Shopster's Dropshippers, eCommerce, and Selling Online Blog

Facebook Moves from FBML to iFrames: Are You Ready?

We’ve said it a countless times in this blog: Social media is important. Particularly, Facebook. With over 500 million subscribers, this leader in the social network game simply isn’t something a marketer should ignore. Facebook has generated leads and sales for different industries, and retail is no stranger to phenomenon.

Remember that post we had on FBML? It’s now time to upgrade what you know about Facebook. FBML was the way to create custom Facebook Pages (then know as Fan Pages) for businesses. There have been several case studies on how to succeed in marketing within this space simply by customizing one’s Page. And FBML or Facebook Mark Up Language was the way to do this. It’s pretty similar to html and is easy to learn, except that it has additional Facebook-specific functions.

However, times are changing yet again. FBML will be deprecated soon. While existing FBML pages will still work, new ones can no longer be created by March 11. iFrame is not new technology. It stands for Inline Frame and its history is traced as far back as 1997. The goal is to embed or frame one page in another. This means that custom tabs will no longer be hosted in Facebook’s server but will be pulled from the page owner’s own server.

At this point, it would be best for merchants who keep a Page in Facebook to market their online stores to learn the iFrames technology. It may take some getting used to but it offers a better branding option for you in the end. iFrames can help make your pages more interactive and it will eventually interface better with your online store.

 

 

Targeting Local Traffic for Your Online Stores

With the internet and ecommerce, the world truly is your oyster. However, there is still a good amount of sales you can squeeze from local visitors. As such, targeting local traffic is also a good idea for online merchants, especially those that have local stores or limited delivery capability.

If we are to take the assumption that you do have a local store and your online presence only complements your in-store sales as an additional distribution channel, then let’s start with the basic offline-online marketing tandem. Our first piece of advice is to add your online store URL to your marketing materials – whether these be posters, business cards or brochures – having real people see your website address written down somewhere can already be a good way to drive local traffic to your online store.

Next, it’s also a good idea to get your business in the yellow pages. Here, we’re talking about that big, heavy book collecting dust somewhere near your phone as well as the online version of the business directory.

Getting your physical address online is also one way to localize the traffic visiting your online store. One of the best ways to do this today is to use Google’s tools, namely Google Maps and Google Places. Maps can be added to your own online store and is also searchable on the internet, while Google Places allows you to include more details about your business and even create coupons for your site.

Then there’s ccTLD and local hosting as even more options to target your local market. You can also use Webmaster Tools to limit your targets for your domain. After you’re done with all the technical stuff, it’s time to ensure that all your campaigns are aligned and cater to the right market. If you are targeting more than one specific market, then it would be best to run separate campaigns for each one. This piece of advice is particularly useful for pay per click advertising. You can even go as far as adding the country name in your ads to increase clickthroughs and filter the clickers to just those with interest in buying within the specific country.

Be conscious of the local targeting even with your promotions and banner ads. For instance, do not send out a promo for U.S. Thanksgiving to your Canadian clientele or display an ad for Boxing Day in the U.S.  In line with that, make sure that any landing pages you have connected to those ads are also designed with your targeted location in mind.

Happy selling!

Online Store: Redesign versus Testing

One of the biggest mistakes an online merchant can make is to haphazardly decide to redesign his or her online store if something seems like it’s not working. First of all, you may be missing out on a lot of potential revenue for your website by not testing what works and what doesn’t. You may be surprised to find out that even the smallest tweak in your online store can generate a lot of sales.

Before you even think about redesigning your website, make sure you have clear goals. The main purpose of any website redesign is to make it easier for your customers to use your site and eventually to increase conversions

Second, a sitewide revamp is costly. Just like it would be to hire a designer or a web developer to do a custom website for you, it will cost you money to deploy a supposedly better version of your existing website.

Third, a major redesign is a big gamble if you already have customer following or a known brand. Customers who are already used to the way your site looks and functions and often come back for return purchases may not be too happy to find a big change in your website. Your customers will most likely associate the look of your website to your brand, as such it will be a big adjustment for them to see the difference for the first time.

What we suggest is to take things one step at a time. Test the elements that have a big effect on conversions. You can start with your call to action. Followed by your navigation. You can even test page layout. There are a lot of tools on the internet to help you conduct A/B split tests or multi-variate tests. A popular tool is Google’s Website Optimizer, which is free and easy to use.

If you’ve already taken the leap and hired a web developer to do your new online store, then your best recourse is to measure its impact on your conversion. If the site has already been launched, do a historical analysis of data from the time you made the change. If you see a drastic drop in conversions, then you should consider reverting back to the old version of your online store.

A redesign can make your site look fresh, but it can have dangerous effects to your bottom line. So decide carefully.

 

 

Top 5 Cost-Cutting Tips for eCommerce

In our last blog post, we talked about how stopping revenue leakage can help increase your bottom line. Another strategy to take is to cut costs where you can. These money-saving tips for ecommerce merchants can help you reduce your overall costs to run operations. By nature, ecommerce should not be an expensive enterprise. Especially compared to traditional retail, there is much room for reducing your business spending. There is no need for office space or even a physical store to run an ecommerce business. Manpower hiring is also not an immediate must-have for thrifty merchants. What you do have to invest on are your marketing efforts, order fulfillment, your online storefront and your inventory of items to sell. But even those can be shaved down to the bare minimum.  

Here are some tips you can follow to save money on running your online store:

• Start with a ready-made website for your online store. Whether it’s your first or your third online store, testing the waters for a new product is a must. To save you money on customizing a store that may not even work in the long run, we suggest you start selling via a free web store. There are hundreds of templates available on the internet and some (like those available in Shopster) even come with free hosting and a subdomain.
• Do things yourself. As a beginner online merchant, it is tempting to start hiring people or outsourcing some tasks, but hold yourself back and you’ll see that you’re saving a bundle on labor costs by doing it yourself. One example would be managing your website’s inventory. Since you’re starting out small, it would be best to be hands-on with this task. It may seem trivial, but the more time you spend on different aspects of running your own store, the more you’d understand everything about the business.
• Use your connections to market your online store. Marketing can easily become the most expensive aspect of running your ecommerce business. While paid options like PPC campaigns definitely have a good showing of return on investment, you can try alternative means to get the word out about your site. Social media marketing has started to gain good footing in the field of online advertising, and it’s relatively easy to use and is free.
• Consider dropshipping for your order fulfillment. One of today’s most useful innovations in online retail is dropshipping. This supply chain management method does not only save on upfront costs for inventory (no need to have products physically on-hand to sell), it also saves you big on shipping and handling as the items you order from dropshippers are sent directly to your end-buyer.
• Focus on retaining old customers. Customer retention is always the cheaper way to go versus acquiring new customers. Marketing to existing customers is less expensive as they do not need to be reoriented about your site or the products you sell. One way to achieve this goal is to provide a product that has a recurring demand and of course, to offer world-class customer service that your customers would not soon forget.

Paring down the cost is not easy, but if you’re really determined to do it, you’ll soon find yourself saving more and more each passing month.

Happy selling!

Preventing Revenue Loss for Online Stores

Does it feel like you’ve been running your online store for ages and have yet to break even? Preventing and recovering lost revenue can put a stop to that money leakage and help you ultimately achieve your goal. But to get there, you need to know where and how the loss occurs.

1. Make sure your site is secure to prevent attacks. Attacks will cause your site to become inaccessible. The first to do is to try to stop it from happening in the first place. Site security should be your number one concern. Get a good system administrator to build good firewalls that block out malicious scripts, yet allow quality visitors to browse your website.
2. Streamline your processes. Any business inefficiency is money down the drain. Investing in systems that automate parts of your process or make it easier to do a task is well-worth it. This means that the manpower you’ve hired can focus their time and effort on other things that could push your online store to perform better. Do a quality check on all of your processes from order taking to fulfillment, the less human involvement in a process, the better.
3. Have stricter measures in place for fraud prevention. Preventing fraud will help you keep your chargebacks in check (which in turn means you won’t have problems dealing with your payment gateway and merchant account provider in the future). Billions of dollars a year also become lost revenue due to fraud. A simple SSL certificate to encrypt your secure transaction can do the trick. But you can also go to the extreme with address verification systems and other BIN checks.
4. Have a Plan B to prevent downtime. Aside from maximizing your site security to prevent your website from being attacked, there are also other ways to ensure you don’t have downtime. Using a CDN or a content distribution network won’t just speed up your online store, it can also help prevent DDOS and other attacks that may cause your site to go down. Even better, it replicates your content throughout data centers in the world, so when one goes down, you still have the data somewhere in the world alive and kicking. Always have a failover in place, being dependent on just one physical server can get you in trouble. Some online retailers swear by collocation to ensure that whatever happens to one data center, they still have the ability to be back up in a jiffy. Last, but not the least, employ good technical people that can get you back online when you need it. The money you spend on your tech guys and web developers will be so worth it when an emergency comes around.

It may seem like preventing revenue loss is a big technical investment, but do consider that you are running an online store. Controlling those vulnerabilities will only mean good things for you in the future.

Happy selling!

Transparency can Prevent Abandoned Shopping Carts

At one time or another, you may have experienced dealing with the problem of abandoned shopping carts. You are not alone in this challenge. In fact, shopping cart abandonment has plagued so many merchants that the total rings up to about $21 billion. The main reason consumers abandon carts is fear of identity theft in online shopping. On average, abandoned carts have goods amounting to about $109.

It really is a big loss if compiled on a daily basis. Some have given up on the issue and have resigned to the fact that not all sales will close. But you could actually do something about it. Transparency is the key. Letting your potential buyers know more about what you offer can lead to a more trusting relationship.

Let’s start with the basics. Put yourself in the shoes of your shopper. When you reach your online store, do you feel confident about buying there? Does it look like it’s a real retail store? Something as simple as good, professional-design can clearly communicate reliability. It may cost you a few dollars to get a well-designed store, but for the recovery of those abandoned cart losses, you will more than break even.

Contact information is another must-have on your website. Prominently display ways for the customer to get in touch with you. If you have a hotline they can call, we even suggest you place this on the first virtual fold. It gives buyers confidence to know that they have someone to talk to in case things don’t turn out so well.

Another important thing for you to do is to actually provide a safe and secure environment for your potential customers to shop in. It takes more than a few encouraging words to get your buyers to trust you. You actually have to earn it. If you are processing payments online (like getting credit card details and charging the card), you will need an SSL certificate. SSL or Secure Sockets Layer encrypts the data that is passed on the internet on to the banking institutions that make the charge possible.

For our last tip, you need to show your customers you can be trusted. One very effective way to do this is via trust seals. According to one of the most popular providers of security seals today, 86% of shoppers feel more confident about shopping on website using security indicators such as trust marks.

One service we highly recommend is KikScore. It offers a suite of services to help online stores build trust. With KikScore, online merchants get a Confidence Badge as well as a Trust Score to show shoppers they can be trusted. For those that seek to find out more, they can look over the KikReport, where pertinent details about the business can be reviewed.

We believe in the importance of being transparent and building trust so much that we’re giving you access to KikScore right from your Shopster account. With it, you’ll get the following benefits:

• Ability to leverage your Shopster track record to show your store is reliable and trustworthy
• Your website visitors see multiple trust factors about your business like security, traffic, management and customer feedback
• Interactive features that allow Shopster customers to include an introduction video for shoppers and interact with customers
• Dynamic trust scoring that updates your website trust and reliability score on a daily basis

You can try KikScore free for the first 90 days. To find out more, visit: http://www.kikscore.com/

How to Price Items in eBay

eBay isn’t just an auction site, it has become a very lucrative business venue for a lot of people. It is also a complementary sales channel for those who have their own online stores. We’ve given several tips in this blog to help you sell successfully in eBay. But none of those compare to the impact of how you price your products.

Pricing in eBay is dictated by many things. First, there’s competition. Pricing yourself above the perceived market value will ensure that you get very little bids, if any at all, for your items. So, first, do your research before you even list. Do a title-only search for the same item or items similar to yours. It would be best to go through the Completed items. List these by price, highest to lowest. Then, study those that have been sold successfully. Do not make the mistake of comparing your price to those that never even got any bids. The successful auctions won’t just help you with price benchmark, but you can also use it to understand how to present your product (titles, descriptions and even images used).

Next, study the demand by looking at the available products already listed and the bids they are attracting. If the product is in demand, you can raise the price a little. You can lower your price if you want your item to get sold fast.

The starting price is also a good tactic to play with. If you know that your product has a good potential to fetch bids, then you can price it even as low as a dollar. As a general rule, a lower starting price can encourage healthy bidding. If you want to use this strategy but are concerned about the risks, then you might want to consider having a reserve price. This means that if you don’t receive a bid for at least the amount of the reserve, you aren’t obliged to sell your item. This amount is not show to bidders, but they will know that your listing has a reserve. Once the reserve price has been met, it is no longer displayed and you will have to sell your item to the highest bidder. The reserve price protects you from selling your item for too little. Do take note that this is only available for auction-style listings and not on fixed price or classified ad listings. There is also a fee to set the reserve price. It is good to set the reserve price if you know the value of your item. Do take note that there is a particular disadvantage to it. It can unnecessarily end the auction in the middle of a bidding war when the reserve price has already been reached, so you are limiting your potential to sell the item for an even higher price.  Worse than that, not knowing the reserve price can discourage potential buyers from bidding. If they bid on the item and realize that it doesn’t meet the reserve price, bidders might assume that you are selling your items for too much.

Another strategy to take is to set the start price as close to your ideal selling price as possible and have a Buy-it-Now option a few dollars higher than that. It’s less risky and it makes for a faster sale. The potential buyer will be put in the position of deciding to get the item for the Buy-It-Now price rather than risking losing at the auction.

The last thing you need to consider for your pricing strategy are your costs. Do not list the item at the price you got it for. Remember that there are other expenses that are involved in listing the item, storing it, shipping it and everything else in between. Do not price yourself too low that you are losing money with a winning bid.

Happy eBay Selling!

Online Selling and Seasonality

Just like in old-fashioned retail, selling online has it’s cycles. Seasonality happens throughout the year. Whatever you are selling, you will experience this. For some products, it may not be as extreme as others.  What’s important is to understand the movement of sales to know when it peaks and when it drops. This is essential for making both purchase and marketing decisions.

Here are some tips for selling online and riding the waves of seasonality:

1. Know your peak seasons in advance. Summer selling should not begin during summer months. If this is your first time gathering benchmark data on your store’s seasonality trends, then it might surprise you to find that the buying season starts way In advance. Three to four months before, you’ll already start seeing that upturn in summer items.
2. Take advantage of holidays in your marketing. Creating marketing materials suited for the holidays can help you gain better visibility when the day is upon you. This is more effective in paid marketing campaigns as search engines will need to crawl those keywords and serve them up for the proper search terms.
3. Packaging matters. Don’t go overboard with handling seasons by changing your product line as often as the leaves changes. Package items meant for one season as part of a gift basket or a kit for the season and you’ll never have items sitting around your virtual shelves. Imagination and creativity play a big part in how you package and sell your items online.
4. Play around with your store design. Don’t be afraid to add a playful spin to your online store by changing some elements to suit the season. Some branding elements need to remain consistent – like your corporate colors or  your logo – but banners and display items can change to get potential buyers in the mood for the purchasing holiday.
5. Push harder during lean months. Remember, during your peak days, visitors will naturally increase and they will have better potential to purchase. There isn’t much need to keep pushing your advertising dollars to get people to your site, instead, use your budget to focus on season that are low. Drive traffic by allotting a bigger percentage of your paid campaign budget for seasons that demand it.

Last but not the least, use your time wisely. The low seasons will give you the opportunity to plan for the next campaign. This is the best time to think up new ideas and to find more ways to ride the waves of change that happens throughout the year.

Happy selling!

Driving Traffic to Your Blog

In recent blog posts, we’ve encouraged online sellers to create blogs to get people more interested in their online store. A blog can really make a big difference – from providing vital information about your products to pushing your brand forward. Today, we’re discussing how to drive traffic to the blog itself. One advantage of doing this is to promote push marketing. Potential buyers can go from your blog to your online store with the proper placement of links or by dropping your stores name in your posts every so often.

So here goes. Read on for tips to generate more blog traffic:

1. Write content that matters to your audience. Simply writing content you deem great isn’t enough. It’s best to write content that is useful for your audience. You could try different topics, as long as it educates or provides a solution or is relevant to your potential buyers.
2. Use Your RSS feeds. This stands for Real Simple Syndication. Readers can subscribe to it to find out what your latest posts are about. You can also pro-actively use it by submitting it to RSS sites.
3. Join blog catalogs. This is one way to get good backlinks to your blog and get it to rank for target keywords. There are hundreds of blog catalogs out there. Make sure you submit to Technorati as it is the most active and has the biggest audience of all the blog catalogs.
4. Talk about your blog in your social circle. Particularly in your social networks. Drop links there or do excerpts of posts, linking back to your blog for the full article. At least, your friends know about it and you’re getting the initial traffic hits from them. You can even get an honest opinion about the posts you’ve been putting up from the people you trust.
5. Be interactive. If you open your blog posts to comment, make sure you’re also open to having a 2-way conversation with your audience. In other words, when they comment, do take the time to reply to these. You can push this further by reading and posting on other blogs within a similar niche and linking your username to your blog URL in the process.

Blogging is a fun activity that can easily be done daily, but more than that, it’s also a good way to generate traffic for your own online store.

Happy blogging!

 

Submitting Your Online Store to Search Engines

If you’re new to selling online and have set up your virtual storefront for the first time, it’s only natural to be excited about getting your visitors. You’ll soon discover that the most powerful driver of visitors to your online store are search engines. The top three among these are Google, Yahoo and Bing (formerly MSN).

But to start seeing those numbers build up, you need to exercise patience. Ranking for your target keywords takes time. First things first, you need to know if your site is already being crawled and is indexed by search engines. Understand the basic premise of how search engines work. They send out bots or spiders or crawlers, these are little programs that run through your site’s content. It then places your site in a massive index and serves up your listing on their search engine results page if it matches the keywords that the searcher is looking for. As such, you need to get in that index first.

If your website is fairly new, it won’t happen automatically. In fact, it may take anywhere from three weeks to two months to even see your first page appear in the search results. A quick way to check is to use the site operator. In Google, for example, you just type in “site: yourwebsite.com” to check if it’s already been indexed.

Now on to ranking for your target keywords. If you did your search engine optimization correctly, chances are you will start ranking and showing up in search engines even if you don’t submit your website. The way search engines work is that each link that points to your website counts as a vote for it and hastens the crawling of your site. So do make sure that you focus not only on the on-page aspect of SEO but also the offpage link building work.

One thing that you can try to yield faster results is to submit your online store to search engines directly. To do this, you may need an xml file that contains information on all the pages of your website. Some free websites online can do this for you. We particularly like: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Next, you need to know where to submit. Some search engines require that you verify that you are the website owner first before you can submit. It’s pretty easy to do that, just follow the instructions of inserting either a meta tag or a page on your site’s root directory.

You need to visit the following pages to submit to search engines:

• For Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/
• For Yahoo: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
• For Bing: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx

Happy selling!

 

 

Shopping has Gone Social

 By now, you’ve probably heard of social commerce – or selling products on social networks like Facebook and Multiply. An even bigger trend has been on the rise since late 2010, pushing the social nature of human beings to its boundaries. Shopping has gone social. The site encourages members to ask shopping questions or share recent purchases with their network.

The general premise behind social shopping is to involve friends in the purchasing experience via reviews, recommendations and shared deals. The very basic type of social shopping deals with getting product recommendations before a purchase is made.  An example of this is ShopSocially. The site encourages members to ask shopping questions or share recent purchases with their network. Other sites with a similar objective include Blippy, ShopWithYourFriends and BeeBargains.

Then there’s the shopping community. This has actually been around for a while with websites like Kaboodle and Stylefeeder focusing on sharing the shopping experience for fashion. These community shopping sites often allow members to create wishlists or shopping lists to share with friends.

Today’s most popular social shopping platform are those that offer discounts via group purchasing. Deals are set at wholesale prices with groups of people encouraged to buy together. The most controversial site falling under this category is Groupon, for its recent rejection of Google’s offer to buy the site. Other group buying sites include Grooster, Social Shopper, Tippr, BuyWithMe and more.

Social shopping is changing the ecommerce landscape for merchants. Products featured on social shopping sites have better value to potential buyers because they are recommended by a trusted source (friends, friends of friends) versus advertising agencies. However, the same benefit can be a liability if a company does not take care of its own online reputation. Recommendations and reviews are the core engine of social shopping sites.

 

What NOT to Do for Your Online Store

So you’ve done a lot of things for your online store that are actually working for you. That’s great news. However, you may have also done a couple of things that are actually not working right for your store. This is a list of what NOT to do for your online store.

• Having an obscure call to action button – This is the key to getting your customers place items in your shopping cart and have them actually buy from your online store. By not placing your Add to Cart or Buy Now button in a prominent position that captures the attention of your target audience, you may be losing out on big sales.
• Having a slow-loading site – This is a big turn off for today’s modern shoppers. Most internet users today expect your entire site to load in less than 10 seconds. Any more than that and you’re risking an increase in bounce and exit rates.
• Lacking product photos or have limited descriptions – The first thing a buyer looks for in your website is information. If it is already obvious that you are selling the item they need, they would look for pictures, descriptions or anything that lets them know more about the product. It would be a big plus factor if you could also add actual testimonials or even video reviews of the product.
• Having misspellings or errors – This may seem like a simple mistake here and there, but in bulk it can really annoy your target audience. They way your write and the way you present things in your website reflects on how professional you are as a business. Do a simple check to avoid having potential customer question your credibility.
• Having anything that instantly plays – Whether it’s a video about your company or background music, anything that plays without being prompted by the user is not a good idea. Even more so if it already plays and the user can’t easily find a way to stop it. Be careful with putting any media that does this unless you intend to purposely annoy your online store visitors.
• Broken links and broken images – Broken images are usually signified by a transparent box with a little red x mark while broken links just don’t lead your users anywhere when they click. Both degrade the value of your site in terms of usability so do your periodic checks and clean ups for these.
• Pop-up Windows – Today’s technology can give you so many options to render your advertisements. Please don’t be tempted to use pop-ups as one of these. Pop-ups are associated with spam and it really does not contribute to the users buying experience so it’s best to avoid.

The best way for you to really veer away from things that are not helping your site or your conversions is to put yourself in the shoes of your potential buyers. When you visit other websites to buy anything, try to assess what things annoy you that the store could really do without. You might discover that you are doing some of these things yourself.

Happy selling!

The Unique Selling Proposition

If you’ve ever attended a marketing class or hired one of those executives to do the job for you, then you’ve probably heard of the term unique selling proposition. It’s not some fancy way of selling, nor is it just a text book concept. The unique selling proposition is actually one of the things you need to focus on as you prepare to brand and position your site for your chosen target market.

The unique selling proposition or USP, answers the question: why should I do business with you and not your competitor? It highlights your company’s competitive edge. It speaks to what makes your offering different (and more valuable) that your competitors. The internet makes it easy for both you and your competitors to communicate your offerings to your markets. With more and more products, services and brands swelling the internet daily, you need to stay on top of the game. And having a clear unique selling proposition can help you achieve this.

 It can also serve as the anchor for your team to base their service delivery level on. For instance, when a particular pizza brand promises to deliver in 30 minutes or it’s free, everyone from the person baking the pizza to the guy delivering it knows what’s at stake and they push hard to get it done. Management, in turn,  ensures that the systems are in place to enable delivery of this service.

When formulating your unique selling proposition, think first about your target market. What is your core business? Whom do you seek to deliver it to? What benefits do you offer them with your product/service? Answer these questions to help you break down the things that make your company valuable to the market.

Then, find out what your competitors are offering and how they are positioning this. Copying them will only drown your product in a sea of several hundreds that are already existing. What you need to do is to strive to be unique. Differentiate your own product/service but make sure it is some that is relevant to your market.

Once you already know how to position your product and you are sure that this is a claim you can deliver, start working on the statement that embodies this promise. Say it as clear and straightforward as possible, do not try to be cute, use jargon or to limit it within a set number of words. What’s important is you get to communicate what you need to say with the right audience.

Finding your unique selling proposition is critical to any business, especially to online stores competing with millions of other sellers on the internet. Spend time thinking it through and your audience will have a better appreciation for your brand in the end.

Happy selling!

Store Builders and Your Customers

If you’ve been thinking about getting a storefront builder for your ecommerce website, you should skip the internal debate and just go for it. Store builders make life easy for merchants. You can update your inventory and process orders faster and better, making life simple for you.

But much more than a store builder’s benefit to merchants is how it affects your customers. A storefront software makes searching, selecting and ordering products easy for your potential customers. Here are some functions that a storefront builder can incorporate into your online store:

• Product Browsing – A storefront software makes product navigation easy. In a quick glance, your site visitor can easily tell what products you sell. The store builder becomes your repository for all product-related information such as the product name, SKU, description, price and photos. But more than just the ability to display, it also enables searching within products and displaying categories for easier access to the products.
• Shopping Cart – For most storefront builders, the shopping cart is already built-in. As discussed in previous blog posts, the shopping cart holds much value for an online store. First, it acts like the traditional shopping cart where your customers can temporarily keep their chosen products while continuing to shop. Second, and more importantly, it connects to your payment gateway, allowing you charge for purchases via credit card.
• Secure transactions -  The biggest contribution of a storefront builder to an online store is providing a venue for secure transactions. Store builders are designed to work with SSL certificates at check out. This is something that customers look for in any online store.

These three things are enough to make any merchant seek storefront builders for their own online store.

Happy selling!

Counting Down to Valentine’s Day

Hey online retailers! You have roughly 2 weeks left before Valentine’s Day arrives. Are you ready for another season of heavy purchasing? Like the past few years, gifts for women top searches during this season of hearts. Try targeting search terms related to flowers, personal electronics, jewelry, lingerie, perfume and chocolates and candies.

For the season, you should also try to come up with a new section of gift ideas (if you don’t already have one). Highlight the products that we’ve mentioned above. Do make sure you have a back up dropship supplier, in case your regular one is flooded with requests and you end up on the backorder list.

A change of color to match the blooming reds and the blushing pinks of the season would be a fun way to re-brand for the holidays. This should only take a quick click to change the colors in your Shopster store, just look for a template that offers this hue. To do this:

• Login to your Shopster account.
• From your dashboard, click on the “Store” tab.
• Under the header Build Store Brand, click on the link to Change Store Colors.
• Click on the color combination that you want to use.

If you don’t want to go to the extreme, try having a banners on your website to direct your buyers to your specials or sales, or just about any product you want to promote.

Enjoy selling during Valentine’s. Remember, it’s all about love, love, love.

Happy selling!

Our Best Value For Money Offer: PowerMerchant Pro Sale

Take advantage of the best deal from Shopster today. Our PowerMerchant Pro package is currently on sale from $119.95 a month to only $69.95 monthly. To make the deal even sweeter (after all, the season of hearts is coming up), we’re waiving the 1% transaction fee for a limited time only.

The PowerMerchant Pro is one of our most popular packages. It allows subscribers to list as much as 2,500 products they can list in their stores, add to eBay or add to the Network. The package is also pre-configured with a payment gateway. It offers users a monthly store bandwidth of up to 10GB. On top of that, the packages gives merchants full access to Shopster’s store template selection as well as to Shopster’s Network directory and over 1.5 million products in the virtual warehouse. You can also do bulk product uploads with the PowerMerchant Pro. To top it off, gain the marketing advantage that you need with our bonus $25 Google Adwords credit that comes bundled with the package

Grab the opportunity to be a PowerMerchant today! For more information, please visit our Pricing and Plans page here: http://www.shopster.com/pricing.html.

Happy selling!

How to Deal with Bad Reviews

Negative reviews about your store isn’t the worst problem you’ll encounter in the world of ecommerce. But it can be quite annoying, not to mention that it will actually impact the amount of visitors your online store is getting. As such, it is best to deal with the bad review swiftly and as professionally as possible.

First, you need to find out what people are saying about you. You can do this by setting alerts for your brand name. Both Google and Yahoo offer this service. To get the exact brand name, enclose it in double quotes. For example: “brand name” and “brandname.com”.

If you find that you are receiving a number of complaints from former clients, then it’s time to take action. Here are some steps you could take to control your online reputation:

1. Have a frank discussion about the person who made the review. In most cases, these reviews will either go to merchant review websites or personal blogs. If you are being attacked based on a previous transaction that didn’t go smoothly, get the details of the transaction first. Then, send a private message or an email to the concerned individual explaining your side of the story.
2. Avoid any future incidents from happening. This is just part of good customer service. If you are repeatedly getting complaints about the same issue, then it would be best to nip it in the bud. Do a root cause analysis and address it as best you can.
3. Recognize that not everything can be fixed. Just like not all criticisms warrant a response, there are also things that are beyond your scope for fixing. Take it with a grain of salt and work on the immediate items that you can act upon first.
4. Do not take the defensive stance. This is where most corporations go wrong when it comes to responding to bad reviews. Emotions have a proper place, and this is not it. Stay factual and deal with the situation with a bit of humility. You’ll find that your customers are more likely to trust you again if you are clear about what you can do to correct a situation and you are able to handle situations in a professional manner.
5. If all else fails, walk away. There are times when your firefighting just won’t work. If the situation goes from bad to worse, learn to walk away from it. Thank your critic for their opinion and let them know you understand their perspective, and leave it at that. Don’t let it go further than that.

Handling the situation in a calm manner and choosing your words wisely are your best defense against bad reviews. But nothing is second to actually providing good customer service to prove them wrong.

Happy selling!

New Law Affects US eCommerce

If you are like many online sellers today, the US would be a sizeable market for you to work with. If this is the case, then you should be aware of the new law passed late last year. The “Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act” (S. 3386) aims to protect the American online consumer certain aggressive sales tactics on the Internet.

The law looks into some aspects of ecommerce such as “data pass” or the practice of exchanging payment for customer’s billing information – including credit card and debit card numbers – with third party sellers.

The law also looks at “negative options” – this is the practice of some merchants to automatically enroll members into a paid membership club after a free trial period. The said consumers are then charged periodically until they affirmatively cancel their membership.  

The heart of the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act are the new requirements for ecommerce websites before they can charge or attempt to charge any consumer’s financial account. This includes clear and conspicuous disclosure of all material terms and express informed consent from the consumer prior to charging.

While it aims to protect the consumer, the new law is also fair to online sellers. Any violation of this law would be classified as an unfair or deceptive act and practice under the Federal Trade Commission. Penalties include a fine of up to $10,000 per violation and civil action.

You can find out more about the Act here: http://commerce.senate.gov/public/?a=Files.Serve&File_id=34de7a0c-ad3e-431a-a1ad-131c5e146833

Stay well-informed of the laws that exist in your current target markets to avoid any hassle in the future.

Happy selling!