Shopster's Dropshippers, eCommerce, and Selling Online Blog

Videos: The Next Best Thing to Product Descriptions

Looking for an alternative to creating product descriptions and adding images to your online store? Why not try creating product videos instead? People who choose to shop in a local or a brick-and-mortar store do so for good reason. Sometimes, seeing and having a feel of the product for yourself is irreplaceable.

However, these days, convenience and cost savings far outweigh the need for a hands-on product experience. Creating video descriptions of your products can give your potential buyers the next best thing to handling it themselves.

First off, it can give your potential buyers a better view of the product. Pictures are one-dimensional but videos can give them the 360-degree look of the item. Furthermore, hearing the description from a person gives it more warmth than reading about product specs on size, shape and texture.

Second, creating product videos also give you the advantage of being able to explain the practical use of a product. For instance, for people buying exercise equipment online, they would have a better understanding of how to use the product and may be more driven to buy it. Same goes for cookware, electronics or just about anything under the sun. Ask yourself why infomercials are so successful, and you know why this is important.

The downside between having a video description on your site and having text product descriptions is that your text will still do better at ranking for specific search keywords. Do make sure that for video content, you tag it as crawlable (check your robots.txt file)

Though the video description’s impact on attracting visitors may be low, it can help significantly increase conversions by pushing certain types of buyers down that conversion funnel.

Happy selling!

The Value of Trust

In the world of online sales, credibility holds a high value. In fact, it could mean the difference between closing a sale and having an abandoned cart. Unlike its brick-and-mortar counterpart, online merchants can’t easily win over a client with their mere presence. If a customer is unhappy about a purchase, they won’t be able to just walking in and make a complaint. Then, there’s the constant fear of identity theft.

More than 63% of shoppers do not complete an online purchase because of security and trust concerns. That amounts to a total loss of about $21 billion with the average cost of abandoned goods in US shopping carts pegged at $109.   

Earning a customer’s trust then becomes one of the most important things an online merchant has to deal with. Getting to that point is not easy. Some quick ways to do it would be to have clear, honest product descriptions, to be transparent about your policies and to have warranties for your products.

But it shouldn’t stop there. Any other merchant can provide the same things. Differentiate yourself by displaying a trust seal in your site. It can give your potential buyers the confidence to make an online purchase. According to VeriSign’s Internet Security Report, 86% of online shoppers feel more confident about making a purchase on websites using security indicators such as trust marks.

Shopster now offers online merchants the advantage of having verifiable trust score and a confidence badge to display on their stores. The company has partnered with KikScore to provide a unique trust and reliability scoring system that weighs multiple trust factors such as website security, site traffic, public records and customer feedback. It also leverages on your previous track record as a Shopster merchant. This results in a dynamic score to display in your store for the short-term goal of driving more sales.

For the long-term goal, you can use the data provided to you to foster a better relationship with your target market. It gives you a venue to collect and respond to customer feedback. Plus, you have the ability to continuously improve your product offerings.

Do remember that a trust seal can only go so far in doing its job of instilling that confidence in your buyers. The true measure of credibility and trustworthiness as a merchant will still heavily rely on your ability to service customer concerns.  The better you are at delivering a consistent level of service at all customer touchpoints, the easier it becomes to gain their trust.

eBay Selling Tips: Using RSS Feeds to Increase Sales

The RSS technology has been around for a while but is steadily gaining popularity as an online marketing tool. Made popular by the blogging community, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. This programming format (usually and xml file) is used for transmitting and distributing headlines to a wider audience via a feed.

eBay sellers can now get their listings from eBay in RSS format. On the bottom of the user’s Store Home Page or from the Selling Manager dashboard, click on the Manage My Store link. Look for the Store Marketing link in the left navigation menu and click on Listing Feeds.

Click on the radio button for Distribute your listing via RSS or you can enable the button for Make a file of your Store inventory listings available. It may take a couple of hours for this to take effect, but you should see an orange RSS icon on the bottom of your store’s index page.

Listing in RSS format can help increase sales for your eBay store. Encourage buyers to subscribe to your feeds to allow them to monitor changes that you make to your store, specifically for any new or updated inventory, auction or listings under Buy It Now.You can also automatically feed your selection to any other online media you are connected to, be it your blog or a social networking site like Twitter.

Another advantage of using eBay RSS Listing Feeds as a seller is that you get notification for items under “Good til Cancelled” that are automatically relisted. To be able to view this feed, you will need an RSS aggregator. There are several free readers online, the most popular of which are AmphetaDes, NewzCrawler and Radio UserLand.

On another note, eBay has been expanding the use of it feeds to cater to its vibrant community. Aside from allowing RSS for eBay stores, feeds are also available for discussion boards, search results pages and announcement boards.

Happy eBay selling!

Spying on Your Competition

In retail, there are the huge 800-pound gorillas that you don’t compete with – Walmart, Target, Macy’s and more. Then, there are the smaller guys that have built their presence on the internet for the same niche as yours. These are your competitors.

If you type in a keyword related to what you’re selling, more often than not, they show up in the same results pages as you do. Sometimes their entries even rank higher than yours. I’m sure as an online merchant you’ve found this annoying.

If you really want to be a bigger player in your niche, you need to start outperforming your competition. Aside from trying to rank your website for targeted keywords via SEO and paid search campaigns, it’s time to do some spying.

Here are some tips and tricks on how to find out what your competitors are targeting and why they’re ranking better than you:

• Ctrl+U – This command brings out any website’s source code. You can get the same results by clicking View in your browser menu and selecting Page Source . What good does this do? It gives you access to their meta tags, namely the meta descriptions and the keywords they are targeting for the page.
• Set Alerts – Both Yahoo and Google have them. Aside from setting alerts for your own brand name, set exact matches for your top competitors as well so you always know what your potential customers are saying about them.
• Use backlink checkers like Yahoo! Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/). This gives you a sneakpeak with regards to the number of pages they have in their site, their internal link structure, but most importantly, which sites are linking to them. You can actual target the same set of sites for your link building efforts.
• Join their mailing list – most websites get in contact with their customers via a mailing list. This gives them the venue to discuss the latest and greatest on their brand. Be on those lists and you won’t need to do much legwork to find out what your competitors are up to.
• SpyFu – This neat little tool gives you an insight on the paid campaigns they’re after. You could find out how much they are bidding on particular keywords. It may not be 100% accurate but it’s the closest thing you have to see their paid campaign strategy.

Luckily, spying on your online competitors does not require much cloak and dagger work. Information is easily accessible and the data you harvest is easy to act upon.

Happy snooping!

Optimizing Your Site to Load Faster

Today, speed counts and every second you lose may mean lost dollars. One of the most important things to consider when designing a retail website is its performance in terms of speed. A research from Forrester showed that 40% of customers would leave a site that would take more than 3 seconds to load. The accepted performance level is now at 2 seconds.

Given that, it is important that any online store owner find new ways to get their sites to load faster. We’re offering the following tips to help solve a slow-loading problem:

• Use a Content Distribution Network – Your site will load in X location depending on the location of your servers. A content distribution network or a CDN sends your webfiles across different servers around the world, so anywhere your visitor comes from, they’ll have the same fast loading experience.
• Optimize images for the web. Set a target size for your web pages and determine what percent of that is your images. Then, decide on the maximum file size you’ll have for each image so you can control it better.
• Slice images rather than having a whole one load at once. It doesn’t reduce the file size but it reduces the loading time by having the sliced elements appear one a t a tie.
• Use CSS. This tableless design called cascading style sheets can do a lot to make your website more efficient. Aside from skinning your site with the look and feel you want, it could also optimize your website for speed.

Our last tip on optimizing your online store for speed is to continuously check on performance. With every little change you make on your site, find out how it will affect the loading time. In the web, just like in real life, you need to simplify things and keep it short and simple to get the best sales out of your store.

Happy selling!

 

Understanding Friction in Web Design

One of the first few groups to mention the physics term “friction” in web design is Marketing Experiments. This is basically the psychological resistance of the user to complete the sales process. It may cause aggravation or confusion.

There are several elements of friction in web design and performance that stop the user from completing the intended action. One of the easiest friction elements to identify is page load. According to Forrester Research, 2 seconds is now the acceptable threshold for speed. The longer it takes for a site to load the more friction is experienced by the customer, the higher the possibility to leave the site. In this day and age of super speed, every second counts.

Another cause of friction is not having a clear call to action on your website. The call to action guides your user to the next step in the conversion funnel. Without this, they wouldn’t know what to do next aside from navigating your site via the nav panel or with the tabs.

Similarly, having too many things to choose from is also a cause for friction. If you will be displaying items for your customer to select, keep it to 5 or a maximum 10 items. Choice is good, but too much of it becomes confusing.

In relation to choice and the call to action, never place anything next to your main call to action that draws their attention away from it. For instance, if you have a “Buy Now” button, do not put a widget beside it that generates the weather or directs them to a review site.  

Unreadable text is yet another cause of friction. The nice fancy fonts may seem artistic, but if it derails your users from the real purpose (which is to understand what they need to do), then stick with the less artsy option.

In retail, try to avoid asking for too much questions. Sites that require log-ins often have a high exit rate. If there’s no need for you to capture the customer information at the sales stage, then you shouldn’t ask for it. If you must, make it at least an optional part to complete the sale.

Always consider things from the buyer’s perspective when designing a site for sales. What annoys you as a buyer will probably annoy others as well.

Happy selling!

Creating Christmas Campaigns

Focusing your marketing efforts during the December holiday season may just be one of the smartest moves you make as an online retailer. Last year,  the value of average order placed online during the Christmas season grew 94% year on year, such rosy forecasts are expected for the 2008 holiday sales.

For paid campaigns, be conscious about your Cost per Click (CPC). The competition during this season will be at an all time high, so consider driving your CPCs up starting early December until the days leading to the 25^th. It is also wise to consider some budget reallocation at this point to cover for any adjustments to your paid marketing efforts.

Be sure to align your ad copies (or other creative if you’re doing graphic ads) to what sells. Start bidding for holiday keywords such as “gifts”, “holiday”, “Christmas” and more. If you have unique propositions such as holiday discounts or free delivery, now is the time to get those running.

For the early shoppers – some actually start as early as July – they will be at the product comparison stage. So here, price will make a difference. Coupled with the sagging global economy, gift buying budgets may have decreased substantially over the last few years. So tip number 2: Be competitive in your pricing strategy. And if you are able to reduce your prices significantly less than the competition, use it as a marketing edge. Add it to your campaigns and reflect the low prices in your landing page.

Next, let’s focus on the organic results for holiday queries. If you have a blog on your retail store, the best way to add keyword targeted content is via posts and categories. You may also want to re-tag some of the items you are selling as Holiday Sale: <name of product>. Do proper research on top-selling holiday items and start mixing these in with your content.

Last but not the least, if you already have creative prepared for your Display network listings, then it would be a great idea to use these in banner advertising as well. Remember, the closer it gets to the Christmas season the higher the banner advertising rates so start booking these early.

Christmas is a great time to be in retail. Sales peak during this season. The colors are lovely and you can customize your store to follow the traditional colors. And most of all, it is the best season to have fun at what you do.

Happy selling!

Engaging Your Social Network Followers

Many online retailers today realize the value of creating business profiles in networks like LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. However, not many know how to engage the following they’ve already developed. Having people add you to their favorites or getting them to read your updates is one thing, actually interacting with them is a whole different animal.

Here are some tips to get your followers to interact with your brand on social spaces:

• Send them a personal message. Most social networks today allow you to send direct messages to your connections or followers. Use this to your advantage by sending them a welcome note when they “Like” or “Follow” your page or profile.
• Create exclusive offers for them . Make them feel special by giving them access to promotions or discounts that are available only for the specific social network. This will keep them from unfollowing you in the future.
•  Respond to comments or queries. When you start posting relevant materials on your pages, you will soon see good interaction from your followers. Acknowledge any comments, requests and or inquiries in a timely manner so they know there’s actually a person behind the brand.
•  Create a fun, friendly app. Keep things light in your pages by creating apps like quizzes or games in Facebook. In Twitter, you can upload creative pictures for them to view. This gives your page the human touch and gives your followers a reason to keep coming back to your page.
• Customize your page design. This is something you can do for both Twitter and Facebook. Add your logo, content that speaks to your target audience and more sections that help them understand your brand better.
• Upload photos and videos frequently. Your wall posts and tweets are probably amazing, but let’s face it, not everyone will want to read what you have to say. Why not show them instead? Pictures are an easy way to grab the attention of your fans.
• Launch a contest. This is a great way to get more people to follow you and to interact with your brand. You can have your followers upload pictures to your page or tag themselves in a photo and comment on it. Whatever the mechanics of the contest, make sure it entices interaction with the page itself by giving a good incentive for them to do so.

These are just great ways to keep your social network followers engaged and to get them to actually interact with your brand. The more time you spend on your page, the more ways you’ll discover how to do it.

Happy selling!

When Do You Show Them the Shipping Cost?

Part of good web usability practice for any retail store is knowing where to place the shipping cost of an item. Two very important questions related to this: where do you do it? And when should it happen? With that in mind, you need to realize that transparency is valued in online retail. Buyers appreciate that you share with them this number early on as it affects their purchase decision.

According to Forrester Research, then number one reason for cart abandonment is high shipping charges. So don’t surprise them with the shipping cost. Around 59% of consumers expect you to offer a shipping calculator on the shopping cart page. It may not be true for your case, so the best way to find out is to check your web analytics stats. Find out which page has the most bounce and exit rate in your shopping cart. The farther down the conversion funnel, the more decided your users become about the purchase, so surprising them with that number won’t really do you any good. You will just frustrate your buyer who may end up abandoning your cart.

Also, it would be a good idea to show the lowest rate available to ship to a particular country. But you should also try offering other options. It may surprise you that some buyers will prefer the more expensive option. It maybe because they trust the shipping company more. So whether companies like USPS or Fedex are offering high rates, include those in a dropdown.

Last tip for shipping that affects usability of your online store: Display your shipping policy. Create a separate, easily accessible page for this (along with all your other policies). When you display your shipping fees in your shopping cart, add a link to the shipping policy.

Now that you’re clear with where you can show your shipping charges, it would be best to work on getting those down. That is a business decision unrelated to web usability, but if you want good advice, we suggest you go for dropshipping as a product sourcing method. This does not only allow you to significantly decrease the shipping cost it will also help you extend your market to a worldwide reach. Dropshipping is a supply chain management tactic wherein your product supplier send the item directly from to your buyer. This means, the more suppliers you have across the globe, the lower your shipping can be in some countries.

Happy selling!

eBay Selling Tips: Creating Auction Headlines

If you plan on selling in eBay, one of the most important things to work on is your auction title. This goes next to your gallery image and is the first thing a potential customer sees when searching for items on eBay.

Those with popular eBay stores have less of a problem than those listing individual items, mainly because impressions for those without a store are driven by eBay’s search function. So, choose your words wisely. eBay only allows 55 characters for your title.

Include important listing details such as model, color, year, size, new or used, brand name and more. In other words, be specific about the product you are listing. Don’t waste your characters on non-essential words (like “Cute”, “wow” or “super rare”)

• Make sure you spell any proper nouns in the title correctly. If you want to expand your search impressions to misspellings, you can insert those in your listing’s description. But stick with correct spellings on the title.
• You may use capital letters, but do it sparingly. Over-capitalizing all words in your description is just plain annoying. If you must, stick to rendering in all caps a maximum of two words in your auction title.
• In the same grain as that of capital letters, avoid goofy characters that represent letters or abbreviating words with inappropriate characters (for instance: “Must C” or “!!!!”)
• Learn from your competition. Do a search of products similar to the ones you plan on listing. Find out how they use their titles.
• Use descriptive related to your product, and not just the brand name. For instance, if you are selling antiques, it would be a good idea to include words like “vintage” or even “old”
• Keep it simple, use words that are familiar to everyone. Your eBay listing is also displayed in other countries as international listings if there are no items available in the local eBay versions. So consider non-English speakers when you create your auction title.
• Consider highlighting options for items that have high value and can make you more money in terms of profit. eBay offers options for boldfacing your title or adding a subtitle.
• If you have more room to spare on your title, try adding alternate names for the item (ie for a pouch, you can add the word bag or beltbag)
• It helps  to learn eBay lingo. Got one or two characters left, how about adding “NWT” for new clothes, it means “New with Tags” and often pertains to apparel with tags from the manufacturer still affixed to the item.

As a last tip, anytime you feel like you’re on the overdoing-it-mode, pause and think. Put yourself in the shoes of your buyer and ask what you would type in that search box to find your item.

Happy eBay Selling!

The Importance of the Post-Sale Email

A post-sale email, or any form of follow-up for that matter, is essential in online retail. This is especially true if the product you are selling has potential for repeat purchase.

Whether the supply chain management method you use is the traditional send-to-my-warehouse type or the newer and more practical dropshipping method, you should be able to trace when a product arrives at your customer’s preferred shipping address. This should be your trigger for sending out your post-sale communication.

It may range from anything between a simple thank you note or it can include a more complex survey to determine customer satisfaction. The important thing to do is to get in touch with the customer and let them know you value their business.

Make it short and sweet and don’t start selling right away. You can do it via email, postal mail or if you have the time/resources, do it with a phone call. The latter makes the experience more personal and memorable the buyer. It also elicits better interaction with you as the seller.

If you do decide to get on the phone with a client, confirm first if they did receive the product. Find out if they are satisfied with the quality. If there are any complaints, handle it in an expeditious manner. The follow up communication – whether via phone or email – is also the perfect opportunity to capture email addresses for leads. Ask your customers if they would want to know about on-going promotions or get a list of your latest product offering, then let them know about your mailing list and how to sign up for it.

Last, but not the least, when doing a follow up call or email, make sure you end by leaving your contact information. This way, they feel that they can get in touch with you anytime.

Happy  Selling!

Preparing to Launch Your Blog

We’ve talked about the benefits of blogging several times in ShopTalk. Today, we want to get you started on the habit. We call it a habit specifically because it’s something you need to do consistently on at the intervals you set – so whether this is a daily activity, a weekly activity or even one that you do monthly, it needs to be consistent. 

Before you decide to have a grand launch of your blog, you need to consider your resources. If you’re the CEO of the retail company or the owner a large online store, ask yourself if you really have the time to do this.  Some other personnel-related questions to ask:

• Who should write the blog?
• Should it be created and maintained by a single person or a team?
• Are you adding the byline of that person?
• Will there be a section to introduce the blogger?
• What skill sets are required of the person creating the blog entries/managing the entire blog?
• Will you consider outsourcing the blog management?
• Do you have personnel to answer queries or comments made on your blog?
• Are there any other social media interactions to consider?
• Will the person maintaining the blog be the same person managing social media concerns?

Once you know who will be managing the blog for your online store, the next thing you will need to consider are the technical aspects. First, you need a platform to launch it. There are several blogging platforms available online and most of them are free. Some that are good to consider are Typepad, WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal. Your choice really depends on what you want to do with the blog and how familiar you are with the backend to allow customization for your brand.

Third-party apps or plug-ins to enhance how you use your blogs are also something to think about. First, you could use this for your SEO efforts. There are plug-ins available that would allow you to customize the keywords, titles and meta descriptions for each blog post. There are also ones available that allow you to install the Google Analytics script to each post. Then there are those for usability such as those for comment threading or gravatar that associates pictures with profiles.

Syndication tools are another must have. These will help spread the word about your blog by feeding your content to RSS sites. Similar tools for social media are also available, these automatically upload your post to social voting sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon with a click of the button.

Last, but definitely not the least, before you launch your blog you should consider creating a content calendar. Understand what topics would interest your potential readers and focus on those. You should also start working on your categories for your blog.

Happy blogging!

Keeping Up With Google: Instant Search

As an online retailer, one of the most important websites to study is Google. This search engine has taken over a significant share of the market. Both organic and paid search results can bring in enough quality visitors with a high potential to convert to cover the costs of your online store’s maintenance. Yes, that’s how powerful a search engine is to an online merchant.

Recently, we’ve noticed a change to how search results are being displayed. One is the presence of Google Maps in prominent parts of the results page. If your online store is paired with a local business, this can create good synergy between your online and offline presence. Make sure you create a Google Places listing to get your store marked on the map. You can claim your listing here: http://www.google.com/local/add/analyticsSplashPage

Another big change we noticed is Google’s instant search. This revolutionary technology dynamically updates the search results as the user types in each character in the search box. Unlike its older method of searching, there is no need to hit the Search button to get the results to show.

 

How does this impact your online business. Well, there’s a higher chance of getting more exposure is one. Those who target shorter keywords can start showing up in the results even with just the first keyword.

Today, it’s still uncertain how this will change user behavior and click patterns. So, keep a close eye on your analytics for both the paid and non-paid searches for your top keywords. You may end up getting more impressions without actually increasing your conversions – whether the effects are negative or positive is yet to be seen.

Here is yet another move by Google to personalize search results. In the recent past, it has been serving up different search results when you are logged in versus when you are not. It provide a good user experience to the searcher, but has uncertain impacts to the merchant. According to Google’s information page on Google Instant, it can save as 2 to 5 seconds per search.

Here’s one tip to try, do it for your own brand and target keywords. The auto-complete suggestions can be a great way to find more popular keywords to target.

 

Purchasing Multiple Domains for Your Online Store

If you’ve ever registered a domain online, towards the end of the purchase process you’ll often see an offer to purchase additional top-level domains (TLDs). Each domain extension stands for something. For instance, that .com you are registering stands for commercial.   

Other TLDs are .net which stands for network and .org for organizations. Another type of domains are the generic TLDs such as .biz for business, .info for informational sites, and .mobi for mobile. Some of the more recent ones that cropped up recently include .name for personal or family sites, .tv for television, .ws for website and .me for personal sites. The last two are actually part of another subset called ccTLD or country code top-level domains. Western Samoa is represented by .ws and .me is for Montenegro.

ccTLDs are often more difficult to acquire as some registrars require a physical address in the particular city to be associated with the domain. These are generally made up of 2 characters. Some of the most popular are .us for the United States, .ca for Canada, .jp for Japan and .cn for China.

Even if you don’t get that pop-up offering you other domain extensions, you should still consider purchasing it. One, it is important for brand equity. By registering multiple domain extensions, you are protecting your brand throughout the internet and keeping your competitors from registering your domain name. You’ll never really know how big a website can grow until you actually start working on it. Just imagine how Google started.

The second reason you should purchase multiple domain extensions for your brand is for local search engine optimization. If you are targeting to sell in a local market, it would be best to optimize using local keywords. Having a ccTLD is a great way to get search engines to recognize your affinity with a particular location.

Having multiple domains also leads to better exposure and accessibility for your brand. Even if your searcher makes the mistake of typing .biz as your extension instead of .com, they should see the same content about your store and your products. A note of warning though, do not replicate your website in different servers and point your domain to these. Unless the content in your replicated sites are unique, you will be risking search engine penalties due to duplicate content. What you need to do instead is use a 301 or a permanent redirection for your other domains to the main URL.

Why Shopster Rules

So far, we’ve given you tips on how to improve your website using SEO and in terms of conversion. We’ve also focused on the business side of retail and when to take advantage of seasonal selling. Today, we’re doing a shameless plug on why Shopster beats the competition.

There are a number of other players in the dropship market. DHGate, Doba and Dropship Access are the top three competitors that come to mind. Of these, Doba is the one offering services closest to what Shopster can offer.

Both Shopster and Doba offer access to about 1.5 million products from a number of suppliers, wholesalers, distributors and manufacturers. The variety of products and the low prices are great selling points we both offer.

When it comes to industry recognition and reliability, both Shopster and Doba belong to eBay’s Certified Service Providers list (which has less than 50 members as of writing).

In terms of pricing both Shopster and Doba offer a free version. Upgrading would open up a bigger world of possibilities for merchants. Shopster’s cheapest upgrade package (PowerMerchant Starter) is priced at $39.95 per month while Doba offers theirs at $49.95 per month.

I’m pretty sure customer support for both Shopster and Doba are at par. After all, we wouldn’t be topping the markets if it were any different.  Both companies also provide articles to help you learn more about dropshipping and how to use it in retail.

Tools for listing products in comparison shopping sites are available in both. Doba talks about its API technology in its website, while Shopster has datafeed capabilities for sites like eBay, Amazon, NextTag and more. This means you are opening up your market to other distribution channels, giving you a better potential to earn even more.  In terms of inventory management, Doba offers a single, consolidated product catalog while Shopster actually has an integrated inventory management tool.

The real differentiating factor of Shopster when compared head-to-head with Doba, are two things: the social network and the store builder. Shopster rules because it will let anyone who wants to get into eCommerce a go at it instantly.

The store builder functionality of Shopster is unique in the dropshipping industry such that each new retailer that registers automatically gets a virtual storefront with different professionally designed, free templates to choose from. This is hosted as a subdomain, but can be customized to a more brand-centric one if the retailer chooses to do so. Furthermore, the online store is already connected to the dropship item database so you can choose to upload and sell products right away. If you choose a product to include to your managed inventory, it automatically inputs the images and the descriptions that come with that item. No need to upload or export anything.

Shopster is also a social network. You get to connect to other retailers and suppliers. Products are pooled in a virtual warehouse, so you get to buy and sell to other Shopster members. This is also an advantage to Shopster subscribers because it opens up even more inventory for you to sell, at competitive prices.

Shopster empowers merchants to sell immediately without having to go through the hassles of creating a store for dropship products. It truly is the all-in-one eCommerce solution you are looking for.

Going Beyond FAQs: The Help Desk System

As an online retailer, customer service is one of the most important things you can deliver to your audience. While most online stores will provide the list of Frequently Asked Questions and a number of Help articles others go beyond their call of duty by putting an entire Help Desk System in place.

This isn’t just a piece of software you install into your system, it is actual a whole other web of support you provide customers for a more timely response to their concerns. So before you go into it, you need to ensure that you have the capability (manpower and in-house skills) to back up the actual technology.

What you basically need to put in place is a ticketing system for concerns. What needs to be reflected on the customer-facing side is that you are making available a number of options to reach you for support. This can be in the form of a toll-free number, a form-to-email on your website or a help desk email address. For bigger companies willing to invest more, a Live Chat system can also be considered.

On the back-end or the administration side, you would need people to service your customers, a ticketing system that issues user requests with a unique tracking number and a knowledgebase to help your service people respond with a quick resolution. You also need to understand that your first wave of support may not always be able to handle all inquiries. As such, it would be best to have an escalation system in place.

Before you make any system purchases to get this up and running, consider the following:

• What are your company’s business needs?
• What are your customer’s needs?
• Will it work with any existing systems you have in place?
• What kind of metrics will you be tracking?

In general,  having a help desk system in place can help improve efficiency and help you build a business plan. It improves your ability to support customers by having information on any account and any issue ready to be accessed by your staff. It can also be  a central point where you can detect the weakness of your processes and to assess the gravity of problem.

A help desk system is an investment, and can be an expensive one. While companies big and small should have this for their internal IT needs, having one for external customer handling can really improve the overall customer experience.

Happy selling!

Selling Online for the Holidays: Gift Registries & Wish Lists

As the December holidays draw closer, online retailers need to push for more sales. November will be the peak shopping period, but it would be best to start as early as now. One way to push for that is by adding a gift registry or wishlist feature in your online store.

These provide customers who are not yet ready to purchase an option to come back and shop again later. Depending on your design, it may need user log ins and account creation capability. The main purpose is for your website to “remember” the customer preference. You can do this by allowing the customer to create a page listing their favorite products, which they can order in the future. Gift registries, often associated with weddings, can also be shared by customers to other buyers.

Having a wish list offers many benefits. One is having a better way to profile your customers. Wish lists show you the buying preferences of a particular demographic. How you use this information is entirely up to you, but it should help you in creating promotions and in deciding on which products to highlight for a particular market. Particularly for the holidays, you can use it to generate a category of gift ideas.

Additionally, wish lists reduce cart abandonment by allowing you extend the session beyond the visit. You can even come up with ways to run after those carts by resending the list to the customer and offering a limited time discount should they decide to pursue the purchase transaction.

Gift registries and wish lists also offer a way to keep you in the customer’s mind, reinforcing customer loyalty. You should provide a widget or allow export capacity so the customer may choose to display their wish list on their blogs or their own websites and maybe even on popular social media sites like Facebook for other to see. This doesn’t just build your brand, it also helps in terms of SEO by creating a link to your website.  

Happy Holiday Selling!

How to Choose an SEO Professional

If you are serious about selling online, at some point, you will have to work with an SEO. Search Engine Optimization is the act of purposely ranking your website for a given set of keywords as they appear in search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing. The process usually involves some form of writing, coding, research and some manual  submissions.

You can do it yourself if you have the time to study the concepts behind SEO and you have the time and energy to actually deploy your learnings to your website. However, like most online merchants who prefer to concentrate on selling and merchandising, it would be best to just hire a person to do it for you.

Selecting an SEO can be a gargantuan task. You will have to filter through people who claim to know things, when in reality they don’t. You’ll have to manager your chosen SEO’s time well. You need to coordinate with him or her on the requirements for your website. But first, let’s discuss what you need to know before you choose your SEO:

• Decide between dealing with and individual versus dealing with an SEO company. Chances are, if your online retail site is a small one and you do not expect much conversions in the first few months, an SEO company will cost you too much for your expected return. On one hand, price is a big consideration. On the other hand, SEO companies may offer you the reliability that individuals may not.
• Ask your potential candidates for their SEO portfolio. Having a personal website that talks about SEO concepts is not nearly enough to help you make that difficult decision. Once you’ve contacted an SEO, ask him or her for a portfolio of projects. This is when they start sharing the numbers with you. Look at the percentage of increase since the time they took on a project. You should also look at the improvement in conversions, not just the visitors. If a specific successful project catches your interest, ask the SEO regarding his strategy to achieve this.
• Ask what they can do for your website. This is where we go down to the specifics to help you gauge the candidate’s skills. Not everyone will be open to share their ideas, but a good SEO practitioner will see something off about your website and will not hesitate to tell you about it – whether you hire them or not.
• Request a resume or a CV. This won’t really say much about the candidate’s ability to perform a task, but it will help you determine the level of professionalism. Even just a couple of months in a strict office setting can teach discipline and good work habits.
• Discuss the expected results. No decent SEO should promise you a particular ranking or number of visitors over a short period of time, namely because they do not have real control over any search engine. So if you see ads saying you’ll be #1 on Google, then you may be setting yourself up to be scammed. SEO success is not instant and no one should be able to guarantee it.  

The bottomline is, be careful with the person you are hiring. Make sure he or she isn’t all talk, but should be able to prove their worth as an SEO. And last but not the least, let your gut feeling work to your advantage. Trust your instinct.

How to Create a Buyer’s Guide

For search engine optimization (SEO for short), content is still king. Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing all still hold it in high regard. More importantly, consumers still appreciate good content on blogs, corporate websites and even online stores.

But exactly what kind of content can you give your users? There are a few out there that they will truly appreciate. First, you can create fresh content via your product descriptions. Anyone online merchant can pull content straight from the ones created by suppliers, but a good merchant will give it a different spin. Make the content their own, so to speak, by giving their own take on the product.

Another good content to share with your potential buyers is reviews. It is user-generated, which would make your job so much easier. Reviews are also something consumers are more adamant about these days. They often search for a product feedback first before even considering a purchase.

But the best suggestion we can make is to create an all-out buyer’s guide. This would definitely take more time and effort to develop, but is really worth it. When buyers see an impartial guide to the products available on your store, they would be more inclined to trust you.

Starting your own buyer’s guide isn’t easy. What you need to do at the onset is to define what you would like to write about. If your online store is focused on just one niche market, then this should be relatively easy. Say you’re selling shoes, then a comparative study of the different brands in one category (ie rubber shoes) is a good place to start.

Here are other things you need to include in your buyer’s guide:

• A brief overview of what you will be discussing
• Information on the product
• Your rating scale and what your criteria for evaluating the products
• Top brands available in the market and how you rated them
• Product specs (technical, size, color, etc)
• Average price of each product evaluated
• Summary of your findings in tabular form (for easier comparison)
• General tips for purchasing the particular product (ie sizing chart, what to look for, etc)

What you write in your buyers guide or consumer’s guide is entirely up to you. But do keep in mind that this has to be written for your specific audience in mind (buyers of your products) and should be as fair and unbiased as possible. It would also help to be aware of libel laws, lest you be sued for creating a guide that is unfair to a specific brand. If you cannot have a lawyer help you review it, the best workaround is to specifically indicated via a disclaimer that the views expressed on the guide are your own and are a result of usage of the particular product .

Happy selling!

How to Earn from an Online Store

If you’ve heard the news about making money online and had your doubts, you can put them to rest. It’s actually true, you can earn big profits all on the web.  But be warned, there is no fast and easy way to do it. To make money, you have to put in the effort.

If you’re looking at a website offering you to make money online, make sure it doesn’t ask you to do email marketing, sell face to face, sell door to door or do telemarketing. It shouldn’t be an offer that forces you to sell one item or product you are not even familiar with. When you see something like this in a website, you should start considering other options.

eCommerce is the way to go when it comes to making money online. It so much easier to implement and making money is a breeze.  All you really have to do is choose the right products and market your site properly. 

If you go for dropshipping, it increases your chances of earning online. This supply chain management technique allows you to significantly reduce overhead cost associated with retail. Merchants who use dropshipping can focus on selecting products and marketing it. Once an order comes in, all you have to do is send the it to your dropship supplier and they’ll take care of packaging it and shipping it to your customers.

So let’s start by understanding the process of online sales with dropshipped products:

First: Select the products you want to sell. Understand your market and what keywords you can target in your marketing efforts.

Second: Create your online store. You can get this for free on some websites. Others will offer to customize one for you at a fee.

Third: Start uploading your inventory into your site. If you will be dropshipping, make sure you select items that are high in stock.

Fourth: Price your items such that you are making a profit. There must be a difference between your selling price and the price at which you will purchase the item. Despite putting a big difference between these two numbers, you still need to keep your selling price at a rate acceptable to your target market.

Fifth: Wait for sales to come in and send the orders over to your dropship supplier.

Sixth: There you have it, you’ve already made your first sale. Sooner or later, you’ll realize you’re making a lot more money even without a lot of effort.

Happy selling!