eCommerce Blog for Entrepreneurs
Buying Products Smartly is Key to eCommerce Success
At the eTail Alliance you will often hearing us preach about the importance of research, market, customer and competitor research.
One subset of this is to understand the market dynamics of your industry.
If there is one area where we see independent ecommerce merchants struggle to compete and that is on purely buying power.
Being able to procure competitively is one of the most important factors to online success. This is often overlooked by new and smaller ecommerce operations.
Think about it. Large retailers can use their leverage to dominate huge swathes of their market.
The cheaper they can procure their products, the more that they can allocate to marketing, brand building, customer retention, rewarding affiliates, new technology – the list goes on and on.
You need to understand the dynamics of your specific market in order to compete effectively. Chances are you can’t compete with your larger competitors on pure buying power, but that doesn’t mean curtains for you. In order to compete, once you know your competitor, you can refine your strategy.
There are different options open to smaller online retailers.
eCommerce Conversion Rates – Does Free Shipping Work?
Free shipping is one of the most hotly contested subjects in the eCommerce world, some claim that free shipping is the way to go, that it is a massive driver of conversion and sales, others would rather have a lower upfront price but a decent shipping charge to cover the loss in margin.
Unlike the offline world the cost of shipping is usually taken into account by the shopper in the combined cost of the product. In the offline world, how many shoppers will take into account the cost of their fuel, their time, their parking cost etc when weighing up the cost of a purchase? Not many, that’s for sure.
The most graphic illustration of the power of shipping charges can be seen on the marketplaces like Amazon and eBay. On Amazon, marketplace sellers are ranked on their combined price, that is the combined total of the product price and the shipping price. When there is a single product purchase a higher price with free shipping can be an advantage, anything free, as has been shown in many studies, will outperform any other type of offer, we are just suckers for anything free and that includes shipping. However if you want to buy multiple items, a shipping cost that has a base price and a small increment for each additional item will appeal to the more savvy internet shopper.
The Death of SEO? No, but start to inflate your life raft now…
Another spate of posts have been circulating the internet proclaiming the death of SEO. This happens every now and again, especially after Google has made some significant changes then started beating the drum loudly to proclaim that certain SEO tactics are dead.
But whilst many of us would like to see the end of web spam, those of us who know anything about SEO know that how ever hard Google beats the drum after these large changes, they only have an effect on some of the web spam and often (as seen recently) for sites who would consider themselves ‘white hat’.
The truth is that the people who will get hit hardest from algorithm changes like Penguin are the smaller sites who have employed less than skilful SEO’ers who employ 1 or 2 very basic tactics to get their clients sites to rank.
It is these tactics that end up getting squashed by Google as they are simple, easy and clear manipulations that are relatively simple to squash.
Many people though over estimate the effectiveness of the Google algorithm to hunt this stuff out,
If you don’t have a plan, make one now!
Recently we have been doing a lot of work on goal setting.
For those who don’t set goals, goal setting is one of the major triggers for success.
Watching the olympics over the last few days got me thinking, thinking about the story behind every gold medal.
You see, every successful gold medal has been preceeded by years of hard work, focus and dedication, towards a singular goal that was set four or more years in the past.
It is this singular vision and hard work towards a single goal that results in gold medals.
Without the goal and the focused effort it becomes too easy for us to get sidetracked and stray off our chosen path, this leads to poor productivity and stunted results.
What are your Goals?
So what are your goals? Do you have one major goal for your business that you are striving for? If not, you need to set one.
Start with a 7 year plan,
Are you spending your time on the right things?
One of the breakthrough tactics that I have learnt over the last 12 months is to focus my time on the right things.
All eCommerce site owners are busy, often very busy, but are you busy doing the “right things”?
80:20
Everyone knows the pareto principle, that 20% of the input accounts for 20% of the output. This is true for many things, especially when running a business.
It is too easy to spend the majority of your time on the 80% of tasks that only account for 20% of your results.
This approach will almost certainly stunt the growth of your business and have a serious affect on your personal wealth.
So what are the “right things”?
The right things will
Why PPC Should be a Critical Part of Your Website Promotion Strategy?
From the eTail Alliance eCommerce survey, we know that as many as 50% of independent eCommerce sites don’t use Google adwords at all.
The reasons for this are varied, but the most common issues are:
- Lack of advertising budget
- Inability to compete at the top positions
- Low conversion rates making clicks prohibitively expensive
As we have discussed in other posts, the way to win at Adwords is to convert a lot of the traffic from PPC, which will enable you to buy more clicks and get a higher position, this is a virtuous circle, most companies get caught in a negative PPC spiral and end up giving up on it very quickly.
The guys over at Word Stream have dug up some interesting data showing the importance of PPC (well they would they sell PPC management software, wouldn’t they?) – but interestingly it highlights the importance of PPC on search phrases with high commercial intent.
Google Website Optimizer – Gets the Chop!
One of the key tools that many e-Commerce webmasters rely on, Google Website Optimizer, is being retired.
It has been a core tool for anyone serious about split testing changes on their website.
Whilst it is rather clunky and not exactly what we would call ‘elegant’ it did the job pretty well, plus it was free.
So what’s the alternative?
Whilst website optimizer is getting retired, new functionality is
