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!

Well if you’re reading this chances are you either have an e-commerce site that is live and doing business or you are at least contemplating launching your very own online store front. One of the first steps you’ll need to take is making a decision on how you’ll chose your e-commerce platform. This is not going to be fun and I’ll guarantee you that you are going to be confused, misled, and frustrated at some point during your research.

If you read my last post about hosted eCommerce solutions you’ll have a few good ideas about what to look for but one place you’re going to inevitably end up landing is a shopping cart review site. There are tons of them just like there are a million hosting review sites. Why? You’d be pretty dense to not figure this one out. Most, if not all of those review sites are not actually reviewing the eCommerce platforms rather taking payment for advertisement. See just like you’ll want to rank high and sell products online to people who landed on your page via Google search or through pay per click advertising they’ve realized that there is a huge market that is growing wildly for online commerce solutions to sell their products. Most of the top ranking sites or pay per click sites you’ll stumble upon are not legit. They do not load a catalog, manage a template, or sell a product online. Instead they collect money from shopping cart solution providers and rank according to how much advertising fee was paid. Or they may be operating as an affiliate collecting a fee for each person they send on to the merchant. Who ranks at the top? You guess who.

So how do you get a legitimate review of different hosted shopping carts available on the market today? Unfortunately you’re going to have to talk to customers, read tons of blog articles, and do the research yourself. Of course there are the monsters like Volusion, 1Shoppingcart, and Shopify but there are also the free solutions trying to make money in alternative approaches all vying for your business like Magento and others. As with anything making the decision should not be based on what you read in advertising or who has the coolest features but rather how successful your online store is going to be on that platform, how well you’re going to be able to manage it, and what your total cost of ownership will be.

If anybody does know of a legit eCommerce review site that has actually thoroughly went through the options I’d be dying to hear about them but I’m not sure they’d remain around long as it’s a lot of work for no return. Until next time happy selling.

There’s a reason why companies like Walmart, Fred Myers, Target, and others have dominated the retail space. Of course, they’ve done exceptional at eliminating costs on the backend and built stores the size of small towns but there is something else they do very well. Successful brick and mortar retail merchants have perfected the art of commerce. When you walk into a store you are guided down a path that maximizes revenue and commitment to purchase. There is plenty of in your face marketing to gently inform you what products you should be buying, what’s on sale, and what’s hot. Finalize your trip at the front of the store and you’ll see something dramatically different in a major retailer in comparison with a small mom and pop operation. Tons of lanes to check out in that are customized to each individual. There are the standard lanes for those uncomfortable with the optional computerized checkout lanes. Fast, fast, fast, and don’t forget to pick up your magazine, candy, and last minute essentials as you pay.

These stores are built this way for a reason. It’s successful but it didn’t happen overnight. There are tools in the industry, consultants, and analytics to measure results. As we enter the age of eCommerce the smart will realize they need those same tools on their websites and online shopping carts. This is why it’s so important to pick an E-Commerce solution that fits your business model. We’ll take a look at a few essential check off items in this part, 1 of 3 in our discussion on choosing the most effective hosted shopping cart solution.

Simple eCommerce setup

A lot of solutions are either too slimmed down or too robust. There doesn’t seem to be anything that’s in the middle as far as hosted e-commerce solution setups go. Make sure the provider you choose pays close attention offering wizards or helpful step by step instructions for setting up your online store front.

Managing your Catalog

All online eCommerce shopping carts will provide some sort of catalog feature to enable you to manage your products. Make sure it’s very intuitive for you to import and export items you decide to sell online and that there are easy ways to add SKUs, product images, product descriptions, and prices. Higher end e-commerce platforms will allow you to build groups and select policies, run analytics, and price changes on multiple items in your storefront at once.

E-Commerce Templates

Do you have your own eCommerce website? Are you going to have a developer design a website for you? Or do you want to use a template to create your storefront and go from there. This is a very important decision and aspect of your online business. Some solutions like Volusion and Shopify are more catered to the mom and pop online reseller and have a lot of ready to go templates while others like Ultracart have more advanced custom templates that you can provide to your developer to customize and optimize your hosted shopping cart for optimized checkout experiences.

Advertising and Marketing your Storefront

Of course you need to make sure you get your name out there and you hosted e-commerce solutions should be carrying some of this load for you. Make sure the shopping cart is SEO friendly and optimized for Google search results. Nicer options are the ability to generate email lists, provide coupons, tie into solutions like Froogle, Google’s shopping feed, accept affiliate marketers and allow them to be compensated on their online sales leads, and more. Make sure it’s something you research with each shopping cart.

Performance Measuring and eCommerce Analytics

In order to be successful you need to make sure you are tracking every aspect of your e-commerce business. That means product success, price strategies, pages or articles that are frequented, and other things related to your website need to be studied. You need to know also how your visitors interact with you eCommerce storefront. Are you loosing sales at checkout? Is one advertisement working better than the other? If you can’t answer those questions you may want to take advise from an e-commerce consultant who is an expert in the industry.

Payment Gateways and Shipping Products

Collecting money would sure be nice huh? Take a look at what merchant gateways the hosted e-commerce solutions supports. Top vendors would be PayPal, authorize.net, and 2Checkout but there are many others that have advantages depending on the volume of sales you do and type of transactions that occur. You’ll also need to make sure that shipping is an automated or near automated process. Are you using FedEx, UPS, or USPS? Do you know your shipping dimensions and can you import them into your shopping cart catalog? How do you plan to manage returns inside your eCommerce platform? Keep looking deeper inside as the choices you make today are not easy to change tomorrow.

On the next post we’ll talk a bit more about choosing e-commerce solution providers and hosted shopping cart solutions digging into advanced options like: Evaluating review sites and weeding out internet spam marketing about e-commerce. Until then take care.

Okay, I know it’s tough to rank up on the G but cmon lately it’s seeming impossible to do anything right.  G changes everything at least once a quarter now and the black-hatters are catching up too fast for them.  Oh, it’s keywords, no it’s meta, no it’s backlinks, no it’s pagerank, no it’s a balance. NO, it’s NOTHING.

In the last 9 months I’ve watched 12 properties that I own all eCommerce or pointing to eCommerce sites hosted with shopping carts get annihilated by domains that not only have next to 0 content but in many cases were registered less then a month before they were in the top 5 rank on G’s front page.  WTF. Maybe they’re trustworthy sites that posted a new topic and their strength took them to the top in record times. Yeah right.  They are on the front page before normal URLs are listed.  How is this happening. Well it doesn’t take much research to figure out how.

There are tons of techniques and even software available now for the crowd that’s willing to go to the darkside and not concerned with long term interests for their properties.  And why would they be with properties that look like atrocities (any tld, large character domains just to cover keywords, and $5 worth of outsourced content) . Then they use one of many techniques to artificially ping their site with thousands to millions of fake hits in order to get listed in rapid fashion.  Once listed they begin a process either manually or more often then not with software like seNuke to build a completely artificial backlink system called a link-wheel.  This has the ability to produce thousands of links a day. So in a matter of weeks or months at the longest there they are topping your site that you’ve spent years working on, writing your own content, doing your own research, trying to add some value to what you are selling rather than just profit from a few ads and bail next week.

G’s response. Well Mr. Cutts states in a YouTube response that while blackhat techniques will rise and fall your whitehat strategy will prevail in the longterm.  What about those of us that are feeding ourselves with eCommerce sales? What about those truly looking for a product review, or real information on a subject. One to two months to weed out the scam sites is not quick enough. That can costs thousands of dollars out of somebodies living income.

The question is how many will start looking into the grey area or darker to keep their domains ranking high enough to make money? It’s only a matter of time before everybody has to resort to lowre quality content an higher quantity of tactics just to survive. What does that do to the web though? What does that do to G?

Call me an end of world’est kind of guy but I think search is slowly dying in the way we know it. How many times a day do you hit G now compared to let’s say a year ago? An no not to see where you rank but to look for something or collect the news or research something. I see a huge trend of automating these types of processes. Leveraging social networks and trusted relationships for information, feeds for news, and trusted authorities like Amazon for shopping. My wife commented the other day she goes straight to stores she knows from the brick and mortar days or something she has seen on traditional advertising like Overstock.com, Amazon, and others because she’s afraid of where she’ll end up just by searching. Take for example, the term Dark Eye Circle. My wife like any woman spends way too much money on cosmetics and she was looking at some outlandishly overpriced solution for eye circles. First rank in G is a site that’s clearly bullshish.  It’s a review site pumping up a product with perfect 5 out of 5 review and the rest of the contenders with very poor results. I’d bet my yearly salary that the person who wrote the site has never even seen a bottle of the product little on try it and review it. So how does a manufacturer that say spent millions in research and development to make something real compete in the eCommerce world when they know that they’ll need to spend that much just to rank in the fastest growing way of marketing (search). I’m saying they eventually wont. They’ll find new ways to promote their product more affordable.

What is your take? Are you tired of bogus results busting through your hard work? Are you excited about techniques that ruin legacy competition? Let us know in the comments section.

Wow, first post on the blog.  Am I alone in thinking that eCommerce is still relatively new to the world?  I mean sure there are only a million articles, websites, and blogs about the subject but just how new is this portion of the web.  Well, let’s think about that for minute.  When was the first time you bought something online?  Or better yet when was the first time you sold something online.  If you’re like most people out there it was probably on a site we all love to hate now.  eBay.  I’m sure there is great debate on the first major online retailer but my vote goes to eBay.  Sure, Amazon is an amazing platform that has revolutionized the internet but most got their start submitting a credit card or other form of payment on the great auction site.

A lot has changed since those early days of online selling.  The question is what’s next.  It’s only a matter of time before a greater shift occurs from traditional brick and mortar shopping to online shopping cart shopping.  That leaves a lot of concerns and questions for both consumers and customers right?  I mean when I look online for products it’s very dissimilar to shopping in the physical world.  Granted some of the basics still shape my shopping experience such as quality of the storefront, prices, and the selection of products but there is a whole lot more that comes into play.  For example, when I go for a drive with an itch in my wallet to blow a few hundred dollars on the new must have gadget I usually pop into a Fry’s or BestBuy.  However, when online the first place I hit is Google or another search engine.  If there was a second place it would be NewEgg.  Why is it that so many that have loyal followings to their favorite brick and mortar stores loose that loyalty the instant FireFox launches?  How has Google, shopping cart optimization, SEO, and the plethora of other dynamic challenges impacted business and consumer decisions so vastly.  This and many other questions are what we aim to deliver on this blog.  Please subscribe to our feeds and I’ll promise that if you are a traditional retailer, E Commerce developer, website designer, or a concerned consumer you’ll find great information every week here.