1. What Is E-commerce?
E-Commerce is the selling of goods or services online, including via online stores, auction sites (like eBay), or online classifieds (like Craigslist). While eBay and online classified sites can be great places to sell products and grow an online business, for the purposes of this article, I will be discussing online e-commerce stores only.
2. Why E-commerce and why now?
In 2007 US online E-Commerce sales reached $175 Billion dollars. This number is expected to grow to $335 Billion dollars by 2012. (Neilson) Today, Business-to-Customer (B2C) projections are enjoying a double digit year over year growth. As the Internet becomes ever more ubiquitous, and more people become comfortable with the process of purchasing products and services online, the larger E-Commerce will become. The fact of the matter is that the new era of the Internet has opened up a window of opportunity that may never present itself again. Companies that are able to solidify their E-Commerce businesses online within the next few years will likely enjoy long-term popularity and success as a result of being early movers. Late-comers, however, will find it extremely difficult to break into already established and crowded niches.
3. E-Commerce vs Affiliate Marketing
When it comes to selling goods or services online, the two most common models are affiliate marketing and E-Commerce. Affiliate marketing is the selling of goods or services on behalf of another company for which you are paid a commission. E-Commerce is the selling of goods or services directly from a website that is maintained by you (you already own the product, or purchase it from a distributor). Affiliate marketing can be tempting for those who are not interested in working through the initial logistical steps required to acquire products, set up an online store, and manage customers, but affiliate marketing provides far less of a return.
Bottom Line: It pays to ‘do-it-yourself.’ Affiliates who sell other companies’ products can expect to make anywhere from 5-20% of the cost of the good or service sold through a click-through or referral style tactic. E-Commerce, by comparison, yields much higher profits with product markup usually upwards of 100% of the wholesale price of the good or service sold. There are some niches that have markups of 300-400% on their products or services. Many retailers or affiliates assume that the process of setting up and running an E-Commerce property is difficult, but this perception inaccurate. There are currently many new, easy to use technologies and services that make starting and running an E-Commerce business possible even for those with little or no experience with websites, E-Commerce, or marketing. The following steps will walk you through the process of setting up and launching an E-Commerce business in a do-it-yourself style guide.
Starting The Business
1. Choosing a Niche
The single most important choice you must make when deciding to begin an E-Commerce business is the niche that you are going to be working in, and the products that you are going to be selling. The following hints contain some criteria you should consider in making your decision.
A. Where to Start
With millions of potential products you can sell, it might seem a bit overwhelming. Fortunately, there is an excellent resource to explore all your options, and it is a source that is probably already familiar to you. The source is eBay! eBay is the largest auction site online and does huge volumes of goods transactions in every conceivable niche. eBay has done an incredible job of segmenting each market, and they have tools within their site to help users evaluate the popularity of each niche. If you start in the Categories section, you will get a feel for the scope of information available to you. After you have selected a niche from the category list, you can take a look at a “completed listing” and see how many products have been sold in that niche recently. My advice would be to find several that seem interesting and then evaluate them based on the criteria listed below.
B. Traffic Potential
If you are going to sell products online for money, you have to first make sure there are enough people out there willing to purchase your products. The best way to figure out if there is a market for your niche, and the easiest, is by finding out how many people are looking for the products you will be selling. You can find this by looking at the monthly search volume (total number of searches done) for ten or so of the most common keywords (usually products) in that niche. An excellent tool for analyzing those keywords is something that Google provides and you can access here. If the combined total number of monthly searches from the top ten or so most common keywords in one niche is less than 50,000, you are probably better off choosing a more popular niche.
C. Number of products
The more products that exist within the niche, the more unique opportunities there will be to attract customers looking specifically for those products. Congruently, the more products that exist within the niche, the more traffic you will be able to get from “long-tail keywords.” Long-Tail keywords are more specific, less general search phrases that aren’t searched particularly often individually, but exist in large quantities. For example the keyword “1995 used Chevy Blazer” would be considered “long-tail”, whereas the keyword “used car” would be considered short-tail. 80% of the searches done in any niche are of the “long-tail” variety. The more individual products within the niche, the more long-tail keywords will be used to find the products you are selling. **While it is good to be in a niche with a large number of products, and a strong “long-tail”, be careful of overextending yourself. Stick to one niche; don’t try to sell absolutely everything.
D. Would I enjoy this niche?
Starting and running an E-Commerce business requires considerable initial effort and sustained work over the long term in order to be successful. It is important that you have a passion, or at the very least, some interest in the niche you are going to be selecting. There is a high likelihood that part of your marketing and promotions will mean writing about topics within the niche, so don’t pick something you are uncomfortable talking about, or something that bores you.
E. Is the niche prohibitively competitive?
A common mistake of many E-Commerce start ups is failing to evaluate the current state of competition within a niche. Electronics, clothing, shoes, flowers, and sporting goods are probably poor choices for niches because they are already saturated and dominated by well known brands. If you can name two or more online retailers in the niche you are looking to enter, it is probably a good idea to look into a different niche. Make a list of the top ten current E-Commerce sites within the niche you are evaluating. You can do this by searching for common keywords within this niche and making note of the top ranking sites in Google’s search results. Evaluate each site on aesthetics, usability, features, the niche’s unique selling proposition, product selection, and prices. Another good idea would be to take a look at how difficult it might be to rank well in Google and other search engines for some of the most competitive keywords within the niche you are considering. SEOmoz.org has an excellent tool for evaluating how competitive a keyword is, which you can access here.
F. Online vs. Offline (buying trends within the niche)
You should consider how the products you are looking to sell are currently purchased. Are they available locally? Can your customer buy this item from their local Target or Wal-Mart? Is the product the sort of thing people don’t mind waiting 4-5 days to receive? The ideal product is something people would prefer to buy online, or something that is inconvenient or hard to find offline. Taboo products or unique, ‘throwback’, or closeout inventories often make great niche E-Commerce products, with the bulk of their sales occurring online. These markets do well for a few reasons, but the main reasons are E-Commerce sales are discreet and they offer more variety. Additionally, I would caution against products that people like to ‘try on’, or examine in person before purchasing (like Jewelry.) Selling Clothing or Jewelry online can be quite difficult and wrought with frustrating return situations.
G. Product Profit Margins
Selling a product that has very slim profit margins won’t leave you much room to advertise or market your site. It is important for you to consider both the cost and the profit margins of the types of products you will be selling. The higher the profit margin, the more leeway you will have to spend money on advertising and marketing strategies and still maintain profitability. Look at the wholesale prices of the products in that niche and compare them to the average prices of the top E-Commerce sites currently selling the same products to find out the average profit margins.
2. Acquiring a Product Source
A. Dropshipping vs Stocking Inventory
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Once you have decided on a niche, you will now have to find a supplier for the products you are going to sell. There are two main ways to accomplish this: For those with enough start-up capital, you could simply by the products you will be selling on your site wholesale from a wholesaler or distributor. Depending on the niche you are in this could be a large initial investment. This option also means that you will be responsible for managing your inventory, packing and shipping the products to your customers, and dealing with returns or exchanges. Another option is to find a wholesaler or distributor that will drop ship products for you, which allows start-ups and small businesses to maintain the site and the marketing, and not be bogged down by customer issues. The second option also allows for a faster shipping time in most cases. If you find a company that will drop ship for you, you will only purchase products from them when a customer orders that product, and the dropshipper is responsible for packing and shipping, returns, and some customer service. Most dropshippers charge a fee of $3-$5 per order for these services, a fee that can be easily passed on to your customer.
1. Stocking Inventory Considerations
If you choose to purchase your inventory here are a few things to consider:
A. What is the shelf life of these products? (Do they spoil, go out of style, wear out, become obsolete, etc.)
B. What are the minimum orders? (Do I have to buy giant case lots, or can I purchase just what I need?)
C. What is the cost of housing these products? (Will you need to rent warehouse space?)
D. Who will do the packing, shipping, customer service, and returns?
2. Dropshipping Considerations
If you choose to use a dropshipper here are a few things to consider:
A. How reliable is the dropshipper? (Do they have good customer service and track record?)
B. What are their fill rates? (The percentage of orders that are filled 100% correctly and in full.)
C. Do they provide a product feed, which contains data and images of their products? (Can you get an automatically updated list of available, discontinued, and out of stock products?)
D. How do they handle returns, exchanges, and customer complaints?
E. What is their dropship service fee? (Does this make it difficult to price your products competitively?)
F. Do they have a minimum order amount? (This can present a problem if they have a $100 per order minimum, but you are only selling $25 per day on your site)
B. Finding Dropshippers
The following are some great places to look for wholesalers, distributors, and dropshippers.
1. Alibaba – Is a very large directory of business-to-business (B2B) suppliers, distributors, and manufacturers. Many of the companies you will find on here will also drop-ship.
2. Doba.com – Dropshipper
Simplest Business Model
Works Seamlessly With eBay
Excellent Training Materials
Guarantees the Best Drop Ship Price
Sells Name Brand Products
3. Salehoo.com 75,000 Members; 8,000
Unmatched Customer Support
Connect Directly to Suppliers
Access to Instant Imports
Supportive Community
Recognized by BBB
4. Worldwidebrands.com 8.1 Million Products
Top-Notch Video Training
Recognized As Best In the Wholesaling Industry
No Risk Of Scam Suppliers
Tested For Legitimacy
Over 9,000 Suppliers
Approved By eBay
5. Blackhatworld Forums – Dropship Wholesale Hookups – Forum in a Tech world setting
Wholesale/Dropshipper List via BHW
3. Buying a Domain Name
Once you have decided on a niche and figured out what you are going to sell, it’s time to select an appropriate domain name where your E-Commerce site will be located. The following tips contain some criteria that your domain choice should match with:
A. It should be as short as possible. Shorter domains are seen by users as having more authority and are generally easier to remember, and spell.
B. Your domain name should make it obvious to your potential customer what type of products you are selling. Unless you have huge start-up capital to build and launch an actual brand, stick with a domain/business name that reflects your product offering. Including the type of product you sell in your domain name can also help your site rank in the search engines for those keywords. For instance, if you are starting a Dog Clothing E-Commerce site, pick a name like “www.doggyclothing.com” instead of “www.bowwowscloset.com.”
C. Make the .com extension your main domain. If it is a commercial site, your visitors expect it to be .com domain, the .com domain extension is among the most trusted by searchers and search engines alike. You should purchase the .org, .net, .info, and .biz of your site as well, but your main domain should always be the .com domain.
D. Avoid hyphens and numbers, they seem ‘spammy’ and unprofessional.
E. Make sure the domain is easy to spell. Spelling something intentionally incorrectly just to have a .com name will come back to bite you in the butt when your customers get to your competitors because they spelled it right.
F. Make sure the name that you choose for your domain name is not similar to other company’s names and that it is not protected by copyright.
G. Some great places to research domains:
1. Bustaname.com – allows you to create lists of possible domains based on keywords you choose.
2. Instantdomainsearch.com – Quick domain availability search – also gives you a discount coupon for godaddy.com
3. Buy an Expired Domain – Domains that are recently expired could potentially still exist in Google’s index which means they already have authority (of some kind) and have some power to rank well in the search engines. If you can, try to find a good expired domain that makes sense for your niche, this will be your best bet.
4. Developing your site
A. Choosing a Platform
If you have no experience with web development, you will probably need someone to create your E-Commerce site for you. The good news is that in recent years many new and powerful platforms have been created that work well as E-Commerce solutions. The following are my top picks and some notable considerations for each:
1. OsCommerce – Free – Open Source – Huge active community that regularly develops free add-ons – Tons of options for customization, skinning, and templating.
2. ZenCart – Free – Open Source – User friendly – Easy Installation.
3.VirtueMart – Free – Open Source – Ajax Product Overview – Joomla Integration.
4. Magento – Free or Enterprise(Pay) – Full Featured and Very Professional – Excellent product views – One page checkout.
5. CubeCart – Free and Pay versions – Template Driven – Full Featured – Very easy to set up.
6. X-Cart – Costs $229.00 – $500 – Very full featured – Good back-end control – Compatible with many payment systems.
B. SEO considerations
When it comes to On-Page Search Engine Optimizations best practices for E-Commerce sites, there are many considerations to be made. For those of you who are not experts, or don’t have the patience to spend the time optimizing the site for the search engines yourselves, your best bet is to go with a shopping cart platform that has integrated proper SEO technique into their systems. Be sure to look into this before choosing your platform. Below is a checklist of SEO items that should be adhered to at a minimum.
1. Title, Heading, and Meta optimization
Each page should have individual Titles, Headings, and Meta Descriptions that match with the content on that page. This is especially important for individual product pages. You will run into major issues if all of your product pages use the same titles, headings, and Meta info.
2. URL Rewriting
Your URLS should contain appropriate keywords and should reflect your menu hierarchies. For example if you sell 1998 Ford Windshields your URL should look something like www.yoursite.com/cars/ford/1998-windshields.html or something similar.
3. Avoid duplicate content at all costs
Make sure that you don’t have the same content on multiple pages; this can cause serious indexing problems and drastically reduce the amount of long-tail organic traffic you get from the search engines. Additionally, make sure that the product descriptions you are using are 100% unique across the Internet. A lot of times drop ship companies will give you product descriptions, if they have been provided to you, they have been provided to others. Even if it is a huge hassle, REWRITE your product descriptions so you can make sure they are UNIQUE.
I cannot overstate how important this is.
C. Unique selling proposition
Success within a niche relies on a combination of factors, but one of the most important factors is your site’s ability to stand out from the crowd. Even in niches that are not very competitive, it is likely that there are already dozens, if not hundreds of E-Commerce sites already in business. Ninety percent of these will be mediocre cookie cutter E-Commerce stores with very little in the way of uniqueness. Becoming a top E-Commerce site within your niche will be much easier if you can add value to your site beyond what the other sites in your niche offer. A few things I would recommend are:
1. Product reviews. (Outsource this if you have to, having third party reviews can boost your site’s credibility, and help you convert visitors into sales.)
2. Stellar search functionality. There is nothing more frustrating than knowing a site probably has what you are looking for, but being unable to find it. Give your customers a superior search experience and you’ve done your job.
3. Product Sorting. Many E-Commerce sites have some product sorting features, but few do it well enough. Give your customers a way to sort by price, name, rating, and any other metric that you think would be helpful for your product.
4. Blog Entries. Give a voice to your E-Commerce site by writing and regularly maintaining a blog that is located on your E-Commerce site. This blog will serve a dual purpose (Link Building) which I’ll discuss later on, and keyword placement.
5. Marketing Your Site
A. Manual Link Building
Manual link building should be a long term consistent task recognized as an important tactic in growing your E-Commerce store. It can often be difficult to build links to a commercial web property like an E-Commerce site, so it is important to be smart about how you acquire your links. The following are strategies that have worked well in my experience:
1. Blogger Outreach
Requesting links from bloggers in who maintain blogs in your niche. Often times they will give you a link upon request, but you may have to give them an incentive to link to you. Some bloggers will want a link in return; others may be swayed by an offer to write a guest post for their blog. Just remember, flattery goes a long way! If you’re having trouble getting bloggers to give you that link, offering monetary incentives, while frowned upon, certainly does work.
2. Directories
With thousands of directories out there, it’s very easy to find and drop your link for some easy link building. Directories won’t give you a huge boost in rankings, but it is still worth it to get into the major ones (Yahoo’s directory and a select few paid directories) and higher pagerank directories within your niche. Also try to get your site included in a directory that showcases sites built on whichever E-Commerce platform you choose. Getting into the oscommerce directory can net several dozen visits per week, and provides a good link value to help improve your rankings.
3. Article Marketing
One major difficulty when link building for E-Commerce sites is getting links to deep pages, particularly deep product pages. One great solution for this is to build links to those products through article marketing. There are many sites online that allow submissions of well written articles and how-to guides (ehow.com, Ezinearticles.com to name a couple). By writing articles about specific products or types of products, you can build links to deep pages to help fill out your sites overall link profile. Make sure that you take every opportunity to link back to pages on your site within the body of the articles you submit. Make sure you vary the anchor text and keep it natural – don’t force it to fit because you want it to. Keep it relevant and interesting, and you will get longevity out of the article.
B. Content Generation and Viral Marketing
Generating links to an E-Commerce site can be a difficult process, because other sites rarely have an incentive to link to a commercial web property. Editorially given links rely on having content considered worthy of linking to. Here are a few ways to accomplish this:
1. Blogging
By creating a blog, you can give your E-Commerce site a location for content that other sites will want to link to. It is important to make sure your blog is located on your domain; that way, any links built back to your blog will help the ranking of your site on a whole. There are several good blogging platforms that will accomplish this, including WordPress, Blogger and Typepad, among others. For this type of blog I recommend WordPress, it is a full featured blogging platform with a large development community. WordPress has thousands of add-ons, templates, and tools that make it easy to customize and maintain. WordPress can also be easily optimized for on-page SEO factors, which is why it is the best choice in my opinion.
The goal of the blog is to give you a place for content that will hopefully stimulate others to link. Creating such content is easier said than done, but there are a few tips worth mentioning:
A. The goal is links, not traffic, but LINKS.
As you conceptualize and write a blog post, ask yourself “Would I share this with people?”, if the answer is no, start again come up with something compelling enough to share.
B. Resources for coming up with ideas:
1. Digg search: http://digg.com/search (organize by most diggs based on keyword)
2. Reddit search: http://www.reddit.com/search (organize by top based on keyword)
3. Delicious search: http://delicious.com/search (look for most saved based on keyword)
4. Stumbleupon search: http://www.stumbleupon.com/
5. Google groups: http://groups.google.com (look for popular topics within keyword relevant groups)
C. Evaluating Virility Potential:
1. Will the reader understand the content quickly and easily?
2. Does the initial impression of the blog post illicit further desire to understand the topic?
3. Does the reader have an incentive or desire to spread the content by sharing?
4. Will it enhance their reputation, income, friendships, status, or peace of mind?
5. Is the effort required to spread the content less than the benefits recieved from spreading it?
If you can answer yes to most or all of these questions, you have yourself a viral topic. Basically that means a worthy subject to put on your blog so that people will want to read about it, and share it with others.
D. Content that builds links has a hook to it. The following are the most common hooks:
News Hooks — Breaking a hot news story on your site will almost guarantee a large amount of traffic and keen interest from the social news communities. However, news hooks are not the most linkable. Once the story becomes old news, it’s no longer a valuable resource to link to.
Contrary Hooks — Playing devil’s advocate is a good way to get attention, traffic, and links. Contrary content must be created with great caution, however. Unpopular opinions can cause damage in the form of down votes on social sites and unsubscribes from your content.
Resource Hooks — Creating a great resource of links, tutorials, information, and more are some of the best ways to attract a large amount of links. The great thing about resources is they rarely go stale. You can always go back and update them, when the content changes or the information is dated.
Humor Hooks — Next to news, funny and offbeat content is one of the most popular to share. The advantage humorous articles have over news articles are their great longevity. What was funny yesterday is usually funny today.
Ego Hooks — Appealing to prominent community members’ egos will entice them to help promote the content with their honorable mention. This can be done in the form of interviews, spotlights and lists. Ego-based content has a high success rate of obtaining links from those people featured in your content, as well as their entire personal and professional networks.
Attack — This hook relies on pissing people off, so if your goal is to build a brand, this is method is not for you. If your goal is simply to build links, than it can be one of the most effective methods. Creating controversy can be one of the best motivators for building links. By inciting anger, outrage, or frustration, your message can be spread far and wide, just be careful, this can also result in unwanted attacks or slander lawsuits.
Whatever the Hook, it is necessary for you to think about the direction that content will take you, and to think about where you would promote that content once it is written and live on your site.
2. Quizzes and Widgets
Interactive content can be extremely effective at building links. Quizzes and widgets allow users to interact by answering questions about a certain topic for comparison to an average of the answers for those questions. By appealing to a visitors desire for introspection, and by giving those visitors easy ways to share the results, we have seen tremendous successes with our own Viral Quizzes and Widgets.
3. Videos
Expanding into rich media such as videos can be an excellent way to make your E-Commerce site more unique and more memorable. It can also be a great way to open yourself up to new areas of visibility online, and create more vectors for linking to improve your sites rankings. Video content can be centered around several different things including but not limited to the following:
A. Product Reviews
Doing video product reviews are great for a few reasons. First, they give shoppers on your site a better experience, and more information to help them in their buying decision. This added value makes your E-Commerce site stand out. Product reviews that are hosted on YouTube have the added benefit of ranking pretty well in the search engines, so if you own a golfing supply store, and do a product review of the latest TaylorMade Driver, you probably have a pretty good chance of having your video rank for the products name!
B. Tutorials
How-to videos are another excellent option. They provide added value for your visitors, while also giving you an opportunity to drive traffic from YouTube or Google video searches. There are also many niche “how-to” video sites that allow submissions of video content. Syndicating your videos can be a great way to build links and gain additional referral traffic to your site. Check out TubeMogul.com, a video syndication site that lets you upload one video to dozens of video sites like dailymotion.com, Howcast, Metacafe, and many others simply and easily.
C. General Video Blogging
If you don’t want to do tutorials or product reviews, creating a more general video blog can be a great way to attract more links and visitors. Select topics related to your niche, and try to structure them to be interesting in the same way your blog entries are interesting. They should contain a hook just as your blog posts would.
6. Pay Per Click Marketing
Pay Per Click marketing can be an excellent way for new stores to begin making sales and developing a brand almost immediately. Being profitable with PPC in E-Commerce can be difficult, but it can certainly be done quite successfully. The following are some pro-tips:
A. Organize your campaigns by Product Type —> Sub Product Type. A key to achieving good ROI with PPC is to segment your campaigns so that you can serve relevant ads and landing pages to those who are searching for the keywords you are bidding on. Providing clear organization with proper ad and landing page targeting you will be guaranteed high PPC quality scores with Google and optimum campaign performance.
B. Do extensive keyword research. You are looking for keywords that get a good number of searches, but are still not very competitive. One of the best tools for researching and evaluating keywords is provided by Google. The Google Keyword Tool gives suggestions on potential keywords. It also gives estimated monthly search volumes, and a rough guide to how competitive the keyword is. The Google search based keyword tool also provides good keyword information.
C. Don’t go CRAZY with keywords. Starting with small groups of keywords is preferable to giant lists of every imaginable longtail keyword. Start with 20-30 keywords per adgroup and add more as you build a strong account.
D. Do some Math: Calculate how much money you can spend on each campaign according to your conversion rates and profit margins. If you’re campaign on “Blue Widgets” has an average profit margin of $30 per sale (excluding advertising spend), and your conversion rate is 2%, then your average cost per click has to be less than $0.60 in order to make anything on the sale. You should know what this number is for each of your campaigns. This can be accomplished with Google Analytics quite easily as I will discuss in the next section.
E. Avoid hyper-competitive keywords. Focus on finding more focused “long-tail” product specific keywords for much higher conversion rates and ROI.
F. Take hints from your competitors. Use tools like Spyfu.com or others to figure out what keywords your direct competitors are bidding on and adjust accordingly.
G. Create multiple ads and do ad testing almost constantly. Try adding coupon codes to your ads, it worked wonders for us!
H. Bid on your competitors brand names and manufacturers names. Unless they have submitted an exclusion request, you are allowed to bid on your competitors names or even URL’s. Many people will type in the URL they are looking for into a Google search instead of the address bar. By bidding on these terms, you can pick up a large amount of very targeted, cheap traffic when searchers click on your ad instead of going to your competitors site.
7. Tracking and Conversion Optimization
A. In-Depth Analytics
Utilizing professional analytics tools like Google analytics to better understand your visitors is extremely important to having a successful E-Commerce business. Even if you are not doing PPC marketing, you should be aware of the keywords and referring sites that are driving the most traffic to your site. A few key metrics that should be understood and examined in order to optimize your sites conversion rates include:
1. Total Traffic: How much traffic is your site getting daily? How does this break down between Direct, Organic (from the search engines), and Referral traffic from other sites.
2. What is the average number of pages per visit? By increasing the average number of pages per visit you are getting, you will also increase your sales.
3. What is your sites bounce rate? Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that leave after looking at only a single page. High bounce rates indicate a lack of interest or an inconsistency in what the visitor wanted to find, and what they actually found on your site.
4. What are your conversion rates, broken down by product category, and sales channel? You should use your analytics to understand how Organic, Direct, PPC, and Referral traffic is converting to sales. Knowing this information is the only way to make informed decisions about where to best spend your money.
B. Heat Mapping
The second piece to proper tracking and conversion optimization lies in understanding how your customers interact with your site. Your analytics data may let you know where you might have a problem that needs fixing, but you need to know how to fix this in order to progress. Tools such as CrazyEgg allow you to see more specifically potential problem areas in your site, including places that customers find confusing, frustrating, or simply unappealing. CrazyEgg, and other similar offerings allow you to see where on the page users click, giving you an opportunity to change styling and layout that can create big improvements in site interaction, length of stay, and ultimately in conversions(sales).
C. Better Conversions Through a Personalized Experience
One of the major differences between online and offline commerce is the personalized service you can get in a brick and mortar store if you need help. Most E-Commerce sites do a very poor job at addressing customer concerns while they are on the site. There are several ways to give your customers that personalized experience and superior customer service.
1. Livechat – Having a live person available to answer questions can be an excellent way to convert visitor to buyers. Liveperson is an excellent paid solution and Crafty Syntax provides a decent open source version.
2. 800 number – Having an 800 number adds authority and legitimacy to your site.
3. Extensive FAQ – Try to answer any potential questions a customer might have. A few important ones to address that could mean a lost customer if not answered included: “what will appear on my credit card statement?”; “will my item be shipped in discreet packaging?”; “What is your return policy?” etc.
8. Email Marketing and Social Networking
While the majority of your sales will likely come from first time customers, repeat business is essential to the success of any online store. Email marketing and integrating social networking can be an excellent way to keep in touch with your customers and encourage repeat business.
A. Email
1. Collect email addresses from all customers. Email address should be a mandatory field for all purchases. This email will be used to contact customers about their orders, but can also be used later on to solicit new business, to tell them about deals, or to introduce them to new products. Make sure you give them the option to refuse further communication though.
2. Use an email service like IContact.com to send email blasts. Sending the emails yourself will result in poor results. IContact.com and other email marketing providers have white-list agreements with many ISP’s, meaning more of your emails will get through and less will be sent to your customers spam folders. IContact also provide tracking features which can help you track your email campaigns efficacy.
B. Social Networking
Integrating Twitter and Facebook into your site and email blasts can be a great way to reach new customers and develop brand loyalty with your current customers. With each email blast, be sure to include links to your Facebook group page and your twitter account. Incentivize your customers into being your friend on Facebook, or following you on Twitter by offering bonuses through these channels. Exclusive coupons or deals work great.
9. Affiliate Programs
An excellent way to increase both your sales and your organic search engine rankings is by starting an affiliate program for your ecommerce store. Affiliates act as your sales people, spreading the word about your ecommerce store online. Not only will you gain more sales through the traffic they drive to your site, but their marketing efforts will increase the number of links pointing back at your site which can significantly improve your organic search engine rankings. By utilizing an affiliate program you can also get your site included in many reputable affiliate directories, which can provide additional benefit.
A. Affiliate Software
1. idevdirect.com – iDevAffiliate offers inexpensive software that is highly compatible with most shopping cart systems. There is a small initial fee but no monthly recurring fees.
2. Post Affiliate Pro – Post Affiliate Pro is an award-winning software program designed to empower or establish your affiliate program. Post Affiliate Pro is easy-to-use, and easy to set up to manage your own affiliate program. Cost varies depending on features, but is one of the more expensive options.
3. Affiliatewiz – Is a decent solution for tracking your affiliates online. Similar to idevaffiliate, but with a few different features and a bit more expensive.
4. Direct Track -Direct Track is powerful software that is used by many including CPA Networks, Affiliate Networks, etc. Infact. DirectTrack currently powers more affiliate programs and affiliate networks than any other technology in the world. DirectTrack is an intuitive, turn-key ASP platform that can easily be private labeled and tailored
5. Affiliate Trail – Another low cost, highly featured affiliate software solution.
B. Affiliate Directories to Join
One of the best ways to attract new affiliates (and also build links) is to add your new affiliate program to affiliate directories. There are hundreds of such directories out there. Here are a few good ones:
affiliatescout.com
affiliatesdirectory.com
affiliateseeking.com
associateprograms.com
jamaffiliates.com
10. User Generated Content
Writing your own content or having it outsourced consumes both time and resources. It is, however a very valuable piece of marketing your site and building links. An excellent way to increase the amount of quality content is to ask the visitors and fans of your site to contribute to its content. This works particularly well for niche sites, where readers are well invested in the topic, and likely knowledgeable and eager to contribute. Although you will find some altruistic people who will write for you free of charge, having some incentive to contribute is usually necessary.
Incentivizing UGC: Incentivizing people who come to your site to write for you can be done in many ways. If your site is heavily trafficked and receives a lot of visitors, the visibility will likely be enough to entice others to write for you. If you’re just starting or have a small readership or low traffic, it might be necessary to incentivize writers monetarily or by offering them products from your E-Commerce store in exchange for their services.
Examples: There are many sites that have utilized user generated content well. One excellent example is Youmoz.org/UGC. Youmoz is an excellent SEO and Internet Marketing site with a very high reader base. They allow submissions for content from anyone, and when approved post the content in their user generated content section. They post many of these articles written by users per week, and they have seen increases in their rankings as a result of the success of articles written by their viewers.
WordPress MU: WordPress Multi User is a great way to provide a way for your visitors to have their own blogs that are hosted on your domain. Check it out.
11. A Few Notes on Outsourcing
Outsourcing can provide a huge competitive advantage if you can learn to do it properly. There are huge numbers of qualified cheap workers available to help with almost any aspect of your E-Commerce business. The following are some resources for finding these workers.
MTURK: Excellent for menial and repetitive tasks. Mturk is a service of Amazon.com and there are many qualified workers who can do a wide variety of tasks. As I discussed earlier, having a 100% unique site is very important in avoiding duplicate content issues that can hurt your E-Commerce stores rankings. Mturk can be a great resource to have people re-write content, especially product descriptions so that they are unique from the product descriptions being used elsewhere online (a lot of times generic product descriptions are supplied by dropshippers or manufacturers and most E-Commerce stores don’t go to the trouble of rewriting them.)
ODesk: Odesk.com is a website that allows for the hiring and monitoring of outsourced workers. You can hire workers here with almost any skill from around the world. Odesk is unique in a few regards. First is that you will find more workers from foreign countries than on other freelancing sites. Workers are generally cheaper because of the foreign workers. While they are not the best for more advanced writing jobs because many are not native English speakers, it is easy to find programmers, link builders, low level content writers, and other basic tasks. In order to get the most out of workers here it is essential to provide very detailed instructions about the tasks you assign and the deliverables you expect. Odesk does a great job of helping you monitor your workers by providing keystroke counting, screenshots of what they are doing, and even the ability to monitor them to see if they are at their desks.
Guru/Elance/Scriptlance/Rent-a-coder Etc: These sites are for hiring freelancers, most of whom are native English speakers and are from first world countries. You can outsource almost any task on these sites from design to writing to programming to illustration to marketing. Expect to pay freelancers a bit more on these sites than Odesk, but they will produce higher quality work more autonomously.
Conclusion
While starting and running an E-commerce business can require more upfront work than some other methods of making money online, it provides significant benefits. By creating a sustainable and profitable E-commerce store that ranks well in the search engines and gets significant organic search traffic, you will have also created a very valuable web property that can be sold for many times its yearly profit.
