E-Commerce Backpack

Contains about e-commerce information

Category: E-Commerce

The Most Popular Payment Options For Ecommerce Website

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An eCommerce site must always have multiple payment options. If you run a shopping site, and you only have one payment method, you may be leaving thousands of dollars on the table. So what are some of the must-have payment options?

Paypal.

Everyone knows about Paypal. If you are not using Paypal, you are isolating a huge group of people. Paypal is a payment solution that allows its members to make payment without having to use a credit card. The credit card info has already been stored in the Paypal account. All the member has to do, is to login to his or her paypal account when making payment. That means entering an email address and a password. That is far more convenient than having to take out the credit card and enter the credit card numbers into the payment form.

In the event that a customer does not have a Paypal account, he or she can still proceed with payment without having to sign up for an account. In this case, the check out process would be very similar to the usual check out process. The customer will have to enter the credit or debit card number.

In addition, you can easily integrate Paypal into your shopping site as most eCommerce software supports Paypal.

Google Checkout.

Google is becoming a highly competitive player in the payment solutions space. Like Paypal, it also has millions of members. You can easily add Google Checkout buttons to your site by copying and pasting some code snippets.

Google Checkout is especially important if you are promoting your eCommerce site using Google’s very own pay per click advertising system. When you create an add in the system, your ad appears on the right hand side of the search results. If your site supports Google checkout, a small little shopping cart will appear in your ad. Visitors will know that your site supports this payment method just by viewing the ad.

This increases conversion rates because payment by Google checkout is very fast and convenient. For customers who have used Google checkout before, all they have to do is to enter their email address and password (just like Paypal). There are no lengthy forms to fill up. If he or she is a first time user, a new account will be created.

Conversion rates tend to be higher when you offer Google Checkout as a payment option because of the trust factor. Some customers may be afraid to make a purchase because they are unwilling to share credit card information with merchants. With Google checkout, they won’t have to share private information.

2Checkout.

2CO has been around for many years now. This is a payment processor that allows you to accept payments by credit or debit cards. Unlike Paypal and Google Checkout, customers will have to fill in their credit card info when making a purchase. The payments will be sent to 2CO, who will then verify the payments. The revenues will then be sent to the merchants via direct bank transfer or check.

Worldpay.

This is a very popular payment processing solution that is used by many large corporations. You must have your own merchant account if you want to use Worldpay. The setup allows revenues to be sent directly into your bank account.

Questions to Ask Yourself When Setting Up Ecommerce

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For years now e-commerce has been continuously evolving and transforming the shopping experience. It isnt to say that brick and mortar stores are necessarily on the decline, but rather innovative bells and whistles have been added to the industry. If you had mentioned the term e-commerce to anyone a few years ago, the majority would have answered with, “Oh its like Ebay and Amazon” or “Its online shopping.” The fact of the matter is that trying to compare it to anything else is only going to be relevant for that particular time period.

With the release of every new technology, a new way to attract and retain customers is simultaneously born. Try explaining to someone before the introduction of smart phones and tablets, that one day they will be able to buy products not only from the comfort of their own PC at home, but also in public transport, while waiting for an appointment at the doctors office, or even on a treadmill at the gym. And with the recent introduction of wearable technology such as Google Glass among others, the e-commerce experience and shopper behavior is only going to further evolve.

When e-commerce first began to take off, typically the shopper would order a product online and wait four to six weeks for it to arrive. Today that model has been reversed. Individuals preview a number of different products on a number of different devices, reserving or buying online but picking the product up in person. It is killing two birds with one stone so to say. The shopper looks at merchandise when its convenient for them without having to take time out from their schedule to visit a store, not to mention eliminating the shipping and handling process completely.

Questions, Questions, Questions

If you are a retailer who is reading this, naturally you are concerned, quite discombobulated, and have many questions in respect to how you will keep up with the never ending cycle of technological advancements and fluctuating shopper behavior:

Am I effectively engaging my target audience and how much should I invest in it?
Am I getting the most use out of my customer databases?
How can I predict customers behavior?
How can I offer customers the products they want but werent aware of the fact until they were shown to them?
What can I do to improve my online business visibility?
How user friendly is my on-line platform?
How can I increase the number of visitors to my site and keep them there for longer than 10 seconds?

Who holds the key?

The best ally a retailer of any product can have against volatility in todays market is a reliable technology partner who is constantly informed about the changing market trends and is always able to offer the right solutions at the right time, before it is too late! There is a reason for the saying, “Knowledge is power.”

Ecommerce and client orientation.

How to combine two terms?

The rapidly transforming industry makes a retailer confront the issue of how to stay relevant and keep pace in such situation. Moreover new tendencies and technologies that appeared recently the entrepreneur pay more attention to client orientation of their services. For example would you really buy new iPhone or MacBook if you had to lose half an hour of your expensive time while searching on their tangled website? I bet that you wont. Thats why Apple services is extremely client oriented and even intuitive. As you may notice from your personal experience this approach works for both small firms and international enterprises. Isnt it sweet when you come to a coffee shop next to your door and the barista knows which syrup you like the most in your latte? It is easy to focus business philosophy on the clients needs when online shopping is not an option for your business. But now the status quo has changed.

So what is the most challenging point of eCommerce client orientation? To fit demands of the client you definitely should think of device diversity that is in every-day use. Think of it: even if your website is profitable, at some point your user will stand up from his PC and move along with his smartphone or tablet in hand thats where all the troubles start for you. The chinese say: A good client doesn’t change shop in three years, a good shop doesn’t change clients in three years. So lets see what is the best option for you to follow. OmniChannel is the key to your clients heart and wallet. One of the ways to explain OmniChannel is: cross channel being done well. But real OmniChannel goes well beyond this definition its not only understanding of customer needs its predicting of what your user has in mind. Allow customers to own their data and experience, then give them the ability to use it to guide creation and context of every future experience and youll reap the harvest of your efforts.

eCommerce Trends to Watch This Holiday Season

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Black Friday and the holiday shopping season are fast approaching, and customers know this just as well as retailers. Based on last year, between Labor Day and mid-November we can expect online customers to change their behavior by deferring purchases. As an industry, we have conditioned our customers to expect exceptional offers in the run up to Black Friday.

At SeeWhy, we track both conversions and shopping cart abandonment rates, and you can see this change in behavior in the data. Shopping cart abandonment rates normally average 70 percent, i.e. 7 out of every 10 people that place items in the shopping cart do not complete the transaction. But last year from Labor Day through November 15, the number of online sales fell by almost 56 percent compared with the volume for the previous month, and the shopping cart abandonment rate shot up, peaking at 83 percent.

But once holiday promotional offers were rolled out, the transaction volumes rose sharply, and the abandonment rate fell dramatically. You can see this in the graphs below.

Note also how the day of the week is very significant: During the weekends, customers were researching, not buying. The pattern of high shopping cart abandonment rates during the weekend is normal throughout the year as customers research online before potentially making a purchase during the week. However, this pattern was much more pronounced from mid-September through mid-November, reflected in a peak abandonment rate for the year.

What happened in mid-November, of course, was that Black Friday-specific promotions were being rolled out across the board, triggering seasonal buyingnot browsingbehavior and the ramp up to the peak on Cyber Monday.

Based on last years pattern, we should expect that, until the big Thanksgiving promotions get rolled out in mid-November, many customers will defer purchases, having become conditioned not to purchase online but to wait.

This reinforces what we have known for decades; promotions shift the timing of revenues and may not provide significant lift overall.

Well be monitoring both the discounting trends and the shopping cart abandonment rates through the rest of the holiday season, and it will be interesting to see whether the Holiday 2010 will be a rerun of 2009.

E-commerce Solutions Accommodating Specific Needs

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A complete, front-to-back e-commerce solution or the tools necessary to successfully complete an online purchase and is a part of the free or paid shopping cart package offered online. An E-commerce solution caters to your specific needs with the right solution that can serve fruitful. There are a variety of e-commerce solution tools to accommodate your specific need, complete web store hosting and maintenance, pulling pricing, tax, shipping, stock, and order total web and email order processing, electronic software delivery (ESD) that supports real-time credit card processing, web customer service response, specialized IT team for your technical support and integrated fulfillment solutions. An entire storefront can now be created simply by adding a “Buy now” button to the site. Customers can place an order on our secure system and get instant verification of product availability, pricing, tax calculation, shipping cost, total order cost and order confirmation.

The extensible e-commerce solution in most of the e-commerce websites is powered by industry leading technology with enterprise web store solutions that are easy to deploy and maintain to integrate with critical business operations with advanced discounting and promotional strategies implemented to the optimum level with a Microsoft SQL Server database or Oracle 10i Server that offers stability and scalability across web servers to quickly deploy sophisticated e-commerce solutions that integrate with critical business systems for streamlined sales and fulfillment processes, to provide with a rich shopper experience, enterprise modules, design, custom development, and training services to ensure rapid deployment of productive skills.

E-commerce websites have their very own customer service representatives who are very courteous, professional, and well trained to offer all required assistance 24/7 relevant to the e-commerce solutions provided. Representatives have up-to-the-minute information at their fingertips using integrated ordering system to offer accurate and expedient service. Within seconds they can assist your customers’ needs, from taking an order, answering product and billing questions to tracking an order and providing an RMA. These quick, efficient and cost-effective services have resulted in very high customer satisfaction for both our clients and their customers. E-commerce solutions are easy to implement and used successfully via the call center phone system that incorporates efficient skill based and result oriented routing for the calls to get automatically distributed to the most qualified and trained representatives for efficient, high quality service. The representatives take care of the phone orders, pre-sales questions, inside sales, upgrade order processing, technical support, back office accounting, data entry, online chat / live Chat, Email and fax correspondence, direct mail processing, shipment tracking, credit card processing and literature requests.

Visit the most acclaimed of them all with the added advantage of integrating free or paid shopping cart with advanced e-commerce solutions coming to you with flawless payment processing.

Easy Tips for Ecommerce SEO

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Ecommerce websites are light on original, textual content, making it difficult for their webmasters to garner editorial links. And since content and links are so important in SEO, optimizing ecommerce websites may seem like an impossible feat. Fortunately, by following these 8 easy tips, you can get your ecommerce website to rank highly in no time.

1.Include expert product reviews of at least 300 words for each product you sell. Not only do product reviews make your site more linkable and improve the overall user experience, they also allow you to include more unique content, which search engines love.

2.Create unique product descriptions. Rather than utilizing the descriptions provided by a manufacturer or supplier, rewrite product descriptions so they are original and contain target keywords. Otherwise, the descriptions on your site will be duplicates of the descriptions on other peoples sites. The wordier your product descriptions, the better. Rewriting all of the product descriptions will be overwhelming, so start with descriptions of your 10 most important products.

3.Add descriptions to category pages. Category pages are important to ecommerce SEO, and you can make them even more valuable by adding descriptions of at least 100 words. The descriptions must be unique and contain target keywords.

4.Allow users to submit content. User-generated reviews not only enable you to fill your site with unique content, they also vastly improve the usability of your site. People love to read user reviews and contribute their own. Furthermore, user reviews often heavily influence peoples buying decisions.

5.Add a cool widget, tool, or piece of content to your site that attracts links. People will be more likely to link to your site if you provide something that is fun, useful, or valuable. For example, if you sell bandannas, you could provide a free information product that teaches customers 50 ways to tie a bandanna.

6.Add a buyers guide that educates website visitors about the products you sell. Buyers guides should be informative, unique, and keyword-rich. Buyers guides improve the linkability of your website in addition to providing your website visitors with valuable information that helps them make smarter buying decisions.

7.Optimize your websites home page for your most important keywords or for the names of the most profitable products you sell. If you also own a local store, make sure to include local search terms (i.e. toys in Denver) so you can drive local search traffic to your site. Treat your home page like your storefront. Include direct links to the various categories of your site on the home page to make it easier for visitors to find exactly what theyre looking for. When you add text links to your home page, incorporate them into textual content because it looks more attractive than featuring a long list of text links.

8.Add an education and information section to your website to increase linkability. The section could include informative “how to” content and videos. For example, if you sell toys for toddlers, you can create a section that includes articles and videos that teach people activities and games that they can play with their toddlers.

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