What Ecommerce Software Has to Offer
Setting up a website can seem a daunting task to many of us. Not everyone is proficient at building stunning, effective and dynamic websites; but if you have a product or a service to sell, then having your own website utilizing ecommerce software is one of the most fruitful methods of making sales.
The Advantages of Ecommerce
Selling your product online means there are no geographic limitations. You can sit in your lounge in Texas and sell your home-knitted scarves to people living in Japan. The costs of setting up your business are comparatively non-existent. You don’t need to purchase or rent a shop. You don’t need to pay for decoration, you will undoubtedly be using less staff and the only utility bills are bills you would usually pay at your own home anyway.
About Your Ecommerce Website
Ecommerce software is any software used on your website to help customers easily shop and pay for their items easily, safely and quickly. In recent years, one of the many advances of the Internet has been the increase in publicity surrounding Internet security. It is absolutely imperative that as well as a good crisp and clean looking website you also offer and display high security on all of your online payments. If you don’t you will undoubtedly lose customers and money.
Shopping Carts and Payments - The Essential Items
If you’ve done any shopping online, you will have probably come across shopping carts of varying levels of quality. When considering ecommerce software you need to pick shopping cart software for your site that is user friendly, stable and fits the design of your site. You should ensure that it can be used on any operating system and as many browsers as possible. Don’t forget that not everyone uses Internet Explorer.
When a visitor is looking around your site at the items you have to offer, you are perhaps hoping that they will make a purchase. Making the buying process easy for them will encourage them to do that. An ‘Add To Cart’ button is virtually standard on any ecommerce site now, and clicking on this button should take you to a simple but effective looking shopping cart page. Shoppers should be able to select how many items they want and then add that to basket. Once they have selected that item, it may be a good idea to take them back to the page they were last on, encouraging them to continue shopping and spending more money.
Offers
Everybody loves a good deal, and Internet shoppers are by no means different. Try to make sure that your ecommerce software allows you to give discounts under certain circumstances. Perhaps, a 10% discount for anyone spending over $200. Recent ecommerce software offering shopping carts will give you both product level and order level discount options, so you can have sale items as well as spend dependant discounts.
The Bottom Line
If you want to set up an ecommerce website, you will have to get some shopping cart software. Most surfers will simply look for another site if you don’t give them the options they expect.
A good shopping cart will give you plenty of options and the opportunity to offer discounts and sale items. A reputable ecommerce software company will, at the very least, give you detailed instructions on installing this software onto your site and how to use it. Choose wisely.
Halstatt Pires is with MarketingTitan.com - an Internet marketing firm in San Diego offering automated web site systems through BusinessCreatorPro.com.
Keyword Selection - Overture vs Wordtracker?
Why are the Overture and Wordtracker figure always so different? Good Question!” Jim Williams Managing Director JU2
Selecting effective keywords is vital to any search engine optimisation campaign. Finding keywords that are going to be effective in attracting the right visitors to your website is a matter of trying to put yourself in the mind of your potential customers. How do you find out which search queries your customers use to search for your products or services? Well you can ask your customers directly but properly designed market research doesn’t come cheap. You can look at your web statistics although this only tells you the phrases used by visitors who have already successfully found your website. It tells you nothing about the hordes of potential customers who gave up or went to one of your competitors. What other tools do you have at your disposal?
Most search engine optimisation professionals rely on the Overture Keyword Analysis Tool and Wordtracker. If you enter “swimming pool” into Overture you get 46,239 searches for January 2006. Compare this to Wordtracker which returns 1914 searches. Why the disparity? To understand this you need to understand how Overture and Wordtracker arrive at these figures.
The Overture Keyword Analysis Tool is designed to help advertisers choose effective keywords as part of a Yahoo Search Marketing pay per click adverting campaign. It gives you the total number of times a search query has been entered into a search engines with-in the Overture network in the previous calendar month and includes searches from Yahoo! Search, AltaVista and MSN as well as others. On the other hand Wordtracker gets its figure from entries made on Metacrawler and Dogpile - meta search engines that query all the major engines simultaneously.
Also because of the way Overture provides search results to its partners a single search often generates multiple queries. On top of this Overture combines plural, singular, upper and lower case searches where queries can have potential entirely different meanings. While searches can also be inflated by automated queries by tools such as automated bid optimisers, search engine ranking monitors and some web analytics packages to name but a few.
How can you minimise the effect of duplicates and automated queries? Do what Wordtracker does and go to the meta search engines. Metacrawler and Dogpile, have a much higher ratio of human to automated queries because there is little value in pointing auto-bots at them. Automated bid optimisers, and search engine ranking monitors are typically conducted directly at the search engines themselves. Additionally, duplicate searches are eliminated because query counts are being tabulated from a single source instead of combining results from a network of partners. Unfortunately though the Dogpile and Metacrawler combined market share in January 2006 was less than 0.75% and are seen as niche search engines whose users tend to be much more technically literate than your average Yahoo user – can you assume that searches on Dogpile are similar to Yahoo? Probably not!
What’s the answer? Providing you understand that Overture and Wordtracker are measuring different things both tools are an invaluable help in selecting effective keywords for your search engine optimisation campaign.
For more information on keyword research and selection contact Jim Williams at www.ju2.com call 0845 890 8855 or keep an eye on our blog at www.ju2blog.com
Angry customers - what can we do with them
"You are the worst company I have bought from!" - writes the client. Oops, bossss! What should I write back? It is very hard to select words when some of your customers is angry and complains about your company. Read more for an insight into it.
All is well when it ends well. And until it ends be sure not to panic; no matter how bad it looks. Your customers only want you to do your best when they complain. They can see things that you might miss and every complaint will give you insight on how to improve your business. Here are some tips of handling with complains:
• Be empathetic and come them down - which means that you should acknowledge the person's feelings (you don't have to agree with them to do that). In the NLP practices this is called "to build rapport". For example, you can say: "I understand how upsetting that might be..."
• Do not defend yourself - you will surely want to say something to defend yourself - don't! Getting defensive will never help. The issue is not about who is right, it is about helping a disappointed customer and keeping their repeated purchases.
• Take responsibility - no matter whether you are guilty for the complaint or not, you still represent your company. Therefore, you should take the "blame". By doing that, you emphasize the company's trustworthiness and reliability. If you can't handle the issue alone, be sure to hand the customer off in a classy manner.
• Make commitments - only that way the customer is assured that something will be done in a precise time interval. You have to state your actions clearly, for example: "Our team will come to your place tomorrow at 15:00".
• Make some offer before they ask for refund - that's what most of your customers say in cases of dissatisfaction: "We want our money back". But that is the least you want, because it leaves your customer disappointed in your company. You will have to be cleverer and offer them something of a value for their trouble and time before they ask a refund.
• Do more - every company can do things the regular way. We are sure you can come up with something more. After all, the complaining customer only wants you to be better, and you can use this interaction to prove that you can.
• Walk the talk - make sure to do what you have promised.
• Follow up - check back with them after some period. Phone them up or e-mail them and ask if they need anything else and if the arrangement you made works properly. That way you show them that you care and can also trigger word-of-mouth referrals.
At the end, let's use the statistics as a guide: it shows that about seven out of ten complaining guests will do business with you again if you resolve the complaint in their favor.
Dijana Dimitrovska is Marketing Strategist at iTechnologies Corporation. If you want to improve your customer service for your website visitors, visit www.activereception.com and find out more about this on-demand live chat support software.
