7 Most Common Ecommerce Problems

Written by Shinta Yanirma on October 3, 2011 in Ecommerce Tips and Trick - No Comments

Ecommerce Isn’t Everything

Ecommerce is not an efficacious remedy for your business. Yes, it is important and can help to expand your geographical customer reach, blah blah blah. But you can’t just set up an online stores, pour your products and services into it, and wait for good things fall down from the sky. Just like another form of business, ecommerce has its own advantages and disadvantages.

The most common ecommerce problems are usually the unrecognized ones. They seem to be just the little disruption at first, yet they are crucial. Never ignore them, because they may mightily influence your sales amount for the upcoming period.

So, have you set your online stores free from these most common ecommerce problems? You know, just in case.

Web Copy For Your Ecommerce Site: Tips & Tricks

Written by Shinta Yanirma on September 19, 2011 in Ecommerce Tips and Trick - No Comments

In the ecommerce world, communication is the core requirement to do effective marketing effort. But, what kind of activities best describe the words “marketing effort”? Is marketing effort limited to campaign, advertisement, and special promo? IMHO, those examples of marketing effort are the conventional ones. Paraphrasing Jason Fried’s statement in his book “Rework”, today, marketing should not be a separated department from other functions. Accounting is a department, but marketing is not. Marketing should be in the company’s blood. It can be done in any company activity, by everyone; regardless of what job title he/she has.

Why We Shouldn’t Put Web Copy In Second Place

In the ecommerce world, web copy is one of several ways we communicate to external parties, espescially, customers and visitors (potential customers). This is why web copy is important and should be written in some way. You built an ecommerce site for some purposes, some of them may be:

sell products or services,
widen your customer geographical reach,
………. *insert something else here*.

Whatever your purpose is, you clearly don’t want visitors to just land in your site, wander a few seconds, then navigate away, do you?

The good news is you can prevent this unwanted thing happens. With great web copy, you can even persuade visitors to do what you want them to do (buy your product? be your client?), and build an audience that keep coming back over and over again.

Now, what characteristics should your ecommerce site have to be the closest representation of your company and establish good communication with customers? Keep reading.

Instant, Easy Tips To Be Practiced

For you who already have an ecommerce site, these tips are useful to reevaluate your current web copy. For you who are planning to have one, then these tips are useful to guide you prepare web copy, or to be a benchmark for selecting a freelance writer to do the job for you.

It should be the closest substitute of real talk. Imagine you are talking to your potential customers as you write some words. Imagine how bored you will be when someone is talking to you and all they talk about is themselves. You don’t want to make your site visitors get bored, do you? So use simple and to the point words as in real talk, and remember to use “you” in calling your site visitors.
Interesting user interface layout. Web copy isn’t your school old textbooks. Besides, eyes get tired faster when facing electronics device compared to reading books. This also one of the reasons why visitors barely read the entire content of a page. So, be creative.
Beautifully written web copy is useless unless search engines can find your ecommerce site, it is proven by some research said that +-80% visitors come off after find a site in search engines. So, what to do to be indexed by search engines, espescially Google? Choose the suitable keywords (and repeat it quite often in your posts), insert hyperlinks (it’s better when you link to existing posts on your site), and post regularly are the main successful techniques.
Persuade visitors to do what you want them to do. Firstly, decide the activity flow you want visitors to take. For example, do you want visitors to land on homepage then continue to read your blog, move to product page, and end up buying something? Insert link in each page to persuade them do so. After you’ve done with activity flow, now learn about persuasive post. If you write a post to persuade visitors buying a product, never pass these important concepts: (a) focus on describing what customers will get, not what your product technically offers, (b) tell them what problems they might currently have, and how your product will help solve it.

Hope these little tips help. Do you want to share some other helpful tips? Feel free to leave them on the comment box.

images credit: World of Gopher

How To Use Email Marketing Effectively Instead of Spamming – Part II

Written by Shinta Yanirma on August 18, 2011 in Ecommerce Tips and Trick, WP Ecommerce Tutorials - 2 Comments

Tokokoo Unique online store by categories

…have you read the How To Use Email Marketing Effectively Instead of Spamming – part I?

Learn From Other People’s Mistakes

A proverb in my neighborhood says, “It’s only donkey who fell twice in the same hole.” For you who are about to begin using email marketing, don’t do things that had been proven didn’t work. From the facts list above, we learn that there are some forbidden things,

Don’t do email marketing too frequently. Once a week is considered okay, but once every three days? Two days? That’s annoying. Some exceptions work, though. If you are having special event, it is okay to send your subscribers one or two additional emails.
Don’t do repetitive and boring email marketing. Don’t behave like a college sending education publication with the same format from time to time. Keep in mind that your subscribers do not have the obligation to read your emails. So, be creative. Use interesting layout, good-and-approaching words selection… be outstanding!
Do marketing, not spam. If you undertake the #1 and #2 excelently, well, the #3 is done, too.
Don’t do exactly the same as your competitors do. Be recognized.

how to use effective email marketing part ii

"Trash Mail" by Dirk Wegman

Load Your Gun and Shoot

No matter how good your plan is, it will remain a plan forever if you don’t execute it. Just make sure you read our helpful tips and tricks below so you hit the correct targets.

Understand whom you are trying to market to. Without the proper knowledge of the types of customers interested in a business’s products and/or services, marketing tactics fail, no matter the medium.
Put the “Subscribe to Our Newsletter” links on as much pages as possible at your website. Not too catchy, but enough to gain customers interest.
Maximize the social media benefit. Nowadays, who isn’t into social media? Put the Like and Tweet button on your website pages. Be active in both medias, build an audience, e.g. people who would come back checking your accounts everyday and help spreading the words about your products at no cost.
Put attention to the content. Instead of reading a very-ads-alike content, your subscribers must prefer a more-human content. Write the content as if you are telling your bestfriend about your great findings on the web.
If you are currently doing email marketing, don’t forget to analyze the state of the current marketing plan.
Set up your tomorrow email marketing strategies. Evaluate goals periodically to determine whether it’s okay to continue or it’s the time to change direction.

Those are the basic things about doing email marketing campaign. The rest are adjustable, depend on your business’ needs and goals. Good luck!

How To Use Email Marketing Effectively Instead of Spamming – Part I

Written by Shinta Yanirma on August 16, 2011 in Ecommerce Tips and Trick, WP Ecommerce Tutorials - 1 Comment

Let’s take a look on right bottom corner in Tokokoo home page. As a customer, what does snap into your mind when a website offers you to subscribe to their newsletters? Interested, or… kinda allergic that you neglect them by a quick glance? Now, when you act as ecommerce business owner and you are doing, or will soon do, email marketing, of couse you want them to be effective, don’t you? And by effective, it means increasing sales.

Use Two Points of View

To do effective email marketing, we must first think of what our customers want and what the statistics show. Sounds cliche, but it works. How will our sales increase if no one aims to read your ads (which some significant portion is done through email marketing)?

How to use effective email marketing - blender

"Chiller email blender" by Paul Mayne

Listen To The Statistics

You don’t live in utopia (e.g. where every subscribers read your email regardless of the contents), neither do I. That’s why some facts would definitely help you in planning your email marketing strategies. Relax, because we’ve got your back covered.

88% of B2C firms currently use email marketing and another 10% are planning to use it before December 2011.
72% of responding companies reported ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ return of investments for email marketing plans.
54% of people who unsubscribe from permission emails said the reason was due to emails coming too frequently.
49% of people who unsubscribe from permission emails said the reason was because content was repetitive or boring over time.
It should be noted that statistics state that peak hours for social media traffic is from 9am to 3pm, therefore, tweeting or Facebook posting during these hours could yield more results.
Ideally, according to one study conducted in 2011, the best hour to tweet is during the midweek or weekend at 5PM EST. Also, studies have shown that to maximize possible traffic on Facebook, posting at noon on a Saturday would give the best possible visibility.
40% of US and UK internet users said the reason for not regularly opening/reading email marketing messages is that they consider the message to be spam.
55% of mobile phone users with internet access check their email. This also coincides with the statistic that 13.6% of emails are opened on a mobile device or operating system.

To be continued…

Top UX Features For Your Ecommerce Sites – Part II

Written by Shinta Yanirma on August 15, 2011 in Ecommerce Tips and Trick, Resources - No Comments

Hi, people! Let’s recall Tokokoo blog post from a few days ago, Top User Experience Features For Your Ecommerce Sites. Today, we will continue our previous discussion about user experience features. If we had had user experience features like: Product Videos, Price Drop Alert, and Image Testimonials from Customer on the former blog post, now we are going to have Customers Review, Shop Together, and What Others Are Viewing. Sip and enjoy!

Customers Review

Customers Review – UrbanOutfitters.com

This user experience (like one in UrbanOutfitters.com) feature allows your customers to review your product. Their review (including ratings, comments, and their identity) will appear in each product description page. Just make sure if you are confident enough with the quality of your product so the bad ratings risk can be reduced. Otherwise, it would make those potential buyers think twice before buying your products, or worse, cancel it.

Shop Together

Shop Together – Buy.com

Which one do you prefer, go shopping all alone or pull someone to accompany you? If you already know which product to pick, maybe go shopping all alone is not a big deal. But in most situation, don’t we all need a second opinion? That’s why there are user experience features called Co-Shopping or Shop Together that connects different users from different areas, virtually. Some ecommerce sites also add up facility to chat online with their customer service.

What Others Are Viewing

What Others Are Viewing – Buy.com

Still on Buy.com ecommerce sites, right below the shop together widget, there is a column whose title is “what others are viewing”. Now, imagine yourself when visiting an online store. First, I bet you’ll click the Shop tab then select a product category that attracts you the most. Then, you browse their products, read some descriptions. If you get interested, maybe you’ll use the Shop Together user experience feature above. If not, mostly you’ll just close the web browser tab. That’s the use of this What Others Are Viewing: to prevent potential buyers to navigate away from the ecommerce sites while probably there are some other products that they’d like to buy.

That’s all for now. Any opinion?

Top UX Features For Your Ecommerce Sites

Written by Shinta Yanirma on August 3, 2011 in Ecommerce Tips and Trick - 1 Comment

Essentially, doing either offline business or online business makes no different. You still have to do continuous marketing, maintain unique brand image, keep up innovation, etc. It also applies for customer. Your aggressive online stores advertisement will do you no good unless your brand has gained customer attention and loyalty. One of the many ways to engage customers is to include some user experience (UX) features on your online stores.

But user experience features aren’t free. In some cases, they are very, very expensive. Selecting the right feature set is an exercise that should be as well-informed as possible, and should take into account available resources, industry best practices, and the competitive landscape.

What kind of user experience features that may be suitable for your online stores? Keep reading.

Product Videos

Product video -Nikicio.com

A minute of video is worth 1.8 million words, according to Dr. James McQuivey of Forrester, a leading technology research firm. Videos bring a product to life more than static images. It is also usable for almost any kind of product varying from software to apparel. Because of their potential for increasing sales as well as improving search engine placement, product videos are likely to become a standard user experience feature on e-commerce product description pages in the near future.

Price Drop Alert

Newegg’s price drop alert. -image by UXBooth.com

Price is a key determining factor for purchase decisions. It even matters more when customers consider to buy such products whose price has high tendency to decline, for example: electronic products and gadgets. It makes sense, then, to let customers know when the price of a product they have indicated an interest in drops. Hopefully, it would encourage customers to return and buy. As a return, you could set requirement for customers to give their email address.

Image Testimonials from Customer

Image Testimonials -Iwearup.com

There are some customers who have lost faith in product image displayed on the online store, espescially when the product physical appearance is the important thing, for example: furniture, shoes, jewelry, etc. These customers may have experienced “ads scam” from another sellers in the past that the products they got weren’t the same as they looked on the web. If you let customers to post picture of themselves with the products, those potential buyers might finally decide to buy.

There are plenty more, sure. So, which user experience feature had been used on your online store?

Online Store Owner: Don’t Get Slippery on Your Delivery

Written by Shinta Yanirma on November 3, 2010 in Ecommerce Tips and Trick - 1 Comment

One of the challenges for E-commerce website is delivering order on time. It was a very different way of selling when compared with traditional shopping. So how do we avoid mistakes on it?

When you sell physical items need to be shipped away, and then you will need some extra charges for shipping costs. Also you may need to arrange order-tracking for your delivery.

image: freeshippingday

Selling online means your customers could be from any country around the worlds. To avoid disappoint customers, you may tell them in the first place if you only deliver your products only for certain country or group of countries.

To attract more customers, usually online stores offers free shipping for purchase on certain prices. There are also choices for shipping in different carriers, for example by regular post or by priority courier. These types of things should be including for online store owner.

How About Digital Products?

image: payloadz

Don’t underestimate delivery on digital products for online store. It may seem much easier, but it was really not that simple.

Nowadays online store are possible to sell digital items, such as e-book, music or software download. The challenge is, because they are delivered online so customers expected to get it quickly after they have pay.

Typically, after customers pay and then delivery takes the form of a page or link on their profile so it can be downloaded. You can also complete it with license code.

So, online store merchants should have their system able to secure products before they get downloaded by customers. Also, provide account and email link which download can be done. One more thing, especially for online store who sell software, you might need a product code.

Getting the Report Done

Online stores need a program will help them easily receive and process orders from customers. You may also consider making special mark items are already shipped or on processed. Make sure your data on customers form required them to fill out their address as complete as possible.

There are also possibilities to have a mail-merge of data to import to offline system on your E-commerce websites. It is something you have to discuss with your web developer.

As a hint, you can answer these questions. Do you want the system linked to any other systems or maybe offline systems, such as accounting systems? Do you need the website generate invoices or you will rather organize it offline? And, there are a lot of possibilities to make your delivery processed easier for you and customers.

image: corbis

You may have to think to prepare offline staff that will receive calls about confirmation, delays or trouble in product delivery, beside email or instant messenger that customers usually comfort with.

Learning from successful store owners, usually they will automate their accounting processes in order to avoid any duplicating data on year-end calculation. Their solution is having an API on accounting systems which allow them to send transactions automatically from the store to the accounting package.

Remember, this is one of the reasons whether your customers will be loyal on your store or not. Their satisfaction on delivery is very crucial. So, a little sweat on it will be getting a prize eventually.

Have something else to say? Please kindly write on the box and share with us.

How to Engage Customers In Your E-commerce Website (Part 2)

Written by Shinta Yanirma on August 21, 2010 in Ecommerce Tips and Trick, WP Ecommerce Tutorials - No Comments

Make sure you read part 1 of this whole article before focusing on part 2. So you’re now understand the facts about having an online store which is not always smooth in the implementation and how hard it seems to attract customers to visit our site. Don’t give up now. Read on these articles which will guide and help you getting customers to your site.

The Secret to Marketing An Online Store

Mind Your Personality

Love your store.

So what is the number one secret to marketing your store? *Drum rolls please* The secret to marketing your online store is to keep your customer engaged with your website by showing them your personality. The secret is to keep your customer so interested in what you have to say that they don’t even realize that you are selling to them. And to accomplish this feat, you need to have engaging content.

Similar to a blog, if you have good content, the word will eventually spread, people will link to your website and you’ll get tons of organic traffic without having to spend much on advertising.

The more you can engage with customers, the more you’ll be able to sell. Instead of a direct sales pitch, show them that you are a real person and that you are passionate and care about your products.

Feedbacks

Yes, customers' feedbacks are important.

People sometimes want to read only negative reviews because they already have a positive impression of a product and want to know about disadvantages (intentionally or unintentionally) not mentioned by the provider. An unfair negative review could entice people to write positive reviews to mitigate the negative one and defend their favorite.

But don’t worry. In the absence of negative reviews, visitors will assume that all of your reviews are fake. No service or product is perfect. Potential customers want to know what could go wrong with it. But if they cannot sympathize with a negative reviewer, they may be inclined to purchase your product.

Ratings

Find out what customers' feel via ratings you provide.

Collecting ratings is a quick and dirty way to collect valuable product information from users. Ratings can be given in a second, and so they do not interrupt the user’s main activity and (usually) do not require them to log in. While ratings are a simple tool, make sure they are simple and straightforward: even tiny deviations from conventions can affect their usefulness.

Reviews

Reviews also can be a barometer for the value of your products.

You could ask customers to write reviews by e-mailing them, but be careful with timing. Customers may need time to form an opinion about your product. With an electronic device, they may know whether they like it within days. With a book, they may need weeks or months. In the latter case, asking for a review after a week could only annoy the buyer who will be very likely to block or ignore your e-mails in the future.

Social Networks

Spread words about your online store using social networking sites.

E-tailers (I mean you! ) have long known that nothing makes virtual cash registers ring better than word-of-mouth marketing. For these reasons, social media and online social networks can drive online shopping and spending. Pssst, I’m not talking about posting your new products’ URL in your social timelines. We talk about network here.

According to Charles Nicholls, founder of SeeWhy, a re-marketing services company, if you allow customers to log in to social networks via your own site, then you can track your biggest word-of-mouth customers. Social networking sites make it incredibly easy for your “sneezer” customer to share promotions and positive word-of-mouth marketing about your business in a single click with his or her network of friends. You can use Facebook Connect, tweet your new products on Twitter, or promoting via popular forums.

You should reward customers who spread positive words about your e-commerce business. Nicholls recommends that when customers share your promotion or message in their activity feed, you should reward them (through the social networking site) with a special offer or discount.

The conclusion is, making it easy for users to keep your product pages alive is a crucial aspect of an e-commerce website. Your environment should be inviting enough to involve your loyal customers as well as unhappy customers to submit their reviews. This makes your store looks open for any kind of responses, and thus, people will respect you and willing to browse your store for more.

How to Engage Customers In Your E-commerce Website (Part 1)

Written by Shinta Yanirma on August 17, 2010 in Ecommerce Tips and Trick, WP Ecommerce Tutorials - 1 Comment

So your online store has been built and you have been managing your products, buying goods from suppliers, and uploading your products’ photos and details into your site. Now you need people to find out about your store, have a not-quick look, then wouldn’t it be relieving if they also purchase things you sell? But how to make our site appear on the world wide web? How to attract people and make them sure that our great products are very worth their time and money?

Setting up people connections.

(P.S. Still confusing about how on earth you can create your own online store? Are you really prepared for that? To ensure you more, read what we have written about first things to consider before building an online store.)

Facts

One of the most influential factors in our buying decisions is the opinions of our friends and relatives. Likewise, a large majority of online shoppers now trust what other customers say about the products they buy more than the e-tailers themselves. The reason is that we trust people who are “on our side,” even if we do not know them personally.

People Hate Sales Pages On Social Media

Using Facebook to promote your online store.

Marketing your business on social media is all the rage right now but simply posting your online store URL on Twitter or Facebook is not going to get you customers. For one thing, most people are extremely suspicious of any type of sales page they encounter. Anything that even resembles a product page is just going to get passed on. By default, people are going to ignore you and the promotions you put on social media unless they know who you are.

You Need To Create A Connection

Spread words about your online store using niche marketing.

The key here is that the superior product isn’t always the one that sells and the decision to buy is not always about the product itself. The key is to make people want to buy from you and no one else. And to do that you need to make your store standout. If you can establish some sort of connection to your customers through your website or customer service, then you will have the upper hand.

Low Price is Not Everything

Besides low price, use your intuition, too.

Indeed, a customer may not buy from your because of superior product or lowest pricing. An experienced seller said that a few weeks ago when a customer of him was so impressed with the patience that he showed in answering her questions, she ended up placing his largest order so far. Good customer service really does make a big difference even when you’re selling a product! Put some respects for your customers, hear them, answer all the questions they ask clearly, remember to treat them like they are kings.

Now that the facts are in our laps and we see hot prospects are going around our store. Do they see us? Not yet. We should go call them initiatively, with the correct ways! So how to attract people to come to our site? What is the secret in taking their whole attention and making them sure that our products are awesome and that it is easy and safe to buy online? Just stay in tune in this blog, I’ll post the part two very soon!

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