Mother’s Day Cupcakes
Credit : Cupcakes-Plain-And-Fancy.blogspot.com

This year, Mother’s Day 2013 lands on 15th of May. So what better way to get an online promotion out to all your customers, friends and contacts by sending out some newsletters and creating some buzz on social media?

You don’t have to spend a lot of time typing out a long and boring newsletter. Just create one with lots of nice images of some of your best selling products.

Mothers Day Promotion
Credit : MyHabit.com

And don’t just think about targeting people to get gifts for mothers. Expand the range so that people could think about getting something for mum AND on top of that something for themselves and their friends.

There’s always plenty of reasons to shop when there’s a sale or promo on. Makes us feel less guilty somehow!

And if it’s the wedding season (depending on where you’re at!), this would be a great time to promote your products as wedding favors and awesome wedding gifts (also depending on what you’re selling).

Promotions could come in the form discounts, gift vouchers or even a free gift when you purchase up to a certain amount. If you need some help putting together an AWESOME banner or front page to spruce up your site, drop us a ticket and we’ll be more than happy to help. So gear up your Mother’s Day 2013 promotions if you haven’t done so and have a great time celebrating with family and friends while making mum happy. Enjoy!

Here’s the basic rundown on how you can DIY (Do-It-Yourself).

Basic SEO Stuff That’s Important

Title tags, headlines, individual page content needs to be written well to capture the attention of both website and search engine visitors. Please don’t overdo it with the keywords although you may need to include in relevant ones along with your brand name. Meta description tags need to have interesting content to appeal to visitors as well. Make sure your pages are internally linked well to guide visitors and for search engines to crawl through well. And of course whatever images that you plan to use needs to be relevant and optimized to your site’s content.

Check For Any Broken Links

BrokenLinkCheck.com

If you have a lot of pages, it’s always good to make sure they are all properly linked together as broken links and dead pages could spell trouble. This is especially crucial when you have customers wanting to find out more about your products or are going to make a purchase only to discover the dreaded ‘Page Not Found’. Quick way to check that won’t cost you any money? Try using Broken Link Check.

Is My Site Fast, Slow Or Trailing?

Google Page Insight Tools

Patience may be a virtue but when it comes to making money, everyone’s in a hurry! No one has all the time in the world to wait for your site to load. Even a delay of a few seconds or minutes would get on people’s nerves and you run the risk of losing potential sales if you can’t keep the attention of shoppers on your site long enough for them to browse and buy something. How to check whether your site is fast, slow or trailing? Make use of Google’s Page Insight Tool to check the speed of your site. Not only will it provide you the score, it’ll also list out suggestions to help you improve your site’s performance.

What Does The Search Engine See?

Ever wondered what the search engine sees when it crawls your site? It needs to access your site without running into broken links and dead pages. For the more advanced users, certain codes or added files could very well prevent search engines from crawling your site successfully. Anyway, you can use this Search Engine Simulator to check your site. If you can see your results displayed as text then so can the search engine. It will also display your keywords so this helps if you need to add or remove certain keywords on top of making sure that your site can be indexed by the search engines.

How Is My Site Doing Compared To My Competitors? 

OpenSiteExplorer.com

Wouldn’t we all like to know? Like how many and what type of internal and external links do you have compared to your competitors? What about your page authority? These are all very important information to help us see where we are lacking in terms of link building. So getting an overall site link profile will help you see which area needs more work on. You also want to make sure that other sites linking to yours are relevant to your own site’s content as well. Where to check this? Use Open Site Explorer and if you require a more detailed look, you may consider signing up for their subscription package.

If you’ve never done any of the above, it’s high time you start. Need any help? Drop us a ticket and we’ll be more than happy to assist. Till then, have a great weekend!

Screen Grab Of Ads Utilizing Scenery

If you’re selling items directed at a target market that already knows more about your products than you do, you may want to change your marketing approach, specifically the images or stock photos you use. Stores selling niche products like aftermarket mods for cars and bikes, organic supplements and dedicated sports products use this method.

For example, a conventional online store selling running shoes might post a big banner of a hot selling running shoe model on their front page. However, a store selling a specialized trainer might post an image of an 8-lane track or a rugged off road path, depending on the ‘dreams’ or ‘wants’ of their target market and not necessarily their needs. The product image takes a back seat in that shot.

This technique in not something new. If you noticed BMW’s ‘Joy is BMW’ ads, it would have been obvious that they were targeting a specific emotion. BMW’s target market already knows what to expect from the premium German marque in terms of technological ability. In fact, many are not even interested in that element. They are more interested in the exclusivity of the brand itself. So targeting a positive emotion would help their customers imagine where they want to be emotionally when using their product.

Of course, do not just post up a ‘dream’ image without any CTA (call-to-action) messages. Every element on your store page must help persuade a customer to make a purchase at your store. Tell your customers what to do next ‘zone’. Don’t wow them with a nice image and then just leaving them hanging there. You’ve hooked them, now you need to reel them in.

One last thing, if you’re using ‘free’ stock photos, make sure to read the usage rules carefully. Some are ok to use for free if you’re not using them to sell products or make money off of them. Some are ok to use for free if you mention where you got them from or mention the name of the photographer. Expanding on this, some images have watermarks, near the top or bottom, advertising the name of the photographer or source site. Users may use these images for free provided the watermark remains intact

Free stock photos are usually low rez. You’d probably have to fork out some money for better resolution images but they need not be print quality images. Those require really high resolution.

Stock photos for purchase cost anywhere from $1 to $100 each depending on resolution and type of license. The average cost of a 681 x 1024 image is less than $10. So it’s not going to burn a hole in your wallet if you decide to use a couple of them.

Here comes our brand new spanking content slider! The previous one was getting ancient so the team decided to create a better one for our merchants to use. With the new slider, all you need to do is to upload your own images and type in whatever text you want displayed on it. We’ve included a text editor so you could pick the font and color of your choice.

Once you’ve gotten all your images uploaded and text added, just drag and drop the slides in accordance to how you would like them displayed on your website. Pretty neat eh? You could even add links to each slide so customers who click on any of them will be directed to the actual page on your site.

What’s best about it? It’s totally free and available for all our merchants to make full use of. So get some pretty pictures ready and make full use of this feature to promote your online store products. Displaying a gorgeous slide show on your site just got easier and faster with our new content slider. If you have any questions, feel free to drop us a ticket. Have a great week and happy selling!

Victoria’s Secrets’ Facebook

Being able to sell your products on Facebook is an added bonus for many online business owners. These days, many customers prefer to communicate with businesses via social media like Facebook and Twitter as they want faster results instead of the usual email. The fact that these social media sites are open to the public is good reason for businesses to ensure that they are offering excellent products and services to avoid a public relations meltdown.

Anyway, for those who have yet to try selling on Facebook, just follow the easy steps to set up your Facebook Shop from the Admin panel. Here are a couple of important tips to take note of as well.

Don’t Overdo It

If your online store happens to have 1000 products (for example), please DO NOT upload all your products to your Facebook Shop. That will end up frightening away your friends and customers. What you could do is to select some of your best selling products to put up in your Facebook Shop. Remember now, Facebook is a social media platform. The focus is always to lead customers back to your online store so that they could see more product selection and to buy from you there. So it’s a bonus if they decide to buy from your Facebook Shop while catching up with the latest news and happenings.

Have The Same Look And Theme

Your store’s Facebook should have the same feel as your online store. Meaning that those who visit your Facebook site should not see something totally different from your online store. Customize the look of your Facebook with the same theme and look so that there is a branding consistency. This is to avoid your customers from getting confused. If you need some help with that, just drop us an email or ticket and we’ll be happy to help you any way we can.

Put Up Promotions And Discounts

Other than sharing the latest products and happenings in your store, remember to also put up promotions and discount codes for your customers to share with their other friends. Word tends to get out quicker when it’s shared via social media. So you may also want to shout it out on your Twitter account as well. Just remember to set the correct boundaries for your promotions and discounts as you wouldn’t want any customer to find some crazy loophole to take advantage of your business.

Share And Add Value To Your Audience

Lastly, when it comes to using social media, remember to share stuff that will add value to your audience. Share helpful tips and solutions that will interest people. For example, if you’re selling car products, offer helpful tips on how best to maintain your car. Fashion products? Offer advice on color coordination, latest fashion tips and clothing materials. In short, expand the information that is related to the products that you are selling. Keep it short and sweet.

In short, your Facebook should be a convenient place for people to buy some of your top selling products as well as to reach you and get valuable tips and interaction. It’s also an extension of your online store which you could use to promote your brand as well. Happy selling!

Frame Shape Examples For Product Images

I remember reading a joke many years back about a guy who walked by a restaurant and stopped at the menu stand outside the front door. The images of the food looked so inviting that he could not resist having a meal there. Unfortunately, he was less than pleased with what he ate. He summoned the maitre d’ and said to him, “My compliments to the photographer.”

Product images are an important element marketing. Having good quality images alone isn’t enough, it’s how we fit them in with the other elements our our websites.

One the easiest ways to make your product images look more appealing is to frame them appropriately. If you look at car websites, especially the ones dedicated to sports marques, you’ll notice the cars are always framed in a landscape orientation. This, combined with the angle of the shot, makes the cars looks sleeker, lower, wider and thus, more desirable.

From the image samples above, you’ll notice that the landscape orientation suits other items as well.

Items like watches and pendants are presented much better in a square frame via close-up shots to highlight detail.

Dresses usually look great in portrait. This makes the model look slimmer and taller, which is how most people want to look like, not just women.

So, before you upload your product images, be sure to crop them in such a way that they utilize this simple tip. Try to standardize the frame shape and size of your images so they appear uniformed when displayed on your front and category pages.

Store pages are not like Pinterest pages, which are not arranged in uniformed manner. Uniformed images on store pages allow viewers to quickly compare and assess the items they are viewing. This makes it easy for them to pick out what they like and proceed to checkout. Good user experience leads to more sales.

But what about images on an image or content slider? Well, you can experiment with different slider shapes and different arrangements of images on slides. Take a peek at what other sites are doing and see what works best for you.

Always keep in mind that all these tools are to be used to help persuade visitors to purchase products from your store and should never be used to distract them. So, don’t forget to add a call to action on your slides and link them to their related product pages.

Fab

Fab.com

Fab is able to make any products look good. Call it creative photography but I definitely see the effort here. The style of the site is catered to the tonnes of products that they sell which is always changing so it looks fresh all the time. You’ll notice that they make full use of different sliders here and there to showcase some of their most popular products that people are liking or buying  on their site.

Zulily

Zulily.com

Selling stuff for kids, babies and mums will require a lot of happy images that are bright, colorful and on the move.

Sole Society

SoleSociety.com

Although this site only sells shoes, the images are clear, crisp and inviting. You’ll also notice that they use a lot of big picture sliders to showcase their shoes which makes it really easy and comfortable to browse and look around.

One King’s Lane

OneKingsLane.com

Selling stuff for the home does not need to look boring. Consumers like to see plenty of suggestions on how the products will look good in their homes before they are convinced to even buy it.

Rent The Runway

RentTheRunWay.com

Anything to do with fashion and clothing will always look good with real life models. Instead of a floating product, the effect is totally different when you have someone wearing it. The focus is on the clothes while the models are there to make the clothes look good.

Beyond The Rack

BeyondTheRack.com

You’ll also notice that sites which offer accessories like watches or jewelry will usually have close ups and big pictures of their products against good background.

SneakPeeq

SneakPeeq.com

Other than great images, beauty and accessory sites make it easy for shoppers to love their products and share them on popular social media like Pinterest easily. The site will clearly show how many likes they got for their products. Spreading the word around comes naturally and easily.

These are some of the tips that will help your online store look and sell better depending on the type of products. If you have any interesting sites that you would like us to take a look at or want us to help customize for you, drop us an email with the site info and we’ll be more than happy to help. Till then, have a great weekend!

User Experience Honeycomb Design by Peter Morville.

User experience can make or break a site. The user experience honeycomb design above puts things very simply if you’d like to take a closer look at the user experience expect of your site. If your site checks all the boxes, it’s good to go. But more often than not, it won’t.

For many of us, we only look at 2 of the elements listed above – findable and usable -  and disregard the rest. As long as our site can be easily found on search engine results pages and the features on it work as they should, we think our work is just about done. But that’s not the case now, is it?

Google has been increasingly harping on user experience these past couple of years. Everything is important, from the point a user clicks your online store’s link on SERPs to the time the same user exits your store.

A few user experience related questions could be asked about this process. Some of them include:

• Did the users click your link because you did a good job in writing compelling and accurate page titles and descriptions?
• Was your website design well thought-out so users were able to navigate your site with utter ease?
• Did the tools and features available on your online store contribute to visitors’ decision making process in a positive manner?
• Was your on-site information sufficient and targeted at closing sales?
• Was your customer support prompt and efficient?
• Do you think visitors thought well enough of their experience on your site to share it with their friends and family? Do take note that visitors are more than willing to share bad experiences on a site as well.

Why is user experience so important? Well, everyone wants to be on the first results page but there are only so many results (8 to 11) that search engines display in that limited but coveted area. So search engines like Google want to make sure that only those pages that are truly deserving are the ones that show up there. Of course, Google does make a boo boo once a while and lists crappy sites but that should be a thing of the past as they continue to tweak their algorithm.

But overall, user experience is a better way to see if a site is an accurate match to a search query as a whole. Theoretically speaking, over optimized junk sites which used to out rank your site should start to fall off the charts using this standard. Improved user experience could also lead to better sales and better customer retention.

For more information about the user experience honeycomb design, click here.

Most of these sites have major categories like Electronics, Computers, Clothing, Accessories, Appliances, Sports, Jewelry, Furniture, Health and Beauty, Home and Garden, Children, Games, etc.

Depending on the type of products that you are selling, you could check out the categories listed on these sites to see whether they are offering similar products as your store along with the pricing to compare.  If you’ve got a better price to offer, then by all means go for it.

If you’re on a tight budget, stick to the free ones. Otherwise, you could check out some of these popular shopping search sites that consumers normally go to when they want to look for specific products. I’ve listed the tops ones here. Most of them will charge a cost-per-click (CPC) rate.

Google Shopping

Google Shopping

Google has been busy cleaning up their product search results. Last time, they used to offer this for free but then again with the amount of junk and outdated products that got registered, the company decided to start charging retailers as part of their plan to monetize. Also, Google needs to compete with Amazon which has a huge ecosystem of products on its site.

Shopzilla.com

Shopzilla.com

Founded in 1996 and located in Los Angeles, California, this company has been growing steadily offering its services in the States, United Kingdom, French and German markets. CPC rates for products charged to retailers will usually rise when the holiday season hits.

Amazon Product Ads

Amazon Product Ads

Amazon’s Product Ads allow merchants to advertise their products in the form of ads targeted specifically to what customers are looking for when they browse Amazon. Merchants do not need to have their products sold in Amazon’s Marketplace as consumers who click on the ads will be directed to the merchant’s website.

NextTag.com

NextTag.com

NextTag has a total of 9 sites serving the United States, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom and Japan. Quite impressive as they also include travel as well.

Bing Shopping

Bing Shopping

This was previously known as MSN Shopping. While it offers the service for free, to have your products displayed more prominently will still require payment. And you need to update your product file every 30 days. If not, they’ll take it down.

PriceGrabber.com

PriceGrabber.com

Impressive site with a huge list of categories. Company headquarters is located in Los Angeles, California. Allows shoppers to compare product pricing, reviews and even merchant ratings.

Pronto.com

Pronto.com

While other search shopping engines have multiple country sites, Pronto has several specific smaller sites to narrow down the category of products that people are searching for. Their other sites are ProntoStyle.com, ProntoHome.com, ProntoTech.com, ProntoKids.com and BabyPronto.com

TheFind.com

TheFind.com

With its headquarters in Mountain View, California, the company initially started off specializing in event ticketing but later expanded to product search. The company adopts a discovery shopping search engine approach and allows consumers to save their searches for future references and comparisons.

Become.com

Become.com

Founded and incorporated in 2004 with its headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, Become.com quickly grew with the help of funding from venture capital groups. The company launched an iPad comparison shopping app in 2010 that came with side-by-side product comparison features along with the ability to view products like furniture in sample rooms helping people get a bigger picture and to decide on which type of decor to buy.

Shopping.com

Shopping.com

This company is owned by eBay. Initially known as DealTime.com and founded in 1998 in Israel, it was acquired by eBay in 2005. The company currently has its headquarters in Brisbane, California.

While there are other search comparison sites out there, these happen to be the popular ones that people go to. So if you’re planning a marketing campaign for this year’s holiday shopping season, it’s always good to check out who your competitors are along with the product pricing. That will at least give you a heads up on what to expect when the sale season hits. Have a good one checking out these sites!

But let’s get down to reality here. Not all businesses are like Apple. Normal folks who are just setting up a small online store to sell products need to offer something more to their customers.

Other than the usual buy 2 and get 1 free or free shipping thrown in, one of the best ways would be to add some value to your customers. Depending on what type of product that you are selling, your online store should not only be about your products. It should have a mixture of tips, advice and relevant information to help your customers. Or it could even be a good place for people to visit to get relevant, useful and informative tips and advice. This will help your store’s SEO if you get a lot of natural traffic coming in.

Keep It Simple And Straight To The Point

And to make sure that all those wonderful advice and information does not get too mundane or boring, please remember to keep it concise, easy to understand and throw in a few good images and short videos. For example, if you’re selling gym equipment, you’d offer good tips on how to work out with the relevant gym products that you are selling. Also throw in helpful tips on how to loose weight or build muscle mass along with the right way to go about training your body. Add in a training calendar or point to relevant helpful apps that are available.

Add In Sizing And Measurement Tables

If you happen to be selling clothing, have a measurement table or schedule for easy access so that international customers could quickly find their size equivalent. Offer them tips on how to care for their clothing or which type and color of clothing is best suited for which body shape. Your customers will appreciate your advice. You could also throw in some natural tips on how to care for your skin and body texture. (Tip : Soak away your stress with Epsom salt and enjoy smooth skin)

Offer Wise Advice, Creative Tips And Problem-Solving Solutions

Selling toys for children? No problem. Offer some wise parental advice for parents. Not only about how to play with their kids but on helping to engage their children to help them grow intellectually along with behavior management. Sounds quite a mouthful huh? Start a small forum where parents could come together to help discuss about some of the challenges that they face as parents and where they could get good and helpful advice.

Electronic gadgets? Offer tips on prolonging the battery life or in taking care of the product.

Selling shoes? How to avoid nasty corns and callouses. Tips to pamper your feet without costing you a bomb. The size of your feet should fit comfortably with which size to avoid buying the wrong size?

Food stuff? Offer recipes and creative ways to cook. Come up with a creative dish. What would go well with your product?

Bags, wallets, accessories. How to best care for your products. What kind of cleaning agent to use or not to use.

The list and possibilities are endless. Be creative. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and think about what will actually add value to them when they come to have a look at your products.

Don’t forget to put these up on your store’s Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, etc. They make good content for your newsletters and flyers that you email out to your customers.

Happy selling and sharing! And to all our customers out there who are looking forward to the Lunar New Year, enjoy this season celebrating with your family and friends.

Amazon Apparel Display Sample

I’ve always said that everything on a store page should somehow lead a visitor to add a product to cart and hopefully the visitor will end up successfully completing the checkout process.

Our ecommerce solution offers lots of tools that can both improve conversion as well distract visitors when not applied wisely.You don’t have to use every single tool that’s available. Chill a bit and look at your store from the point of view of a visitor, a potential buyer.

If you find yourself asking, “Would it be nice if feature ‘x’ was available?”, then it it would probably be wise to add that feature. If you find that certain available features do not add any value to the persuasion process, then it would probably be wise to remove it from the page.

For example, surveys reveal that visitors to web stores selling party or clubbing dresses are not too interested in having a closer look at the dresses. Visitors to those sites have not much use for zoom tools, user reviews, and rating systems.

What they do want to see more of are different product views. So each dress should have at least two different angle shots accompanying it, preferable with a ‘hover to change view’ feature for better user experience.

Also, as mentioned in another article, try to use real models instead of mannequins. And believe it or not, if you find that a a particular dress design is not selling well, put in on your prettiest model and see what happens. If you’re selling such products, you must remember that you’re not selling a dress. You’re selling a look.

Distractions come in many forms. One common distraction lies in the choice of cross-sell items. If you’ve managed to persuade a visitor to add a dress to cat, it would not be a wise choice to cross sell that person similar dresses. If that person only has the budget to spend on one dress, she might be torn between the design she just added to cart and another which just appeared in the cross-sell section.

If she decides she needs some time to think it over, you’ve more or less lost a sale.

Cross-selling accessories and shoes would be a better bet as it would complement the dress which has just been added to cart and not compete with it.

Infographic About Link Building

Link building is still important in this post Google Panda & Penguin Updates day and age. But this time around link quality is more important than ever.

Why Are Links Important?
Links are important for a number of reasons. In terms of SEO, the more other sites link to your site (inbound linking), the more important your site would seem to be in the eyes of search engines.

Look at it this way, if your site has good content (great information, good customer service, wonderful user experience, quality products, competitive prices, etc), it would be natural for people to want to link to your site as well as share it with others. However, this natural process of link building can take time (unless an image or video that links back to your site has gone viral, like that video of the guy singing his wedding speech).

For merchants who have just joined the ecommerce fraternity, you might be thinking that it would be much easier and faster to click on of those banner ads promising thousands of links for $9.95 built for you in just a week. Don’t do it. Google does not like it when you play dirty and your site might just get penalized.

(Inbound) links are also important because they lead people to your site. If people see a photo of a dress from your store on Facebook, Pinterest, forums or blogs, they might click the image (link) or text link to get to your site.

If they see an instructional video on YouTube on how to properly wax a car using a product from your store, again, they might click the link that would lead them to the product page on your site. You get where I’m going with this?

Outbound links are also important. Outbound links are links which lead out to another site from yours. Now why would you want to lead traffic out of you site? Actually, you don’t. However, if you do have information pages on your site, it’s a healthy practice to have a couple of links leading to relevant pages on other sites.

For example, if you are selling exercise equipment, it would be natural to have an information page on your site about weight loss strategies. It would be also be natural, and beneficial to your visitors, if you included an outbound link to a Mayo clinic page on healthy diets. By doing this, your site gains points on being a resource site.

Link Exchanges
Automatic link exchanges, reciprocal links, link directories – and the like – used to be all the rage many years back. Nowadays, you have to be really careful who you link to. Do not just simply link to a site which has linked to yours. You could be asking for trouble if the other site has got a bad reputation.

Make an effort to build or get links from sites which content is relevant to what is on your site. It just makes more sense that way, to people as well as to search engines.

For instance, if I see an informative blog post (a product review, perhaps) from a guest blogger on a site about running, and at the end of that post the blogger makes a recommendation about running shoes and includes a link to the product page for that particular shoe model, I would likely follow that link.

However, it does not make any sense to link to a site selling running shoes from a site talking about home furnishing. You might get a link count but you won’t get any traffic from it.

Link Text
In the old days, people used to target a few keywords and religiously use the same link text in all the inbound links to their sites. It didn’t matter much when each keyword had 20 or 30 links. However, the over optimization siren went off when that figure went into the hundreds, and in some cases, thousands.

So, when it comes to link text, use variations of your keywords. You could also try the indirect approach. For example, if you sell running shoes, it would make sense to target the exact model name as a keyword. However, when you do that, you will find your store up against other stores on search engine results pages.

Instead, if you’re selling a model of a light weight racing shoe model, try targeting the ‘need’ or a solution to a problem. Confused?

Here’s what I mean:
- what/which running shoes to wear/use for races/5k/10k/21k/marathon/trail races
- …running shoes for tempo runs
- …racing shoes for flat feet
- …racing shoes for heavy runners

Here’s another example. Instead of targeting a particular car polish type, you could target:
- how do I make car shiny
- how do I remove light scratches from my car
- how do I give my car a showroom glow

If you do a search for such keywords, you’ll find blogs and forums populating SERPs, not stores. So, while you still need to target the exact model name, you could broaden your keyword range/variation to address different search mentalities.

Shipping Took Ages

Bought a plastic product. Shipping was supposed to take only 2 weeks (maximum time frame). When did the actual product arrived? Nearly one and a half months later! It probably went for a tour around the continent. What got me frustrated was the fact that I did not know where my stuff was because the seller forgot to put any tracking on it (even after I had requested for tracking). Ever come across this situation? I hope that most of you who are selling products offer your customers the option to add tracking to their products (if you haven’t done so) and to show clearly how much tracking will cost. That will at least put them at peace so they will know where their items are.

Wrong Item Sent

Second scenario, bought a pair of shoes. Image and description clearly shows what the item was. Paid for it. Took a month to arrive (again, maximum time frame was only supposed to be 2 weeks). Reason for the delay? Seller took their own sweet time to approve the order. And even after approving the order, for some mysterious reason they again took their own sweet time to ship out the items. Emails went unanswered for several days. There was also no tracking provided even after I had requested for it in the initial stage. Did I receive the actual product as shown and described on their website. Nope. Different product. By then I was too frustrated to even bother contacting them any more about it.

Don’t Want International Business?

Here’s a third scenario. Wanted to buy some hardware products online from a reputable hardware company. Selected the items, placed the order and paid for the stuff. Automated email came back showing confirmation of order. Few days went by and was wondering when I would get my stuff. Contacted the company and guess what? The order was not processed as the payment was pending. Now why would the payment be pending? No one knew. A few more phone calls and finally someone in the customer service did some checking and came back saying that the order could not be processed because they could not accept payment from international credit cards. Mind you this was 3 days after I had made the purchase online. This got me thinking. For a huge reputable company that does not accept international credit cards and did nothing about it until the customer had to keep calling to find out where their stuff was is rather…appalling.

Customer Service Needs Improving With Proactive Solutions

Would I buy from these sellers again? The answer would be a definite ‘no’ if I can help it. Customer service was clearly not their priority. I hope that those of you who are selling make the time to engage your customers and find out what they like and dislike when it comes to buying stuff from your stores. Because it’s experiences like these that put customers off from wanting to buy from online businesses.

The least these online businesses could have done would be to let customers know what was going on and be more proactive in engaging their clients. If you don’t accept international credit cards, just put it up clearly (it’s like saying you don’t want any international business). And being a little proactive to contact the customer and letting them know the status would have gone a long way rather than to have customers come chasing wondering where their purchases are only to be told that nothing was done. There was no proactive alternate suggestions to solve the problem which resulted in future loss business.

Credit : econsultancy.com

Remember to make it a point to proactively contact your customers and offer alternate solutions to help them do business with you. While InstanteStore has an abandoned cart feature which will show you a list of customers who did not complete the checkout transaction, it’s up to store owners to engage customers.

Communicate clearly with your clients. Offer them alternate solutions. The market is huge. If you can meet what customers are looking for in terms of product and service, the sky’s the limit. Let me end on a positive note. I came across a few online sellers once who mention that they ship only within the States. A few short emails to them and they were more than happy to do international shipping and I got my products. Be open to what your customers are looking for. Service them well and they will definitely recommend you to their friends. Happy selling!

Figures from ComScore.com showed that Black Friday 2012 sales topped $1.042 billion in online sales (who says people were cutting back on spending??) an increase of 26% compared to Black Friday 2011 ($816 million). Cyber Monday 2012 shopping figures went over the roof as well with an increase of 17% ($1.46 billion in online sales overtaking Black Friday!). Quite impressive considering the amount of moolah that was transacted in a day.

2012 Holiday Spending Growth by ComScore

Now that being said, most of the money went to big time retailers like Amazon, Walmart, BestBuy, Target and Apple. In reality, what happened to the small and medium sized businesses? Many are struggling to compete with these big guns as they can’t afford to offer crazy prices like these retailers who keep slashing prices to the bone. So what can they do?

Target emerging markets or niche markets. If you find that your target market is over-saturated with competitors that offer products and services at ridiculous pricing which you can’t compete with, choose to move on and target a different market and customer group.

Offer a different kind of service. Revamp your business. Consider selling your products to other countries. Did you know that many countries outside the United States have tonnes of consumers that would love to purchase items offered within the States? The only setback is not because they can’t buy the product but because there’s no international shipping offered to them. And even if there were international shipping offered, the rates were too ridiculous to be true (for example, the shipping cost more than the product!).

Or consumers in these countries were unaware that such amazing products and services actually exist. Make your business more visible in these countries and offer affordable international shipping. The sky’s the limit actually. Emerging markets like South America, certain countries in Africa, India and China have tremendous opportunities for online stores to offer their consumers products which they could never get in their own country. The middle income group has a lot of purchasing power. Think about it. Try a different pond. Change your target group of customers. There are bigger fishes (and different ones) out there to catch. Have a go at it.

Fireworks Over Manhattan Bridge

In a few hours, we will bid goodbye to 2012 and welcome the brand new year of 2013. While 2012 may have its set of challenges along with its ups and downs, let’s not forget to be thankful for the victories and successes that we have experienced along the way in doing business online. May the year 2013 bring you to greater heights of success in both your personal life and work.

So before the ball drops at Times Square signalling the New Year, take a moment to reflect and savor how amazingly far you’ve grown and achieved. Let’s choose to look ahead for a better year in every aspect and celebrate!

Happy New Year 2013 to all from the team @ InstanteStore.