Category — ecommerce

When I first met Dale Miller of CanvasesbeGone.com she needed a nice ecommerce website. It turns out that Dale is a terrific woman who is both  industrious and generous as she endeavored to make just the right website for her customers.  When I got the flu about halfway through the job, Dale sent yummy soup from one of the online sellers of comfort food. What a thoughtful gift!

I thought that this gift of wonder couldn’t be topped, it was both delicious and beautiful, and oh so convenient for someone who didn’t have the energy to get up and make dinner, or lunch for that matter.

But Dale has done it again..This afternoon Dale so kindly sent a care package of my favorite things… Chocolate! specifically Chocolate Covered Strawberries and Cookies dipped in Chocolate.

It’s rare to find a client so easy to work with, not to mention one so generous and thoughtful as Dale Miller. Check out her needlepoint canvases at her website. Thanks so much Dale for your kindness and generosity, you make the world a nicer place!  …. Suzanne

When you start a campaign for Google Adwords, you might want to consider excluding certain types of networks. For example, if you are selling an ecommerce product, you’ll want to exclude places where people don’t normally travel to purchase goods. For example sites about crime and war. We used to tell our clients to simply use Search only, but in some cases you’ll want to get on networks. Some of the sponsored links on buying sites can be very important for some products.

Therefore, you may want to exclude things like Parked domains, error pages, crime sites, death and tragedy etc. To do this you should click on “Exclusions” and use the list under Campaign Level to exclude those places. This will get you into content areas and yet get you out of money wasters that can reak havoc on your advertising budget.

One of the most important aspect of successful e-commerce selling is a goal list. Believe it or not, retailers need to make a list and stick with it. Some of our most successful sellers abide by it. Sit down and plan, make a list and go about methodically taking the time to put it into practice in 2010.

Here is a basic ecommerce plan for new sellers and small shops with limited budgets, that will set you going on your Goal list.

Increase e-commerce sales by 50% this year:

Go through design and evaluate user-friendliness, make adjustments

• Focus on one or two products and make them shine, pick your most popular products
• As a customer, navigate your site in dumbed down mode, what do you see? Does your customer find the information they need to purchase your products?
• What are the benefits of those who shop with you? Put them right in front of the customer. ie: Fast Shipping, Easy Return Policy, etc.

Learn about SEO and make changes to Product Names, pages and improve content on pages.

• Don’t try to bite off more than you can chew. Start with products and label them with proper keywords, then proper content. Subtle changes like this can really make a site noticeable to search engines.
• Get the word out. You should at the very least have your items in Googlebase, which is free. Do one feed at a time and do another one next month.

Set up at least one Pay-Per-Click Channel, give it a budget of at least 1% of expected revenues.

• If you don’t have a few dollars to advertise, you should completely re-evaluate your plan here. This is a business. It requires getting the word out or going viral. If you are not a guru marketeer, then pay for some basic advertising in targeted places.

Set up and maintain an email list, and send out those emails once a month!

• Probably the biggest mistake the new site owners make is to fail to collect emails of interested parties. Our most successful clients use an email list religiously.
• aSending has a great, and inexpensive tool for gathering emails and shooting out marketing materials to your prospective customers about offerings, sales and new products. Use it!

Good Luck on a Great and Prosperous New Year!

Some people who plan to earn affiliate revenue online never think about formulas to determine how to do it. It’s really an essential to know what you are up against, what you need to do to earn revenues.

If you are an ecommerce site planning to add this to your ecom, think twice. Here are some figures to estimate whether or not it’s worth it.

Let’s say you can get about 3000 unique visitors a month. And let’s say your average Click Rate is about 3% (which is nice and high). It equates to about $50 dollars in Google Adsense revenue, and if you have really good content for your direct visitor, you might be able to get them to view more and more pages, resulting in let’s say 25K in pageviews. Of those page views you could be earning let’s say .50 cents per click on 3% so you might even end up with 375. a month.

Doing some affiliate products that earn more than just a few dollars each, with just the unique visitor count and that click through rate, you might earn say 20. per item you send them to, making it something like $1800 a month.

But let me make something very clear, these numbers are very optimistic. I would rather estimate a 1% click rate on the unique visitors at a mere 4. per clicker to get $360, and keep working to improve my traffic, then to estimate that all my visitors are great big spenders who will want the single widget that I have and read all the content on my website.

If you are running an ecommerce site, most likely you’ll want to forgo this type of advertising, unless you do a blog on your site. Earning affiliate revenues of a few hundred a month, or selling products for many more hundreds (or thousands a month) on a small site is a no-brainer. You don’t want to send your visitor to your ecommerce site off to another site where you may or may not get revenue.

Now that Paypal has grown up, they are the only bank in the world that doesn’t export or web connect to financial software. Many small business owners use Quickbooks or Quicken and need an import.

If you are looking for something to use to get those transactions into one of the financial software programs take a look at Big Red Consulting who has both a Excel to QIF converter and a Paypal to Quickbooks converter. Either of these will send you happily on your way exporting and reconcilling your bank accounts.

If you have a Zen Cart and have been agonizing about SEO options, take a look at Ultimate SEO. This one works well and despite seeing all the disclaimers, we did not find any issues with making our Zen install Search Engine Friendly and safe from wierdness.

Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Zen Cart made easy.