a place tucked to the side on a left or right column. Nobody wants a window popping in their face asking to chat and way too many people (even HP) are bombarding customers with these. If a customer has a question they are going to find a way to ask. Make it convenient, don’t force it.
• Man it for goodness sake. If you don’t have a staff that can actually answer questions during normal business hours you are simply aggravating your potential customers or portraying an image that you are a VERY small company.
• Even worse, chat bots. Come on, do you think your customers are that stupid that a chat bot will actually suffice for real questions. If your product is that simple then you don’t need a chat option anyway.

2. I don’t need to see a miniature person talking to me at the bottom of your website.

• Oh my god! I hate it when you hit the home page of a website and after the load pops up a man, woman, robot, or whatever telling you about their website. Hello, I’m already here and since I chose the web as my media I probably don’t want to listen to babble. HTML is hyper TEXT not hyper small person giving me a sales pitch at full obnoxious volume. Does anybody remember the paperclip in Windows? Nuff said.

3. AdSense on your eCommerce site… really?

• This is a sour topic for me. I hate shopping cart websites that have ads smeared all over the page. Not only does it make for a very complicated read it eliminates any and all optimization you can offer a page. How are people supposed to find and purchase your product if they are bombarded by competitive product links?
• There is an argument that you can augment the bounce rate with AdSense but the reality is that you should be trying to eliminate your bounce rate with e-commerce optimization. If your product makes so little margin that you want to subsidize it with ad-words then maybe you shouldn’t be selling the product to begin with.

4. Fake reviews are for fake products

• Consumer reports is dead. Most people are more intelligent then you seem to think. Popping up 5-10 review sites and rating your product 5 of 5 and competitive products 2-3 of 5 is bogus and while there may be some short term strategy there are an equal amount of other products employing the same strategy. Rather than blowing time building out a lavish review website perhaps spend some more time optimizing your e-commerce site, finding legit review companies to test your product and review it, spend some money and have video demonstrations filmed, or just improve your product. These sites are quickly being recognized as spam and you should be steering towards the next strategy if you haven’t already.

5. Simple E-Commerce please! Optimize my checkout page

• Why do I need to create an account, verify my email, and choose to subscribe to your spam just to buy a product? Oh, I don’t I just go buy it somewhere else. The faster you can get somebody through your shopping cart and checkout page the higher the conversion rate you will recognize. If you have multiple pages in your checkout, feel it’s clunky looking, or cannot edit for performance you need to find another eCommerce provider.
• Give me a solid confirmation and don’t ask me things you don’t absolutely need to know. Why do I need to choose if it’s a Visa or MasterCard. If you cannot write a snippet of code to auto determine simply from the numbers I enter you need to talk to a developer or find a better hosted shopping cart platform.

Well that’s my rant today. I really think it’s sad to see somebody spend blood, sweat, tears, and most importantly money to get their website up, product advertised, and e-commerce storefront ready to go only to have customers visit and walk away to find another reseller or vendor. Do yourself a favor and buy some of your own products. See how it feels to go through the process. If you are new to this business find an eCommerce consultant who can walk you through some things and guide you to better profits. Happy Selling!

If you’re selling your product primarily online you know that cost per acquisition or CPA plays a major role in your profit margins. Basically, in one way or another you’re paying for every customer you have. The challenge is that for every one customer that actually commits and purchases your product there are probably many more that you pay to get to your site and evaluate but there’s not enough umph to get them to click purchase. This has a nasty effect on your CPA and can creep into your businesses earnings if not analyzed and performance checked often.

So how do you minimize the CPA and improve your eCommerce shopping cart”s efficiency?

First you need to understand what your conversion rate is. Are you running any type of analytic software on your store front site? If so then you should be able to customize that to report on your conversion rates. If you are paying for any type of PPC marketing whether adwords, banner ads, or some other type of marketing you need to track how many of those customers follow on through the process and act on a purchase.

Next thing you need to take into consideration is if your site is optimized to get customers in the momentum you desire. That should momentum to quickly select the product you want them to purchase and rush through the checkout page. E-Commerce is about money not beautiful sites with lavish designs. Way too many eCommerce web designers spend too much time building fancy sites that look nice but are not optimized for high conversion rates. When you visit your site what do you do? What are your customers doing? If they are spending time browsing or bouncing then you don’t have what you need. There are tools that can check hot spots on your site and you should be using them. Not only that but using a multivariate test to compare different versions of your pages. Focus on the checkout page with highest priority. The most attrition is in the form of shopping cart abandonment. Do you know what your abandonment rate is? Are you doing anything to improve this number? Does your shopping cart include tools to measure these analytic information? If not then it’s seriously time to start looking abroad.

Some other things to otimize your hosted eCommerce solution are making sure that your site is SEO friendly. Sure there are carts that claim to be SEO shopping carts or SEO optimized e-commerce platforms but things to look for are the ability to add good keyword content in Google’s preferred ways to all of your catalog pages. Making sure the templates are easily editable to ensure great results on the SERPs. Make sure that you can customize your checkout page for efficiency and that it supports cross selling and upselling of products.

I’ll have more time to write about this in the future but I want to make sure that all e-tailers are thinking about conversion optimization and SEO friendly e-commerce platforms. You can’t just throw your product on a webpage, stick a price to it, and sell. You’ll throw your money away too quickly to even learn what you need to be doing. Take your time, do the research on solutions, talk to an e-commerce consultant and choose the right developer to make sure your site, checkout page, and entire shopping cart is optimized for the one thing it’s built for, Selling!