Category — Selling Online

Despite the economic downturn online sales for sellers on eBay and Amazon continue to rise as do the sales of other retailers as reported by various sources in the e-Commerce industry. Meanwhile as sellers prepare for Black Friday the rush to compete is on!  Free Shipping is permeating the web’s shopping sites as we speak, and life continues to roar as retailers compete for the supposedly last dollar available in the US as thousands man the OccupyWallStreet movement and things seem so depressing elsewhere. While stocks are plummeting at the mention of more financial problems for Greece, savvy sellers in the United States still appear to be somewhat unaffected by the slide.

You have a mobile device, like a smartphone or tablet, right?

Now that everybody and their brother has a smartphone, a tablet, or at least a laptop shopping for the 2011 season online is blooming all over.

Online sellers can prepare for the greatest month since last December by sprucing up their stores, checking their offerings and matching those other guys out in the forefront. Shopping feeds may be picking back up as  the use of bar code shopping on mobile devices is sure to make the competition fierce this year for sellers who have UPC coded products and free shipping offers.

The most important things to watch with your online store now is

1.  Get yourself into Google’s shopping feed

2. Offer Free Shipping wherever possible

3. Spruce up your store with at least one holiday message.

4. Make your site a mobile friendly website.

Its not too late to work for greater sales this holiday season.

The other day my son happened to mention that these days business start-ups are predicted more on how many iterations of the same business a person can do without running out of money.They say that the start-up is a science now. It’s not the person or the product/service, but the number of permutations you try before running out of money or quitting.

What this means is that with most start-ups, there is little money, yet you really need to find your niche and then try different things to succeed. Some find that once they do this they don’t like their new business at all and then decide to cancel that thought and move to the next thought.

Fitting in line with this thinking is the fact that if you run out of money before you find the right niche and business for yourself, then you’ll soon be going back to work for someone else. This is why it’s so important to be careful with your funds.

This leads to the question of the hour… What really is he lifespan of a start-up website?

We  see many new start ups invest money into websites, only to find out a year later that they are no longer in business.  For us this is frustrating. We develop a beautiful site, we put it in our portfolio and the link is broken in a year. (This is why we started making pictures of websites instead of links, because start-ups are sketchy. ) Entrepreneurs fail, they get bored, they want more.

For a normal business, out of the start-up phase, the lifespan is about 3 to 4 years, but for start-ups it’s an entirely different story.

I was asked recently what to do with a change in products on a domain name. Once your start-up becomes a different company basically you are looking at an entirely different website, and an entirely different investment. This is why it’s important to be careful with funds when you are starting your new business. If you invest thousands into the design of a website and a year later have to do it all over again, you are already spending precious start-up monies unnecessarily. Don’t get me wrong, most web design companies will love you for it, but as far as being successful in business, this just doesn’t count.

The easiest thing to do, knowing that this may be just a test, is to design a cost effective professional website and let it work  for a year. Does it move you? are you still interested? If so, improve that website and make it even better.  Of course, letting a website work for a year is a great idea, but remember that you have to work your website for a year. Contrary to popular belief successful websites that make money don’t just work themselves. You have to invest some serious time into promoting and marketing that website to make it beneficial and make it earn money for you.

One of the most neglected parts of ecommerce is getting the word out. Time and time again new internet retailers just put up a site and then do nothing. These are the few that subscribe to the old adage “Build it and they will come.”

A few months or a year goes by and their next move is to call around and find someone to do SEO work because they have heard that Search Optimization will get them some free clicks and they need business. Those who do search optimization are in a great position, everyone knows that being on top of Google is king, and the money to be made by these professionals has hit the roof. As time ticks by not much happens. Sure you get some keywords to rank, but the majority of your promise is still sitting in your website unnoticed.

This is where the shopping feed comes in. Specifically Google Base which has been rolling along bringing great sales to many a smart retailer for free.

Sellers who don’t utilize a platform that does shopping feeds automatically need to get with it. There are many ecommerce shopping carts that do this, and one of the best to do it automatically is ProStores. Set it up, and wallah! Go! You’ve got business. Neglect it and guess what, you’ll be out there paying some programmer disguised as an SEO expert $2 grand to do not much of nothing that will reflect in internet sales.

Another cart that does this is Channeladvisor and Miva can do it using Template Data Feeds by Emporiumplus.com

Moreover you can subscribe to a number of feed services that will do all the updating for you.

So get with it people! Stop complaining about a lack of sales and increase your money making activities on the internet now…. For FREE!

Email marketing is one of the most important aspects of ecommerce sites that are profitable. Of our top 100 customers, 90% of them use email marketing on a monthly basis to generate new sales from existing clients and their friends. There is nothing sweeter than generating revenue instantly by sending out a company newsletter informing of new products, sales and specials. Here are some must-do’s for email marketing:

1. Make your newsletter shine: Text emails may be fine, but a nicely done polished email marketing piece has no equal.
2. Send Monthly: Sending out your email on a monthly basis is a must. Even if you don’t have much to say you can shout the allocades of a fine product offering, or give your customers information on your service record.
3. Use a Call to Action: It’s not enough to say something about today, but make your efforts count by either offering a special that lasts a few days only, or by creating a sense of urgency in your email. Emails that ask readers to check out the offering online will more likely garner some real action than those that simply make a statement inside them. The “read more” or “click here to learn more” or “check it out on our website” is more likely going to give you some good clickthrough as well as a sale.
4. Customize your Message: Do you ever get emails that just say Hello Customer? Boring. Use a first name at the very least. If you require it in the signup, you can utilize it in programs such as aSending.com’s email marketing package with little effort.

Take a look at the offering at aSending.com for more information on how to put together a fabulous email marketing program. aSending has programs that start at just $9.95 per month and is a well developed program to generate great looking emails.