Ecommerce Blog: 2011

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Increase traffic to your store with Google Product Search

Online retailers, merchants, sellers, ecommerce store owners - attention please!

Do you have thousands of products in your stores? Are you worrying astir to sell them across the web? I am sure; many of you have been disappointed through poor online marketing and SEO activities, and even if they have been worked, it assists you to just getting traffic for limited products only. Numerous products are still impending in your stores, which have no visits at all. So, what will be the solution? How to get traffic and sales for those products will be the main concerns for the sellers.

Yes, you come to the right place, customized-ecommerce.blogspot.com and time. The solution is Google product search engine, which helps shoppers find and buy products across the web. As a seller, you can submit your products to Google Product Search, allowing shoppers to quickly and easily find your site.

Ok, where do you find Google product search? Just navigate through (Google.com). For an instance, search “alain mikli eyewear” without quotes. Let’s find this, “shopping results for alain mikli eyewear” on Google SERP page.This could be something like,

Please note that the “shopping results” may only display the products on Google.com, depending on your items' relevance.

It will be easier to understand if you navigate though one of the products under the shopping results. Let’s go for the first one. Now, you are on the “shopping results” page. This page will display all the products similar to the query.

Now, click on one of these products, which will take you to the google.com/products - “Google Product Search” page. You can compare product prices; find all online stores selling the same products, list of other related products and some more details of this product. You can even filter, which store is offering a free shipping.

Let’s quickly go through the benefits of submitting products:

Inclusion of your products is completely free.
It helps shoppers find and buy products across the web.
It connects your products to the shoppers.
Helping you drive traffic and sales.
Depending on relevancy your product may appear on Google.com

How to submit products to Google Shopping:

Google currently offers two main options to submit your products information.

Data feed: Create an XML or a single tab-delimited text data feed, which contains all the product information, which are mandatory and recommended by the Google. You can send them through Google Merchant Centre account, or by using FTP.

API: Learn more about using the Content API for shopping here.

Selling Products Online via E-commerce Store

Hundreds of the way on hand for selling the products or services online and two modes you can go for - build a custom ecommerce website that entirely managed by you or use the capabilities of storefronts, such as eBay Store and Amazon web store with least efforts, make sure some of the stuff that you may not customize.

Today, three ways you can sell your products online – Through,

Third-party retail e-commerce sites
Integration of Shopping cart software to your existing ecommerce site
Creating and managing fully integrated online ecommerce store

Let us start with first –

1. Third-party retail e-commerce sites:

The best advantage you can get is that you do not have to build and maintain your own ecommerce store - the eBay store design and Amazon web store are the examples of these. Moreover, you have an access of intended shoppers who already search for the products on such stores - eBay or Amazon.

2. Integration of Shopping cart software to your existing ecommerce site:

Do not fret if you are not friendly with programming and all that. This alternative is best for the existing ecommerce storeowner who runs a store with simple product's lines. External shopping cart software can benefit them by simply adding it although buy buttons. Shopify is a leader in this option. The major advantage is that it easily merges with your existing ecommerce website and simplifies the technology with the ease of enabling you to place a storefront within the current framework of your website.

3. Creating and managing fully integrated online ecommerce store:

There are two leaders in this option, Yahoo! Small Business Solutions and Network Solutions - where you can build and maintain a fully integrated ecommerce store. You can customize it according to your needs later this established platforms.

No matter which alternative you opt for, ensure that one of these Triple eCommerce turns driving efficient traffic to your store and delivering people a shopping experience that comes across the anticipations set by your marketing. Make sure you have a blueprint, budget and a plan for obtaining new visitors and for serving them when they face issues or have some queries.

Little Story will advise you to create an Ecommerce Site

Before we start, let's share me a little story of my friend with you. The story is something about the creation of an ecommerce website, which will motivate you. His mother was outstanding in textile handcrafting. In a small town where they were living, all the handcrafted textiles were very popular and sold easily. However, my friend was not happy with this limited sales opportunity. He was thinking; why we could not nationalize our craft business throughout the internet? His thought was an excellent, and somebody advised him to enter the ecommerce business by creating an ecommerce website that eases him to create more sales opportunities and marketplace. He went through the solution was the computer, the internet and ecommerce, but he was not much familiar with all these technologies.

Textile Handicraft

After all, he met an ecommerce web developer, who shared some useful steps to create an ecommerce website as follows to him…

The internet and Ecommerce are the perfect solutions to sell the goods and services of any kind. We all know this, and it requires having an ecommerce site that visibly stores all these products with the ease of good design, quality products and the essential SEO factors.

People expect something different from each class of online business...

People prefer to buy the textile handcrafting materials once they feel and touch it, so when it goes online, make sure about the quality of images that displays these kinds of products.
Branded products, e.g. Raymond's suits that people orders without feeling.
Licensed Software – it requires having the best after-sale customer support.
Banking products and services – the site rendering these products and services should provide high level of security of the data collected from the potential customers.

As an Entrepreneur…

It is not required to have computer skills but a little knowledge in web designing, SEO ease you to negotiate with the webmaster. If you already have some ideas about placement and promotion regarding the products, it should get several estimates and accept that which is closest to what you really want to sell and in what quantities.

E-commerce Website Design

Quote for an e-commerce website…

When you quote for ecommerce website designing, it is also essential to know the resources of the company that will design your ecommerce site and put it online. Indeed, the variety is required. On the net, you can end up with many ecommerce sites that are curiously similar in design.

Offer piece of mind…

One-step is to prefer the name of its domain and its extension. A short name is certainly much more catchy and memorable. We must also think about the future consumers and offer them peace of mind with respect to the payments mode, procedures and resources.

Offer more security…

Like any merchant, an ecommerce site is subject to the particular terms and conditions e.g. price, mode of delivery, return. They are clear and precise so the customers have been confident when buying something from your store. One can easily contact the ecommerce site representative via email or phone. The images that go along with the products must be professional. The product description should not delude the consumer to create a mistake. Make sure about the pricing, tax and other charges to the product at the shopping cart level.

Lastly, advertising…

In order to attract more customers, one best way is to build a blog with the site to keep informing your customers about the new products' launch, discount, coupons, etc. The next is to list your site into the top directories for better visibility of your site into the search engine. Offer and increase the newsletter subscribers to build a customer loyalty.

Therefore, creating an ecommerce site takes time, investment and particularly the frequent updates!

Enhancing the Ecommerce Product Page Efficiency

Before we highlight Best Practices for Product Page of an Ecommerce Website, it will be interesting for you to visit our two previous posts; the first was on best practices incorporate with Ecommerce Web Design, and the second was on Ecommerce Website Promotion. This is the third one, which is also associated with ecommerce best practices, and I am sure it will be helpful to the ecommerce web designers, online retailers and ecommerce SEO professionals. When we picked a particular PRODUCT PAGE from the product-listing page, there were two goals in our mind, to keep existing customers and to engage new customers. If we concentrate on the areas or items that enhance the efficiency of product pages, then it is easy to convert the visitors into buyers.

To increase the USABILITY, see how it is worth to add or improve the following Product Management Features on the ecommerce product page,

Stock Levels: Make sure to display the level of stocks you have in your store e.g. 'items in stocks', 'in stocks', etc. if you cannot indicate this to the product page, then for the customer who already put an order for that product will have to wait for your response, and afterward you have to apologies by sending an email that product is out of stock, which creates a bad impression of your ecommerce store.
Use of Images: These are necessary, one of the most significant elements in a shopper deciding on whether they will buy. Ensure product imagery is lavish, of proper size, very good quality and indicates the product in various outlooks.
Demonstrate product using Videos/Images: Include as many as you can, each image or video you can supplement for your products provides you more chances of being found in search engines and imparts customers an extreme visible walk-through of your end products before they purchase.
Ability to zoom the images: Consistently enable your product images to be enlarged and make sure the enlarged version is in fact larger. You will be surprised of the lot of eCommerce websites that uses the same image for both the image outlook at product page and the zoomed image.
Utilize Multiple Tabs: It is prominent in secure your product pages don't look too littered, but at the same time, show all the vital information that the consumer might wish to go through in addition to delivering the search engines something large to crawl. Find out more about CSS or jQuery, it is likely to show a tabbed area which could be cast off to break up information such as description, reviews, specifications, etc. and by doing so, make sure it does not influence the design and layout of your product pages.
Display Everything: In spite of you believe it is not related, show it! What you might think over worthless information could rightly be vital essential for one of your shoppers. The more substance the better, break it up into relevant areas like utilizing the tabbed method above, for instance.
Related Product list: Mention related products on product pages so that if a specific product doesn't go with the precise needs of the shopper, they can outlook close and related products that may be what they are looking for.
“Add to Cart” Button: This is immense. Be sure that your “Add to Cart” button is extremely noticeable. Test different sizes and different colors to see, which performs best for your ecommerce site. Make sure it is positioned toward the topmost of your product page and not at underneath.
“Buy Now” Button: Ensure each product has a “Buy Now” button. Make the button large enough that customers can view it, but not too large that it vies with the product image.
Customer Reviews: Let customers to leave product reviews and be honest, show them all, in spite of, they are bad reviews - honesty and clarity go a long way in eCommerce. It is better to approve an unsatisfactory review but explain to it with a justification.
Voting: Allow your consumers to vote your products up and down, this provides other consumers an excellent idea of the level of acceptable your product range has and would enable consumers to sort them by popularity too.
Rollovers: Think about rollovers, which can show extra information to the customer (which retains them an additional click through to the page). This could be at a category level when observing products in a list which when turned over displays a tool-tip showing sizes that the product is stored in, for instance.). This could likely be used for images at the product page while rolling over the images that zoom the image to show in considerably closer detail.
Social Links: Make sure to contain links to “like” functionality as it helps share your product to the visitors' Facebook wall, and other relevant social media accounts.
Warranty information: Containing a powerful warranty program will put consumers at ease. E.g., Offering Lifetime warranty is very beneficial.

You can quickly quote here to get more advice to optimize your existing or pre-launched product page.

We schedule best practices on shopping cart and checkout around next week.

Four Ecommerce Best Practices for 2011 – II

Hope you like Four Ecommerce Best Practices for 2011 – I, if you have gone through. It contains best practices for ecommerce website design (index page, global, customer services) to increase the conversion.

This is the second part, and it is all about the best practices for ecommerce website promotion - on-site and offsite. Many times, you may have heard about the terms, Ecommerce Marketing, Ecommerce SEO, SEO tips for Ecommerce Site, etc. This post is exactly focusing on the areas that are directly or indirectly responsible for the promotion of an ecommerce website. I have determined some areas that can best fit into the category of Marketing and Technical.
Best Practices for E-commerce Website Promotion:

Marketing
Technical

Let’s start with first,

Marketing (off site):

Landing page creation – You can create and optimize landing pages for each category or each primary keyword that best described your products, which will especially help in your PPC campaign as well. You can after analyze which pages have most conversion.
Targeting keywords for your products – This is truly difficult part for any site owner. You can use keyword research tool and identify the best suits of keywords for the products, whether it could be the short tail or long tail. You can also use the synonyms of the keywords based on Latent Semantic Method, which describe to contain keywords related to a particular keyword, e.g. Ecommerce, E-commerce, Electronic Commerce, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, etc.
Set up a blog to the site – Why is it necessary to have a blog for an ecommerce website? The answer is to gather the people of having interested to find more information, resources about the products or services, which you are selling. Post at least once in a week in the blog with the targeting keywords in titles and the content. Make sure your blog post title should be attractive. You can even link out from the blog post to the top category, landing or product page of your ecommerce website.
Follow up surveys – Send out the survey forms to your existing customers to know their behavior about your ecommerce website, products and services.
Send an email newsletter – This is the best and affordable way to keep communicating with your existing customers via sending the newsletter, which includes the promotional offers, coupons, discounts, etc. Even you can highlight the new products with their features.
Create Facebook page – Facebook fan page is one of the excellent way to build friends, fans for your store by the references of your existing customers. You can share the special offers also.
Create a Twitter account – Twitter is a micro blogging in which you can quickly announce the special offerings, introduce new products, features products, etc. to your existing customers.

Technical (on site):

Accessible in multiple browsers – Make sure that your ecommerce website work perfectly in all major browsers, e.g. Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and IE, etc.
Multiple sorting to navigation (color, size, gender etc.) – Sometimes people leave your site as they cannot able to find out the product of their choice. The best solution is to provide sorting option in the home page that distributes all the products by color, size, gender etc.
Keywords in title tag – Make sure to include targeting keywords and brands in the title, which are not more than 65 characters.
Keywords in Meta tags – Recent algorithm changes suggest that there will be no more impact of Meta description to the ranking henceforth. You can now include the targeting keywords relevant to the content.
RSS feeds – Two areas you can use RSS feed in your site, Product, Category page and Blog. It informs your shoppers if they subscribed to the product feed about the new product. They can also subscribe to the blog to keep updating with the products of your ecommerce website.
Keywords worthy and easy to understand URLs – Make sure to include keyword in your URL with underscore “_” sign. You can remove the unnecessary stings of numbers and letters from the URL so that it makes easy for human to read.
Image optimization – Make sure the images are in good quality and perfect in size. If you want to show a product, use jpg. For logo, you can use png or gif format.
Use “title” and “alt” attributes in your image – For better visibility and usability of your product image in search engines, you can use keywords in “title” tag (link source) and “alt” tag (image source).

If you have more ideas about ecommerce website promotion, you can share them in the comments.

In our next post, you will find the best practices for product pages.

Four Ecommerce Best Practices for 2011 – I

Why is it necessary to follow the ecommerce best practices? What are the areas that mainly affect if you do not follow the ecommerce website guide? Why to follow ecommerce website checklist, are the kind of questions that have only one answer – the CONVERSION!

What if there is no relationship between the E-COMMERCE WEB DESIGN and CONVERSION, hiring a professional ecommerce web designer is not just the solution. If you have an access of the Internet, you can follow the case studies, best guidelines, and ecommerce design best practices for the sake of success in Ecommerce Business.

The best practices for ecommerce website that I am going to share here is for the entrepreneurs, retailers, merchants who are planning to start an online business through the ecommerce store. In the beginning, whether you decide to start your online retailing business with small ecommerce website or large, success is in your hand and for this, you can follow this simple Four Ecommerce Best Practices.

Let’s see the areas included in this post of FOUR ECOMMERCE BEST PRACTICES for 2011,

Best Practices for E-commerce Website Design
Best Practices for E-commerce Marketing
Best Practices for Product Pages in E-commerce Website
Best Practices for Shopping Cart and Checkout

Let's start with PART I today, the remaining will be covered in our next posts...

Part I: Best Practices incorporate with E-commerce Website Design:

Index Page:

Test your site – Let’s take 7 seconds test of your site by the one who has seen your site first time and close once after 7 seconds, ask them some questions about the company, the products they are selling, area where the shopping cart is, etc.,. If they do not have any answer of your questions, you may have some issues in your ecommerce website design. So fix them with the professional ecommerce web designers.
Logo – Clear and designed in a way that it looks easy to read and understand.
Tagline – It should be under your logo, which represents your company’s mission or vision.
Banners – Highlight the primary products, brands of your store with the attractive graphics, link to the pages where you are offering discounts, coupons especially increasing sale during holidays.
Testimonials – You can use this feature to your site with the option of rotating each of your testimonials one by one to gain the comforts of shopping in your store.
Link to your Blog – If you run a blog with your ecommerce site that guides your customer through the products or services you are selling, it is an added advantage to convert your potential blog visitors to buyers by contextual linking with your sites.
Features products of your store – Use this feature o share list of products that mostly sold in your store with the title of features products and it should be 10 or less.

General:

Set up, track conversion – Use Goggle Analytics, and set up a goal conversion starting from your shopping cart page to the ending with checkout. You can use funnel feature of GA to tack systematic conversion process.
Navigation – Categorized you products and fit them into the navigation in a way that it makes easy for the customers to find them.
Breadcrumbs – It is good for SEO and easy to find the page that link to in the site.
Aware of Conversion rate – Create a habit to track your conversion rate and keep update in your site accordingly.
Why shopping from our store – Include a page that lists all the reasons why someone should buy from your site and not competitors.
Free Shipping – Offer free shipping to get more sales.
Use of Trust Seals – Trust Seals to Encash the Trust. Getting customers to rely on your company versus your competitors is the key to get more conversions. Use these trust seals, VeriSign, McAfee, SSL logos, payment logo (PayPal, Visa, etc.), Shipping options (UPS, FedEx, etc.).
Easy to find contact information – You should include the phone number in header area of the website with large font. Make sure to include the email id, phone no. and other contact information that easily find in your site by the customers.
Social Media Presence – We understand the The Relevance of Social Media to E-commerce so Engaging customers using social networks is the latest trend and you can create your website profile in facebook, twitter etc. and share them in the form of attractive social media icons to show that you are actively communicating with your customers.
Call-to-Action items – Make sure to include the call to action items, links, buttons etc. where it is necessary to have and should engage customer to click. E.g. Add to Cart, Buy Now etc.
Site search feature – Site Search feature helps when visitors could not find the product they are looking for in your site. It should be on top and you can track the queries that visitors used.
Sitemap – For human, it helps to get an idea of all products that where it has been located, etc. For search engines, it helps to crawl all the pages of your site using the sitemap easily.
Privacy page – Add a page for privacy policy, which should be clear and easy to read and understand. It is usually in the footer of the page and make sure it is short, and it clears about the information you are tracking and storing.
Return and exchange policy – You must be clear about the return and exchange policy, which is easy to find and accessible.

Customer Services:

Offer excellent customer service – You should create a value of your business in customer’s mind by offering excellent customer services.
Offer a chat feature – Customer like if your ecommerce site contains a chat option, which helps them in many ways like to get support services, to know the discounts, pricing anytime, even in some cases it can help customers for negotiating the prices for some products or services etc.
Easy return policy – Always be clear in your return policy and make sure to complete this process if it happens with any of your customer by satisfying him.
Free shipping on returned items – This is one more area where an online retailer wins a customers’ heart, if they offer free shipping on the items returned by them.
Thanks you after purchase – Once customer puts an order and the items successfully delivered then call him to make sure they receive the product, which could be the first step to build longer lasting engagement with your customer for future order. Even you can send emails too.
Have a human answer the phone – I know I hate those automated systems that you get stuck in, so does everyone else. Have someone answer the phone. It will increase your chances of making a sale.
Personalize everything – Make sure to include your ecommerce store name with anything you send them.

Hope you like this post!

In our next post, you will find what includes in the following area,

Part II: Best Practices for E-commerce Marketing:

Marketing
Technical

Steps to Choose a Solution for Ecommerce Website

Choose an ecommerce solution, what technologies are available for creation of e-commerce sites are the questions that trigger in your mind in the initial phase of an ecommerce website development. For an online merchant, technology is indeed a first strategic choice that will affect in many ways like to accelerate the development of online activities, it may increase or decrease the future costs, etc.

You may come across many articles on ecommerce regarding this but it will be very interesting to read the two simple steps to choose an ecommerce solution,

1. Choosing a programming language:

Just do some research through search engines to find the programming languages to develop an ecommerce website, You will get a hundreds of results to choose the technology, but only two of them covers 95% of market, the PHP and asp.Net. These two languages are the excellent in all cases that they produce high-quality ecommerce websites. The main difference is the cost incurred by each technology.

ASP.Net Ecommerce:

It is the product of Microsoft. It requires purchasing a license to use this language. Moreover, the website must be hosted on a server, which is compatible to .net framework. For small business merchants, it is hard to afford the cost of using this language. In general, the cost per day incurred by the .Net developers are significantly higher than, the PHP developers.

PHP Ecommerce:

It now represents more than 80% of dynamic sites in the world; therefore, it is a leader in this category. The reason for his success is simple that it can implement all types of sites; it is completely free, including the tools for its modification. It is therefore, ultimately cheaper for the merchant to develop and maintain the ecommerce website in PHP with a quality performance.

2. Choosing a mode - Custom, Proprietary, or Open-source:

Once a merchant chooses a programming language, the next step is to choose a mode or it’s called platform.

There are three modes,

Custom E-commerce:

In principle, each site is different. The custom ecommerce software company (e.g. Ydeveloper) is responsible for the production of the site, which begin from scratch and build the complete ecommerce solution for his client. The benefit of this method is to acquire a final site ideally suited to the customer's request, both in terms of functionality and in terms of affordability. This is the most effective solution for customizing an ecommerce website. Choose Ydeveloper for Custom Ecommerce…

Proprietary E-commerce:

In these cases, the agency has developed its own 'skeleton' of the e-commerce site, and proposed to the Merchant, with any necessary modifications.

Open source E-commerce:

E-commerce is not a new activity, excessively back and forth the world. Ecommerce Developers come together in as a community and build the most powerful engine or ecommerce software in their eyes. Sometimes these communities are backed by a commercial structure. When their engine is completed, these communities make it available for online merchants, free of charge. If the engine is pleasurable, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of ecommerce websites around the world will adopt it, each of which can notify the community about the existence of a bug, a missing feature, etc and so it will automatically improve and enhance the quality of a particular open source ecommerce solution.

Many agencies then formed to develop the open source solution or the most interesting, offer these solutions to their customers. These are the examples of some of them:

osCommerce
Magento
X-Cart
RoR

Click here for more!

Tips to optimize an Ecommerce Site before Christmas Starts

Over 2 months to pass before Christmas holiday season starts. For online merchants, it is time to refresh or customize ecommerce site they own excitingly with the application of Christmas marketing ideas in terms of getting higher search engine visibility of their products during this specific period. If you want more sales with less time and efforts, you should pay more attention to the areas of your ecommerce website that optimized easily. Compare your sites with competitors first, see if have updated their site with any exciting offers, discounts, coupons, etc. Are there site banners looks more attractive? Are they providing free shipping to all products?

Once you dominate the kind of above promotional offers, next step is to check ranking of your ecommerce store in search engine for specific search queries. What position you deserve right now, especially for the long tail search terms that usually have low competition and higher conversion. Is that far away from first page of search engine? Do not worry; two months are enough to reach there, if you consistently follow 10 easy SEO optimization tips for Ecommerce Site that mainly includes three main areas of ecommerce website optimization, on-page, off-page through link building and social media, by which you can able to boost Christmas holiday sale and revenue.

For Ecommerce Store

If you have not done it yet, do a little audit of your site for 404 errors, broken links or missing graphics, etc.
You can update home page area with keyword rich anchor text for special Christmas ranges or categories.
Revise the Meta descriptions with typical Christmas keywords. For example, "gift box" or "delivery guarantee" or even a matching call to action words.
Add Alt Tags to Images on all pages ranked high on search engines.
Short-term link building initiatives using link baits such as “Top 10 Charismas Gifts to give this Holiday Season” etc.
Optimize for value-added services such as free packaging, free shipping, gift ideas or gift consultant, etc.
Check & optimize your pay per click ads.
Add Long tail keywords to the pages ranking higher in search engines.
Make friends who own the website that is related to your niche and request them to link back to you site from their home or any other page.
Write a blog post that includes Christmas, Gift, Holiday with your product’s keywords.
With holiday keywords, you can promote the products with the brand into the social networks like Facebook, Twitter, etc.
You can also start blogging temporarily to promote your products for grabbing attention of people visit your blog in the search of shopping and gift ideas specially for Christmas holidays.

Unveils X.commerce by eBay

Recently, in San Francisco, opening Innovate 2011 Developer Conference – John Donahoe – a CEO of eBay has officially launched X.commerce, an open-source ecommerce platform. He summarized that it’s a unique platform that aggregates all the ecommerce services of all sized e-merchants. The strategies of eBay that we found recently for acquisition has now been more cleared.

The Magento, a free e-commerce platform acquired by eBay in 2010, so the combination of Magento ecommerce, and the experience of offering eBay stores design and development solutions with distributing over their own shopping store is enough to deploy a comprehensive solution called, X.commerce that has been tagged by them as,

“The future of technology-powered buying and selling”

X.commerce is the platform that drives into the end-to-end and multi-channel commerce technology chosen by today’s modern consumers when they go for shopping online.

For online retailers:

X.commerce is an exclusive platform that performs the most modern commerce technologies easy to approach. X.commerce developers build a technology that is easy for the personal modification to any online retail business. In addition, the capability to measure quickly without investing in expensive, complicated configuration begins the playing field to retailers of any size, in any place, to strive for the success and win.

For ecommerce developers:

X.commerce is a powerful, open ecosystem that enables integrators and ecommerce web developers with the most impeccable set of commerce-related tools and abilities in the world. Seeing that this ecosystem offers the path to eBay Inc.’s resources via this entry point, it also offers developers access to the large numbers of consumers and online retailers who are starving for best end-to-end commerce solutions.

X.commerce Fabric Overview:

The entire first floor consists of a platform to grow by the market place of Magento extensions and integration of all ecosystem services of eBay. The SDK will enable developers to contribute in the development of X.commerce. eBay is therefore, the challenge of breaking the borders between online and offline businesses and commenced new bridges between the web and sales areas in the concept of an innovative collaboration with the retail chain.

John Donahoe predicted more change in the next three years than in the previous 15, including the explosion of m-commerce.

Give your views on this new open source platform, as it is more than ecommerce…

What happens in a minute on the Internet?

In the world of SEO, there are least numbers of people, who have not ever heard about Rand Fishkin. He is a founder of SEOMoz. I frequently follow SEOMoz blog to find out what is happening in the world of Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Internet Marketing, Ecommerce, etc.

I am so crazy about the use of the Internet, and I cannot stop myself to share an interesting info-graphic to all the viewers of this blog.

I found this interesting infographics on my Google+ stream.

Click here for large graphical view.

Keep enjoying!

What seven things can change the presence of Ecommerce

Seven areas we have explored in the context of online retailers and customers to make e-commerce more advanced.

For retail merchants looking forward to implement a first-to-next generation e-commerce solution or change their existing systems, there are a number of up-to-date new enhancements available. Deciding which of these will drive higher return can be difficult to even the most well-versed e-commerce practitioner, and it is smart to deliberate for modernization as not only haptic product but also as a business practice.

We have examined SEVEN such new advancements, both tactual and process-driven, that are contemporary in nowadays interactive orb, in the context of online retailers, companies that design and develop an ecommerce website and last but not least the customers.

1. Retailing through multi store:

2. Individual's experience and interaction:

3. People expect to shop directly from their iPad, iPhone:

4. Effective online Customer Service:

5. Navigation tools:

6. Video solutions:

7. Guidance to buy the products:

Keep on visiting this blog, as we are going to study each of the above areas in details and share with you later on posting this article.

Until we finish writing on the topics above, you can share your views, ideas and the other areas that have in your mind and we missed out...

Innovative Ecommerce Solution for the Next Generation

Innovative, Next Generation Technologies are the words that completely fit with today’s ecommerce websites. Ecommerce is the most familiar platform for online shopping today and in the future, it can reach up to the level that we could not believe. It is time for think about Innovative Ecommerce Solution, and online retailers have to refine their ecommerce strategies today to stay ahead in the competitive ecommerce sites of tomorrow.

Ydeveloper an ecommerce solution provider that offers next-generation ecommerce solution is apparently the optimal way to go if you are planning to commence your own online store on the web or want to customize your existing store. Overlook the software for ecommerce support and the shopping cart solutions it is all a bunch of waste as we believe and not only that they are very hard to set up from our own personal experience. Running an online business compels many of the same outstanding activities as commencing any other business.

A fundamental business plan, some products, ecommerce store and customers, you will need a retailer account or the capability to process your customers’ credit-card transactions over the Net. This comprehends requiring a secure server so that your on-line store is on a system that secures your customers’ credit card numbers that cannot effortlessly be read by persons who are not presumed to read these numbers.

You will apparently require some sort of online order form that shoppers can complete, in order to buy your products. That is where an ecommerce company provides the best ecommerce solutions that will come in hand. You need to design and promote your ecommerce store through SEO and Social Media. The key is in your hand to access the treasure of our expertise that can conventionally design and look after your website for you and it will need continuing attention and certainly some internet marketing expertise too.

Ecommerce is the selling and buying of goods over the net. It enables even the smallest business to obtain an international audience with its product or idea with least cost. So, we help our clients improve their ecommerce development solutions that works. Our small and mid-sized clients have the same obstacles as their business scale counterparts. They need to proceed to expand and position themselves for future success. We only work with clients who believe change is continuous, is facing one of those changes, and desire a brief help obtaining throughout. Please let us know what kind of ease you are looking for on your ecommerce store as we can do one part or all of it.

Five Tips to Rock your E-commerce Website

I want your ecommerce website to be serviced so that it rocks. To get more traffic, conversion and better ROI, I have determined five areas that need to be focused. We should not forget about the ranking factors for search engines, which depend on these five areas mostly that we are going to talk about lately in this post. A little improvement can give your website more visibility for search engine as well as human. Some factors have no impact on search engines, e.g. Google looking ecommerce websites. Only human can decide that the ecommerce site they are viewing is really looking good or not. Not now but in the future search engines might be able to do this.

No matter which platforms for ecommerce development you used in back ends, ASP.net, PHP, Yahoo Stores, eBay Store, etc. the tips for ecommerce website design shared here are common for each, so consult and make sure from your ecommerce developers if they did not focus highly on these areas.

Finally, the secrets to successful ecommerce are going to be revealed here. It defines that your e-commerce website should be…

Good looking
Easy to understand
Easy to navigate
Easy to accessible
Easy to use

Good looking:
As discussed, this factor has the higher impact on Human and almost no impact to the search engine. Good-looking ecommerce website means to have a clear background, especially in white, nice font that encourages you to read further, clear image with perfect placement, icons for social media, payment gateways, security, awards, etc. should be eye-catching.

Easy to understand:
It is specific to the content that is easily understood by human and follows the search engine guidelines as the density and proximity of keywords used in content should be proper. It is a human tendency that they like to read less and within that timeline, it should be converted into the goals. Other things like, it should be easy to understand by all ages, whether your audiences are teenagers, younger’s or senior citizens.

Easy to navigate:
Navigation is a factor that has the huge impact to both Human and Search Engine. First, it should be placed exactly on the area that human usually go for when visiting to a particular website. For ecommerce website, find out all the possible filter attributes that relate to the products of the ecommerce stores. E.g. if your store sells branded male and female clothes, then you can offer the navigation or categorized using the filter like brand, gender, color, size, etc. Shoppers come to your site with specific product criteria, and navigation will provide them the way to reach easily to that specific location in your ecommerce store.

Easy to accessible:
Accessibility of the ecommerce website means the time it takes to open any page of your ecommerce site over the browser and the internet. Yes, it depends on the internet connection speed but on an average, it will be accessible within seven seconds. No matter if, you own large numbers of products in your store, heavy images, more codes as compare to the text, all should be optimized first to increase the speed of your ecommerce site.

Easy to use:
Make sure all above areas certainly help you to make your website easy to use for potential your potential visitors. In addition, you can focus on the end user goals or the call to action items of your ecommerce website like Add to cart button, highlight special offerings using attractive banners, display phone number for customer support, contact us details, etc.

So, now why are you waiting for? Hurry up and hire Ydeveloper.com for your ecommerce website makeover!

3-Things you must need to know about SEO for Ecommerce

It's 21st century, and we all know why the search engines have become essentials to our day-to-day life. Those who are connected with the internet, once in a day access the Google or other search engines to search something. They may search best resources of learning, shopping, working, travelling and much more. If someone goes for searching best resources for online shopping, they find 10 best ecommerce websites on search engines. Now, the three things that you must need to know about SEO for Ecommerce start from here, first they notice a title of website showing on SERP if it contains exactly what they are looking for or not, which is an important factor for search engine too to rank high.

The next two things are related to off page search engine optimization process, building quality inbound links and optimizing your site getting it visible in major social networks. Everything that we are here talking about is for the small-business owners or retailers who want to see their ecommerce store on first page of the Google or other search engines.

I am sure that now you are exciting to know more about three things in details that are the part of SEO Friendly Ecommerce, so let’s start…

Website Title Optimization: A part of on page SEO process...

If you already set up a breadcrumb to your ecommerce site, then it will be easy for you to define the title of each page of your ecommerce website, whether it is a landing page, category page, product page or any other promotional page. In the category page, you should contain your business brand name within title and for product page; you must contain the brand name of the product you are selling. e.g.

Category page title should be,
Sunglasses | Designer Sunglasses | Your Brand Name
Product page title should be,
Ray-Ban Sunglasses | Designer Ray-ban Sunglasses | Your Brand Name

Link building: A part of off page SEO process...

Quality Inbound links are the second essential factors for ranking in search engines. Many ways that you can use to request a link to your site. Go for a natural way. E.g. if you are an online retailer of sunglasses, you can find out the blog perusing information of sunglasses and commenting on their interesting blog post with your website link. This is called blog commenting. Other ways are directory submission, write an article with unique and interesting content and submit them to major article directories.

To know more, click on Search Engine Optimization to see what we offer in link building services for ecommerce website.

Social Media Optimization: Building Social Network and Sharing to Social Bookmarking...

Social Media Optimization process is all about building friend, fans and followers of your online business using Facebook page and Twitter. Share all the updates of what you are selling, your promotional offering, free shipping, etc. to your Facebook and twitter. Additionally, you can share to major social news and bookmarking sites. E.g. Delicious, Digg etc.

Live Chat Integration - Part of Ecommerce Marketing Strategy

Those who usually go for shopping online and find a live chat support will never miss a chance to chat with the live chat support executive [not for passing time:)] about to get more information of products or services they expect to buy, to get a solution for an issue they faced, etc. These are the typical examples, and it will have a huge impact to your customer services if you answer and resolve their queries quickly and politely. Customers will not be able to rely in your products or services up to the time of all of their questions are solved. The quicker and more effectively you comeback a customer’s query the faster they will buy from you.

This is a powerful e-commerce website marketing tip and the online retailer has already included this as a part of their ecommerce marketing strategy. Customers who participate in live chat are four times more acceptable to transform into a sale than those who do not. Of those that transform, an average of 61% does it throughout the same visit in which they chat.

Live Chat Support Services Tips – For Ecommerce Website Marketing:

Live Chat Support Services

Most important, your live chat support resources should be professional and quick in answering and they know what to reply when they do not have an answer.
For an online store, it is better to have 24/7 live chat support and your customer service agents will be dedicated and able to work long hours even if there is a holiday.
Answer quickly but smartly as your customer can take it as commitment from your side.
You can place Live Chat icon to all of your pages or some of the popular page of your site to get attention of potential customers for more engagement.
An automated chat invitation, a.k.a. proactive chat is a dominant customer engagement tool that could be easily set up.

Case Study: “Let’s get Insight into this post, Case Study on Live Chat about how it helps to increase conversion to find exactly how live chat support has changed the mind of a customer and encouraged him to place an order.”

Days have gone to use expensive phone support or email support. Integration of live chat feature into your site is the present and future of customer services. It is more effective, and it imposes less constraint on the customer service agent as well as the shopper. The e-commerce world is full of rivalry and by offering customized services to your customers by way of Live Chat; you ensure that your consumer sticks with you. Sometimes, customers get bored from scrolling through your website pages and did not get what they want, while the thing is available on your site. Same time a live chat support can save their time to search and directly come to you for products/services; they are looking for and feel confident about to buy it once they chat with you.

If you want to know more about live chat integration in php for your ecommerce store, give us a call to 888 828 9864, which is toll free OR......

Definitive Guide to Shipping for Ecommerce Sites

Yes, we are now talking about Shipping Management in Ecommerce Sites. After a couple of sessions to this blog on various ecommerce features and topics such as shopping cart development, ecommerce platforms, storefronts, ecommerce marketing and SEO, why we forget about Shipping and Payment section of any online shopping store. Shipping services plays an important part for building long-term relationships with Customers. An online storeowner finds most of the queries on shipping services by customers.

This definitive guide on online shipping is especially dedicated to online retailers. In my knowledge and examinations of other sites, shipping costs and delivery time are the greatest customer grievance that online retailers receive; a recent study defends shipping to be one of the most significant things to customers. Even if the shipping is free, shoppers frequently have impure anticipations on how quickly their order will reach them. If it is not free, there are consistently complaints about the cost even when the retailer instantly passes down charges with no markup.

In my definitive guide to e commerce shipping, I have covered three main areas in relation with shipping – its presentation on site, how it could be charged and managing the shipping services….so what I recommend to have best shipping methods are as follows,

Do not forget Shipping Policy section
Must show – Shipping options, fees and time frame of delivery
Make sure when you offer free shipping
Never use United States Postal Services (USPS)
Stay up to date on shipping status with customers

DO NOT FORGET SHIPPING POLICY SECTION:

It must be. I have noticed this on many sites. It does not matter what you stated in your shipping policy, it could be simple and make sure it is your commitments to your customers. So, You can only act according to this policy if you have provided rather it create bad impression of your business by customers. It mainly covers the things like shipping within so and so hours, refund policy etc

MUST SHOW – SHIPPING OPTIONS, FEES AND TIME FRAME OF DELIVERY:

Make sure to indicate shipping options with their fees and delivery time
Radio buttons are the best way to represent all available shipping options
Make sure to use logic or tools for calculating accurate delivery time-frame

MAKE SURE, WHEN YOU OFFER FREE SHIPPING:

Free Shipping is extreme. It can drive sales and give a company an immense competitive edge. Free shipping is a great enough reward that many people will choose a more costly comprehensive price, over an item with expensive shipping costs. Even so, free shipping is not great when you have to cancel it. If you have an established website, canceling free shipping can precisely destroy the business. Particularly, in the case of repeat consumers, you can lose a set of business when you go back to a paid shipping form. These are even practices to limited time free shipping.

NEVER USE UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICES (USPS):

For some category of products, the USPC can be considered. E.g. low-ticket products or those that can be compressed into a pre-paid priority box or in an envelope. If your customer has no expectation for the parcel to get there in the next week, month... etc., then it is good to hire this and this is why most of the successful online retailers use UPS or Fedex in spite of having expensive.

STAY UP TO DATE ON SHIPPING STATUS WITH CUSTOMERS:

Through every step of the buying to shipping to delivery process, your customer should be taken cared and informed by you in all terms of shipping order status especially on the status of their order even if your order management system is so strong. In this area, you have 100% of control and there is no reason to do so. Send an email informing them that you received the order. Email to inform them the order has been shipped. Email to inform them about that you missed the orders and it has been backed. Finally, the email to inform them it was delivered and follow-up in a few days to make sure they go to it, and these are the things that the customers wanted.

We, Ydeveloper understand what is to be required by customers while designing and developing an ecommerce website and the kind of ecommerce features needs to be implemented based on this. They recently refreshed all their ecommerce services and now offer them under the “e-Smart eCommerce Suite”. So, let us see “Top 5 Reasons to opt for e-Smart eCommerce Suite”.

Share your thoughts on Shipping and its management!

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