Ecommerce Blog

Why f-commerce failed?

The Facebook commerce is a great tool for marketing of your ecommerce or shopping store. F-Commerce is more popular as compared to the leading storefront providers, eBay Stores and Amazon Web store. Facebook is also an important part of social media optimization and marketing. It uses FBML language for designing and developing a store of your choice in Facebook. There are many Facebook applications for ecommerce available online that can be installed to get more engagements directly from your store using your Facebook friends.

Nearly 700 millions of people in Facebook itself and if you want your facebook store to be noticed, you should come up with a nice looking store design to Facebook.

After all having all such benefits, Can anyone miss the chance to have their own F-commerce store? Not at all! But, the fact is that it’s failed. Next couple of paragraph will give you some more idea on Facebook.

Forced to give up their f-shops failing to have been able to generate the expected results, great names in US e-commerce industry have recently clashed with the vagaries of the new social wave that affects the online business. According to reports from Bloomberg, the first generation of signs to have tested the online shops directly incorporated with their fan pages have suffered a total flop.

A situation which, despite being the result of a first attempt, called social media analysts and consultants to review their forecasts regarding the future of f-commerce, and of course the failure.

This suggests that the difficulty to hang the network members have been mainly related to the approach used. Indeed, doing business on a social network, here in this case Facebook does is to reproduce the experiment as is proposed on its website. The social-commerce is not limited either to integrate its catalog to its fan page, that is to resolve to introduce a commercial approach within a social network, but to reflect on the real value added that contact point could be made.

An ill-conceived adaptation, due to a lack of experience and perspective in certain would be the cause of this essay almost stillborn for retailers concerned.

Especially, as Facebook has not really a gift for inspiring confidence with all the problems it generates about privacy of personal data. Not to mention the interface so far is not necessarily appropriate (banners, small space, time of relatively slow loading pages, etc.).

To date, the network seems especially appropriate as a medium for sales support, to talk about their products and benefit from the experiences of consumers.

Latest trend on "Facebook commerce" and "Facebook Store",

You can RT (Re-tweet) here,

Why f-commerce failed? Interesting post by @ydeveloper at bit.ly/J5iJyd
— YDeveloper (@Ydeveloper) April 13, 2012

Recommending Three Ecommerce Solutions for Online Retailers

Today, People have become busier in their personal as well as professional life. They have to consume some necessary products or services. Like, grocery, toothpaste, clothes are few examples of such products and services like medical, bill payments etc. They feel there are wastes of time to spend behind all these activities. I think Ecommerce Store is best solutions. Products or services you want to buy are just a few clicks away from you. Many ecommerce stores are offering free shipping and special discounts, which is in the benefit of both, online retailers and consumers and this is why many retailers are finding ecommerce website developer or ecommerce solution that ensures them having all features incorporated in their store.

We have listed out 3 leading and best ecommerce solutions to opt for…

e-Smart eCommerce Suite (Custom Ecommerce): You may have heard or not but, e-Smart eCommerce Suite is going to be one of the most powerful custom ecommerce solution. This is different in the sense that it offers a backend ecommerce solution to manage all your existing store activities using one single admin panel, where you can customized all the activities, functions of your multiple ecommerce stores according to your requirements. E.g. multiple shopping carts management at single panel, multiple inventories and order management system composited into to single panel with extensive reporting functionality. It comes with many more exciting features, click here to explore. This is much more flexible than any other ecommerce solution as it allows you to use this within ecommerce storefront features of your choice.

Magento (Open Source): Magento is one of the most admired ecommerce solutions around. It is an extremely proficient open source solution which guarantees a highly interactive, dynamic, flexible and a user friendly website. It offers an user with the full control over the look, content and functionality of a website. Magento development is very consistent which enables online business to operate several online stores through a single administration panel. It’s capabilities to handle all the marketing activities have increased after it was acquired by the eBay.

OsCommerce (Open Source): This is one more great solution which powers more than 10,000 ecommerce sites around the world. This solution can be used on any web server which has PHP and MySQL installed on it. With the default installation, you can easily enable and configure the features on your own. It also allows you to set prices in different currencies and accepts all popular payment methods like PayPal, credit cards, checks etc. Some of the key features of osCommerce are unlimited products and categories support, shippable and downloadable products support etc.

These are the top 3 ecommerce solutions available in the market. You can select any of these based on your website's requirements. Analyze your business requirements and website to find out which ecommerce solution will work well for your site and business.

How to find a right Ecommerce Development Company

Finding an ecommerce development company that offers a reliable and best ecommerce solution is the difficult process to perform by an individual or a retailer. They can use some online resources like search engine by typing a queries like “custom ecommerce development”, “ecommerce development company” etc. Does this solve your problem? In both cases, if it is yes – means you find an ecommerce company of your need or if it is no, then you are also interested to know about the main reasons of not finding the choice of your company. We determined some areas that perfectly fit in the category of reliable and quality ecommerce solutions.
Suite of Success:

Many ecommerce development companies are offering comprehensive solutions in terms of managing all the ecommerce activities behind the screen – a backend solution. This helps you to customize your current ecommerce store to make it more advanced and flexible. E.g. e-Smart eCommerce Suite can be considered as a suite of Success.

Designing an Ecommerce Website:

Designing a high-quality ecommerce website means to get a perfect ecommerce solutions and make sure that your existence on web is visible and also your clientele are served in a better way. The ecommerce website designed by the ecommerce web developers of a web development company offer increase to competent company management as well as insert value to the sales page and also providers. There are many companies in the region of the globe that have capability in creating personalized internet based software and applications. The method is to determine the right ecommerce application development company.

Portfolio of Ecommerce Application Development:

To start on, you have to take into account if the ecommerce developer you are going to select could help you accomplish your requirements and you ensure him a right sort of an ecommerce developer. You can review their ecommerce application development projects portfolio.

Partnership that built Long Run Business Growth:

Ok, you reviewed their portfolio, now what? The next step is to find how much they are reliable as you have to build a long run partnership with that custom software development agency and you are always in a need of improvement in the area in terms of technological upgrades. How it help to your web and other development process if you get a strong partner,

It makes you keep updated with the latest technological development
Provide you a competitive advantage
Provide a space that help you in focusing your core goals

You can also take advantages of other areas like Mobile Application Development, Search Marketing Services etc. that an application development company you have chooses have expertise in.

Business Values:

You have to be known with the company offering web application development services in a wide that you are going to employ for your business growth. Some web design companies confer interest to mass creation of websites. Such types of agencies typically are surely not thinking about everlasting company relationships.

Coding Standards:

Whether it will be a custom ecommerce development or web development process, you need to make sure the coding standards and framework that the company is going to follows. It will be latest and a developer can easily customized and work on that.

Other areas to concern:

These are just a small number of significant points you must give attention to while hiring a web application developer or a company. With the exception of them you have to verify company’s monetary strength, number of years that the company has been in business, their business standards and experience in quality software programming, development, designing, and usability and search engine marketing.

Create Customized Dashboard for your Ecommerce Store

Ecommerce Stores can be varied by the platform it uses. Not all platforms have same features, functionality and tools, particularly when you are using Yahoo Store, eBay Store, Amazon Web-store or other storefronts. The activities on your store depend on what you are selling online. Sometime you believe ecommerce storefronts are best ecommerce solution, but on the other hand they have some limited features.

Let’s take an example of ecommerce shopping cart – it generally provides the details of product pricing, tax, shipping, and the payment gateways. What else people are looking for? Cross selling is a feature that offers a list of related products that suggest your prospective buyers to look at other products from same store and have almost same criteria.

Cross Selling - See the section below "Other items you might want to order":

This is an example of how you can customize your existing shopping cart to offer it something more. Inventory and order management are other areas that can be also effectively designed to provide more efficiency. So, combining all these enhanced features to a single dashboard will help you manage all your ecommerce activities according your requirements. The customized dashboard is enough to manage all activities that concern with inventory, order, customer services, content, product, payment, shipping, marketing, SEO of your store etc. You can still continue with your existing storefront services as this is only a dashboard of your choice. This required expertise, first in the storefront design and development and secondly custom ecommerce development.

There is least number of such ecommerce solution providers in USA, e-Smart eCommerce Suite (at Ydeveloper.com) is one of them. It’s a comprehensive backend ecommerce storefront solution.

This article better explains you Why e-Smart eCommerce Suite is a profitable ecommerce solution? e-Smart eCommerce Suite has been designed keeping in mind all an above customizing requirements by store owners to their customers.

Before moving its advantage section, let’s look at more features of a customized dashboard,

Customize Revenue Graph with Tax, Shipping & Quantities
Best Sellers
Low Inventory Products
Most Views Products
Recent Viewed Products
Easy Modules Navigation
Latest Order
Recent Added Products
Recent Customers
Top Customers
Recent Search by Customers

This suite mainly comply with all the following areas of customization,

Managing inventories
Managing orders
Product feed or shopping feed management
RMA application – a customer refund management tool
Improved Navigation
Enhance customer experience

Here are the exclusive benefits:

A single admin panel to manage all store activities
Custom solution for all your business process and other requirements
High end solution for inventory management
Custom-built shopping cart, checkout process, and order processing
Customized reports to understand and analyzed your business performance
A complete SEO friendly environment
Managing multiple shipping addresses per order
Providing multiple real-time shipping rates per order
Supporting multiple currencies and languages
Generating feeds for various ecommerce storefronts, e.g. Yahoo Store, eBay Store etc.
Generating feeds for comparison shopping search engines – Goggle shopping, Price Grabber, Yahoo Shopping and more

The customizing your ecommerce store could be a great experience for a long run. Tell your friends if they are in online retailing business and want to re-build his/her store enabled with advanced features all the way through custom ecommerce solution.

What else you expect that needs to be included here?

Difference in Google Search Results with and without logged in

To stay myself updated with latest technological upgrades in Ecommerce, I was looking for top ecommerce blogs to get it subscribed via email or other way. To do this, I go for search into the Google.com using Firefox web browser. Search box of Google was waiting for me to put a query. Therefore, I entered “top ten ecommerce blogs” and click to search for a result; I was surprised with the results I found. Can someone guess why I was surprised?
No? Not?

Surprisingly, my blog on ecommerce was on 4th place. I did same process again to find list of top ten ecommerce blogs; there was no change in the search results. When I tried Google.com using Google Chrome for a same search query, I did not found my blog in the first 10 results whereas it was found on 4th when I used Firefox. This difference confused me a lot. It might be an issue with web browsers. So, I cleared cookies for a while in both of the web browsers and I did same process again in Firefox and chrome. This time, I could not find my blog in first ten results and both browsers had same results on “top ten ecommerce blogs”.

Do you know why? I find, logged into Google account was the main reason of this difference, which I had never noticed before and automatically logged out after clearing the Firefox cookies.

Now, the question is why this difference was there. Why a logged in user can’t see a normal Google search results?

The answer is the effect of personalized search / social search / search plus your world (SPYW)! These results are based on what you and the people in your circles have shared, commented and +1’d in Google+ stream.

Here, I can see my blog on 4th place, which was originally posted in Google+ stream of Ecommerce Blog and I shared it on Ydeveloper’s Google+ stream. Please take a note; I was logged in with Ydeveloper’s Google+ account while searching for a “top ten ecommerce blogs”.

With and Without logged in Search Result comparison:

Google search results on “top ten ecommerce blogs” with logged in:

Google search results on “top ten ecommerce blogs” without logged in:

Are you in favor of these personalized search results or still, you loving the normal search results.
Please share your views on this topic via comment.

Tips for Creating an Attractive and Productive Ecommerce Site

Creating an Ecommerce website, is a completely different process from a regular website. In terms of design, each has different looks and style. Ecommerce site is a catalog of products offering by an online merchant or a retailer, which includes the option of paying online via various payment gateways. This is why it requires some more efforts to design an Ecommerce website.

Here are some tips to create an attractive, useful and more productive ecommerce site,

Unique Product line:
Obviously, if you want to create an ecommerce website means that you want to sell something online. Therefore, before starting with the site, you must choose the product you are selling. The design and layout of your site depends on the product or service you sell. Usually, there are many products for sale through e-commerce. However, you should choose a particular product to sell so that your site could well know for a single product market and attract more customers through your site Web.

Qualified Model:

You can get many models for building an ecommerce website over the Internet free of charge. However, be careful while choosing models for developing an ecommerce site. The template you choose should be in line with the product or services you are offering. If you sell formal wear and using a model for funky wear, then it is not in the line with the product you are selling. Never use heavy graphics and images that are otherwise negative aspect of your site, as large images take longer to load.

Flexible Shopping Cart Software:

Cart is part of your ecommerce site that contains the record of each order placed by customer. Whatever your customer will purchase, the list of items with the total amount and tax will be calculated by the shopping cart. Thus, it should be visible on every page of your ecommerce website. It becomes more convenient to shop online with the help of your cart.

Secured and Easy Payment Process:

If your site looks very attractive with eye catching banners and product images but, you do not have a reliable and easy payment processing and gateways, your site will be overlooked and may be considered unproductive. It has been recommended to use different payment gateways on your ecommerce site like Visa, PayPal etc.

Monitoring:

It is also an important factor for the success of your ecommerce site. You should know all the time on the responses and reviews of customers on your products and services including the comments and suggestion given by the customer in part of website or blog. Based on suggestion, you can improve your site and maintain it to give your site more attractive and unique look.

Which method is best for Ecommerce Marketing?

Want to know what works today to get more audience for your ecommerce store? I am sure you could be more excited to know what methods of Marketing really works today from these two,

Inbound Marketing
Outbound Marketing

I have just got an excellent infographics on the Rise of Inbound Marketing from Pinterest, which was originally shared by Bridget Sprague and I have re-pinned.

Let's take a look:

Source: b2bmarketinginsider.com via Bridget on Pinterest

That's all....!!

How SOPA can affect an ecommerce store

People are in the support of anti-SOPA movement. Until, this anti-Piracy bill passes, I erge people to support continue. It may affect to almost all forms of online sources such as your website, blog, ecommerce store, social networks, forums, portals etc. People are thinking that they are getting restricted. It does not mean that they can not share their photos, music, video and other forms of content but it can be censored by the SOPA and PIPA.

Let's take an example, I own an E-commerce website that provide goods and services to the users in United States then, this Ecommerce website should be passed under SOPA to check if it does not break the rules or regualtions of SOPA.

So, can anyone has more ideas that how it could affect an E-commerce website if it passes?

Like this story in Reddit here, http://www.reddit.com/tb/on3zr if your are in the support of anti-SOPA movement.

Social Search Engines and Ecommerce Store

Personalized Search Engine – a new era of Search Engine begins:

Recently, Google has transformed its search engine to social search engine or personalized search engine or an integration of the Google+ into Search engine. Search result has now being influenced by the interest of people, their preferences, photos and posts shared in their Google+ page or profile when they have signed-in. Therefore, it is now being logical the previous statement made by Google when they have released the encrypt version and blocked all organic (signed-in) search queries from Google Analytics and said this is because of the privacy as it was the part of this new integration of Google+ to search.After a series of enhancements in Google search engine as seen below, it is now being confirmed that People can see list of publically shared results of whom they are following or those who are in their circles – if he/she is being search something after signing on Google+.

Google Instant
Place Search
Instant Previews
Social Search Update
Recipe View
Google Profile Enhanced
+1 Button
Search by Image
Flight Search
Personal Results
Profile in Search
Related people and page

You can find more information on last three search engine updates in this post, [Search, plus Your World] and all other updates here.

On the other hand, make sure, if you have heard about Google’s Custom Search Engine, then it is used in websites as a site search tool powered by Google.

Personalized Search Engine and E-commerce Store:

Guess you are an online retailer and selling branded and designer Sunglasses over your ecommerce store and struggling with getting potential customers – a solution is to have the Google+ page for your ecommerce business. The community is behind on the most search queries, therefore if you have signed-in your G+ page and have huge following and followers, you may discover the personal results, posts, photos, meaningful conversation from their profile to search engine on the topic you are interested in a way it wasn’t possible before.

You are selling Sunglasses, you can find what people are talking about Sunglasses, what they like, dislike, suggesting people and pages may enable you to follow or add them into your circle. You can also search profile of people or pages directly into the search box auto complete whether he/she might be interesting for you to add or not.

Of course, there are some other ways to promote ecommerce store into Google’s personalized search engine – share your views and ideas on this topic via comments.

Shopping Cart Abandonment - How to avoid this

When I was exploring the web to find out the infographics and resources on Shopping cart abandonment, my search was ended with this excellent infographics, which basically focus on checkout page of an ecommerce site that how you can improve this page so that it will help you (as an online ecommerce store owner) to decrease a shopping cart abandonment rate and what you can Do's and Don't.

Here is the infographics:

source:http://bit.ly/upeuNo

fem-noll

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!