eCommerce Best Practices

According to Internet Retailer, Asda, the subsidiary of retail giant Walmart and one of the largest grocery stores in United Kingdom, plans to strengthen its ecommerce presence.

Asda is planning to invest about £ 700 million ($1.07 billion) to bolster its ecommerce, as per Internet Retailer. This massive investment will create more than 2500 jobs within ecommerce, supply chain and other few areas.

“By focusing on their needs through accelerating our investment in the technology and infrastructure to make shopping more convenient, customers can shop for what they want when they want it,” said Andy Clarke, Asda CEO.

The proliferation of ecommerce has been dramatic in the last ten years (2003-2013). Several companies came up, thrived and some are history now. So has been the technology. What was the best in 2003 is no longer good enough. Corra has come up with an infograhic to explain this is detailed and visual way. The same infograhic is placed below.

Blogs are the best way to establish relationship with your customers. It will not only help you to showcase your expertise but also to know what the customer thinks about you. Blogging has several things for your business to leverage from. In this post, we will look at some tips for your ecommerce business to leverage from blogs.

• No Self-Promotion – Make sure that you don’t post anything that is self-promotional. Blogs can make or break your relationship with customers. So consider it as a platform to get feedback from the customers.
• Educate Customers – This is better way to engage and enhance the relationship with the customers.
• Run contests – This can be partial marketing however, make sure that you don’t overdo it. It can be something like providing coupons freebies etc.
• Address the concerns – Sometimes you will receive complains and queries through blog. You must have resources in place to address and resolve the issues. This will give an impression to the customer that you are serious even on blogs. Read more

In retail terms, warranties are referred to and considered guarantees. They are agreements which call for the replacement or repair of tangible personal property with either no additional charge, or a reduced charge for parts or labor. It also refers to replacement or repair of the tangible property based upon happenings of some unforeseen occurrence or event that renders a faulty product. The property needs to be repaired within the warranty period. Some retailers also give extended warranties which sometimes require additional charges to the customer.

When a warranty is included in the retail selling price of the product being sold and no additional charge is made, the value of the warranty becomes a part of the selling price. Online products are no exception to the rules, and should recognize how the value of warranties will fit into their selling price. Sales and Use tax are some additions to your warranty legal implications.

A Landing page on your website can be a make or break situation for your ecommerce business. If you adopt the best practices mentioned below, it can dramatically improve the conversions in your ecommerce website.

Experts at InboundMarketingAgents.com confirm, “Companies with 30+ landing pages generate 7X more leads than those with fewer than 10.”

We’ve taken a look at some of the world’s leading ecommerce websites and found some common tricks they use to boost their online sales conversions. Here we outline how small business owners and entrepreneurs can utilize these landing page secrets used by sales giants to boost their own online conversions.

1. Show Relevance with Headlines

Even the ideal landing page will suffer if visitors can’t find the answers they seek. Headings and page titles must show potential customers that they have reached the right place. Many great headlines follow one of these formulas:

• A promise: “Eat These 10 Foods to Drop 10 Pounds”
• A threat: “5 Lies Your Accountant Doesn’t Know He’s Telling”
• Social proof: “Warren Buffet Hand-Picked This Stock. Are You Missing Out?”

It’s important that the headline/title is consistent with the content of the page once users click through to avoid their disappointment and frustration – this will only lead to them clicking right back out to the search results.

2. Create a Call to Action

Once visitors know they have reached a relevant webpage, they need to know what to do. Each landing page must have a single call to action, which is what the business wants the visitor to do.

A clear call to action, such as “Download Free,” can outperform an ambiguous “Try Us” many times over.

3. Focus on Baby Steps

Conversions are often more successful when the customer only needs to take small steps at a time. For instance, an opt-in form can be divided into two sections: the primary page requests an email address and then the subsequent page asks for name and postal code.

People are more likely to complete short forms than long forms, more likely to give out ZIP codes than full addresses and more likely to give out any details at all if they receive something free in return.

4. Inspire Trust

When customers trust websites, they take action. They do not worry about spam, identity theft and credit card fraud. Instead, they focus on signing up, buying or completing a transaction. Improve your credibility; add:

• Reviews
• Awards
• Warranties
• Social media likes
• Specific testimonials – which can increase buyers by 30% or more.

5. Pack Value Above-the-Fold

A long webpage can be divided into two areas: above-the-fold is all content that can be seen without scrolling, and below-the-fold is the rest of the content on the page. Since visitors do not like to hunt for information, important details, including calls to action, must be placed within the top 600 pixels of the page.

6. Remove Distractions

Distractions give visitors a reason to do something other than the desired action. Landing pages should be free from any menus, text, images or other clutter that detracts from the desired response.

At the same time, certain images and videos can complement the page goal and encourage visitors to take action.

• The best images display real people using real products.
• Their captions should follow the same rules as major headlines.
• The best videos are even easier to understand than text and images.
• Videos encourage visitors to spend more time on the landing page and can improve conversion

Overall, the perfect landing page must be relevant, offer solutions and make it easy for a customer to take action. To keep conversions high, business owners must be willing to test performance and tweak options when necessary.

Though affiliate marketers have multiple techniques to make money, the one thing that would help them along is to make sure they publish quality content. So how do you write quality content

1. Unique Content

Ensure that your content is different in presentation and is not just more than re-hashed content that appears on every other website. If the style of writing is sharp, the word choice is relevant and the presentation is enticing, the user will make a point to come back to your site.

2. User-focused

Users search for information that can help them, especially for information related to tips or how-to articles. As a retailer, you need to target them with user-focused web content to which they might keep coming back to more.

3. Grammatically correct

Spelling, punctuations, passive voice all add up to well written content. Always omit needless words because being succinct fairs better than long winded explanations Read more

Many retailers may dismiss sweepstakes marketing as irrelevant, but according to research firms like Forrester and Jupiter, Sweepstake games are a fresh way to approach and engage a wide range of customers. Nearly one in four online consumers – split between men and women – which is to say almost 80% have entered online Sweepstakes. An average of 46% of online consumers between the ages of 30 and 59 play online games which half of consumers ages 65 and over, play online games and 71% enter online Sweepstakes.

• Sweepstakes helps marketers also gather opt-in psychographic and demographic data about respondents, which can assist in segmentation and cross-selling and up-selling.

• Use a branded sub-domain or register a branded domain specific for the sweepstakes.

• Spend time upfront developing a strategy that allows you to collect the key data for follow-up marketing.

• Make sure prizes are tied closely to your product and/or service offering.

• Utilize all customer touch points to promote sweepstakes – also consider using free resources such as Internet bulletin boards (shopping boards, sweepstakes boards, interest boards, etc.).

• Track referring sources of entrants to determine best sources of referrals or best places/channels to advertise.

• Consider offering additional entries for completing a short survey (to collect data for follow-up marketing) and referring friends to enter (while complying with CAN-SPAM).

• Feature key products and/or offers on the sweepstakes “Thank You” page for consumers for instant conversions. Follow-up and intelligently market to these new prospects!

In US, the travel ecommerce spending has reached $100 billion, for the first time, in 2012.  Hotels have been outpaced by Airlines, as far as growth is concerned.

Air travel dominated e-commerce spending with a 65% share of the nearly $103 billion in spending. Air travel grew 10% to $66.5 billion, besting the next largest sector, hotels (19% share), which saw spending increase at a 7% pace to nearly $19.4 billion.

The assessments of winners and losers, and the U.S. travel e-commerce sales estimates come from comScore as it released its 2012 numbers, with the category growing 10% to $103 billion, topping the magic $100 billion mark for the first time.

Car rentals (9% share of the market) grew a tad slower than hotels and were considerably more sluggish than airlines, with car rental e-commerce sales in the U.S. rising 6% to nearly $9.7 billion, according to comScore.

Two smaller categories, travel packages (5% share) and “other travel” (2% share), grew on par with airlines at a 10% pace. comScore estimate consumer spending on travel packages at $5.1 billion, and other travel, which could include a bit of cruise, as well as tours and activities, at $2.2 billion.