Holiday Shipping: Time and Money Savers

With the holiday shopping rush, it’s important to ship as cheaply and efficiently as possible to please your customers and increase your bottom line. Here are a few seasonal tips:

Stock up on Supplies
Make sure you have everything you need – boxes, mailers, tape, bubble wrap, postage. If you run out, you could waste a lot of time and money trying to locate more.

Save Time and Money: Ship Online
Save up to 15 percent on postage when you use the U.S. Postal Service’s online services. Not only do you save money, but you also save time. Just order free Priority Mail and Express Mail supplies from USPS.com, and they’ll be delivered right to your door. (USPS suggests you order them by December 5 so that they’ll arrive in time for the holidays.) You can create labels, pay postage by credit card, and even purchase insurance online. Then let the USPS know your packages are ready, and your mail carrier will pick them up for free. Afterwards you can easily view your shipment status.

Be Smart about Packaging
To save money on shipments, use the smallest box you can, without damaging the products. Remember that USPS Priority Mail ships at a flat rate, so no matter how heavy your items, you can ship whatever can fit in one box for one price.

Print Once with PayPal Multiorder Shipping
Print up to 50 domestic USPS shipping labels at one time, complete with postage, right from your PayPal account. You pay postage costs, but the service is free. If you also use the USPS SCAN form, postal employees can scan the bar codes for every package in your shipment at once. You and your customers are then able to use USPS' Track & Confirm tool to verify that a package was actually sent.

Reassess Your Shipping Providers
If you offer multiple shipping providers, determine which ones your customers are using the most. If few shoppers are using a certain service, removing it might save you some money.

Attract Shoppers with Good Holiday Shipping Practices

Make more sales this holiday season with shipping discounts and promotions.  And don't forget those important holiday deadlines. 

Offer Free Shipping, Both Ways
Many shoppers do their research online but buy at their local brick & mortar because they don’t want to pay for shipping.  Free shipping is a big draw, especially during the winter shopping season.  On the same token, shoppers hate paying for returns and often fear buying gifts online in case the recipient has trouble taking it back.  Free returns also instill consumer confidence, even though most customers don’t end up using them.

Join in National Free Shipping Day
Free Shipping Day this year is December 16, when more than 2,000 merchants offer free shipping with delivery by Christmas Eve.  Join them to stay competitive.

Post and Know Your Holiday Deadlines
Make sure your customers know the latest they can order to ensure that their holiday packages arrive on time, including international shoppers if you ship abroad.  Do your research so that you know the holiday shipping deadlines for all your shipping providers.  They’re not always the same.       

Subscribe to Delay Alerts
Some shipping providers email notifications of any weather delays that affect your delivery dates.  If you get the information early, you can adjust your schedule before one of your shoppers has a gift-giving fiasco.

Attract the Last-Minute Shopper
Offer expedited shipping option during the two weeks before Christmas (when traditional retail stores do the most business), so buyers feel comfortable doing their last-minute shopping with you.  

Tune into our next blog post when we'll show you how to save time and money on your holiday shipping.

5 Ways to Build Your eCommerce Business on Facebook

In our last post, we talked about the increase in online shopping on social media sites and how more and more merchants are setting up Facebook stores.  

"According to Forrester Research and Shop.org, implementation of social shopping sites for retailers will grow from 15 percent in 2010 to 47 percent in 2011," says Kevin Gralen, founder and CEO of ShopTab, a product that helps merchants create shops on their Facebook pages.

To bring more people to your Facebook store and page, you can implement some effective social networking strategies. Practical eCommerce presented some good tips in a recent blog entry.  We've covered most of them in various posts, but it's always good to get a reminder.

Check out Practical eCommerce's 5 Pointers for Using Facebook for Your eCommerce Business. 

Grow Your Facebook Sales with ShopTab

With the ubiquity of Facebook, it’s inevitable that online shoppers are sharing their favorite products with friends and subsequently purchasing more through social media sites.

According to a recent analysis by Booz and Company, sales of physical goods through online social networks will grow by 93 percent per year in the U.S., reaching $14 billion by 2015.

“Everybody has a Facebook account these days, and more and more people will go there to shop,” says Garry Kline, owner of web storefront Kline Tours.  “It makes sense to have your web store in another place that’s easily accessible.” 

To create his Facebook store, Garry turned to ShopTab.  The eCommerce tool creates a shop right on your Facebook page where you can showcase your products.  Shoppers can also search by keyword or category.  

“Now customers can make purchases directly from there,” says Garry.  “They click on whatever they want, and it leads them to our actual store.”  They can also share products with their friends.  And it all takes less than 15 minutes to install. 

The best thing about ShopTab is that it’s super easy to set up.  “"I had it up and running in five minutes.  I’m not kidding,” says Todd Walbridge of Tuxedo T-shirts Online.

ShopTab supports foreign languages and more than 35 currencies.  Merchants can easily add and edit products via CSV or XML data feeds.

“The cost, $10 a month, is a no-brainer,” says Steve K. of web storefront Stepani Style.  “Even if I get just one or two additional sales a year, it’s well worth the money.”

Todd has definitely noticed more traffic coming to his store from ShopTab but “it’s also about appearances.  When customers come to Facebook or your web store, you want it to look professional,” he adds.  “With ShopTab, you look more cutting-edge, and your consumer confidence level goes up.”

ProStores merchants get a chance to try ShopTab for 30 days - FREE!  For details, visit ProStores Merchant Offers page.

Mobilize Your Web Store and Drive More Sales

Todd Walbridge had a mobile site for his web store Tuxedo T-Shirts Online, but it was mostly informational—customers couldn’t actually check out on their phones.  Garry Kline of Kline Tours didn’t even have a mobile site, so his web store was hard to view on a smartphone.

With the world becoming increasingly mobile, both merchants realized that they had to get a fully functional site up and running.  “Mobile online shopping used to hover around two to five percent of total traffic, but now it’s up to 15 percent,” explains Todd. 

That's when both store owners discovered DudaMobile, the platform that creates mobile-friendly storefronts optimized for the smartphone.  DudaMobile can customize your site and then get it up in one business day.  The mobile version automatically syncs with your regular web store.  When shoppers type in your URL on their smartphone, they’re immediately directed to your mobile store.  DudaMobile then tracks that traffic.

 

Todd also added a click-to-call button so his customers could easily contact him.  “That DudaMobile feature is huge.  We have a great conversion rate – 60 to 70 percent -- with people calling in.”

Thanks to DudaMobile mobile customers can now shop at Garry’s store.  “Our mobile store is much easier to use.  It looks a lot better, and it’s very user friendly.”  “You want your phone web store to be one column,” adds Todd, “so customers need only scroll up and down and not left to right.  DudaMobile takes care of that.” 

Since his mobile store went online, Todd says maintaining it has been a cinch.  “As soon as I make a change in my main store, it automatically shows up on my mobile site, so I don’t have to create two feeds to keep them both going.”

The improved user experience has manifested into concrete numbers.  “Thanks to DudaMobile, we’ve seen a 50 percent increase in mobile conversions in the last three months,” says Todd, “and our informal polling of customers shows a larger percentage of them calling in.” 

DudaMobile has an exclusive offer just for ProStores merchants:

- $99 setup fee waived
- Pay just $9.95/month (normally $19.95/month) for the first three months.
- Get 30 day money back guarantee.   

Offer available through Dec. 31st, 2011. Go mobilize your store!

Redesign for Even More Success

David and Irina Hinderliter had a successful ProStores web store when they decided that it was time for a revamp.  They hired a certified designer they had worked with before—Neoverve--to do the redesign of GreatRussianGifts.com.

"It had been four years since we worked with Neoverve, and the store looked a little boring,” says Irina.  “Technology has come a long way.  We wanted to keep our customers and ourselves up to date.  We shopped around and thought Neoverve was the most professional designer.  You might find someone cheaper but you won’t find anyone better."

Neoverve gave GreatRussianGifts.com a more contemporary look with a few key improvements: 

• A slideshow of promotions.  “It was so difficult to see the promotions on our homepage that a lot of customers would email us and ask about them,” Irina explains.  “We wanted our customers to have an understanding of what we sold.”

• More featured products.  The Great Russian Gifts homepage now features 20 products compared to the three that were there previously.  “We wanted to give some variety so customers could see what they wanted right away.”

• Smooth category navigation. Categories are easy to spot in a prominent navigation bar.  Shoppers can then use a user-friendly pull-down menu to find sub-categories.

• Full-screen window.  “Our site used to be a lot more narrow because people had smaller monitors.  Now, everyone is trending to bigger monitors, so you’ll notice that most up-to-date stores open to a wider screen.”

• Streamlined shopping cart.  Now that GreatRussianGift.com’s shopping cart is three steps versus five, it’s much clearer and easier to use, saving customers a lot of time and frustration.

• User-friendly wish lists and gift cards.  Irina and David asked neoverve to design a new template for checkout that would better incorporate wish lists and gift cards.  Now that the checkout is more streamlined, customers can more easily purchase and use gift cards and create wish lists.

Even though the old design was serving GreatRussianGifts.com just fine, Irina and David understood that even the most successful merchants could continually improve their user experience and sales conversion to enjoy even more success.   

“Without a brick and mortar, customers don’t see your face," musus Irina.  "The only way to build trust is through the presence of your website.  We started looking at the web stores of the biggest companies because they all try to stay current.  They have all these features available, and we wanted to be, if not as good, very close to them.      

ProStores Designers Help Merchants Create Their Own Look

Joy Horstmann recently started her online store Fancyfirepit.com.  Just as its name implies, the web storefront sells handmade high-end fire pits, made from recycled steel.  Early on, she realized that the look of her store needed to match the quality of her product. 

“I’m selling something that’s high-end, so I wanted to make sure my website looked high-end,” explains Joy.  “There are a lot of web stores out there.  When I’m shopping online, I’m drawn to the ones that are clean, simple, and more elegant.  You look at some web stores, and you can tell that the owners built it themselves.  If you’re selling a $3 product, most shoppers don’t care.  But if someone is looking at a web store with upscale products and it looks terrible, they won't continue shopping.”

That’s why Joy chose PShelper.com to design her store.  The certified provider was able to set up a professional-looking site efficiently so that Joy could launch quickly.  "They did a great job; the whole process was fast; and they were easy to work with," says Joy.  "The web store looks exactly the way I want it to look.  It's user-friendly, and it has the capability to grow."  To top it off, they did it all at a price Joy thought was more than fair.

 

Keywords: What a Difference One Letter Makes

It’s amazing what a difference one letter makes. Albert Farajian runs a web storefront called Dealzer that sells hydroponic gardening systems.  He uses search engine optimization and Google AdWords to drive much of his traffic. 

Albert understands, of course, how important it is to target his keywords.  For instance, he uses the more specific keyword “hydroponic” instead of “gardening.”  “There are a lot of people searching for ‘gardening’,” says Albert, “but it doesn’t mean they’re searching for hydroponics.  As long as we use targeted keywords, we increase the chance that whoever clicks on an ad will end up buying.” 

“Hydroponic” is one of his two primary keywords (the other being “growbox”).  His choice to use the adjective as opposed to the noun (with the added “s”) is not an accident.  While doing research when he first opened his store, he noticed that “‘hydroponic’ was a lot easier to rank on.  We started with ‘hydroponic’ and when the web store got more popular, then added ‘hydroponics’.”  Now Dealzer ranks high in both, but it’s still the adjective that pushes him to the first page of search results. 

In terms of your own search marketing, be sure to consider common misspellings or other forms of a certain word.  It meant the difference between popularity and obscurity for Dealzer.  There are a lot of keyword typo generators online which can help you find common misspellings.  You can also check Google’s Keyword Tool for alternate word forms.

Know Your Competition

Do you ever wonder how your competition is doing, or how your business compares with others in your industry?

Featured merchant David Murad of PriceRock.com regularly monitors other online jewelry stores, and he does it through compete.com.  “It gives me a general idea how much traffic my site is getting compared to others," he says. 

Compete.com analyzes web traffic and publishes the number of visitors to the top million websites in the world.  It also provides up to two years of data on page views, compete rank, pages per visit, visits per person, average stay, age, income and gender.  

To help you with search engine marketing, compete.com shows you what keywords are sending traffic to your web store and your competitors, as well as what websites receive the most traffic from a particular keyword or phrase.  The data is even delineated between paid search and natural search, so that you can finetune keywords for different purposes.

Finally, compete.com can show you how traffic is arriving at your web store.  Find out what portals, shopping sites and social networking sites drive traffic to your web store and your competitors.  You can also see the downstream traffic from a domain so that you can learn where people go when they leave.

Initial information is free.  Plans then start at $199 per month. 

eCommerce Marketing: How to Maximize Google AdWords

eCommerce storefront TDot Performance sells aftermarket car parts, which means owners Mubin Vaid and Charith Perera have to be strategic about attracting customers in a large automotive market.  To drive traffic, they use Google AdWords, in addition to search engine optimization.  Their paid search technique is to walk the line between broad and specific keywords, since the former attract customers early in their purchasing decision, while the latter bring in customers who know exactly what they want to buy.

“If someone searches for 17-inch rims they’re looking for that general size for that vehicle,” Charith explains.  “But if they’re looking for a 17-inch rim with a particular bolt pattern, they’re further along in their buying decision. People clicking on those keywords are more likely to purchase.”

More specific keywords are less expensive, so Mubin and Charith purchase them first to maximize their daily budget.  “As we see more traffic, we broaden our keywords so people who are early in the purchase cycle will also find us.”

*****

Mubin and Charith have used a few eCommerce resources to keep up on the latest paid search techniques.  Here's what they recommend:

• Watch Google’s AdWords video tutorials. 
• Read “Entrepreneur Magazine’s Ultimate Guide to AdWords” or “The Definitive Guide to Google AdWords,” both by Perry Marshall and Bryan Todd
• Join eCommerce forums
• Take SEO classes.