Archive for the ‘Ecommerce’ Category
is the web all that it appears
July 2nd, 2007
admin
Internet advertising is huge
With the growth of information on the internet, the amount of time people spend on it has grown as well, which has in turn generated a new market for internet advertising. Some of the wealthiest companies in the world have made sure that they get a piece of the internet marketing pie, and for a good reason.
Internet advertising is targeted
As a company looking for advertising opportunities to a specific market, internet advertising offers some targeting methods that insure that those who see your ads are the ones most likely to buy. Programs like Google’s AdWords and AdSense match up advertisers with content that their target market peruses regularly. Forget the costly machine-gun strategy of newspaper advertisements, internet advertising is targeted towards the clients you hope to reach!
Internet adverting enables good conversion tracking
It’s impossible to get a good idea of how many people see advertising through traditional means. Tracking the reach of newspaper and television advertisments is difficult. However, internet advertising allows the advertiser to track the number of impressions an ad gets (how many people see it), and how many visits their business web site gets from particular ads, making it easy to see what kind of conversion rates internet advertisements are getting.
Internet advertising has a lower entry-level fees
If you have a limited budget, internet advertising can be much more in reach than traditional methods. A small yellow-page ad can cost several hundred dollars. However, you can bid for advertisements on Google and Overture on a performance basis. That means that you only get charged when visitors click on the advertisement, and bidding starts at a nickle or dime a pop.
Internet advertising can be much cheaper
Because of the targeted nature of internet advertising and the ability to track the effectiveness of ads, conversion rates from internet advertising is typically much better than traditional mediums.
Internet advertising has greater range
One more benefit is that, since the internet spans the globe, pockets of your target market scattered around the world can all be targeted at once, rather than trying to find different publications, radio stations and television stations that cater to a particular geographical area.
On the whole, internet advertising can be a great way to get the word out there about your service or product in a cost-effective, efficient way.
Tricks to Ecommerce
June 13th, 2007
MatthewOh, the wonders of the online shopper and the confused merchant. I sometimes wonder what happened to the striving entrepreneur that understood that to make money, you must spend money and that a cheap product or service was not a bargain. It is cheap.
Lets start with the basics of shopping carts:
Open Source Shopping Carts are extremely cost effective and helpful for the small time, young entrepreneur. If you are starting your first business and have $2000 total saved up to spend on marketing, business plan, equipment, and website. Then yes open source shopping carts like,oscommerce & Zen cart will work well. However, please be realistic. If you expect to sell and and high conversion rates,put some money into your shopping cart so you can get the results you want.
For example, would you purchase a pinto and enter the grand pre?? No of course not. Shopping carts and other things are much the same. If you want results and quality. It comes at a higher price than the lesser.
The bottom line for shopping cart web design. If your web site looks cheap or doesn’t function correctly, your potential customer will rightfully assume that your product or service is also cheap and doesn’t work correctly.
Online shoppers are finicky. Those who aren’t experienced customers–who haven’t yet discovered the convenience of two-day delivery or easy returns–tend to be skittish during the entire shopping experience. A well-planned, secure shopping cart should make the checkout process easy, clear and flexible for the shopper.
Jupiter Research found that 54 percent of Internet shoppers have stopped buying from certain online stores in the middle of a transaction because they have concerns about service, delivery, shipping or handling. Other estimates range as high as 60 to 90 percent abandonment of shopping carts on some e-commerce sites.
Sometimes it’s because of confusion; other times, frustration over the process or lack of information or uncertainty of the merchants credibility. Some shoppers just use the cart as a place to hold items they’re considering and, in the end, never buy.
When setting up an online shopping cart for a business, consider the following tips:
-Don’t force the shopper to go through a lengthy process of logging in, creating passwords and filling out voluminous forms. Privacy issues and complexity of the process can lead the buyer to end the process before even registering.
-Include a link to a page detailing customer service policies, such as warranties, delivery guarantees, return policy, and shipping fee structure.
-Provide “help” tips, a frequently-asked-questions (FAQs) page and a toll-free phone number for consumers to use if they have problems or questions relating to checkout.
-Offer assurance that credit card information is protected through encryption and a highly secure online transmission process.
-Allow customers to call up information about the items being purchased without having to leave the checkout page, with links to windows that contain the product information page.
-Make it easy for buyers to add or remove items, change quantities, or select different models and styles of a product once they are on the checkout page.
Pictures, pictures, pictures.
-Show the customer what they are purchasing. Don’t hide it in any shape or form.
-Indicate the progress buyers are making during the checkout process, revealing the number of steps involved, showing which step they are on at any given time and allowing them to return to earlier steps to make changes.
-Show the shipping costs at the front end of the checkout process. For some products, these costs determine whether the shopper will buy online and the quantity they will buy.
-Clearly indicate a button or link to move on to the next checkout step and make it more prominent than other links on the page.
Provide multiple options for payment, including credit cards, checks or an online payment service.
-Give the customer the choice on which form to pay with. Credit card, paypal or check. Why does it matter to you. It’s a customers choice, let them have it.
Cash flow can make or break a company, especially in its early stages. That’s why many online businesses often encourage credit card payments, although it’s also helpful to give buyers alternative opportunities to pay with checks and money orders. Offering a variety of methods for shoppers to pay online increases the opportunity for these buyers to pay in the method they prefer.
Accepting payments online increases revenue and cash flow because money goes into the account immediately.
Even more compelling is that there are more than 1.2 billion consumer credit cards worldwide.
Credit card payments aren’t returned for non-sufficient funds–and credit card holders tend to do more impulse buying than those who write personal checks.