In a recent blog we talked about how you can encourage users to leave product reviews. Quite often though, when you first enable product reviews in your online store, customers see there are none and can be reluctant to contribute. So how do you get the ball rolling wiith product reviews on your site?
Last week we talked about using your product descriptions as a selling tool. One thing that is often overlooked though is the role that the snippets presented in the search results have in getting customers to your site. If the text that you use for your descriptions doesn’t grab the customers’ attention, they will immediately move to the next result and they might never get to see what you have to offer on your site.
Saturday afternoon and a little off topic. In this industry we not only meet a lot of business people who are developing new online businesses or have existing businesses that need to move online, but we obviously take a very keen interest in what’s happening with offline businesses.
Restaurants, clubs, consultancy firms - they all have an opportunity to take full advantage of the public interest swell in eCommerce. Knowledge can be sold online, just ask any wine enthusiast who subscribes to wine blog websites and periodical eNewsletters. Even accountancy firms have an opportunity. The question is, will those businesses begin to think outside the box or will they continue to ignore the growing demand for buying information online?
That’s a question I often ask an ecommerce store owner, and surprisingly frequently, it’s clear that the site hasn’t been thought about in those terms.
It’s very easy to get caught up in the jargon of online commerce; conversion rates, cart abandonment, fulfillment systems etc etc, and of course these things are all important. The problem with focusing on the technology though is that we tend to forget the psychology of buying and selling.
A product landing page is your opportunity to showcase your favourite or best selling products to a wider audience. These specialist pages are opportunities to spread your creative wings a little and provide information that would otherwise crowd the product’s actual shop page with too much information.
Many businesses developing their first ecommerce website seriously underestimate the amount of time required to properly develop the site. In actual fact, the technical side of things is quite straightforward, and it’s the creation of high quality images and writing of good product descriptions that really takes the time.
There's so much more to opening your first online shop than simply uploading a bunch of great products and images. If you're starting out for the first time, this article may save you some heartache and ensure that you hit the ground running!
Almost always when we’re talking to business owners about a new website development, we ask what work has been done on branding their business, as it is extremely important to understand what messages the website style and design need to project. However, this is usually interpreted as whether the business has a logo and graphic identifier for the business.
Brand and branding are different and understanding what brand is will help with the activities that are part of branding. I found an excellent description of brand and branding by EC (Lisa) Stewart on the website “Indie Creative”.
In my previous blog I mentioned some research that showed that negative product reviews were beneficial as they added credibility and balance in the eyes of your customers.
Looking around a variety of websites though, you see many sites that have reviews enabled but few, if any, reviews. So the question is, how to you encourage customers or even site visitors to review a product?
Product reviews, whether on an ecommerce site or in social media, are proving to be an effective online sales tool. Peer reviews seem to have far greater credibility than normal reviews such as those found in industry magazines, manufacturers websites etc.
However, while many ecommerce store owners are afraid of enabling comments on blogs or enabling customer product reviews for fear of negative comments,
Online retailers have a unique window of opportunity thanks largely to traditional retailers taking their eye off the ball. I shopped across many different types of stores over Xmas and my experience in most of them carried a common thread: lackluster customer service coupled with poor product knowledge.
It never fails to amaze me how often online stores use poor quality photographs for their products. When you buy online, unless it’s a well known product, instead of your customers being able to pick up or inspect the actual product closely, you are relying on the photographs and descriptions that you write to actually make the sale. So it doesn’t make any sense to use poor photographs and descriptive text that doesn’t describe the product fully for a prospective customer and include product benefits.
Change your online store and change it often, your customers will almost certainly reward you for it
Anyone who’s stomped their way through an Asian market knows that once you’ve walked through one, the walk through the next is much the same. Market stalls begin to blur into the next and you start seeing the same mobile phone covers, the same cushion covers or the same jade statues as sold on every other stall. “Getting noticed” is the key to success. As they say in SE Asia, “Same, same but different”!
Over the last few months there has been a growing awareness of the impact that online commerce, through the use of Ecommerce Shopping Cart Software, is having on traditional retail businesses.
Of course there have been the rantings of some notable retail luminaries, and some obvious misinformation spread about the impact of online sales and the unfair advantage that offshore businesses have by not charging GST.
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