By: Ryan Kh
eCommerce companies have promoted their products on Facebook for years, but many are abandoning the social networking giant for more niche sites. Lots of eCommerce marketers have started using Pinterest and Instagram to reach new customers.
Which of these two networks is best for promoting an e-commerce site? Here are some things to consider.
Demographics
The demographics of each site will play a very important role in your marketing campaign.
E-commerce sites invest millions of dollars marketing to women. On average, they spend about 20% more online than men. Therefore, marketers clearly love image sharing sites, because they have a strong female user base.
Approximately 55% of Instagram users are women. On the other hand, nearly three-quarters of Pinterest users are female. If you’re trying to reach female customers, Pinterest is the best site to use.
Pinterest is also better for reaching higher income households. The most popular income bracket for Pinterest users is over $75,000 a year. Instagram users are in a completely different economics status. The most popular income bracket there is under $30,000 a year.
Part of the difference may be due to the average age of the users on each site. Most Pinterest users are between 30 and 49 years old, while Instagram users are typically under 30.
Targeting Capabilities
Ecommerce companies typically target users with very specific tastes. Unlike insurance companies, wireless providers and other brands that appeal to a very broad customer bases, they need to be very strategic to make sure their ads are displayed to interested audiences to generate new customers and Instagram followers.
This is one of the primary benefits of Instagram. Since Instagram uses the same advertising platform as Facebook, it allows you to target very specific types of users. Pinterest’s advertising platform is not nearly as sophisticated.
Engagement
What Pinterest lacks in targeting options, it makes up for in engagement. While Instagram allows users to share images with lots of other users, Pinterest allows users to curate photos. It is a much more engaging social community.
What does this mean for ecommerce marketers? Ecommerce companies need to engage their customers to get them to convert. They may have an easier time driving engage leads from Pinterest than Instagram.
Industry
Obviously, ecommerce sites focusing on certain verticals perform better on one social network versus another. Some industries have better luck on Pinterest, while others thrive on Instagram.
According to this infographic from Shopify, Instagram is the best social network for reaching Customer seating automotive, digital products and Mr. Linh is merchandise. Pinterest is surprisingly better for reaching customers looking for computing services, books and magazines, and antiques.
Number of Landing Pages
Ecommerce companies tend to market numerous products. Larger ecommerce brands such as Amazon have over four million products. Rather than promoting the root domain, marketers push users to their deeper landing pages for products they are most likely to be interested in.
This is a problem for larger ecommerce companies trying to promote on Instagram. They are only allowed to share links from their bio page. This makes it difficult for brands trying to promote a large assortment of unrelated products. However, Shopify points out that Instagram marketing works well for companies with a strategy that involves promoting the front page.
“Perhaps most interesting and surprising was community style site Polyvore which is generating the highest average order value ahead of Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter. Also noteworthy in this category is Instagram which is also generating higher average orders than those same sites. This is especially impressive considering the only clickable links in Instagram are those in profile bios.”
Instagram Buy Buttons
While Instagram doesn’t allow companies to link to their landing pages, they do allow marketers to include “Click to Buy” buttons. Dylan Kissane states that these buttons can be very effective if used properly.
“Today, perhaps thanks to the experience that parent company Facebook has offered, Instagram ads are far more targetable and allow for the integration of ‘click to buy’ buttons that mean the distance from image to shopping cart is far reduced. Forget about a link from the image to a website, to a shopping cart, through a shopping process – jump straight from the image to the cart and speed up the sale.”
However, they aren’t ideal for all ecommerce marketing campaigns. Sometimes you need to engage with customers more before converting them. Some campaigns require you to build an email list and establish a long-term relationship, which isn’t possible with a “Click to Buy” button.
The best option really depends on the nature of your conversion funnel.
Source: https://maximizesocialbusiness.com/instagram-vs-pinterest-better-ecommerce-25476/
Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Monday, January 29, 2018
Ecommerce Monthly: November Review & Roundup
By: Joseph Hsieh
Can you believe it? 2017 is almost over and many of you are probably still celebrating from a smashing Black Friday/Cyber Monday. In November’s roundup there was no shortage of stats, analysis, and news from the record-setting Black Friday and Cyber Monday. While you were busy this past month, we’re here to bring you the most noteworthy updates and news about what’s happening in the ecommerce community at large.
As with all our roundups, we also included what we think are the best guides and posts to help you improve your ecommerce business. Scroll down to our resources and find some handy guides and ideas you can implement into your ecommerce business as you head into the last month of the year. If you’re hungry for more resources, don’t forget to check out our previous April, May, June, July, August and October roundups.
Enjoy this ecommerce review and roundup and leave your comments and suggestions below!
Consumer Trends
5 TRENDS FOR 2018
We always like to start out with something a bit out there in the future. 2017 is coming to a close fast, and certainly by now you’ve been thinking or planning about the coming new year. It’s always nice to have a pulse on what new innovations and trends to watch out for. Trendwatching puts out a quarterly paid premium update, but their blog summary should be good enough for us to start thinking about these new trends. From “Automated Commerce” to the “Glass Box Wrecking Ball” of business transparency, these ideas should help you start thinking how some of these ideas apply to your products, services, or marketing.
Ecommerce News
INTRODUCING LIVE VIEW: WATCH VISITORS BECOME CUSTOMERS WITH REAL-TIME REPORTING
In case you missed it just before BFCM, Shopify released a “Live View” to watch your sales and orders in real time. The overview shows how many people are on your site with a global map view and other data like orders, active carts, and sales. As a bonus, the “live view” is also on the Shopify mobile app too!
SNAPCHAT SEEKS SALVATION IN LONG-FORM AND “HANDS-ON” AR ADS
In time for BFCM, Snap rolled out two brand new ad formats. First, “Promoted Stories” string together multiple Snaps into longer-form slideshows openable from a tile on the Stories page, available for anyone to see. Its aim is to make ads “less skippable and more memorable,” thereby making a significant impact on its users. Second, Snap’s Augmented Reality Trial ads enable customers to intimately experience a brand or product by interacting with an AR version of a product overlaid on the world around them. Fun and functional.
SHOPIFY NOW OFFERS MERCHANTS BUILT-IN, CHEAPER UPS SHIPPING
Good news for both ecommerce customers and Shopify merchants! UPS is not only providing Shopify merchants special, lower rates normally only available to bigger business customers, but also, Shopify platform integration for UPS shipping, billing, and tracking services has been added alongside USPS and DHL.
HOLIDAY ECOMMERCE TO HIT RECORD $107B IN 2017; MOBILE WILL LEAD IN VISITS
Here’s a quick refresher on the power of ecommerce and the big pie that we’re all hoping to get a slice of. For the first time ever, holiday ecommerce sales in the US are expected to break the $100 billion mark. Optimize for mobile, capitalize on last minute shoppers and keep pushing through until the end of the year!
ALIBABA’S SINGLES DAY SALES HIT NEW RECORD OF $25.3 BILLION
For those who are not yet familiar, “Singles Day” is China’s biggest shopping day of the year – similar to Black Friday, the Super Bowl and Valentine’s Day all rolled into one; complete with concerts, celebrities and galas celebrating the event by Alibaba. What may be surprising is the number of Western brands that participated in this year’s event and how mobile centric the Chinese consumers are – over 90% of orders were done on a mobile phone and through digital payments. There’s lots more interesting stats and insights from the post, so even if you don’t think you’ll be selling in China any time soon, there’s still lots to learn from.
Resources
IN-DEPTH GUIDE TO FACEBOOK LOOKALIKE AUDIENCE ADS FOR ECOMMERCE STORES
Sure, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are over, but the holiday season is not quite done! If you have never tried creating a Facebook ad with a “Lookalike” audience, you may be missing out on pushing high quality traffic to your ecommerce stores. Shoelace gives an easy breakdown on how to set up a Lookalike audience and explains the power behind the “Conversion” campaign objective. They believe in this duo as the magic sauce and something you still have time to do for the rest of the holiday shopping season.
10 BREAKTHROUGH LESSONS FROM SHOPIFY’S BILLION-DOLLAR, RECORD-BREAKING
Shopify store owners KILLED it during Black Friday through to Cyber Monday. No. Wait. Ecommerce, as a whole, CRUSHED it, breaking all sorts of records for online holiday sales. Shopify itself boasts $1 billion gross merchandise volume over those four days. Ok, but bragging aside, Shopify’s list of simple, yet impactful, strategies from their heaviest holiday hitters should serve as inspiration for ecommerce businesses throughout the year.
15 FREE FACEBOOK AD TEMPLATES FOR EVERY TYPE OF CAMPAIGN
If you’re on the hunt to look for Facebook ad ideas, you’re in luck. AdEspresso simplifies it there are fifteen templates because there are only fifteen “primary actions” desired from an ecommerce customer. Check out these templates if you need to improve your Facebook ad campaign success!
Read More: https://www.abetterlemonadestand.com/monthly-review-7/
Can you believe it? 2017 is almost over and many of you are probably still celebrating from a smashing Black Friday/Cyber Monday. In November’s roundup there was no shortage of stats, analysis, and news from the record-setting Black Friday and Cyber Monday. While you were busy this past month, we’re here to bring you the most noteworthy updates and news about what’s happening in the ecommerce community at large.
As with all our roundups, we also included what we think are the best guides and posts to help you improve your ecommerce business. Scroll down to our resources and find some handy guides and ideas you can implement into your ecommerce business as you head into the last month of the year. If you’re hungry for more resources, don’t forget to check out our previous April, May, June, July, August and October roundups.
Enjoy this ecommerce review and roundup and leave your comments and suggestions below!
Consumer Trends
5 TRENDS FOR 2018
We always like to start out with something a bit out there in the future. 2017 is coming to a close fast, and certainly by now you’ve been thinking or planning about the coming new year. It’s always nice to have a pulse on what new innovations and trends to watch out for. Trendwatching puts out a quarterly paid premium update, but their blog summary should be good enough for us to start thinking about these new trends. From “Automated Commerce” to the “Glass Box Wrecking Ball” of business transparency, these ideas should help you start thinking how some of these ideas apply to your products, services, or marketing.
Ecommerce News
INTRODUCING LIVE VIEW: WATCH VISITORS BECOME CUSTOMERS WITH REAL-TIME REPORTING
In case you missed it just before BFCM, Shopify released a “Live View” to watch your sales and orders in real time. The overview shows how many people are on your site with a global map view and other data like orders, active carts, and sales. As a bonus, the “live view” is also on the Shopify mobile app too!
SNAPCHAT SEEKS SALVATION IN LONG-FORM AND “HANDS-ON” AR ADS
In time for BFCM, Snap rolled out two brand new ad formats. First, “Promoted Stories” string together multiple Snaps into longer-form slideshows openable from a tile on the Stories page, available for anyone to see. Its aim is to make ads “less skippable and more memorable,” thereby making a significant impact on its users. Second, Snap’s Augmented Reality Trial ads enable customers to intimately experience a brand or product by interacting with an AR version of a product overlaid on the world around them. Fun and functional.
SHOPIFY NOW OFFERS MERCHANTS BUILT-IN, CHEAPER UPS SHIPPING
Good news for both ecommerce customers and Shopify merchants! UPS is not only providing Shopify merchants special, lower rates normally only available to bigger business customers, but also, Shopify platform integration for UPS shipping, billing, and tracking services has been added alongside USPS and DHL.
HOLIDAY ECOMMERCE TO HIT RECORD $107B IN 2017; MOBILE WILL LEAD IN VISITS
Here’s a quick refresher on the power of ecommerce and the big pie that we’re all hoping to get a slice of. For the first time ever, holiday ecommerce sales in the US are expected to break the $100 billion mark. Optimize for mobile, capitalize on last minute shoppers and keep pushing through until the end of the year!
ALIBABA’S SINGLES DAY SALES HIT NEW RECORD OF $25.3 BILLION
For those who are not yet familiar, “Singles Day” is China’s biggest shopping day of the year – similar to Black Friday, the Super Bowl and Valentine’s Day all rolled into one; complete with concerts, celebrities and galas celebrating the event by Alibaba. What may be surprising is the number of Western brands that participated in this year’s event and how mobile centric the Chinese consumers are – over 90% of orders were done on a mobile phone and through digital payments. There’s lots more interesting stats and insights from the post, so even if you don’t think you’ll be selling in China any time soon, there’s still lots to learn from.
Resources
IN-DEPTH GUIDE TO FACEBOOK LOOKALIKE AUDIENCE ADS FOR ECOMMERCE STORES
Sure, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are over, but the holiday season is not quite done! If you have never tried creating a Facebook ad with a “Lookalike” audience, you may be missing out on pushing high quality traffic to your ecommerce stores. Shoelace gives an easy breakdown on how to set up a Lookalike audience and explains the power behind the “Conversion” campaign objective. They believe in this duo as the magic sauce and something you still have time to do for the rest of the holiday shopping season.
10 BREAKTHROUGH LESSONS FROM SHOPIFY’S BILLION-DOLLAR, RECORD-BREAKING
Shopify store owners KILLED it during Black Friday through to Cyber Monday. No. Wait. Ecommerce, as a whole, CRUSHED it, breaking all sorts of records for online holiday sales. Shopify itself boasts $1 billion gross merchandise volume over those four days. Ok, but bragging aside, Shopify’s list of simple, yet impactful, strategies from their heaviest holiday hitters should serve as inspiration for ecommerce businesses throughout the year.
15 FREE FACEBOOK AD TEMPLATES FOR EVERY TYPE OF CAMPAIGN
If you’re on the hunt to look for Facebook ad ideas, you’re in luck. AdEspresso simplifies it there are fifteen templates because there are only fifteen “primary actions” desired from an ecommerce customer. Check out these templates if you need to improve your Facebook ad campaign success!
Read More: https://www.abetterlemonadestand.com/monthly-review-7/
Sunday, January 28, 2018
Top 50 Ecommerce Resources to Grow Your Business
By: Nicole Martins Ferreira
Running a profitable ecommerce business requires a lot of knowledge. You’ll learn a lot by making mistakes and experimenting on your store. However, it’s also important to learn from those who have succeeded before you. Whether you choose to read ecommerce blogs, listen to podcasts, watch YouTube videos, join communities, or take an online course every now and then, you should try to stay on top of relevant trends. We’ve created this list of the top 50 ecommerce resources to help you build a profitable ecommerce store.
Ecommerce Resources – Ecommerce Blogs
A Better Lemonade Stand – This ecommerce blog provides ecommerce entrepreneurs with various products to help simplify their business from business plans to store critiques. The blog features unique content with articles such as ‘7 Ways to Use Slack to Manage Your Online Business’ and evergreen content like ‘The Complete Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization for First Year Stores.’
Shopify blog – Shopify’s blog is one of the biggest ecommerce blogs. They regularly feature step-by-step case studies and sometimes even give stores away. Articles like ‘Win a Profitable Ecommerce Business and Over $3700 in Prizes’ and ‘22 Top-Rated Shopify Apps for Fashion Stores’ can be found on their blog.
Oberlo blog – The Oberlo blog is one of the best ecommerce resources that provides readers with great articles on topics that relate to running an ecommerce store. Articles include ‘How I Launched My eCommerce Store in Less than 30 Minutes,’ ‘Online Marketing Strategies for Your eCommerce Store,’ and ‘5 Ways to Improve your Facebook Marketing Strategy for Online Stores.’
Kissmetrics – The Kissmetrics blog isn’t exclusively ecommerce but it’s a great high level blog that ecommerce entrepreneurs can learn a lot from. The blog focuses on analytics, digital marketing and testing which are probably the most important aspects for a dropshipper. Articles include ‘How to Increase Conversion Rates with Better Product Content’ and ‘25 E-Commerce Experts Share Their Best Tips for Driving Repeat Sales Online.’
Practical Ecommerce – The Practical Ecommerce blog is divided into four categories: marketing, conversion, management, and design & development. Articles like ‘11 Animated Websites, for Design Inspiration’ and ‘3 Ways to Acquire Customers on Social Media’ can be found on their blog.’
Internet Retailer – Internet Retailer is an ecommerce news site that gives valuable industry insight to entrepreneurs. As a news site, the articles are focused on popular ecommerce websites and their sales growth.
Bootstrapping Ecommerce – Bootstrapping Ecommerce, run by entrepreneur Shabbir Nooruddin, shares ecommerce tactics from personal experience from running his own ecommerce business. You can find articles like ‘Why You Should be Building Links For an eCommerce Website’ and ‘How To Drive Ecommerce Sales Using Quizzes’ on his ecommerce blog.
Ecommerce Platforms – The Ecommerce Platforms blog is an ecommerce platform review site. Their articles compare the best ecommerce platforms on various features. Articles include ‘Best Payment Gateways Reviewed and Compared: Worldpay vs Authorize.net vs Adyen vs Stripe vs PayPal’ and ‘Top 5 Ecommerce Platforms: Shopify vs Volusion vs Bigcommerce vs Big Cartel vs 3dcart.’
Ecommerce Times – The Ecommerce Times blog is another ecommerce news site. While it might not feature tactics that you can implement, you’ll stay informed about newsworthy events that relate to ecommerce. Articles include ‘Google Clamps Down on Sneaky Malicious Sites.’
Get Elastic – While the Get Elastic blog hasn’t been updated in awhile it still features some great content that ecommerce entrepreneurs can learn from. Their website features sections like Digital Commerce, Social Media, Conversion Optimization, Search Marketing and more. The ecommerce blog features articles like ‘Five Rules for Content Marketers in 2016’ and ‘The Case for Extreme Personalization.’
Ometria – The Ometria blog is a great ecommerce resource that gets updated regularly. Past blog posts include ‘4 big lessons in personalisation from the experts’ and ‘4 ecommerce marketing trends you can expect to see in 2017.’ Their website also features an an Academy section with videos, ebooks and presentations.
Blue Stout – Blue Stout is a great ecommerce blog for ecommerce experts. Their blog also includes a podcast and videos. You’ll find blog posts on topics such as ‘If you sell to multiple markets, you’re probably doing it WRONG’ and ‘Abandoned Cart Recovery: How to Maximize Sales with Cart Regeneration.’
Ecommerce Resources – Ecommerce Podcasts
Ecommerce Fuel – Hosted by Andrew Youderian, the Ecommerce Fuel podcast features tactics from successful entrepreneurs. As an ecommerce entrepreneur himself, he helps fellow entrepreneurs build profitable stores. Episodes include: ‘Nurturing an Early Stage Proprietary Product’ and ‘Using Instagram to Generate 7 Figures in Sales.’
Shopify Masters – Hosted by Felix Thea, the Shopify Masters podcast is an excellent ecommerce resource as it features interviews with some of the most successful Shopify store owners. You’ll learn the secrets of six and seven figure online stores. Episodes include: ‘GetNadeef.com’s 100K Business From Calling Cart Abandoners’ and ‘How Rhone.com Launched to 80K in Sales With a Manually-Built Mailing List.’
Build My Online Store – The Build My Online Store ecommerce podcast features content on everything related to ecommerce from buying psychology to product listing ads. Episodes include: ‘First Impressions of Instagram Stories After 10,000+ Views’ and ‘When Should You Take a Break.’
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast – The Unofficial Shopify Podcast hosted by Kurt Elster and Paul Reda is one of the popular ecommerce resources for Shopify entrepreneurs who love podcasts. The ecommerce podcast covers a range of topics including ‘Expanding Your Ecommerce Business on Amazon with Kiri Masters’ and ‘Conversion Rate Optimization & User Research with Joris Bryon.’
EcomCrew – Hosted by Mike Jackness and Grant Chen, this ecommerce podcast covers everything in the ecommerce sector. Past episodes include ‘How to Build Traffic Away from Amazon Part 4: Effective Facebook Ads’ and ‘Reaping the Benefits of Holiday Promotions.’ There are over 50 episodes to listen to.
eCommerce Marketing Podcast – Hosted by Robert Kilonzo, this ecommerce podcast covers everything you need to know when it comes to ecommerce marketing. Past episodes include ‘How to Use Content Marketing for Killer Results – with Lee McAlilly’ and ‘How to Tell your Brand’s Story and Attract Customers – with Susie Shaughnessy.’
Read More >> https://www.oberlo.com/blog/top-50-ecommerce-resources
Running a profitable ecommerce business requires a lot of knowledge. You’ll learn a lot by making mistakes and experimenting on your store. However, it’s also important to learn from those who have succeeded before you. Whether you choose to read ecommerce blogs, listen to podcasts, watch YouTube videos, join communities, or take an online course every now and then, you should try to stay on top of relevant trends. We’ve created this list of the top 50 ecommerce resources to help you build a profitable ecommerce store.
Ecommerce Resources – Ecommerce Blogs
A Better Lemonade Stand – This ecommerce blog provides ecommerce entrepreneurs with various products to help simplify their business from business plans to store critiques. The blog features unique content with articles such as ‘7 Ways to Use Slack to Manage Your Online Business’ and evergreen content like ‘The Complete Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization for First Year Stores.’
Shopify blog – Shopify’s blog is one of the biggest ecommerce blogs. They regularly feature step-by-step case studies and sometimes even give stores away. Articles like ‘Win a Profitable Ecommerce Business and Over $3700 in Prizes’ and ‘22 Top-Rated Shopify Apps for Fashion Stores’ can be found on their blog.
Oberlo blog – The Oberlo blog is one of the best ecommerce resources that provides readers with great articles on topics that relate to running an ecommerce store. Articles include ‘How I Launched My eCommerce Store in Less than 30 Minutes,’ ‘Online Marketing Strategies for Your eCommerce Store,’ and ‘5 Ways to Improve your Facebook Marketing Strategy for Online Stores.’
Kissmetrics – The Kissmetrics blog isn’t exclusively ecommerce but it’s a great high level blog that ecommerce entrepreneurs can learn a lot from. The blog focuses on analytics, digital marketing and testing which are probably the most important aspects for a dropshipper. Articles include ‘How to Increase Conversion Rates with Better Product Content’ and ‘25 E-Commerce Experts Share Their Best Tips for Driving Repeat Sales Online.’
Practical Ecommerce – The Practical Ecommerce blog is divided into four categories: marketing, conversion, management, and design & development. Articles like ‘11 Animated Websites, for Design Inspiration’ and ‘3 Ways to Acquire Customers on Social Media’ can be found on their blog.’
Internet Retailer – Internet Retailer is an ecommerce news site that gives valuable industry insight to entrepreneurs. As a news site, the articles are focused on popular ecommerce websites and their sales growth.
Bootstrapping Ecommerce – Bootstrapping Ecommerce, run by entrepreneur Shabbir Nooruddin, shares ecommerce tactics from personal experience from running his own ecommerce business. You can find articles like ‘Why You Should be Building Links For an eCommerce Website’ and ‘How To Drive Ecommerce Sales Using Quizzes’ on his ecommerce blog.
Ecommerce Platforms – The Ecommerce Platforms blog is an ecommerce platform review site. Their articles compare the best ecommerce platforms on various features. Articles include ‘Best Payment Gateways Reviewed and Compared: Worldpay vs Authorize.net vs Adyen vs Stripe vs PayPal’ and ‘Top 5 Ecommerce Platforms: Shopify vs Volusion vs Bigcommerce vs Big Cartel vs 3dcart.’
Ecommerce Times – The Ecommerce Times blog is another ecommerce news site. While it might not feature tactics that you can implement, you’ll stay informed about newsworthy events that relate to ecommerce. Articles include ‘Google Clamps Down on Sneaky Malicious Sites.’
Get Elastic – While the Get Elastic blog hasn’t been updated in awhile it still features some great content that ecommerce entrepreneurs can learn from. Their website features sections like Digital Commerce, Social Media, Conversion Optimization, Search Marketing and more. The ecommerce blog features articles like ‘Five Rules for Content Marketers in 2016’ and ‘The Case for Extreme Personalization.’
Ometria – The Ometria blog is a great ecommerce resource that gets updated regularly. Past blog posts include ‘4 big lessons in personalisation from the experts’ and ‘4 ecommerce marketing trends you can expect to see in 2017.’ Their website also features an an Academy section with videos, ebooks and presentations.
Blue Stout – Blue Stout is a great ecommerce blog for ecommerce experts. Their blog also includes a podcast and videos. You’ll find blog posts on topics such as ‘If you sell to multiple markets, you’re probably doing it WRONG’ and ‘Abandoned Cart Recovery: How to Maximize Sales with Cart Regeneration.’
Ecommerce Resources – Ecommerce Podcasts
Ecommerce Fuel – Hosted by Andrew Youderian, the Ecommerce Fuel podcast features tactics from successful entrepreneurs. As an ecommerce entrepreneur himself, he helps fellow entrepreneurs build profitable stores. Episodes include: ‘Nurturing an Early Stage Proprietary Product’ and ‘Using Instagram to Generate 7 Figures in Sales.’
Shopify Masters – Hosted by Felix Thea, the Shopify Masters podcast is an excellent ecommerce resource as it features interviews with some of the most successful Shopify store owners. You’ll learn the secrets of six and seven figure online stores. Episodes include: ‘GetNadeef.com’s 100K Business From Calling Cart Abandoners’ and ‘How Rhone.com Launched to 80K in Sales With a Manually-Built Mailing List.’
Build My Online Store – The Build My Online Store ecommerce podcast features content on everything related to ecommerce from buying psychology to product listing ads. Episodes include: ‘First Impressions of Instagram Stories After 10,000+ Views’ and ‘When Should You Take a Break.’
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast – The Unofficial Shopify Podcast hosted by Kurt Elster and Paul Reda is one of the popular ecommerce resources for Shopify entrepreneurs who love podcasts. The ecommerce podcast covers a range of topics including ‘Expanding Your Ecommerce Business on Amazon with Kiri Masters’ and ‘Conversion Rate Optimization & User Research with Joris Bryon.’
EcomCrew – Hosted by Mike Jackness and Grant Chen, this ecommerce podcast covers everything in the ecommerce sector. Past episodes include ‘How to Build Traffic Away from Amazon Part 4: Effective Facebook Ads’ and ‘Reaping the Benefits of Holiday Promotions.’ There are over 50 episodes to listen to.
eCommerce Marketing Podcast – Hosted by Robert Kilonzo, this ecommerce podcast covers everything you need to know when it comes to ecommerce marketing. Past episodes include ‘How to Use Content Marketing for Killer Results – with Lee McAlilly’ and ‘How to Tell your Brand’s Story and Attract Customers – with Susie Shaughnessy.’
Read More >> https://www.oberlo.com/blog/top-50-ecommerce-resources
Saturday, January 27, 2018
5 Practical Social Media Marketing Strategies That All eCommerce Sellers Must Know
By: Aaron Agius
With more customers shopping online than ever before, and ever-increasing competition for attention, online businesses will only be able to maximize their success if they learn how to build on organic engagement in social media.
Don't get me wrong, gaining organic traffic through search, and even conversions from paid ads, are still great ways to build business. However, leveraging a community to build sales from organic engagement costs nothing more than your time. And besides that, there are plenty of tools available to help you along the way.
Here are five practical strategies you can implement straight away which will help boost traffic and sales through your social channels.
1. Create, Curate, and Share Awesome Content
If all you do through your social channels is promote your own products, your audience is going to burn out on your pages and posts pretty fast. The more the engagement drops on your posts, the less often your new posts will be seen by your followers - after all, channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest want to display only the most interesting content to keep users engaged (and there are a lot of brands competing for the limited space in a user's social feed).
Ramp up engagement by finding really awesome repurposed content. I'm not just talking about reposting old articles or sharing cool stuff you found on other websites. Instead, take the Skyscraper approach or create something similar to Buzzfeed's listicles.
Find an interesting topic and mold it into something much better than the original. That's what the guys at Shopify did when they were tasked with launching a profitable business in just three days.
Using BuzzSumo, they searched for pieces of highly-shared content that was relevant to their audience. Using the original video created by someone else, they took the tips and created a targeted list post, then shared that to a relevant community online.
It didn't take long for the new content to start driving traffic to the online store where the article was hosted.
While this surge of new traffic usually won't result in immediate sales, well-optimized content like this will continuously send traffic and generate sales over the long-run.
2. Embrace Micro-Content
One of the problems faced by many marketers today - not just those in ecommerce - is that the web is in a constant state of information overload. Audiences are bombarded with updates from their favorite brands, publishers, and media outlets, both directly and through the shares from people in their network.
With limited time and shrinking patience, consumers just aren't willing to spend a lot of time digesting content anymore, you can't expect them to be willing to watch a 10-minute video or read a 5,000 word article when they're on-the-go.
This is why micro-content comes in handy. Short, 10-second Snapchats or brief videos posted to Instagram and Facebook - or even a video converted to GIF format for Twitter - can bump up your engagement.
With micro-content, you get the same benefits of video, and your audience is more likely to watch when they know it won't cost them more than 10-20 seconds of their time.
Major brands have been leveraging this since Vine took off, including Lowe's, Doritos, Taco Bell, and even NASCAR.
3. Blogs Are Social, Too
It's not uncommon for marketers and online store owners to have tunnel vision and get stuck on the idea that social media is all about Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat. But blogs are absolutely forms of social media - they're platforms where content is posted, and that content sees shares and comments, just like the more popular social platforms.
When you're marketing an ecommerce business, be sure to include regular blog outreach in your social media strategy. It can drive a LOT of traffic back to your store if you do it right.
That's what Richard Lazazzera from A Better Lemonade Stand learned when he challenged himself to launch a t-shirt business in just 24 hours. After creating his store on Shopify and listing his products, he reached out to a local blogger to ask if he would be interested in covering the products since they related to an article the blogger had recently published.
When Richard woke up the next morning, he found a stream of notifications from new customers that came from that blogger publishing a post about the shirts. That post not only led to sales, but other people interested in collaborating with Richard.
Don't just create your own content, reach out to influencers and bloggers who align with your audience and work with them to get your business or products featured on other sites and social channels.
4. Create More Engaging Content
Whenever you post content on your social channels, it should have a purpose, whether that's to generate comments, shares, drive traffic to your store, etc. The best way to do that is to always create content with a focus on maximizing engagement.
Some of the best ways to do this include: asking questions, crafting strong call-to-action specific to engagement, and targeting your audience's emotions with a little controversy from time to time.
This is particularly effective if you center your content around a product or your brand, like Ahole Gear has done.
Doritos recently combined another one of the above approaches by creating a short video clip that leverages their product and adds a touch of political controversy to get people talking.
The more engaging your content is, the farther it will reach beyond your immediate followers as they comment, like, and share the content. This will lead to repeat customers as well as the acquisition of new customers who weren't previously aware of your brand.
5. Use Social Reviews
Customer product reviews are a great ways to build social proof on your product pages and let new customers know what they can expect when making a purchase from you. A lot of ecommerce platforms use apps like Yotpo to develop more engaging reviews in their online stores, but you can also leverage reviews from your social media.
Not only does Yotpo enable you to connect your social accounts to post user-generated content on your pages, but Facebook also has its own native reviews that you should activate. This way, when prospective customers discover you in social media they can see right from the channel, without ever going to your site, that people are raving about your products and service.
For example, Coval Vapes is a brick and mortar store that also sells its products worldwide on its online store, and it has amassed a nice run of highly-rated reviews on its Facebook page.
Be sure to consistently encourage your fans to leave reviews. Rather than ask for reviews through your social channels, send follow-up emails after purchases and include a highly visible call-to-action note. Ask them to please come back and review their purchase on your social channels, or within your store, so you can later benefit from greater social proof generated by satisfied customers.
Source: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/5-practical-social-media-marketing-strategies-all-ecommerce-sellers-must-know
With more customers shopping online than ever before, and ever-increasing competition for attention, online businesses will only be able to maximize their success if they learn how to build on organic engagement in social media.
Don't get me wrong, gaining organic traffic through search, and even conversions from paid ads, are still great ways to build business. However, leveraging a community to build sales from organic engagement costs nothing more than your time. And besides that, there are plenty of tools available to help you along the way.
Here are five practical strategies you can implement straight away which will help boost traffic and sales through your social channels.
1. Create, Curate, and Share Awesome Content
If all you do through your social channels is promote your own products, your audience is going to burn out on your pages and posts pretty fast. The more the engagement drops on your posts, the less often your new posts will be seen by your followers - after all, channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest want to display only the most interesting content to keep users engaged (and there are a lot of brands competing for the limited space in a user's social feed).
Ramp up engagement by finding really awesome repurposed content. I'm not just talking about reposting old articles or sharing cool stuff you found on other websites. Instead, take the Skyscraper approach or create something similar to Buzzfeed's listicles.
Find an interesting topic and mold it into something much better than the original. That's what the guys at Shopify did when they were tasked with launching a profitable business in just three days.
Using BuzzSumo, they searched for pieces of highly-shared content that was relevant to their audience. Using the original video created by someone else, they took the tips and created a targeted list post, then shared that to a relevant community online.
It didn't take long for the new content to start driving traffic to the online store where the article was hosted.
While this surge of new traffic usually won't result in immediate sales, well-optimized content like this will continuously send traffic and generate sales over the long-run.
2. Embrace Micro-Content
One of the problems faced by many marketers today - not just those in ecommerce - is that the web is in a constant state of information overload. Audiences are bombarded with updates from their favorite brands, publishers, and media outlets, both directly and through the shares from people in their network.
With limited time and shrinking patience, consumers just aren't willing to spend a lot of time digesting content anymore, you can't expect them to be willing to watch a 10-minute video or read a 5,000 word article when they're on-the-go.
This is why micro-content comes in handy. Short, 10-second Snapchats or brief videos posted to Instagram and Facebook - or even a video converted to GIF format for Twitter - can bump up your engagement.
With micro-content, you get the same benefits of video, and your audience is more likely to watch when they know it won't cost them more than 10-20 seconds of their time.
Major brands have been leveraging this since Vine took off, including Lowe's, Doritos, Taco Bell, and even NASCAR.
3. Blogs Are Social, Too
It's not uncommon for marketers and online store owners to have tunnel vision and get stuck on the idea that social media is all about Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat. But blogs are absolutely forms of social media - they're platforms where content is posted, and that content sees shares and comments, just like the more popular social platforms.
When you're marketing an ecommerce business, be sure to include regular blog outreach in your social media strategy. It can drive a LOT of traffic back to your store if you do it right.
That's what Richard Lazazzera from A Better Lemonade Stand learned when he challenged himself to launch a t-shirt business in just 24 hours. After creating his store on Shopify and listing his products, he reached out to a local blogger to ask if he would be interested in covering the products since they related to an article the blogger had recently published.
When Richard woke up the next morning, he found a stream of notifications from new customers that came from that blogger publishing a post about the shirts. That post not only led to sales, but other people interested in collaborating with Richard.
Don't just create your own content, reach out to influencers and bloggers who align with your audience and work with them to get your business or products featured on other sites and social channels.
4. Create More Engaging Content
Whenever you post content on your social channels, it should have a purpose, whether that's to generate comments, shares, drive traffic to your store, etc. The best way to do that is to always create content with a focus on maximizing engagement.
Some of the best ways to do this include: asking questions, crafting strong call-to-action specific to engagement, and targeting your audience's emotions with a little controversy from time to time.
This is particularly effective if you center your content around a product or your brand, like Ahole Gear has done.
Doritos recently combined another one of the above approaches by creating a short video clip that leverages their product and adds a touch of political controversy to get people talking.
The more engaging your content is, the farther it will reach beyond your immediate followers as they comment, like, and share the content. This will lead to repeat customers as well as the acquisition of new customers who weren't previously aware of your brand.
5. Use Social Reviews
Customer product reviews are a great ways to build social proof on your product pages and let new customers know what they can expect when making a purchase from you. A lot of ecommerce platforms use apps like Yotpo to develop more engaging reviews in their online stores, but you can also leverage reviews from your social media.
Not only does Yotpo enable you to connect your social accounts to post user-generated content on your pages, but Facebook also has its own native reviews that you should activate. This way, when prospective customers discover you in social media they can see right from the channel, without ever going to your site, that people are raving about your products and service.
For example, Coval Vapes is a brick and mortar store that also sells its products worldwide on its online store, and it has amassed a nice run of highly-rated reviews on its Facebook page.
Be sure to consistently encourage your fans to leave reviews. Rather than ask for reviews through your social channels, send follow-up emails after purchases and include a highly visible call-to-action note. Ask them to please come back and review their purchase on your social channels, or within your store, so you can later benefit from greater social proof generated by satisfied customers.
Source: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/5-practical-social-media-marketing-strategies-all-ecommerce-sellers-must-know
Thursday, January 25, 2018
Drive More Ecommerce Sales with Live Chat Without Being Trapped at Your Desk
By: Kate Urban
If you’re running a small ecommerce operation, you know how important it is to turn every visitor into a repeat customer. In the brick and mortar world, you’d accomplish that in large part through personal touches that make every visitor feel like a VIP: a greeting at the door, real-time expert opinions on style and fit, and so on.
You can deliver similar personal touches online by using a real-time communication tool like live chat. According to MarTech, 51% of customers are more likely to purchase from a site that offers live chat, and almost half of say they’re more likely to return to a website with a live chat option.
But if you’re running a small business, you’re probably not going to be able to staff a chat channel for more than a few hours per week. Is that enough to make a difference?
Fortunately, the answer is yes, as long as you choose those few hours carefully and use them wisely. Adding live chat doesn’t have to mean opening the floodgates. Here are 4 ways you can target your efforts. 🎯
Staff your peak traffic windows
Just as a brick-and-mortar store would bring in extra sales clerks for weekends and holidays, you want to be available on chat when your online store is busiest. You can get a detailed look at your traffic patterns by adding Google Analytics to your store website; most ecommerce platforms, including Shopify, also come with some built-in analytics tools that will give you a good overview of the peaks and valleys.
When you’re ready to start chatting, choose a 1-2 hour shift during one of your peak traffic times. Be sure to pay attention to how many chats you receive, and how many of those are productive (did you provide useful information that moved a visitor closer to purchase?) Over the course of a month or two, experiment with chatting during different high-traffic windows. Eventually, you’ll hone in on a few prime times to be available on chat.
From there, you can make your chat shifts even more effective by coordinating them with your other marketing activities. For example, if you’re sending a customer email newsletter that you expect to drive significant traffic to your website, plan to hop on chat as soon as you hit “Send”. Customers who click on your email have already demonstrated interest in making a purchase, so answering their questions on chat is definitely a good use of your time!
Control who sees your chatbox
Your live chat software should give you significant control over when and how the “click to chat” button and chat window are displayed on your website. Make sure you can show and hide the chat option, and send automated greetings, based on criteria like which page a visitor is on, the time they’ve spent browsing, and their location (based on IP address). If you can’t accomplish this with your current tool, look into switching software providers; targeting capabilities will be critical to your success as a small team.
Start by hiding the chat option everywhere on your site, and then adjust your rules and settings to display it strategically. For example, you might want to:
1. Show the chat option only at important moments in the purchase flow, e.g., when a visitor is viewing their shopping cart
2. Show the chat option only on pages that feature new products or bestsellers
3. Expand the chat window and send a brief greeting 20-30 seconds after a new visitor lands on your site
4. Only show the chat option to visitors referred from email promotions, digital ads, or other marketing campaigns
5. Only show the chat options to visitors in certain geographies; for example, if your website is in English, focus on engaging visitors in English-speaking regions
You can try any of the targeting strategies above, together or in isolation, or come up with your own rules. The key is to make sure you’re chatting primarily with visitors who are genuinely interested in making a purchase, and engaging them at the moments when they need more information or a friendly nudge to close the sale.
Emphasize quality over quantity
As a small business owner, it’s not just your time that’s in short supply. Your mental energy is a precious resource, too. Nothing will drain your brain faster than trying to juggle a dozen chat conversations at the same time, so don’t go there! You’ll serve your business better by providing outstanding service to one visitor (and closing that one sale) than by firing off one-word responses to twelve.
To avoid getting overwhelmed, configure your chat software to automatically hide your chatbox once you hit a certain number of simultaneous conversations; our team caps at five per person. And never hesitate to hide chat manually if you encounter an extra-demanding visitor, need time to research a product or order, or just feel like you could use a break.
You can also use a pre-chat survey to make sure you’re prioritizing quality conversations. By requiring visitors to provide basic details (such as their name, contact information, company and role, and/or a summary of their question) before they start a chat, you’ll filter out some folks who aren’t seriously interested in your products. You’ll also be better prepared to offer quick responses and relevant suggestions once the chat begins.
Track feedback to improve your store
It only takes a few hours a week on chat to develop new perspective on how your website visitors think and feel about your brand, what their needs are, and what confuses, frustrates, and delights them. If you use that perspective to improve your storefront and products, you’ll likely see an uptick in purchases. You’ll also reduce the number of basic inquiries that you receive from visitors, leaving more time in your chat shifts to focus on tricky questions and high-touch sales.
Of course, distilling dozens of chat exchanges into a few actionable improvement steps can be a little daunting. If you’re not sure where to start or what to focus on, try any of the following suggestions:
1. Terminology: Do your visitors consistently describe your products in terms that are different from those used on your website? For example, maybe you have a product category called “window dressings”, but every visitor you’ve chatted with has used the term “curtains”. If you’re noticing a terminology disconnect, try updating your website copy to make it easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for.
2. Layout and navigation: Have you chatted with multiple visitors who seem lost or disoriented on your site? Maybe they’re not sure how to get back to your homepage, or they’re completely overlooking a navigation menu. If so, it might be worth experimenting with some changes to your site layout, or even hiring a professional designer to do a quick review and suggest some updates.
3. Product FAQs: If you’ve gotten the same questions about a particular product from multiple visitors on chat, consider adding some information to the product landing page. Clarifying “purchase-critical” questions— those that relate to safety, fit, or compatibility, for example—can have an especially big impact on sales.
4. Requests and suggestions: Following up on every off-the-wall product or feature request could very well drive you crazy, but if your visitors are constantly asking for more color options or faster shipping, it’s worth your while to see what you can do. Tracking requests as they come in will help you make an objective judgement about what to pursue and when—use tags in your chat transcript archive, or a simple spreadsheet, to build a list and assign priority rankings.
From conversation to conversion
For a small ecommerce team looking to maximize conversions and encourage repeat purchases, live chat can be an incredibly powerful tool. If you’ve been nervous about adding a chatbox to your site in the past, give these suggestions a try. It only takes a little planning and strategy to feel totally in control and start closing more sales.
Source: https://www.shopify.com/blog/ecommerce-live-chat
If you’re running a small ecommerce operation, you know how important it is to turn every visitor into a repeat customer. In the brick and mortar world, you’d accomplish that in large part through personal touches that make every visitor feel like a VIP: a greeting at the door, real-time expert opinions on style and fit, and so on.
You can deliver similar personal touches online by using a real-time communication tool like live chat. According to MarTech, 51% of customers are more likely to purchase from a site that offers live chat, and almost half of say they’re more likely to return to a website with a live chat option.
But if you’re running a small business, you’re probably not going to be able to staff a chat channel for more than a few hours per week. Is that enough to make a difference?
Fortunately, the answer is yes, as long as you choose those few hours carefully and use them wisely. Adding live chat doesn’t have to mean opening the floodgates. Here are 4 ways you can target your efforts. 🎯
Staff your peak traffic windows
Just as a brick-and-mortar store would bring in extra sales clerks for weekends and holidays, you want to be available on chat when your online store is busiest. You can get a detailed look at your traffic patterns by adding Google Analytics to your store website; most ecommerce platforms, including Shopify, also come with some built-in analytics tools that will give you a good overview of the peaks and valleys.
When you’re ready to start chatting, choose a 1-2 hour shift during one of your peak traffic times. Be sure to pay attention to how many chats you receive, and how many of those are productive (did you provide useful information that moved a visitor closer to purchase?) Over the course of a month or two, experiment with chatting during different high-traffic windows. Eventually, you’ll hone in on a few prime times to be available on chat.
From there, you can make your chat shifts even more effective by coordinating them with your other marketing activities. For example, if you’re sending a customer email newsletter that you expect to drive significant traffic to your website, plan to hop on chat as soon as you hit “Send”. Customers who click on your email have already demonstrated interest in making a purchase, so answering their questions on chat is definitely a good use of your time!
Control who sees your chatbox
Your live chat software should give you significant control over when and how the “click to chat” button and chat window are displayed on your website. Make sure you can show and hide the chat option, and send automated greetings, based on criteria like which page a visitor is on, the time they’ve spent browsing, and their location (based on IP address). If you can’t accomplish this with your current tool, look into switching software providers; targeting capabilities will be critical to your success as a small team.
Start by hiding the chat option everywhere on your site, and then adjust your rules and settings to display it strategically. For example, you might want to:
1. Show the chat option only at important moments in the purchase flow, e.g., when a visitor is viewing their shopping cart
2. Show the chat option only on pages that feature new products or bestsellers
3. Expand the chat window and send a brief greeting 20-30 seconds after a new visitor lands on your site
4. Only show the chat option to visitors referred from email promotions, digital ads, or other marketing campaigns
5. Only show the chat options to visitors in certain geographies; for example, if your website is in English, focus on engaging visitors in English-speaking regions
You can try any of the targeting strategies above, together or in isolation, or come up with your own rules. The key is to make sure you’re chatting primarily with visitors who are genuinely interested in making a purchase, and engaging them at the moments when they need more information or a friendly nudge to close the sale.
Emphasize quality over quantity
As a small business owner, it’s not just your time that’s in short supply. Your mental energy is a precious resource, too. Nothing will drain your brain faster than trying to juggle a dozen chat conversations at the same time, so don’t go there! You’ll serve your business better by providing outstanding service to one visitor (and closing that one sale) than by firing off one-word responses to twelve.
To avoid getting overwhelmed, configure your chat software to automatically hide your chatbox once you hit a certain number of simultaneous conversations; our team caps at five per person. And never hesitate to hide chat manually if you encounter an extra-demanding visitor, need time to research a product or order, or just feel like you could use a break.
You can also use a pre-chat survey to make sure you’re prioritizing quality conversations. By requiring visitors to provide basic details (such as their name, contact information, company and role, and/or a summary of their question) before they start a chat, you’ll filter out some folks who aren’t seriously interested in your products. You’ll also be better prepared to offer quick responses and relevant suggestions once the chat begins.
Track feedback to improve your store
It only takes a few hours a week on chat to develop new perspective on how your website visitors think and feel about your brand, what their needs are, and what confuses, frustrates, and delights them. If you use that perspective to improve your storefront and products, you’ll likely see an uptick in purchases. You’ll also reduce the number of basic inquiries that you receive from visitors, leaving more time in your chat shifts to focus on tricky questions and high-touch sales.
Of course, distilling dozens of chat exchanges into a few actionable improvement steps can be a little daunting. If you’re not sure where to start or what to focus on, try any of the following suggestions:
1. Terminology: Do your visitors consistently describe your products in terms that are different from those used on your website? For example, maybe you have a product category called “window dressings”, but every visitor you’ve chatted with has used the term “curtains”. If you’re noticing a terminology disconnect, try updating your website copy to make it easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for.
2. Layout and navigation: Have you chatted with multiple visitors who seem lost or disoriented on your site? Maybe they’re not sure how to get back to your homepage, or they’re completely overlooking a navigation menu. If so, it might be worth experimenting with some changes to your site layout, or even hiring a professional designer to do a quick review and suggest some updates.
3. Product FAQs: If you’ve gotten the same questions about a particular product from multiple visitors on chat, consider adding some information to the product landing page. Clarifying “purchase-critical” questions— those that relate to safety, fit, or compatibility, for example—can have an especially big impact on sales.
4. Requests and suggestions: Following up on every off-the-wall product or feature request could very well drive you crazy, but if your visitors are constantly asking for more color options or faster shipping, it’s worth your while to see what you can do. Tracking requests as they come in will help you make an objective judgement about what to pursue and when—use tags in your chat transcript archive, or a simple spreadsheet, to build a list and assign priority rankings.
From conversation to conversion
For a small ecommerce team looking to maximize conversions and encourage repeat purchases, live chat can be an incredibly powerful tool. If you’ve been nervous about adding a chatbox to your site in the past, give these suggestions a try. It only takes a little planning and strategy to feel totally in control and start closing more sales.
Source: https://www.shopify.com/blog/ecommerce-live-chat
Wednesday, January 24, 2018
How to Use Shopify Inventory Management to Optimize your Every Day Business Operations
By: Michelle Deery
If you’ve got Shopify, the next step is to learn how to use its inventory management techniques to optimize your business operations. Once you work out your inventory management strategy, it could become the difference between who is more successful: you or your competitors.
That’s how important it is for eCommerce store owners. If you can’t identify your best and worst stock, or if you’re left with too much or too little of something, you can easily run into some pretty big problems.
Let’s take a look at how to use Shopify inventory management to optimize your day to day business.
Shopify Inventory Management Helps you Organize your Products
Inventory management lets you neatly group your products by category, sale, season, price, type and so on. When you do this, automation becomes a whole lot simpler.
This is lot less hassle than it sounds. Sure, it means you have to do more than just give each product a name and barcode, but by categorizing your products, you’re removing a major headache for both you and the customer. Everything becomes easier to locate and your shoppers find more of what they want.
Shopify Inventory Management Helps you Manage Product Variations
Let’s say you have a product that’s available in different colors. Unless you implement an inventory management system, managing all the variations will be difficult.
MightySkins sells Mavic Pro Skins in over 12 colors. On the left-hand side of the store, all of these colors are listed. These would have to be managed impeccably - or problems would arise when customers are ordering the same product.
This is the case no matter what the product for sale may be. From lampshades that are available in an array of colors to jackets that are available in different materials.
Shopify’s inventory management allows you to manage all those variations of each of your products. You will stay on top of your inventory without confusion.
Shopify Inventory Management Helps you Track Counts
Imagine if a customer places an order for a product that you’ve actually run out of? It’s a nightmare scenario that can easily happen if you don’t have an inventory management system in place that comes with a tracking system.
Ask any customer (including yourself) and they’ll say that stock-outs suck. They’re a massive pet peeve and they can discourage customer loyalty and cause us to shop elsewhere.
Stock-outs aren’t exactly good for businesses either. It’s estimated that companies are losing a combined $634,000,000,000 every year because of them.
Customers understand that stock-outs happen, but what they don’t appreciate is when you fail to warn them about it. They make the order, excited about the new product they’re going to get soon, until they eventually learn that it isn’t even in the warehouse anymore!
What’s worse is that orders can be delayed for months. This can really kill the customer-store relationship. And yet all it takes is for you to implement a simple inventory management system to make sure this never happens to your store.
When you properly manage your inventory, you can keep a close eye on your fast sellers, which means you can restock them quickly. To do this, however, you need to make sure that you’ve built a good working relationship with your suppliers.
Of course, tracking your stock also means that you’ll want to put in minimum orders for certain items that take longer to sell. That’s fine but again you’ll need to build a strong relationship with your suppliers first as minimum orders can be negotiable.
Shopify Inventory Management Helps you Avoid Food Spoilage
If you sell food, there’s always the risk that you’re going to leave food that’s gonna past its best on your digital shelves.
Sound implausible? It can easily happen if you don’t implement an inventory management strategy. Manage your inventory and you can keep track of spoiled food so that you don’t ship items that have gone off. Which isn’t cool.
Orangeglad is a subscription-based service that delivers desserts straight to your door. Their selection of desserts ranges from cakes, cookies, chocolates and many more. They could never risk a spoiled item getting delivered to a customer, or they would lose their custom.
Shopify Inventory Management Helps you Eliminate Dead Stock
Dead stock doesn’t always have to refer to stock that has expired, such as food. It can also refer to stock that has simply gone out of fashion, such as clothes, or even season.
It happens, and unless you’re on top of your inventory, you could end up with crazy Halloween outfits still in your store in February. Be careful, because dead stock like this can make your brand look pretty bad.
Shopify Inventory Management Gives you Greater Insights Into What’s Selling and What Isn’t
If you had access to certain insights, such as which products are in high demand and which ones aren’t, you can then start to build better marketing campaigns.
Implementing an inventory management strategy gives you access to trends and sales to that you plan the right orders and build those better marketing campaigns. Without these insights, you might end up ordering the wrong products that aren’t going to sell in the next sales cycle.
Ask any store owner, be it online or offline, how hard they find it to forecast sales and they’ll tell you it’s difficult without a proper inventory management strategy. These are some of the things you’ll miss:
1. Promotions
2. Ad spend budget
3. Growth rate for this year
4. The amount of sales you made in the same week last year
5. Seasonality
Winning with an eCommerce store sounds like it all comes down to accurate forecast. In reality, it hinges on your inventory management.
Download a Shopify Inventory App
To help you manage your inventory, it’s a good idea to download an inventory app. There are lots available that are compatible with Shopify, and you can have a browse of the selection here.
Choose the app that’s right for you and you can transform your entire customer experience.
Conclusion
Lastly, if managing your inventory yourself still sounds like a lot of hassle, you can always consider drop shipping. Drop shipping means that you don’t even have to carry an inventory, nor do you have to ship anything. Instead, the wholesaler does it all for you.
For everyone else who would rather retain more control over their store and products, and who don’t mind shipping their items themselves, use the advice in this article to stay on top of your inventory.
Source: http://cartcraze.com/blog/how-to-use-shopify-inventory-management-to-optimize-your-every-day-business-operations
If you’ve got Shopify, the next step is to learn how to use its inventory management techniques to optimize your business operations. Once you work out your inventory management strategy, it could become the difference between who is more successful: you or your competitors.
That’s how important it is for eCommerce store owners. If you can’t identify your best and worst stock, or if you’re left with too much or too little of something, you can easily run into some pretty big problems.
Let’s take a look at how to use Shopify inventory management to optimize your day to day business.
Shopify Inventory Management Helps you Organize your Products
Inventory management lets you neatly group your products by category, sale, season, price, type and so on. When you do this, automation becomes a whole lot simpler.
This is lot less hassle than it sounds. Sure, it means you have to do more than just give each product a name and barcode, but by categorizing your products, you’re removing a major headache for both you and the customer. Everything becomes easier to locate and your shoppers find more of what they want.
Shopify Inventory Management Helps you Manage Product Variations
Let’s say you have a product that’s available in different colors. Unless you implement an inventory management system, managing all the variations will be difficult.
MightySkins sells Mavic Pro Skins in over 12 colors. On the left-hand side of the store, all of these colors are listed. These would have to be managed impeccably - or problems would arise when customers are ordering the same product.
This is the case no matter what the product for sale may be. From lampshades that are available in an array of colors to jackets that are available in different materials.
Shopify’s inventory management allows you to manage all those variations of each of your products. You will stay on top of your inventory without confusion.
Shopify Inventory Management Helps you Track Counts
Imagine if a customer places an order for a product that you’ve actually run out of? It’s a nightmare scenario that can easily happen if you don’t have an inventory management system in place that comes with a tracking system.
Ask any customer (including yourself) and they’ll say that stock-outs suck. They’re a massive pet peeve and they can discourage customer loyalty and cause us to shop elsewhere.
Stock-outs aren’t exactly good for businesses either. It’s estimated that companies are losing a combined $634,000,000,000 every year because of them.
Customers understand that stock-outs happen, but what they don’t appreciate is when you fail to warn them about it. They make the order, excited about the new product they’re going to get soon, until they eventually learn that it isn’t even in the warehouse anymore!
What’s worse is that orders can be delayed for months. This can really kill the customer-store relationship. And yet all it takes is for you to implement a simple inventory management system to make sure this never happens to your store.
When you properly manage your inventory, you can keep a close eye on your fast sellers, which means you can restock them quickly. To do this, however, you need to make sure that you’ve built a good working relationship with your suppliers.
Of course, tracking your stock also means that you’ll want to put in minimum orders for certain items that take longer to sell. That’s fine but again you’ll need to build a strong relationship with your suppliers first as minimum orders can be negotiable.
Shopify Inventory Management Helps you Avoid Food Spoilage
If you sell food, there’s always the risk that you’re going to leave food that’s gonna past its best on your digital shelves.
Sound implausible? It can easily happen if you don’t implement an inventory management strategy. Manage your inventory and you can keep track of spoiled food so that you don’t ship items that have gone off. Which isn’t cool.
Orangeglad is a subscription-based service that delivers desserts straight to your door. Their selection of desserts ranges from cakes, cookies, chocolates and many more. They could never risk a spoiled item getting delivered to a customer, or they would lose their custom.
Shopify Inventory Management Helps you Eliminate Dead Stock
Dead stock doesn’t always have to refer to stock that has expired, such as food. It can also refer to stock that has simply gone out of fashion, such as clothes, or even season.
It happens, and unless you’re on top of your inventory, you could end up with crazy Halloween outfits still in your store in February. Be careful, because dead stock like this can make your brand look pretty bad.
Shopify Inventory Management Gives you Greater Insights Into What’s Selling and What Isn’t
If you had access to certain insights, such as which products are in high demand and which ones aren’t, you can then start to build better marketing campaigns.
Implementing an inventory management strategy gives you access to trends and sales to that you plan the right orders and build those better marketing campaigns. Without these insights, you might end up ordering the wrong products that aren’t going to sell in the next sales cycle.
Ask any store owner, be it online or offline, how hard they find it to forecast sales and they’ll tell you it’s difficult without a proper inventory management strategy. These are some of the things you’ll miss:
1. Promotions
2. Ad spend budget
3. Growth rate for this year
4. The amount of sales you made in the same week last year
5. Seasonality
Winning with an eCommerce store sounds like it all comes down to accurate forecast. In reality, it hinges on your inventory management.
Download a Shopify Inventory App
To help you manage your inventory, it’s a good idea to download an inventory app. There are lots available that are compatible with Shopify, and you can have a browse of the selection here.
Choose the app that’s right for you and you can transform your entire customer experience.
Conclusion
Lastly, if managing your inventory yourself still sounds like a lot of hassle, you can always consider drop shipping. Drop shipping means that you don’t even have to carry an inventory, nor do you have to ship anything. Instead, the wholesaler does it all for you.
For everyone else who would rather retain more control over their store and products, and who don’t mind shipping their items themselves, use the advice in this article to stay on top of your inventory.
Source: http://cartcraze.com/blog/how-to-use-shopify-inventory-management-to-optimize-your-every-day-business-operations
Tuesday, January 23, 2018
How Can I Convert Customers When They Land on a Sold-Out Product Page? – Shopify
By: Desirae Odjick
Welcome to Ask Shopify, a series where ecommerce experts from the Shopify community answer real questions from entrepreneurs who are trying to launch, build, and scale their online stores. We’re here to help with every aspect of your business, from marketing to accounting to customer service and more.
It all started with an email.
Our editorial team sent a brief holiday thank-you email asking readers a simple question:
“If you could ask a world-class ecommerce expert for advice on any area of your business, what would you ask and why?”
We got so many thoughtful, detailed, interesting questions back that Ask Shopify was born.
At Shopify, we’re lucky to have a deep bench of ecommerce experts we can talk to—everyone from our colleagues who run their own stores, to our Shopify Experts, to our customers and community members. Now, with Ask Shopify, you do too. Ask Shopify is about providing solutions for the real problems store owners want to solve, by connecting our readers with the experts who can answer their questions.
Without further ado, here’s the first question we’re answering in Ask Shopify!
Question:
When your online product is no longer in stock, what ecommerce and/or marketing opportunities should a small business employ to avoid losing a customer or a potential sale for a different product?
Some of our products are seasonal, and once they’re gone, that’s it for the season. Others are year round, and it would be great to direct people there—or at least avoid losing them if they find a product that’s no longer available.
Answer:
Getting customers to your store is enough of a challenge, so you’re 100% right that once they’re there, you want to keep them around—even if they’re interested in a product they can’t get right now.
There are plenty of reasons items might be sold out, whether it’s seasonality, the nature of the product (ahem, there are only so many things you can hand-craft at once) or even just learning the ropes of how much inventory you need to hold.
Luckily, with a few tweaks, a sold-out item doesn’t have to mean a lost customer.
A sold-out item doesn’t have to mean a lost customer.
Akemi Hiatt, Creative Director at Hidden Gears, has worked with clients who have sold out products for a variety of reasons, and at the end of the day, she says it’s a customer experience challenge and not just a product page issue.
“I think it's partially a design decision, and then a copy decision, and all of those decisions are aimed at creating an experience that will allow people to feel taken care of instead of confused,” says Akemi.
When customers hit a product page, but they can’t buy anything, it’s not what they’re expecting—which is why it’s a good chance to exceed their expectations.
“If you're going to provide an outcome that people don't expect, generally people will be very forgiving, and can even come away feeling good that that didn't happen, as long as you made the process clear and easy.”
So how do you actually do that? Here are three main things you can look at implementing.
Email Sign-Ups
“[You can] set it up so that the product page drives to an email list for interest, so that they can sign up and get notified when it's back in stock,” says Akemi.
That way, when people land on the page, they don’t just leave. There’s something for them to do, and you’ll build an email list of people who did, at one point, want to buy that exact product.
“It’s a way for you to both capture that sale, but also add that person to your mailing list for future promotions.”
This option might be built into your store's theme, but if it’s not, you can check out apps like Back in Stock and Now Back in Stock.
Landing Pages
You can also use the “I wish I could buy this right now, but it looks like I can’t” moment to build more of an experience for your customer (and do a bit of marketing while you’re at it).
“You can set up a dedicated page with some recommended products, that also serves as a landing page with a message about why that particular item isn’t in stock, and include some sort of brand touch,” says Akemi.
While the specifics will depend on your particular business, she offers a great example to clarify her point.
Read More at: https://www.shopify.com/blog/sold-out-product-page
Welcome to Ask Shopify, a series where ecommerce experts from the Shopify community answer real questions from entrepreneurs who are trying to launch, build, and scale their online stores. We’re here to help with every aspect of your business, from marketing to accounting to customer service and more.
It all started with an email.
Our editorial team sent a brief holiday thank-you email asking readers a simple question:
“If you could ask a world-class ecommerce expert for advice on any area of your business, what would you ask and why?”
We got so many thoughtful, detailed, interesting questions back that Ask Shopify was born.
At Shopify, we’re lucky to have a deep bench of ecommerce experts we can talk to—everyone from our colleagues who run their own stores, to our Shopify Experts, to our customers and community members. Now, with Ask Shopify, you do too. Ask Shopify is about providing solutions for the real problems store owners want to solve, by connecting our readers with the experts who can answer their questions.
Without further ado, here’s the first question we’re answering in Ask Shopify!
Question:
When your online product is no longer in stock, what ecommerce and/or marketing opportunities should a small business employ to avoid losing a customer or a potential sale for a different product?
Some of our products are seasonal, and once they’re gone, that’s it for the season. Others are year round, and it would be great to direct people there—or at least avoid losing them if they find a product that’s no longer available.
Answer:
Getting customers to your store is enough of a challenge, so you’re 100% right that once they’re there, you want to keep them around—even if they’re interested in a product they can’t get right now.
There are plenty of reasons items might be sold out, whether it’s seasonality, the nature of the product (ahem, there are only so many things you can hand-craft at once) or even just learning the ropes of how much inventory you need to hold.
Luckily, with a few tweaks, a sold-out item doesn’t have to mean a lost customer.
A sold-out item doesn’t have to mean a lost customer.
Akemi Hiatt, Creative Director at Hidden Gears, has worked with clients who have sold out products for a variety of reasons, and at the end of the day, she says it’s a customer experience challenge and not just a product page issue.
“I think it's partially a design decision, and then a copy decision, and all of those decisions are aimed at creating an experience that will allow people to feel taken care of instead of confused,” says Akemi.
When customers hit a product page, but they can’t buy anything, it’s not what they’re expecting—which is why it’s a good chance to exceed their expectations.
“If you're going to provide an outcome that people don't expect, generally people will be very forgiving, and can even come away feeling good that that didn't happen, as long as you made the process clear and easy.”
So how do you actually do that? Here are three main things you can look at implementing.
Email Sign-Ups
“[You can] set it up so that the product page drives to an email list for interest, so that they can sign up and get notified when it's back in stock,” says Akemi.
That way, when people land on the page, they don’t just leave. There’s something for them to do, and you’ll build an email list of people who did, at one point, want to buy that exact product.
“It’s a way for you to both capture that sale, but also add that person to your mailing list for future promotions.”
This option might be built into your store's theme, but if it’s not, you can check out apps like Back in Stock and Now Back in Stock.
Landing Pages
You can also use the “I wish I could buy this right now, but it looks like I can’t” moment to build more of an experience for your customer (and do a bit of marketing while you’re at it).
“You can set up a dedicated page with some recommended products, that also serves as a landing page with a message about why that particular item isn’t in stock, and include some sort of brand touch,” says Akemi.
While the specifics will depend on your particular business, she offers a great example to clarify her point.
Read More at: https://www.shopify.com/blog/sold-out-product-page
Monday, January 22, 2018
Ecommerce Site Search: Best Practices and What to Look For in a Solution
By: Special Guest Contributor
“Not all who wander are lost.”
Good stuff for bumper stickers or if you’re trying to write a generation-defining bestseller and get Reese Witherspoon to play you on the big screen. In ecommerce, however …
A wandering customer only means one thing: a lost customer.
Having been conditioned by Google, today’s consumers have high expectations when it comes to search functionality. It’s far from surprising then that — as Nielsen Norman Group’s exhaustive E-Commerce User Experience found — “Most e-commerce customers go directly to a site’s search tool to find products.”
Given that none of the leading ecommerce platforms have strong native search, this piece focuses on what to look for in a third-party search solution along with core …
But before we get into the how, let’s address the what and why of onsite search.
What Is an Ecommerce Site Search Solution?
An ecommerce site search solution is a third-party tool used onsite to sync customer search queries — e.g., natural language — with product titles, variants, descriptions, images, videos, SKUs, and reordering codes.
Following in the footsteps of other ecommerce technologies, onsite search has become mainstream in recent years. There is now a host of options available for merchants when previously there were just one or two main providers that were cost prohibitive and required complex, resource-heavy integration.
Today, options exist for merchants of all sizes, with even enterprise-level solutions available from as little as ~$200 per month. This availability has driven a surge in popularity and usage.
At the forefront of this ‘disruption’ at the mid-level and enterprise-level ends of the market are solutions like Klevu and Algolia. Legacy providers have become less relevant, due to not being as agile (in terms of releasing new functionality) and pricing.
Algolia is a good example of a wider search technology, which provides excellent indexing capabilities and speed to all. Klevu is more ecommerce-specific and provides exceptional accuracy, primarily through the use of natural language processing.
Why Does Site Search Matter in Ecommerce?
Onsite search represents a strong opportunity for retailers going into 2018. The rise of mobile commerce demands faster and easier routes for finding things. Even on desktop, search drives higher conversion rates.
Various reports on the value of search for merchants bear this out.
1. On average, users who complete a search are 1.8x more likely to convert
2. Site search visitors can generate as much as 13.8% of overall revenue
3. In the case of detail-oriented products, while less than 10% of visitors may perform onsite searches, upwards of 40% of a site’s revenue came from them
From my own experience with sites in the enterprise space, I’ve found the average conversion rate increases to be closer to 3.5x non-search visitors, with around 5-10% of visitors using search.
In other words, retailers have an opportunity to drive more revenue through search, especially for those who haven’t spent time optimising this area. And, at the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s no better way to frustrate and disappoint customer than serving up irrelevant results or even 0 results for relatively straightforward queries.
Best Practices for an Ecommerce Site Search Solution
1. Natural Language Processing for Better Results
The demand for natural language processing (NLP) within search has increased considerably recently — allowing for accurate results even when the user doesn’t really know how to describe what they’re looking for. Having long been adopted by the likes of Google for its organic search, NLP-based search has now made the transition to ecommerce, driving real change in this often overlooked part of the online shopping experience.
NLP algorithms are based on context and relevance, rather than simply on the presence or absence of keywords in product names or descriptions. In simple terms, that means that an NLP will be able to extract meaning from the query to understand that a visitor who types in ‘red jumper’ is happy to look at sweaters and pullovers, even though the query doesn’t contain the term ‘jumper’.
The same applies to color and being able to understand variations of red. This can be really valuable for retailers, particularly with more complicated queries — an example can be seen below from a Klevu demo store.
This example shows how NLP is being used to understand more about the query - this example also benefits from more product catalog data being indexed (such as product reviews, pricing, all other available descriptive attributes etc).
Here’s another example from the same store, which is from a proof of concept implementation with an IR100 retailer.
2. Merchandising Capabilities for Products, Attributes, and Images
Often one of the main issues that leads to a third party search solution being used is the lack of merchandising options for results, with no way to change the ordering of products being returned and a lack of information being presented generally. Newer third-party tools address these areas and have built-in features to allow retailers to ‘searchandise’ their results properly and weight different items and specific attributes.
Klevu, for example, allows users to assign ‘hero SKUs’ at query level, boost products based on specific rules (based on tags and meta fields) and also assign weightings for specific queries (e.g. boost this red Nike t-shirt across all relevant queries). Another merchandising feature that I think is important is the ability to add suggested listings to error results.
Comprehensive options around filtering, the displaying of product labels and handling of things like variant information are also handled well by the top tier of providers.
Read More at: https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/ecommerce-site-search-solution
“Not all who wander are lost.”
Good stuff for bumper stickers or if you’re trying to write a generation-defining bestseller and get Reese Witherspoon to play you on the big screen. In ecommerce, however …
A wandering customer only means one thing: a lost customer.
Having been conditioned by Google, today’s consumers have high expectations when it comes to search functionality. It’s far from surprising then that — as Nielsen Norman Group’s exhaustive E-Commerce User Experience found — “Most e-commerce customers go directly to a site’s search tool to find products.”
Given that none of the leading ecommerce platforms have strong native search, this piece focuses on what to look for in a third-party search solution along with core …
But before we get into the how, let’s address the what and why of onsite search.
What Is an Ecommerce Site Search Solution?
An ecommerce site search solution is a third-party tool used onsite to sync customer search queries — e.g., natural language — with product titles, variants, descriptions, images, videos, SKUs, and reordering codes.
Following in the footsteps of other ecommerce technologies, onsite search has become mainstream in recent years. There is now a host of options available for merchants when previously there were just one or two main providers that were cost prohibitive and required complex, resource-heavy integration.
Today, options exist for merchants of all sizes, with even enterprise-level solutions available from as little as ~$200 per month. This availability has driven a surge in popularity and usage.
At the forefront of this ‘disruption’ at the mid-level and enterprise-level ends of the market are solutions like Klevu and Algolia. Legacy providers have become less relevant, due to not being as agile (in terms of releasing new functionality) and pricing.
Algolia is a good example of a wider search technology, which provides excellent indexing capabilities and speed to all. Klevu is more ecommerce-specific and provides exceptional accuracy, primarily through the use of natural language processing.
Why Does Site Search Matter in Ecommerce?
Onsite search represents a strong opportunity for retailers going into 2018. The rise of mobile commerce demands faster and easier routes for finding things. Even on desktop, search drives higher conversion rates.
Various reports on the value of search for merchants bear this out.
1. On average, users who complete a search are 1.8x more likely to convert
2. Site search visitors can generate as much as 13.8% of overall revenue
3. In the case of detail-oriented products, while less than 10% of visitors may perform onsite searches, upwards of 40% of a site’s revenue came from them
From my own experience with sites in the enterprise space, I’ve found the average conversion rate increases to be closer to 3.5x non-search visitors, with around 5-10% of visitors using search.
In other words, retailers have an opportunity to drive more revenue through search, especially for those who haven’t spent time optimising this area. And, at the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s no better way to frustrate and disappoint customer than serving up irrelevant results or even 0 results for relatively straightforward queries.
Best Practices for an Ecommerce Site Search Solution
1. Natural Language Processing for Better Results
The demand for natural language processing (NLP) within search has increased considerably recently — allowing for accurate results even when the user doesn’t really know how to describe what they’re looking for. Having long been adopted by the likes of Google for its organic search, NLP-based search has now made the transition to ecommerce, driving real change in this often overlooked part of the online shopping experience.
NLP algorithms are based on context and relevance, rather than simply on the presence or absence of keywords in product names or descriptions. In simple terms, that means that an NLP will be able to extract meaning from the query to understand that a visitor who types in ‘red jumper’ is happy to look at sweaters and pullovers, even though the query doesn’t contain the term ‘jumper’.
The same applies to color and being able to understand variations of red. This can be really valuable for retailers, particularly with more complicated queries — an example can be seen below from a Klevu demo store.
This example shows how NLP is being used to understand more about the query - this example also benefits from more product catalog data being indexed (such as product reviews, pricing, all other available descriptive attributes etc).
Here’s another example from the same store, which is from a proof of concept implementation with an IR100 retailer.
2. Merchandising Capabilities for Products, Attributes, and Images
Often one of the main issues that leads to a third party search solution being used is the lack of merchandising options for results, with no way to change the ordering of products being returned and a lack of information being presented generally. Newer third-party tools address these areas and have built-in features to allow retailers to ‘searchandise’ their results properly and weight different items and specific attributes.
Klevu, for example, allows users to assign ‘hero SKUs’ at query level, boost products based on specific rules (based on tags and meta fields) and also assign weightings for specific queries (e.g. boost this red Nike t-shirt across all relevant queries). Another merchandising feature that I think is important is the ability to add suggested listings to error results.
Comprehensive options around filtering, the displaying of product labels and handling of things like variant information are also handled well by the top tier of providers.
Read More at: https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/ecommerce-site-search-solution
Sunday, January 21, 2018
Your ecommerce business plan roundup: Strategy, Design, Technology, Development and Sales
By: Mahima Sharma
Indeed! No one would ever miss a word of thought from Amazon’s exemplary success. Isn’t it?
In a highly-competitive industry, you must be aware what it takes to scale up your brand and give your customers an awesome shopping experience. To help you with this, we have chalked out the must haves for your ecommerce business plan.
Strategy: 3 eCommerce business models you can leverage upon
Every business strategy includes a business model to monetize upon. That forms the very basis of any venture. For your ecommerce business plan, there exist 3 typical business models which define & drive your strategy and the choices you should make to turn your ecommerce venture into a success:
1. Drop-shipping
This is one of the most popular models in the eCommerce ecosystem today. Under this model, you create a marketplace and enable the sales of products that are manufactured as well as shipped by a third person/party. Largely, these are products which are largely standard in nature and consumer is already educated about them before he/she makes a purchase. E.g. Large online retailers like Amazon offer multiple products in drop-shipping arrangement with 3rd party vendors.
How do you benefit?
Investments are low as compared to other business models since you are not holding any inventory.
What should be your core focus on?
2. Wholesaling and warehousing
These days, this model is generally followed in B2B niches. You need to have either of the 2 characteristics to follow this model:-
a) Price competitiveness resulting from bulk purchasing and selling
b) Niche product categories that can still command higher margins despite bulk purchase discounts
Businesses like AliExpress fall under this category.
How do you benefit?
This type of model typically generates higher profit margins than any other B2C ecommerce business because of higher stock turnarounds.
What should be your core focus on?
While marketing, technology and customer support still pay a huge role in this type of ecommerce business model, the primary factor of your success happens to be your pricing, so focus more on maintaining that cost advantage.
3. White-labelling
White-labelling is when you hold a licensed contract of labelling a product under your name even if it has been manufactured by any other 3rd party. Just think about Dollar Shave Club and you will understand where we are going.
How do you benefit?
You tend to command higher margins not just because of bulk buying of products but also the niche you are able to create. Moreover, you have more control on the overall supply chain and can deliver better customer experience.
What should be your core focus on?
More than the product, you are selling a concept and an idea in this model. As a result, marketing and customer engagement need to take precedence here. However, that doesn’t mean technology, customer support and supply chain don’t need any investment.
Is your ecommerce strategy following any of these 3 models? Here are some of the resources you should look forward to for detailed concepts:
1. Drop Shipping: The Easiest Way to Sell Online
2. Sell Wholesale to Other Retailers
3. Why A White Label Solution Is Easier Than Building Your Own
Research: 4 tips on how to start with your market research
As you get clarity on the ecommerce business model you want to pursue, your research should also start by this time. The next step should be to dive deeper into the research and perform a thorough SWOT analysis. By the end of this analysis, you will be confident of the experience and the bottlenecks you might face once you start, and how to overcome them.
The most important information to include in your ecommerce business blueprint – Your competitors!
Yes, you can’t afford to miss it. Know your competitors even more than yourself. And in order to get started with the competitor research, start with the following data:
1. Competitor Names
2. Traffic Acquisition Methodologies
3. Product Niche & Pricing
4. Demographics
5. Business Model
6. Brand Value
7. Success Stories
8. Performance Benchmarks
9. Conversion & Bounce Rates
10. Shipping Stats
11. Failure Stories (Even more important!)
12. Web and Mobile Design Experience
13. User Ratings and Reviews
14. Sales and Marketing Tactics
15. Customer Loyalty & Services
Understand what makes you different from them
1. Discover your USP
Leverage your selling proposition by highlighting how your customers will benefit from the uniqueness of your product.
Selling your product to customers who have dozens of other options to buy from is only possible if your business answers a very simple question – Why should they buy from you? What’s that extra you are offering to them?
2. Learn from your competitor stories
Keep yourself aware of the business strategies and decisions your competitors take and what consequences they face. This way, you will always make sure that you learn from their mistakes. It will also be a good primer for you to understand the challenges faced in ecommerce industry, and think about the possible stop-gap solutions in your business model.
3. Distinguish your brand
Create a consistent experience across channels so that no one will forget. Show off with an amazing product video or compelling images that define your product and differentiate your service.
4. Add the personal touch
Create a buzz in the market with a customer centric landing page or a brand story to share with your prospects. Sharing the finest of the details about your product/service will offer a personalized consumer experience.
Once you understand your USP and the areas where your ecommerce business intends to make the biggest impact, it’s time that you start investing in the nuts and bolts of your business. A suggested approach can be to start your research on the tech platforms and mapping your business needs to the available technology offerings (if time is critical, ecommerce software development companies like Kays Harbor can help you in not just making such choices but implement them too).
Read More at: https://kaysharbor.com/blog/ecommerce/your-ecommerce-business-plan-roundup
Indeed! No one would ever miss a word of thought from Amazon’s exemplary success. Isn’t it?
In a highly-competitive industry, you must be aware what it takes to scale up your brand and give your customers an awesome shopping experience. To help you with this, we have chalked out the must haves for your ecommerce business plan.
Strategy: 3 eCommerce business models you can leverage upon
Every business strategy includes a business model to monetize upon. That forms the very basis of any venture. For your ecommerce business plan, there exist 3 typical business models which define & drive your strategy and the choices you should make to turn your ecommerce venture into a success:
1. Drop-shipping
This is one of the most popular models in the eCommerce ecosystem today. Under this model, you create a marketplace and enable the sales of products that are manufactured as well as shipped by a third person/party. Largely, these are products which are largely standard in nature and consumer is already educated about them before he/she makes a purchase. E.g. Large online retailers like Amazon offer multiple products in drop-shipping arrangement with 3rd party vendors.
How do you benefit?
Investments are low as compared to other business models since you are not holding any inventory.
What should be your core focus on?
2. Wholesaling and warehousing
These days, this model is generally followed in B2B niches. You need to have either of the 2 characteristics to follow this model:-
a) Price competitiveness resulting from bulk purchasing and selling
b) Niche product categories that can still command higher margins despite bulk purchase discounts
Businesses like AliExpress fall under this category.
How do you benefit?
This type of model typically generates higher profit margins than any other B2C ecommerce business because of higher stock turnarounds.
What should be your core focus on?
While marketing, technology and customer support still pay a huge role in this type of ecommerce business model, the primary factor of your success happens to be your pricing, so focus more on maintaining that cost advantage.
3. White-labelling
White-labelling is when you hold a licensed contract of labelling a product under your name even if it has been manufactured by any other 3rd party. Just think about Dollar Shave Club and you will understand where we are going.
How do you benefit?
You tend to command higher margins not just because of bulk buying of products but also the niche you are able to create. Moreover, you have more control on the overall supply chain and can deliver better customer experience.
What should be your core focus on?
More than the product, you are selling a concept and an idea in this model. As a result, marketing and customer engagement need to take precedence here. However, that doesn’t mean technology, customer support and supply chain don’t need any investment.
Is your ecommerce strategy following any of these 3 models? Here are some of the resources you should look forward to for detailed concepts:
1. Drop Shipping: The Easiest Way to Sell Online
2. Sell Wholesale to Other Retailers
3. Why A White Label Solution Is Easier Than Building Your Own
Research: 4 tips on how to start with your market research
As you get clarity on the ecommerce business model you want to pursue, your research should also start by this time. The next step should be to dive deeper into the research and perform a thorough SWOT analysis. By the end of this analysis, you will be confident of the experience and the bottlenecks you might face once you start, and how to overcome them.
The most important information to include in your ecommerce business blueprint – Your competitors!
Yes, you can’t afford to miss it. Know your competitors even more than yourself. And in order to get started with the competitor research, start with the following data:
1. Competitor Names
2. Traffic Acquisition Methodologies
3. Product Niche & Pricing
4. Demographics
5. Business Model
6. Brand Value
7. Success Stories
8. Performance Benchmarks
9. Conversion & Bounce Rates
10. Shipping Stats
11. Failure Stories (Even more important!)
12. Web and Mobile Design Experience
13. User Ratings and Reviews
14. Sales and Marketing Tactics
15. Customer Loyalty & Services
Understand what makes you different from them
1. Discover your USP
Leverage your selling proposition by highlighting how your customers will benefit from the uniqueness of your product.
Selling your product to customers who have dozens of other options to buy from is only possible if your business answers a very simple question – Why should they buy from you? What’s that extra you are offering to them?
2. Learn from your competitor stories
Keep yourself aware of the business strategies and decisions your competitors take and what consequences they face. This way, you will always make sure that you learn from their mistakes. It will also be a good primer for you to understand the challenges faced in ecommerce industry, and think about the possible stop-gap solutions in your business model.
3. Distinguish your brand
Create a consistent experience across channels so that no one will forget. Show off with an amazing product video or compelling images that define your product and differentiate your service.
4. Add the personal touch
Create a buzz in the market with a customer centric landing page or a brand story to share with your prospects. Sharing the finest of the details about your product/service will offer a personalized consumer experience.
Once you understand your USP and the areas where your ecommerce business intends to make the biggest impact, it’s time that you start investing in the nuts and bolts of your business. A suggested approach can be to start your research on the tech platforms and mapping your business needs to the available technology offerings (if time is critical, ecommerce software development companies like Kays Harbor can help you in not just making such choices but implement them too).
Read More at: https://kaysharbor.com/blog/ecommerce/your-ecommerce-business-plan-roundup
4 Best Shopify Apps for Ecommerce Startup Success
By: Shane Barker
In 2016, there were 322.17 billion ecommerce sales in the United States alone according to Statista, and 2017 is projected to see 353.68 billion. This suggests that ecommerce continues to be a thriving industry. But just because there’s growth in the industry doesn’t mean ecommerce startups will automatically experience success.
Building a successful ecommerce business is a challenge, especially with so many reputable stores like Amazon and eBay to compete with. To make your job easier, Shopify apps are designed to speed things up.
Some of these tools will enhance customer experience, while others will help establish trust with your target customers. Combined, these tools can help you drive conversions, which is crucial for ecommerce success.
Yotpo
The BigCommerce report also found that trustworthy reviews influence the purchase decision of 68 percent of Americans. In addition to this, 69 percent of shoppers want more reviews available at online stores. But since you’re an ecommerce startup, it’s likely that you don’t have a lot of reviews yet.
Collect more authentic reviews using the Yotpo Reviews app available on Shopify. Using this tool, you can send out timely follow-up mails to your customers after they’ve made a purchase and encourage them to leave a review. You can even offer rewards to shoppers for leaving reviews. This has a good chance of driving more customers to write their review.
Not only this, Yotpo also lets you curate user-generated photos and reviews, which you can then use to design compelling ads. And if you’re marketing on Instagram, this tool will let you create a shop-able gallery that imitates your Instagram feed and enables shoppers to easily make their purchases.
Sweet Tooth Loyalty Reward Points
Who doesn’t love a good offer? BigCommerce reports that discount offers influence the decision to purchase for 71 percent of Americans. So for the success of your ecommerce startup, you should consider the kind of offers and deals you can provide to your customers.
This is crucial especially since you’re still at the stage of getting people to trust your business. An attractive discount could convince first-time shoppers to make their first purchase. And to design and manage your offers, you can use the Sweet Tooth Shopify app for Loyalty Reward Points.
Sweet Tooth lets you reward your customers in more than ten different ways. You can create a reward program to incentivize shoppers for making a purchase, referring a friend, creating an account, following you on social media, and more.
Findify
Simple site navigation influences the purchase decision of 64 percent of Americans, according to the previously-cited BigCommerce report. In fact, 21 percent of Americans find it frustrating to shop at a website that’s unattractive or hard to navigate. This suggests that people want to be able to find what they need without much hassle.
The Findify Search app is just want you need to cater to this need in your customers and enhance their experience shopping with you. The tool implements Artificial Intelligence to deliver accurate and personalized search results for your shoppers based on their behavior. You can also use this tool to make product recommendations that are relevant for your shoppers and will most likely result in a purchase.
Fomo
If you’ve heard of Cialdini’s principles of persuasion, you’d know that factors like social proof and urgency play a huge role in driving conversions. And for your ecommerce startup, you can implement these principles using the Fomo tool.
Fomo lets you display notifications when other customers have bought the product a shopper is currently viewing. This not only acts as social proof but also creates a sense of urgency in the shopper as they might feel compelled to buy the product before stock runs out. You can easily customize the messaging, style, and timing of your notification to ensure best results.
Source: https://tech.co/shopify-apps-ecommerce-startup-2017-06
In 2016, there were 322.17 billion ecommerce sales in the United States alone according to Statista, and 2017 is projected to see 353.68 billion. This suggests that ecommerce continues to be a thriving industry. But just because there’s growth in the industry doesn’t mean ecommerce startups will automatically experience success.
Building a successful ecommerce business is a challenge, especially with so many reputable stores like Amazon and eBay to compete with. To make your job easier, Shopify apps are designed to speed things up.
Some of these tools will enhance customer experience, while others will help establish trust with your target customers. Combined, these tools can help you drive conversions, which is crucial for ecommerce success.
Yotpo
The BigCommerce report also found that trustworthy reviews influence the purchase decision of 68 percent of Americans. In addition to this, 69 percent of shoppers want more reviews available at online stores. But since you’re an ecommerce startup, it’s likely that you don’t have a lot of reviews yet.
Collect more authentic reviews using the Yotpo Reviews app available on Shopify. Using this tool, you can send out timely follow-up mails to your customers after they’ve made a purchase and encourage them to leave a review. You can even offer rewards to shoppers for leaving reviews. This has a good chance of driving more customers to write their review.
Not only this, Yotpo also lets you curate user-generated photos and reviews, which you can then use to design compelling ads. And if you’re marketing on Instagram, this tool will let you create a shop-able gallery that imitates your Instagram feed and enables shoppers to easily make their purchases.
Sweet Tooth Loyalty Reward Points
Who doesn’t love a good offer? BigCommerce reports that discount offers influence the decision to purchase for 71 percent of Americans. So for the success of your ecommerce startup, you should consider the kind of offers and deals you can provide to your customers.
This is crucial especially since you’re still at the stage of getting people to trust your business. An attractive discount could convince first-time shoppers to make their first purchase. And to design and manage your offers, you can use the Sweet Tooth Shopify app for Loyalty Reward Points.
Sweet Tooth lets you reward your customers in more than ten different ways. You can create a reward program to incentivize shoppers for making a purchase, referring a friend, creating an account, following you on social media, and more.
Findify
Simple site navigation influences the purchase decision of 64 percent of Americans, according to the previously-cited BigCommerce report. In fact, 21 percent of Americans find it frustrating to shop at a website that’s unattractive or hard to navigate. This suggests that people want to be able to find what they need without much hassle.
The Findify Search app is just want you need to cater to this need in your customers and enhance their experience shopping with you. The tool implements Artificial Intelligence to deliver accurate and personalized search results for your shoppers based on their behavior. You can also use this tool to make product recommendations that are relevant for your shoppers and will most likely result in a purchase.
Fomo
If you’ve heard of Cialdini’s principles of persuasion, you’d know that factors like social proof and urgency play a huge role in driving conversions. And for your ecommerce startup, you can implement these principles using the Fomo tool.
Fomo lets you display notifications when other customers have bought the product a shopper is currently viewing. This not only acts as social proof but also creates a sense of urgency in the shopper as they might feel compelled to buy the product before stock runs out. You can easily customize the messaging, style, and timing of your notification to ensure best results.
Source: https://tech.co/shopify-apps-ecommerce-startup-2017-06
Saturday, January 20, 2018
7 Customer Retention Tactics to Get Current Ecommerce Customers to Purchase More
By: Richard Lazazzera
You’ve heard it time and time again. It’s cheaper to get past customers to purchase again than it is to find new customers. This is true for most businesses, especially in the crowded online ecommerce arena where ad impressions, clicks and conversions always seem to be increasing in cost, making new customers more and more expensive to acquire.
Knowing that it's cheaper to get current customer to purchase from you again, ask yourself, when was the last time you truly made an effort to re-engage your current customers to get them to come back?
In today’s post, we will look at seven strategies to target your current customers and get them to purchase more often.
Let’s find out how
Benefits of Reselling to Current Customers
There are several benefits to reselling to previous customers versus acquiring new ones. First and foremost, as mentioned in the intro, it usually costs less. That alone is reason enough to spend more time focusing on your current customers, however, there are additional benefits as well.
According to the book Leading On The Edge Of Chaos, customer profitability rates tends to increase over the life of a retained customer and a two percent increase in customer retention has the same effect on profits as cutting costs by ten percent.
Finally, the more times a customer purchases from you, the stronger your relationship becomes. It’s these strong relationships that cause customers to champion your products and services, effectively creating powerful referrals and word-of-mouth marketing that will help drive new customers.
So now that we understand why focusing your energy on your current customers can be more important than acquiring new ones, let's look at some ways to increase conversions amongst your current customers.
1. Utilize Customer Accounts
Customer accounts can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, accounts can make repurchasing much easier by giving customer easy access to past orders as well as pre-filled shipping information. On the other hand, customer accounts can be a seen as too big of a commitment for new customers. Because of this, most people will choose to checkout as a guest if given the option
So how can you effectively implement and encourage customer accounts while not hindering conversions of first time customers? The trick is to provide the option to create an account after the first order has been placed.
Additionally, if you're on the Shopify platform and your customer accounts are optional, you can send customers direct invitations to encourage them to activate an account after the fact.
2. Implement a Customer Loyalty Program
Further developing on the idea of customer accounts, is to reward customers for their loyalty. Developing a loyalty membership to your store is another way to increase conversions from your current customers while rewarding them for their repeat purchases.
Creating a loyalty program can be as simple as rewarding customers on their second purchase at your store or after a set dollar figure. Your store reports makes it easy to see who your best customers are by dollar value and total number of orders:
If you're too busy or your customer list is too big, there are ways to also automate this with Shopify apps such as Klaviyo which can automatically email your customer a reward coupon when your customers make a repeat purchase from your store.
Additionally, you can opt for full featured and automated loyalty apps like SLoyalty and LoyaltyLion which can reward your customers for a variety of actions they take in your store, including creating a customer account, referring friends and making purchases.
3. Send Regular Customer Newsletter Emails
Your email list is a critical tool for maintaining and building relationships with your current customers. Time and time again email has proven itself to be one of the top converting channels for ecommerce. Take a look at the graph below from Monetate. It's clear that email converts much higher than social and close to twice as high as organic search:
An email marketing campaign like this to all of your customers is quick to implement and can produce big gains.
For best practices when sending out newsletters, check out our post on Email Marketing: A Guide To Ecommerce Newsletters.
Read More at: https://www.shopify.com/blog/15593136-7-customer-retention-tactics-to-get-current-ecommerce-customers-to-purchase-more
You’ve heard it time and time again. It’s cheaper to get past customers to purchase again than it is to find new customers. This is true for most businesses, especially in the crowded online ecommerce arena where ad impressions, clicks and conversions always seem to be increasing in cost, making new customers more and more expensive to acquire.
Knowing that it's cheaper to get current customer to purchase from you again, ask yourself, when was the last time you truly made an effort to re-engage your current customers to get them to come back?
In today’s post, we will look at seven strategies to target your current customers and get them to purchase more often.
Let’s find out how
Benefits of Reselling to Current Customers
There are several benefits to reselling to previous customers versus acquiring new ones. First and foremost, as mentioned in the intro, it usually costs less. That alone is reason enough to spend more time focusing on your current customers, however, there are additional benefits as well.
According to the book Leading On The Edge Of Chaos, customer profitability rates tends to increase over the life of a retained customer and a two percent increase in customer retention has the same effect on profits as cutting costs by ten percent.
Finally, the more times a customer purchases from you, the stronger your relationship becomes. It’s these strong relationships that cause customers to champion your products and services, effectively creating powerful referrals and word-of-mouth marketing that will help drive new customers.
So now that we understand why focusing your energy on your current customers can be more important than acquiring new ones, let's look at some ways to increase conversions amongst your current customers.
1. Utilize Customer Accounts
Customer accounts can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, accounts can make repurchasing much easier by giving customer easy access to past orders as well as pre-filled shipping information. On the other hand, customer accounts can be a seen as too big of a commitment for new customers. Because of this, most people will choose to checkout as a guest if given the option
So how can you effectively implement and encourage customer accounts while not hindering conversions of first time customers? The trick is to provide the option to create an account after the first order has been placed.
Additionally, if you're on the Shopify platform and your customer accounts are optional, you can send customers direct invitations to encourage them to activate an account after the fact.
2. Implement a Customer Loyalty Program
Further developing on the idea of customer accounts, is to reward customers for their loyalty. Developing a loyalty membership to your store is another way to increase conversions from your current customers while rewarding them for their repeat purchases.
Creating a loyalty program can be as simple as rewarding customers on their second purchase at your store or after a set dollar figure. Your store reports makes it easy to see who your best customers are by dollar value and total number of orders:
If you're too busy or your customer list is too big, there are ways to also automate this with Shopify apps such as Klaviyo which can automatically email your customer a reward coupon when your customers make a repeat purchase from your store.
Additionally, you can opt for full featured and automated loyalty apps like SLoyalty and LoyaltyLion which can reward your customers for a variety of actions they take in your store, including creating a customer account, referring friends and making purchases.
3. Send Regular Customer Newsletter Emails
Your email list is a critical tool for maintaining and building relationships with your current customers. Time and time again email has proven itself to be one of the top converting channels for ecommerce. Take a look at the graph below from Monetate. It's clear that email converts much higher than social and close to twice as high as organic search:
An email marketing campaign like this to all of your customers is quick to implement and can produce big gains.
For best practices when sending out newsletters, check out our post on Email Marketing: A Guide To Ecommerce Newsletters.
Read More at: https://www.shopify.com/blog/15593136-7-customer-retention-tactics-to-get-current-ecommerce-customers-to-purchase-more
The Best Ecommerce Books for Leaders to Read in 2018 (Hint: They’re Not Necessarily About Ecommerce)
By: Aaron Orendorff
“Books,” wrote Charles William Eliot, “are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”
At the risk of contradicting Harvard’s most-distinguished president … I’d like to add a caveat: certainly, books are friends, counselors, and teachers.
However, books — particularly the best books for leaders — are anything but quiet. At least, they shouldn’t be.
Getting books to speak up takes effort. As my friend Jesse Wisnewski recently noted in The Observer:
“Reading isn’t the same as having a face-to-face conversation with someone you want to learn from.
“But if you want to learn lessons from the books you read, then you must become an active reader: someone who is ready to ask questions, review their notes, and then take action. This shift in the way you approach what you read will help you to treat books like your best mentors.”
To that end, I reached out to 10 of the best mentors in the ecommerce space and asked them for the best ecommerce books leaders should read in 2018, along with the best lesson and quote from that book.
But, don’t be fooled. These aren’t books about “ecommerce” — not all of them anyway. Nor are they a round-up of 2017’s most famous titles.
Instead, these books, lessons, and quotes span the worlds of business, sociology, history, psychology, and customer service. So, let’s explore …
1. Shoe Dog by Phil Knight
Recommended by Tobias Lütke, Shopify’s Chief Executive Officer
From Phil Knight’s humble origins — selling $8,000 his first year from the trunk of a Plymouth Valiant — to topping $30 billion at the time of publication, Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike offers an autobiographical account of one of the world’s most recognizable brands.
Best Leadership Lesson:
“War is the most extreme of conditions. But business has its warlike parallels. Someone somewhere once said that business is war without bullets, and I tended to agree.
“One lesson I took from all my home-schooling about heroes was that they didn’t say much. None was a blabbermouth. None micromanaged.
“Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with the results.”
-Phil Knight
2. The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday
Recommended by Harley Finkelstein, Shopify’s Chief Operating Officer
Drawing inspiration from Marcus Aurelius’ 2,000-year-old quote — “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” — The Obstacle Is the Way leads modern readers into the ancient Greek philosophy of stoicism. “The Stoic,” Holiday says, “doesn’t look out at the world and try to change it; they try to change themselves — to orient themselves to be the best person they can in that world.”
Best Leadership Lesson:
“Failure really can be an asset if what you’re trying to do is improve, learn, or do something new. It’s the preceding feature of nearly all successes.
“There’s nothing shameful about being wrong, about changing course. Each time it happens we have new options. Problems become opportunities. And that means changing the relationship with failure. It means iterating, failing, and improving.
Read More at: https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/best-ecommerce-books-leaders
“Books,” wrote Charles William Eliot, “are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”
At the risk of contradicting Harvard’s most-distinguished president … I’d like to add a caveat: certainly, books are friends, counselors, and teachers.
However, books — particularly the best books for leaders — are anything but quiet. At least, they shouldn’t be.
Getting books to speak up takes effort. As my friend Jesse Wisnewski recently noted in The Observer:
“Reading isn’t the same as having a face-to-face conversation with someone you want to learn from.
“But if you want to learn lessons from the books you read, then you must become an active reader: someone who is ready to ask questions, review their notes, and then take action. This shift in the way you approach what you read will help you to treat books like your best mentors.”
To that end, I reached out to 10 of the best mentors in the ecommerce space and asked them for the best ecommerce books leaders should read in 2018, along with the best lesson and quote from that book.
But, don’t be fooled. These aren’t books about “ecommerce” — not all of them anyway. Nor are they a round-up of 2017’s most famous titles.
Instead, these books, lessons, and quotes span the worlds of business, sociology, history, psychology, and customer service. So, let’s explore …
1. Shoe Dog by Phil Knight
Recommended by Tobias Lütke, Shopify’s Chief Executive Officer
From Phil Knight’s humble origins — selling $8,000 his first year from the trunk of a Plymouth Valiant — to topping $30 billion at the time of publication, Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike offers an autobiographical account of one of the world’s most recognizable brands.
Best Leadership Lesson:
“War is the most extreme of conditions. But business has its warlike parallels. Someone somewhere once said that business is war without bullets, and I tended to agree.
“One lesson I took from all my home-schooling about heroes was that they didn’t say much. None was a blabbermouth. None micromanaged.
“Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with the results.”
-Phil Knight
2. The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday
Recommended by Harley Finkelstein, Shopify’s Chief Operating Officer
Drawing inspiration from Marcus Aurelius’ 2,000-year-old quote — “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” — The Obstacle Is the Way leads modern readers into the ancient Greek philosophy of stoicism. “The Stoic,” Holiday says, “doesn’t look out at the world and try to change it; they try to change themselves — to orient themselves to be the best person they can in that world.”
Best Leadership Lesson:
“Failure really can be an asset if what you’re trying to do is improve, learn, or do something new. It’s the preceding feature of nearly all successes.
“There’s nothing shameful about being wrong, about changing course. Each time it happens we have new options. Problems become opportunities. And that means changing the relationship with failure. It means iterating, failing, and improving.
Read More at: https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/best-ecommerce-books-leaders
Friday, January 19, 2018
How Ecommerce Can Get More Customers With Visual Marketing
By: Alla Bogdan
As an online retailer, you’re always thinking about how you can reach new potential buyers. One way to do this is by visual marketing. Social media loves visual posts, as it’s the best way to interact with your followers through visual content: photos, videos, Instagram Stories, GIFs, infographics etc.
As a content marketer for PromoRepublic, I am constantly analyzing Small Business Pages and can, without a doubt, confirm that none of their owners are professional designers. Nevertheless, these Pages leave a lasting impression not only with their visuals but with the number of likes and loves below their posts.
*Join like-minded Ecommerce professionals at free weekly webinars.
Content Plan First
A well-balanced content plan is the first step in your Social Media Strategy.
The Content Balance
Your goal is to promote your products. We suggest 1/3 of your social posts be shares from your Shopify store, or from your other Ecommerce website. You also sell on Facebook via Shopify, so that’s easy. The optimal content plan is made up of engaging, educational, promotional, and curated content.
Engaging Content
They are your followers first; buyers second. Turn your page into a source of entertainment and easy-going content for them. Generate ideas you think will make them want to click on the heart and the share button below your post.
GIFs – Add Visual Variety To Your Feed
Short and sweet, a GIF contains dynamic content that’s rich in meaning and is rarely considered spammy. People like GIFs, plain and simple. They have a mystique about them – they’re like social media’s shiny toy. Giphy’s library is huge and search-friendly. Need to turn videos and YouTube links into GIFs? Use their GIF Maker for free.
Promotional Posts
Shopify links, special offers, discounts, or newsworthy pieces about your product are examples of promotional posts. If they like your visual, they will read your compelling copy and vise versa. Try to keep all the important information in the image.
Instagram Carousel Post
Instagram has extended its carousel format to organic posts and expanded it to include up to 10 photos or videos. Now you can upload as many photos of your products in one post as you need, categorize them and reach a higher engagement.
Share Facebook Shop Collection
Create beautiful posts with your Facebook Shop. You can share your collections during blowout days or any other promotion. To do that, go to Shop and click on Share Collection. Add your copy and post. The post will be published as a Carousel.
Read More at: http://en.promorepublic.com/blog/ecommerce-can-get-customers-visual-marketing/
As an online retailer, you’re always thinking about how you can reach new potential buyers. One way to do this is by visual marketing. Social media loves visual posts, as it’s the best way to interact with your followers through visual content: photos, videos, Instagram Stories, GIFs, infographics etc.
As a content marketer for PromoRepublic, I am constantly analyzing Small Business Pages and can, without a doubt, confirm that none of their owners are professional designers. Nevertheless, these Pages leave a lasting impression not only with their visuals but with the number of likes and loves below their posts.
*Join like-minded Ecommerce professionals at free weekly webinars.
Content Plan First
A well-balanced content plan is the first step in your Social Media Strategy.
The Content Balance
Your goal is to promote your products. We suggest 1/3 of your social posts be shares from your Shopify store, or from your other Ecommerce website. You also sell on Facebook via Shopify, so that’s easy. The optimal content plan is made up of engaging, educational, promotional, and curated content.
Engaging Content
They are your followers first; buyers second. Turn your page into a source of entertainment and easy-going content for them. Generate ideas you think will make them want to click on the heart and the share button below your post.
GIFs – Add Visual Variety To Your Feed
Short and sweet, a GIF contains dynamic content that’s rich in meaning and is rarely considered spammy. People like GIFs, plain and simple. They have a mystique about them – they’re like social media’s shiny toy. Giphy’s library is huge and search-friendly. Need to turn videos and YouTube links into GIFs? Use their GIF Maker for free.
Promotional Posts
Shopify links, special offers, discounts, or newsworthy pieces about your product are examples of promotional posts. If they like your visual, they will read your compelling copy and vise versa. Try to keep all the important information in the image.
Instagram Carousel Post
Instagram has extended its carousel format to organic posts and expanded it to include up to 10 photos or videos. Now you can upload as many photos of your products in one post as you need, categorize them and reach a higher engagement.
Share Facebook Shop Collection
Create beautiful posts with your Facebook Shop. You can share your collections during blowout days or any other promotion. To do that, go to Shop and click on Share Collection. Add your copy and post. The post will be published as a Carousel.
Read More at: http://en.promorepublic.com/blog/ecommerce-can-get-customers-visual-marketing/
Thursday, January 18, 2018
Top Ecommerce Blogs of 2017
By: akash
The ever-evolving eCommerce world stretched its presence even more in 2017. The digitalized market growth encouraged a lot more engagement for online businesses. There has been a lot of new things that were introduced in the eCommerce universe and 2017 has seen a lot of great content spread around the world to make a change.
We have compiled a list of the best blogs that catered to the needs of the users. Here are the Top Ecommerce Blogs of 2017 that were published by our team:
1. SAP Business One 9.3 – New Features and Updates
SAP Business One is the leading pioneer and one of the most trusted Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system in the world for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). SAP Business One has surged to heights with its rigorous development and various functionality-based improvements via patch and major releases. SAP released its SAP Business One 9.2 version back in 2016 and the 9.3 version in 2017. SAP Business One 9.3 will prove to be more helpful to businesses in many more ways. In this blog, we looked at the major changes and feature updates that are new to SAP Business One 9.3!
2. Magento 2.0 vs Magento 2.1 – What are the Major Updates
The introduction of Magento 2.0 in the market back in November 2015 was a big boost as it came with all new features which were not there in its older version. But with time, as customers and developers started using it, they found it functioning slow and was full of bugs. So, in came Magento 2.1 in June 2016 with the bug fixes. It is much more stable when compared to its predecessor Magento 2.0.
3. Functionality Improvements in NAV 2017
Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017 came with newer, greater and better functionalities, and has been released by Microsoft on October 24th, 2016. So, let’s take a sneak peek at the new features provided by Microsoft in the latest version of NAV which will help you assess and decide whether you should upgrade from your previous NAV version to NAV 2017 or not.
4. How to create Multiple Websites in Woocommerce
WooCommerce has grown rapidly with time. Most of us are aware of the multi-site feature of WordPress 3.0 and above. This article contains instructions to create a multi-site network in WooCommerce with few easy steps.
5. Why is iPaaS crucial for SAP ECC Implementation
While SAP ECC remains one of the most popular ERP products available today, its implementation is not a cake walk, and there have been many instances of failures. This is mostly because companies have their own methods of conducting business operations and to move suddenly to the SAP ECC solution means all the data and operations need to be holistically moved as well. The solution to these problems is to adopt an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS). This cloud-enabled service helps companies to manage, execute and maintain the flow of data and operations between disparate software applications, over the cloud so that no data is hampered or lost.
6. 17 Best Responsive PrestaShop Themes for your Online Store
PrestaShop is a free, open-source platform to build your online store. The software is written in PHP language with support for MySQL database management system. PrestaShop employs a web template system that allows users to select and customize themes based on their requirements. It offers powerful features for managing product listing, payments, shipping, manufacturers, and suppliers. Following are the best responsive PrestaShop themes.
7. Integrate Microsoft Dynamics GP with Shopify – APPSeCONNECT
Integrate MS Dynamics GP with Shopify and resolve all the data entry problems, making the business process much more efficient. Things like order processing, stock updates etc can be easily managed with this integration. In this way, this it saves operational cost and boosts your response time to the consumers thus raising their confidence and your reputation.
8. How to Sell on Amazon with BigCommerce to Grow your Business
Among major SaaS based ecommerce platform, BigCommerce supports selling on Amazon, Pinterest and Facebook. From past several years, common people like shopping on Amazon and that is the reason why thousands of merchants have adopted the strategy to sell on Amazon. This is also encouraging direct sales through online store.
9. 15 Amazing OpenCart Web Stores to Watch
If an attractive website with the best ecommerce features were what you were looking for, OpenCart might be the best choice for your store’s website. This open-source PHP based software not only is cost-effective, but comes with benefits like simplicity of use, multiple payment gateways, free support and software updates.
10. Tricks to Customize your WooCommerce Store Part – 2
In this continued blog, a few more tricks are provided that one can use to customize their WooCommerce Store to subsequently increase their store functionalities and have additional business advantages that they can put up for their good use. Here are few of the methods in which one can customize their WooCommerce store further.
Read More at: https://www.appseconnect.com/top-ecommerce-blogs-of-2017/
The ever-evolving eCommerce world stretched its presence even more in 2017. The digitalized market growth encouraged a lot more engagement for online businesses. There has been a lot of new things that were introduced in the eCommerce universe and 2017 has seen a lot of great content spread around the world to make a change.
We have compiled a list of the best blogs that catered to the needs of the users. Here are the Top Ecommerce Blogs of 2017 that were published by our team:
1. SAP Business One 9.3 – New Features and Updates
SAP Business One is the leading pioneer and one of the most trusted Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system in the world for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). SAP Business One has surged to heights with its rigorous development and various functionality-based improvements via patch and major releases. SAP released its SAP Business One 9.2 version back in 2016 and the 9.3 version in 2017. SAP Business One 9.3 will prove to be more helpful to businesses in many more ways. In this blog, we looked at the major changes and feature updates that are new to SAP Business One 9.3!
2. Magento 2.0 vs Magento 2.1 – What are the Major Updates
The introduction of Magento 2.0 in the market back in November 2015 was a big boost as it came with all new features which were not there in its older version. But with time, as customers and developers started using it, they found it functioning slow and was full of bugs. So, in came Magento 2.1 in June 2016 with the bug fixes. It is much more stable when compared to its predecessor Magento 2.0.
3. Functionality Improvements in NAV 2017
Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017 came with newer, greater and better functionalities, and has been released by Microsoft on October 24th, 2016. So, let’s take a sneak peek at the new features provided by Microsoft in the latest version of NAV which will help you assess and decide whether you should upgrade from your previous NAV version to NAV 2017 or not.
4. How to create Multiple Websites in Woocommerce
WooCommerce has grown rapidly with time. Most of us are aware of the multi-site feature of WordPress 3.0 and above. This article contains instructions to create a multi-site network in WooCommerce with few easy steps.
5. Why is iPaaS crucial for SAP ECC Implementation
While SAP ECC remains one of the most popular ERP products available today, its implementation is not a cake walk, and there have been many instances of failures. This is mostly because companies have their own methods of conducting business operations and to move suddenly to the SAP ECC solution means all the data and operations need to be holistically moved as well. The solution to these problems is to adopt an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS). This cloud-enabled service helps companies to manage, execute and maintain the flow of data and operations between disparate software applications, over the cloud so that no data is hampered or lost.
6. 17 Best Responsive PrestaShop Themes for your Online Store
PrestaShop is a free, open-source platform to build your online store. The software is written in PHP language with support for MySQL database management system. PrestaShop employs a web template system that allows users to select and customize themes based on their requirements. It offers powerful features for managing product listing, payments, shipping, manufacturers, and suppliers. Following are the best responsive PrestaShop themes.
7. Integrate Microsoft Dynamics GP with Shopify – APPSeCONNECT
Integrate MS Dynamics GP with Shopify and resolve all the data entry problems, making the business process much more efficient. Things like order processing, stock updates etc can be easily managed with this integration. In this way, this it saves operational cost and boosts your response time to the consumers thus raising their confidence and your reputation.
8. How to Sell on Amazon with BigCommerce to Grow your Business
Among major SaaS based ecommerce platform, BigCommerce supports selling on Amazon, Pinterest and Facebook. From past several years, common people like shopping on Amazon and that is the reason why thousands of merchants have adopted the strategy to sell on Amazon. This is also encouraging direct sales through online store.
9. 15 Amazing OpenCart Web Stores to Watch
If an attractive website with the best ecommerce features were what you were looking for, OpenCart might be the best choice for your store’s website. This open-source PHP based software not only is cost-effective, but comes with benefits like simplicity of use, multiple payment gateways, free support and software updates.
10. Tricks to Customize your WooCommerce Store Part – 2
In this continued blog, a few more tricks are provided that one can use to customize their WooCommerce Store to subsequently increase their store functionalities and have additional business advantages that they can put up for their good use. Here are few of the methods in which one can customize their WooCommerce store further.
Read More at: https://www.appseconnect.com/top-ecommerce-blogs-of-2017/
Shopify Review 2018
By: Conrad Ron
Shopify is my first choice and it’s our best E-Commerce software and commerce website builder the market and is the most popular among small online store. And is the best in class for ease to use, so if you are planing to launch your store quickly, and you don’t have technical skills. So Shopify is the right choice for you, in-addition provide straightforward eCommerce solution with strong customer care, Reliability and affordable price, We found Shopify stand out from the crowd as their industry leader in eCommerce storage space.
Shopify Review 2018
Written on Ruby on Rails Shopify offers a simple and easy to use interface that makes it easy to create and publish a store that you can update at any time.
With Shopify you’ll get everything needed to design and launch an online store, first you need to pick a template for Shopify Theme Store you will have over than 100 premium and free eCommerce website templates to choose from, optimize the design you will have a full control over HTML and CSS also if you are not familiar with HTML and CSS you can use Shopify simple Liquid templating language to personalized touches to your site.
After you setup your template by adding a logo, change colors and much more, you can now start adding product catalog you can upload unlimited images, unlimited product, and with Shopify you can organize your products by easily organize inventory with tools such as Categories, Brand Names, Attributes (size, color, etc.) and Pricing Groups. And you can setup Promotions feature to establish automated product discounts during specified sale periods. When the promotion period ends, products will automatically scan back at their original pre-sale price.
With powerful content management system (CMS) you can create pages, contact us or create blog posts from a single administration dashboard. Shopify feature built-in mobile commerce that includes an iPhone app and mobile storefront. Marketing tools for SEO and coupon codes to help sell items are also available.
Shopify allows you to accept credit cards and PayPal payments by integrating with over 50 payment gateways. Customers can pay using their credit cards, eChecks, Google Checkout, PayPal and more. Spiffy E-commerce system is smart enough to detect your country based on your IP address, the system will automatically add tax rates, change the currency, customize the languages of checkout page , or translate the shopping cart checkout page Also the shipping calculators available with this solution, and you can setup Order Processing rules like the refund and return policy, Shopify has all the tools to make the checkout process much smoother.
Extra Features
Shopify offers a comprehensive app store, With dozens of free and for-purchase apps that you can use to enhance user experience. In addition With Shopify you can sell your products in a retail location using iPad point of sale system $40/Mo.
Marketing
Shopify offers built in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) features to help your website to be easily find Google, Bing, Yahoo and Shopify pages is fully integrated with Google Analytics to track customer purchases and shopping cart transactions. It also features built-in analytics to benchmark your online store’s performance to help you track eCommerce over time.
In addition, Shopify features a full discount code coupon engine, to help promote your products and increase your revenue, You can further add your products to Google Product Page, and your customers can subscribe to your newsletter for future news or offers.
Pricing and Packages
Shopify offers three packages that provide different storage and added features, all packages offer unlimited product and Bandwith, The Professional Package let you sell unlimited Products with 5 GB Storage, mobile store, and 2.5% + 30¢ (online) on transaction fees this package cost $79 /Mo , the top level package has unlimited products, bandwidth, unlimited storage, Cost $179 / Mo
Security
Shopify includes a PCI compliant shopping cart and hosting for online stores, this mean all your data is secure, All packages with Shopify has 128-bit Free SSL certificate at no additional cost.
Shopify gives its clients a 99.94% uptime guarantee. With top of the line equipment, ample redundant power systems, With around-the-clock security, and secure backups,Your business Will be safe with Shopify.
Customer Support
Shopify comes with great customer support around-the-clock live chat, phone calls and efficient email support system. Video tutorials, articles, a searchable knowledge-base and an active user community forum. For those who would like to deal with live support staff, Overall Shopify range of customer service options is above and beyond what most E-commerce software offer. If you give them a call you’ll find out for yourself!
Summary
If you want a full E-commerce software and platform that gives you peace of mind for design, manage, security, marketing for your online store, then Shopify is the clear choice. Shopify score highly on many features, easy-to-use and setup, simple, and all what you will need to start selling your products or you can sell Amazon.com and eBay affiliate products, with fantastic customer service, Shopify is the best E-commerce platform we have reviewed, And is our Best E-commerce software.
Source >> https://5bestthings.com/shopify-review-2018/
Shopify is my first choice and it’s our best E-Commerce software and commerce website builder the market and is the most popular among small online store. And is the best in class for ease to use, so if you are planing to launch your store quickly, and you don’t have technical skills. So Shopify is the right choice for you, in-addition provide straightforward eCommerce solution with strong customer care, Reliability and affordable price, We found Shopify stand out from the crowd as their industry leader in eCommerce storage space.
Shopify Review 2018
Written on Ruby on Rails Shopify offers a simple and easy to use interface that makes it easy to create and publish a store that you can update at any time.
With Shopify you’ll get everything needed to design and launch an online store, first you need to pick a template for Shopify Theme Store you will have over than 100 premium and free eCommerce website templates to choose from, optimize the design you will have a full control over HTML and CSS also if you are not familiar with HTML and CSS you can use Shopify simple Liquid templating language to personalized touches to your site.
After you setup your template by adding a logo, change colors and much more, you can now start adding product catalog you can upload unlimited images, unlimited product, and with Shopify you can organize your products by easily organize inventory with tools such as Categories, Brand Names, Attributes (size, color, etc.) and Pricing Groups. And you can setup Promotions feature to establish automated product discounts during specified sale periods. When the promotion period ends, products will automatically scan back at their original pre-sale price.
With powerful content management system (CMS) you can create pages, contact us or create blog posts from a single administration dashboard. Shopify feature built-in mobile commerce that includes an iPhone app and mobile storefront. Marketing tools for SEO and coupon codes to help sell items are also available.
Shopify allows you to accept credit cards and PayPal payments by integrating with over 50 payment gateways. Customers can pay using their credit cards, eChecks, Google Checkout, PayPal and more. Spiffy E-commerce system is smart enough to detect your country based on your IP address, the system will automatically add tax rates, change the currency, customize the languages of checkout page , or translate the shopping cart checkout page Also the shipping calculators available with this solution, and you can setup Order Processing rules like the refund and return policy, Shopify has all the tools to make the checkout process much smoother.
Extra Features
Shopify offers a comprehensive app store, With dozens of free and for-purchase apps that you can use to enhance user experience. In addition With Shopify you can sell your products in a retail location using iPad point of sale system $40/Mo.
Marketing
Shopify offers built in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) features to help your website to be easily find Google, Bing, Yahoo and Shopify pages is fully integrated with Google Analytics to track customer purchases and shopping cart transactions. It also features built-in analytics to benchmark your online store’s performance to help you track eCommerce over time.
In addition, Shopify features a full discount code coupon engine, to help promote your products and increase your revenue, You can further add your products to Google Product Page, and your customers can subscribe to your newsletter for future news or offers.
Pricing and Packages
Shopify offers three packages that provide different storage and added features, all packages offer unlimited product and Bandwith, The Professional Package let you sell unlimited Products with 5 GB Storage, mobile store, and 2.5% + 30¢ (online) on transaction fees this package cost $79 /Mo , the top level package has unlimited products, bandwidth, unlimited storage, Cost $179 / Mo
Security
Shopify includes a PCI compliant shopping cart and hosting for online stores, this mean all your data is secure, All packages with Shopify has 128-bit Free SSL certificate at no additional cost.
Shopify gives its clients a 99.94% uptime guarantee. With top of the line equipment, ample redundant power systems, With around-the-clock security, and secure backups,Your business Will be safe with Shopify.
Customer Support
Shopify comes with great customer support around-the-clock live chat, phone calls and efficient email support system. Video tutorials, articles, a searchable knowledge-base and an active user community forum. For those who would like to deal with live support staff, Overall Shopify range of customer service options is above and beyond what most E-commerce software offer. If you give them a call you’ll find out for yourself!
Summary
If you want a full E-commerce software and platform that gives you peace of mind for design, manage, security, marketing for your online store, then Shopify is the clear choice. Shopify score highly on many features, easy-to-use and setup, simple, and all what you will need to start selling your products or you can sell Amazon.com and eBay affiliate products, with fantastic customer service, Shopify is the best E-commerce platform we have reviewed, And is our Best E-commerce software.
Source >> https://5bestthings.com/shopify-review-2018/
Wednesday, January 17, 2018
How To Choose A Profitable eCommerce Business Idea
By: Darren DeMatas
Your dream of sitting on the beach and running a successful e-commerce business starts with choosing the right niche and validating your business plan.
I’m dreaming. Are you?
If you’re planning on diving in to e-commerce (like we are), the first step is to research and decide what niche to attack. If you want to compete in today’s competitive e-commerce world, you need to build a sustainable brand.
Churn and burn ecommerce business models fail.
Since this is our first adventure into this world, we wanted to conduct our own analysis. We analyzed over a 100 niches and narrowed down our choices to 30. With a million product to sell on Amazon, there’s too many small ecommerce business ideas out there.
To avoid making mistakes along the way, we asked some of the top e-commerce entrepreneurs in the game the following question:
What is the single biggest mistake entrepreneurs make when choosing their first e-commerce niche?
Their responses are below (and in no particular order):
Sam Mallikarjunan
The biggest mistake is going after catalog depth instead of trying to own a buyer persona. The idea of customer centricity and solving for customer lifetime value instead of transactional margins is still something that hasn’t sunk in for many entrepreneurs, and it involves solving for earlier in the buying cycle and using up-sell, cross-sell, and re-selling strategies to retain customers once you’ve acquired them.
Shabbir Nooruddin
The single biggest mistake entrepreneurs make when choosing their first e-commerce niche is they don’t do enough research (I know I didn’t!). Often, a niche may look promising from far away, but as you get deeper and deeper in it – usually after launching and investing some money into – more competitors turn up, customers seem a lot more finicky, and it seems a lot more difficult than it actually was.
Linda Bustos
A true niche means there’s not many competitors relative to demand. If you’re fortunate enough to truly find a niche not already infiltrated by Amazon and others, understand that if you’re successful, it won’t be long until competitors spring up. Consider vente privee, subscription boxes, dollar razors, yoga wear, moustache wax…
Invest heavily in your brand, and never rest on your lead. Customer loyalty is hard to come by, especially in the online age. Always be acquiring new customers — this may include “joining” competitors like Amazon marketplace at the point your offering is no longer niche. It may be diversifying and expanding your product offering ahead of the competition.
It may be exploring new business models like subscription boxes. Don’t take for granted that anything successful inevitably will be copied.
Read More at >> https://selfstartr.com/ecommerce-business-ideas/
Your dream of sitting on the beach and running a successful e-commerce business starts with choosing the right niche and validating your business plan.
I’m dreaming. Are you?
If you’re planning on diving in to e-commerce (like we are), the first step is to research and decide what niche to attack. If you want to compete in today’s competitive e-commerce world, you need to build a sustainable brand.
Churn and burn ecommerce business models fail.
Since this is our first adventure into this world, we wanted to conduct our own analysis. We analyzed over a 100 niches and narrowed down our choices to 30. With a million product to sell on Amazon, there’s too many small ecommerce business ideas out there.
To avoid making mistakes along the way, we asked some of the top e-commerce entrepreneurs in the game the following question:
What is the single biggest mistake entrepreneurs make when choosing their first e-commerce niche?
Their responses are below (and in no particular order):
Sam Mallikarjunan
The biggest mistake is going after catalog depth instead of trying to own a buyer persona. The idea of customer centricity and solving for customer lifetime value instead of transactional margins is still something that hasn’t sunk in for many entrepreneurs, and it involves solving for earlier in the buying cycle and using up-sell, cross-sell, and re-selling strategies to retain customers once you’ve acquired them.
Shabbir Nooruddin
The single biggest mistake entrepreneurs make when choosing their first e-commerce niche is they don’t do enough research (I know I didn’t!). Often, a niche may look promising from far away, but as you get deeper and deeper in it – usually after launching and investing some money into – more competitors turn up, customers seem a lot more finicky, and it seems a lot more difficult than it actually was.
Linda Bustos
A true niche means there’s not many competitors relative to demand. If you’re fortunate enough to truly find a niche not already infiltrated by Amazon and others, understand that if you’re successful, it won’t be long until competitors spring up. Consider vente privee, subscription boxes, dollar razors, yoga wear, moustache wax…
Invest heavily in your brand, and never rest on your lead. Customer loyalty is hard to come by, especially in the online age. Always be acquiring new customers — this may include “joining” competitors like Amazon marketplace at the point your offering is no longer niche. It may be diversifying and expanding your product offering ahead of the competition.
It may be exploring new business models like subscription boxes. Don’t take for granted that anything successful inevitably will be copied.
Read More at >> https://selfstartr.com/ecommerce-business-ideas/
The American Dream: How To Start Your Own eCommerce Business
By: Chris Von Wilpert
Lindsay McCormick is the hardest working eCommerce business woman I’ve ever met.
She’s working a full-time 9am-6pm job as a TV Producer for HGTV while starting her own eCommerce business from 7pm-3am called Bite Toothpaste Bits.
Usually, I never write about eCommerce businesses just starting out, because they rarely ever make it. But Lindsay has hustled so hard to make her first $1,000 that I had to share her story and the lessons I learned from talking with her so you can see what it really takes to build your own eCommerce business from scratch.
Here are the seven lessons I learned from Lindsay “Toothpaste Bits” McCormick that every eCommerce entrepreneur who wants to start their own physical product eCommerce business can follow:
1
Lesson 1: Scratch Your Own Itch
2
Lesson 2: Research Your Product Idea
3
Lesson 3: Make Your Product
4
Lesson 4: Promote Your Product
5
Lesson 5: Ship Your Product
6
Lesson 6: Grow Your Product
7
Lesson 7: Have A Purpose
1. SCRATCH YOUR OWN ITCH
Start by identifying problems you encounter in your day-to-day life that frustrate you. Lindsay was traveling all the time as a TV Producer for HGTV and found that she was going through travel toothpaste tubes at an alarming rate. These were little plastic bottles that Lindsay realized must take up a ton of landfill and can’t easily be recycled.
Lindsay looked for alternate solutions. She tried toothpaste powder and toothpaste tablets (from commercial brands and homemade products she found on Etsy), but both were still packaged in plastic that harms the environment. She also wanted to make it her mission to stop putting the tons of crap found in toothpaste into our bodies every day.
If you look at the back of a toothpaste tube, stuff like propylene glycol, sodium lauryl sulfate, and diethanolamine are all controversial ingredients that lots of people avoid. There is a ton of research and reasons why these chemicals shouldn’t be in our bodies. For example, Hydrated Silica is a commonly found chemical in toothpaste that even dentists agree is not always effective.[*]
Lindsay found that big toothpaste companies are getting away with using the cheapest and easiest (questionably) effective ingredients, even though there are safer and just as effective ingredients available. The thing is, those ingredients cost a little more, and you have to be okay with asking people to try something new (as in using either a powder or a tablet instead of a paste or gel.)
Lindsay says “commercial toothpaste is like fast food.” Fast food is cheap, chock full of weird preservatives and ingredients that may or may not be good for you but, yeah - it’s food. It will fill you up, and the FDA deems it safe, but just because it’s “safe” doesn’t mean you should eat it every single day.
Commercial toothpaste is the same. It has a bunch of questionable ingredients, it’s not sustainably made in any way, and sure, it cleans your teeth, but it’s not actually good for you. When Lindsay had all these realizations, she started researching her own organic non-paste toothpaste product which wouldn’t explode in her travel luggage like this:
Read Moer at >> https://sumo.com/stories/how-to-start-an-ecommerce-business
Lindsay McCormick is the hardest working eCommerce business woman I’ve ever met.
She’s working a full-time 9am-6pm job as a TV Producer for HGTV while starting her own eCommerce business from 7pm-3am called Bite Toothpaste Bits.
Usually, I never write about eCommerce businesses just starting out, because they rarely ever make it. But Lindsay has hustled so hard to make her first $1,000 that I had to share her story and the lessons I learned from talking with her so you can see what it really takes to build your own eCommerce business from scratch.
Here are the seven lessons I learned from Lindsay “Toothpaste Bits” McCormick that every eCommerce entrepreneur who wants to start their own physical product eCommerce business can follow:
1
Lesson 1: Scratch Your Own Itch
2
Lesson 2: Research Your Product Idea
3
Lesson 3: Make Your Product
4
Lesson 4: Promote Your Product
5
Lesson 5: Ship Your Product
6
Lesson 6: Grow Your Product
7
Lesson 7: Have A Purpose
1. SCRATCH YOUR OWN ITCH
Start by identifying problems you encounter in your day-to-day life that frustrate you. Lindsay was traveling all the time as a TV Producer for HGTV and found that she was going through travel toothpaste tubes at an alarming rate. These were little plastic bottles that Lindsay realized must take up a ton of landfill and can’t easily be recycled.
Lindsay looked for alternate solutions. She tried toothpaste powder and toothpaste tablets (from commercial brands and homemade products she found on Etsy), but both were still packaged in plastic that harms the environment. She also wanted to make it her mission to stop putting the tons of crap found in toothpaste into our bodies every day.
If you look at the back of a toothpaste tube, stuff like propylene glycol, sodium lauryl sulfate, and diethanolamine are all controversial ingredients that lots of people avoid. There is a ton of research and reasons why these chemicals shouldn’t be in our bodies. For example, Hydrated Silica is a commonly found chemical in toothpaste that even dentists agree is not always effective.[*]
Lindsay found that big toothpaste companies are getting away with using the cheapest and easiest (questionably) effective ingredients, even though there are safer and just as effective ingredients available. The thing is, those ingredients cost a little more, and you have to be okay with asking people to try something new (as in using either a powder or a tablet instead of a paste or gel.)
Lindsay says “commercial toothpaste is like fast food.” Fast food is cheap, chock full of weird preservatives and ingredients that may or may not be good for you but, yeah - it’s food. It will fill you up, and the FDA deems it safe, but just because it’s “safe” doesn’t mean you should eat it every single day.
Commercial toothpaste is the same. It has a bunch of questionable ingredients, it’s not sustainably made in any way, and sure, it cleans your teeth, but it’s not actually good for you. When Lindsay had all these realizations, she started researching her own organic non-paste toothpaste product which wouldn’t explode in her travel luggage like this:
Read Moer at >> https://sumo.com/stories/how-to-start-an-ecommerce-business
Shopify vs WooCommerce – Which is the Better Platform? (Comparison)
By: Editorial Staff
Are you thinking of starting an online store? Not sure whether you should use Shopify or WooCommerce? These are the two most popular eCommerce platforms in the market with their own advantages and disadvantages. In this article, we will compare Shopify vs WooCommerce to help you decide the best option for you.
Since this is a detailed comparison of Shopify vs WooCommerce, here’s a quick table of content:
1. Overview: WooCommerce vs Shopify
2. What to look for in your eCommerce platform?
3. Cost Comparison
4. Ease of Use Comparison
5. Payment Methods
6. Add-Ons Comparison
7. Scalability Comparison
8. Conclusion: WooCommerce vs Shopify – Which is Better?
Overview: Shopify vs WooCommerce
What is Shopify?
Shopify is an all-in-one eCommerce platform that makes it easy for you to create an online store, accept payments, and manage your inventory all from a single platform without ever worrying about the technical aspects of managing a website such as web hosting, security, caching, etc.
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is an open-source eCommerce plugin built for WordPress. It allows you to leverage the most powerful content management system (CMS) and use it to run an online store. Because of the open-source nature, you can customize every aspect of your store and easily build custom extensions.
The decision to choose between the two platforms depend entirely on your needs and skill level
What to Look for in Your eCommerce Platform?
There are few things that you absolutely need to keep in mind when starting an online store. These key factors will help you decide which platform is better suited for your needs.
1. Budget – The initial cost of starting a fully functional ecommerce store.
2. Ease of use – It should be easy to use even for absolute beginners.
3. Payment Methods – It should have support for multiple payment methods (e.g. PayPal, Stripe, other merchant processors).
4. Integrations – Number of services and third party tools you can integrate to grow your business.
5. Scalability – The platform should be able to scale as your business grows.
These are the very basic requirements that all online store owners must consider. However depending on your need, you may also want to look at other options like shipping, inventory management, invoicing, taxes, etc.
Our goal with this article is to take an in-depth look at how Shopify and WooCommerce stand on these basic requirements, and which one of them is best suited for your needs.
Read more at >> http://www.wpbeginner.com/opinion/shopify-vs-woocommerce-which-is-the-better-platform-comparison/
Are you thinking of starting an online store? Not sure whether you should use Shopify or WooCommerce? These are the two most popular eCommerce platforms in the market with their own advantages and disadvantages. In this article, we will compare Shopify vs WooCommerce to help you decide the best option for you.
Since this is a detailed comparison of Shopify vs WooCommerce, here’s a quick table of content:
1. Overview: WooCommerce vs Shopify
2. What to look for in your eCommerce platform?
3. Cost Comparison
4. Ease of Use Comparison
5. Payment Methods
6. Add-Ons Comparison
7. Scalability Comparison
8. Conclusion: WooCommerce vs Shopify – Which is Better?
Overview: Shopify vs WooCommerce
What is Shopify?
Shopify is an all-in-one eCommerce platform that makes it easy for you to create an online store, accept payments, and manage your inventory all from a single platform without ever worrying about the technical aspects of managing a website such as web hosting, security, caching, etc.
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is an open-source eCommerce plugin built for WordPress. It allows you to leverage the most powerful content management system (CMS) and use it to run an online store. Because of the open-source nature, you can customize every aspect of your store and easily build custom extensions.
The decision to choose between the two platforms depend entirely on your needs and skill level
What to Look for in Your eCommerce Platform?
There are few things that you absolutely need to keep in mind when starting an online store. These key factors will help you decide which platform is better suited for your needs.
1. Budget – The initial cost of starting a fully functional ecommerce store.
2. Ease of use – It should be easy to use even for absolute beginners.
3. Payment Methods – It should have support for multiple payment methods (e.g. PayPal, Stripe, other merchant processors).
4. Integrations – Number of services and third party tools you can integrate to grow your business.
5. Scalability – The platform should be able to scale as your business grows.
These are the very basic requirements that all online store owners must consider. However depending on your need, you may also want to look at other options like shipping, inventory management, invoicing, taxes, etc.
Our goal with this article is to take an in-depth look at how Shopify and WooCommerce stand on these basic requirements, and which one of them is best suited for your needs.
Read more at >> http://www.wpbeginner.com/opinion/shopify-vs-woocommerce-which-is-the-better-platform-comparison/
Tuesday, January 16, 2018
Shopify Vs. Shopify Plus: 3 Major Differences And What They Mean For Your Business
By: Pixafy Team
The Shopify commerce platform offers a shopping ecosystem designed to create a better experience for consumers and retailers alike. The underlying technology is flexible and easy to use, freeing merchants to create beautiful, customer-friendly sites that are easy to manage and maintain. For consumers, the core interfaces in the platform allow for logical navigation, clean visual design and tools that simplify checkout – something both retailers and customers enjoy.
These core attributes are shared across both Shopify and Shopify Plus, but the two variations of the platform offer a few key distinctions that cater to different types of organizations. Let’s explore not only what is different between the two platforms, but what those variations actually mean for merchants.
BASIC DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN SHOPIFY AND SHOPIFY PLUS
There are many points of differentiation between Shopify and Shopify Plus. To begin, here are a few of the basic attributes of the platform:
1. Price: Basic Shopify begins at $29 per month and is designed for organizations just getting started. The core Shopify platform starts at $79 per month, and Shopify with advanced features is $299 per month. Shopify Plus pricing is much more variable as the service offered is so heavily varied based on customer demands.
2. User base: Approximately 500,000 merchants use Shopify. For Shopify Plus, the user base is 2,500 merchants.
3. Uptime: Shopify has historically been able to achieve uptime rates of 99.99 percent. That amounts to less than an hour of downtime per year.
4. Shopify is built for businesses getting started with commerce and looking for a simplified, streamlined experience. Shopify Plus offers these same core attributes, but provides more opportunities for customization, scalability and higher order volumes.
Core attributes of Shopify
The Shopify platform offers templates and themes so that companies can quickly roll out an attractive, streamlined online store. The system can be customized, built out for new channels extremely quickly and handle an unlimited number of products and inventory items. Furthermore, Shopify provides single-step order fulfillment and basic analytics tools to track sales and company growth.
“SHOPIFY OFFERS EVERYTHING A BUSINESS NEEDS TO ESTABLISH AND SUSTAIN AN ECOMMERCE PRESENCE.”
In essence, Shopify offers everything a business needs to establish and sustain an ecommerce presence with minimal technical overhead, but without compromising site quality. There’s a good reason more than 500,000 merchants are using the system. Where the basic version of the platform begins to hit limitations is at the higher volumes and more stringent demands of growing brands. This is where Shopify Plus comes into play.
There are plenty of detailed features available in Shopify Plus that stand out from base Shopify. Let’s explore the primary attributes of Shopify Plus and the major points of distinction when it comes to your actual operations.
Major attributes of Shopify Plus
Shopify Plus offers all of the capabilities of Shopify, but backed by the kind of infrastructure that can lead to better sales and marketing experiences. As such, some of these features are available with base Shopify, but they are particularly noteworthy when considered alongside Shopify Plus capabilities as well, particularly as they pay dividends for enterprise-class users.
Read More >> https://www.pixafy.com/blog/2018/01/shopify-vs-shopify-plus-3-major-differences-mean-business/
The Shopify commerce platform offers a shopping ecosystem designed to create a better experience for consumers and retailers alike. The underlying technology is flexible and easy to use, freeing merchants to create beautiful, customer-friendly sites that are easy to manage and maintain. For consumers, the core interfaces in the platform allow for logical navigation, clean visual design and tools that simplify checkout – something both retailers and customers enjoy.
These core attributes are shared across both Shopify and Shopify Plus, but the two variations of the platform offer a few key distinctions that cater to different types of organizations. Let’s explore not only what is different between the two platforms, but what those variations actually mean for merchants.
BASIC DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN SHOPIFY AND SHOPIFY PLUS
There are many points of differentiation between Shopify and Shopify Plus. To begin, here are a few of the basic attributes of the platform:
1. Price: Basic Shopify begins at $29 per month and is designed for organizations just getting started. The core Shopify platform starts at $79 per month, and Shopify with advanced features is $299 per month. Shopify Plus pricing is much more variable as the service offered is so heavily varied based on customer demands.
2. User base: Approximately 500,000 merchants use Shopify. For Shopify Plus, the user base is 2,500 merchants.
3. Uptime: Shopify has historically been able to achieve uptime rates of 99.99 percent. That amounts to less than an hour of downtime per year.
4. Shopify is built for businesses getting started with commerce and looking for a simplified, streamlined experience. Shopify Plus offers these same core attributes, but provides more opportunities for customization, scalability and higher order volumes.
Core attributes of Shopify
The Shopify platform offers templates and themes so that companies can quickly roll out an attractive, streamlined online store. The system can be customized, built out for new channels extremely quickly and handle an unlimited number of products and inventory items. Furthermore, Shopify provides single-step order fulfillment and basic analytics tools to track sales and company growth.
“SHOPIFY OFFERS EVERYTHING A BUSINESS NEEDS TO ESTABLISH AND SUSTAIN AN ECOMMERCE PRESENCE.”
In essence, Shopify offers everything a business needs to establish and sustain an ecommerce presence with minimal technical overhead, but without compromising site quality. There’s a good reason more than 500,000 merchants are using the system. Where the basic version of the platform begins to hit limitations is at the higher volumes and more stringent demands of growing brands. This is where Shopify Plus comes into play.
There are plenty of detailed features available in Shopify Plus that stand out from base Shopify. Let’s explore the primary attributes of Shopify Plus and the major points of distinction when it comes to your actual operations.
Major attributes of Shopify Plus
Shopify Plus offers all of the capabilities of Shopify, but backed by the kind of infrastructure that can lead to better sales and marketing experiences. As such, some of these features are available with base Shopify, but they are particularly noteworthy when considered alongside Shopify Plus capabilities as well, particularly as they pay dividends for enterprise-class users.
Read More >> https://www.pixafy.com/blog/2018/01/shopify-vs-shopify-plus-3-major-differences-mean-business/
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