Current Affairs by MonkeySimon - Creative Commons Attribution License

Among my daily readings today I found an interesting piece over at MediaPost by Laurie Sullivan (was actually posted a few days ago, I’m behind in my reading) titled Online Retailers Have Opportunity To Influence Consumers, that could prove to be good news for those retailers/etailers who “get it”.

The story is based on a research study from Bazaarvoice and Richrelevance, and while some of the numbers are scary for retailers, for example that 48% of consumers plan to reduce offline and online spending in the near future, there are some good signs and implacations from the study too.

For instance, suggested sales and impulse buys appear to have risen steadily since 2004. These are items the consumer didn’t set out to purchase, but were enticed to by smart–and often “at the checkout”–promotions.

The takeaway if you run a retail site is simple, cross-promote your merchandise and be sure not to waste any white space in your checkout process pages.

If customers are browsing the latest Horror DVD releases on your site, be sure you also suggest some older Horror titles along with Thriller/Suspense titles as well. If it’s related, suggest it. You may be surprised at the impact to your bottom line.

And on your checkout pages, you’ve already got a buying customer who is entering their credit card information, just prior to them clicking the “Pay Now” button is a prime time to suggest additional items.

And again, if you can set it up so that the items you suggest at this point are related to the items the customer has in their shopping cart already, the chances of adding to the sale are greatly increased.

Another interesting takeaway from the article for me was the information on review sites. It seems up to 77% of online shoppers rely on ratings and reviews when making purchasing decisions.

That number may be slightly based on users of  the giant retail sites like Amazon and eBay which have ratings and reviews built in to their services, but it’s still interesting to see that above traditional advertising streams, people want and trust the reviews and ratings their peers provide.

This gives retailers a huge openinto help influence and guide their visitor’s buying decisions in a completely open and transparent manner.

Setup a simple ratings and review system on your site. Good or bad, let your customers and visitors share their thoughts on you and your products. Heck, encourage them to do so.

Don’t worry about negative comments, and NEVER become defensive to them.  Use them as an opportunity to reach out to an unhappy or unsatisfied customer. Find out what went wrong, and how you can make it better.

You may get that single customer back, or you may not… but if others see the discussion they will realize that you care about your customer’s experience and that’s uber-PR for you.

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Technorati Tags: etail, recession, retail

Well, my extended holiday vacation is over now (boo hoo) and its time to get back to work again. I hope you had a wonderful holiday season and wish you a very happy and profitable New Year ahead.

To that end I’m hopefully going to make my first posting of 2009 a huge help for all of you who have eCommerce and/or retail sites online.

One of the biggest hurdles you face with an eCommerce or retail site, especially if you’re running an affiliate site from merchant data feeds, is simply being able to stand out from the crowd in search results.

When the title, description and even product images you publish are the same as every other affiliate using the same data feed it limits what you can do on-page to stand out.

If you’re a decent programmer and have a lot of time (or resources for hiring freelancers) you can always add unique content to be displayed on your pages on a product by product basis. That’s a great thing to do in-fact, however its a little advanced for most people.

So, I wanted to take a look at what the average person could do with their eCommerce or retail site that might give them an edge over their competitors.

The easiest and best (in my opinion) option is to focus heavily on your category pages. This serves a dual purpose. In a normal eCommerce or retail site you’re going to have 3 tiers to your site structure. The top tier is your home page, the second (or middle) tier is your category index pages, and the third tier will be your individual product pages.

In a perfect situation you will be able to make your individual product pages unique from your competitors and spend resources building backlinks directly to the products. However, for the average person using data feeds that’s not a viable option.

So, the next best thing is to focus on your category index pages.

In most cases the system or script you use for displaying your merchant’s data feed as a web site will have separate template files for the category indexes, so you won’t need to know much (if anything) about web scripting beyond very basic HTML to make edits to these.

I want to make sure I’m clear on what I’m talking about here, so lets assume you’re running an Electronics retail site. Your main home page is going to describe what your site offers and in most cases link to each of your categories such as “Computers”, “Printers”, “Scanners”, “Home Audio”, “Home Video” and etc.

Since you’re likely to have hundreds or even thousands of actual products in the inventory its not feasible to link to all of the products from a home page, so category index pages are used to keep your site navigation orderly.

Many site owners recognize that link building for every individual product is an overwhelming chore, especially when you’re first starting out, but where they often go wrong is they instead focus initially on simply building links to their main home page.

Home page links are fine, but they’re easy to get and if your site suddenly goes from Zero links to a thousand links all pointing only to the home page then the search engines are going to view that as unnatural and fishy.

So again I say, focus on your category index pages. Add unique content to each one and spend your link building time gaining links directly to these instead of your home page.

I said this serves a dual purpose and here it is: your category index pages should list individual products in that category, so in building strength and authority for your category index page you’re also building some strength and authority for those individual product pages too by proxy.

In addition, your category index pages should also link back to your main home page too. So again by building strength for your category indexes you’ll be building strength for your home page as well.

Remember, “link juice” or authority flows through links, so go out and get links to your category index pages and that “juice” will flow to them and through them to your individual product pages along with your home page.

Another good idea is to control your site strength and authority by not leaking it onto non-money pages. For example, if you’re selling or promoting sales then you should absolutely have an “About Us” page, a “Privacy Policy” and other pages that let your customers know who they’re dealing with and what to expect. Those pages are important to the visitors you already have, but aren’t useful to bringing in new customers via search results.

So, make sure you block those pages from being indexed in your robots.txt file and when linking to them from other pages of your site use the rel=”nofollow” tag in the link code. In other words, make sure your customers can find these pages, but also make sure search engines ignore them. Otherwise they’re just sucking your strength and authority away from where you really want it–on the pages that will bring you new customers.

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Technorati Tags: eCommerce, link building, retail

At the request of a friend I met today with a small group of young, aspiring webpreneurs. These are exactly the kind of people I hope to be connecting with here on the Leap blog, so I was excited about getting a more personal interaction and some instant feedback.

The meeting was very productive, the people were great and I learned a little about how the things I was talking about (the same things I write about here) were being received. Not all of it as I expected or intended, so that will help me do better here going forward.

Here are 2 things I took from it that I wanted to share right away here.

Where’s The Beef?

The big question all of them had for me was did I think now was a bad time to start a web business of any kind?

That’s a fair question and I had anticipated it might come up. Attempting a very poor Senator Ted Stevens impression, I coldly yelled “NO!” to the room. They laughed, but I’m not sure they really knew why.

Here is my reasoning as I explained it to them. Right now lots of small operations are going down. Heck, lots of big companies are dropping to. It’s a terrible time to be an established business with operational costs that were budgeted long before this current down turn hit.

It’s a fact of business that the bigger and more established you become, the more intricate and detailed everything gets, the more you have to operate on a projected budget and the harder it becomes to react to real time conditions.

So when things get tight they have to trim costs in areas other than where they really want to. So people lose jobs, service and support levels decrease, the company image takes hits… it just snowballs. And ultimately, some go completely under.

And while all of that is sad, remember that we’re talking about real people losing their jobs, but the flip side to that is these companies which go under leave a void in their marketplaces, and for the nimble startup who isn’t working on projections from numbers of last year yet that’s an opportunity to launch from.

This applies to companies and startups of all sizes, even the lone-ranger home based startup.

Right now, I assure you, there are a lot of people who have been struggling to make a go at Internet Marketing–maybe you’re one of them–and they are debating with themselves over giving up or plowing forward.

Some will quit. It’s sad to see someone give up their dreams but completely understandable. There are bills to pay, hungry mouths to feed. A steady paycheck from anywhere becomes very attractive when everything seems to be going against you.

But some will stay with it. Those who do will find new elbow room in their niches as others leave. Suddenly they go from being Guppies to Sharks in the same tank.

My point is that if you can afford to do it, then I believe this is a opportunistic time to start up.

It isn’t an easy time. Just because someone else left a void in the marketplace doesn’t mean customers who weren’t spending money with them will buy your products, they may still not spend money for a while and you’ll have to be ready for that.

But, with less crowded waters it is an opportunity for the noobie to really learn how to swim them. To become intimate with your market and get to know your customer’s needs and expectations, so you’ll be fully prepared for the inevitable economic upswing when it comes and they start spending again.

AdSense is great for site publishers! Except for most of the time when it’s the wrong choice…

I talked with the group today a little bit about adsense. And after a few minutes I realized that I was giving them the wrong impression (in my opinion) that adsense is always a reliable and safe revenue stream.

In-fact, I think it is when used on the right kind of web site. But I also think it’s a waste and counter-productive for a majority of web sites.

Here’s what I really think about it in-case I’ve given the wrong impression here on the blog in the past.

If you run a web site where visitors might be looking for a service oriented solution to some problem, then adsense is a fantastic way to monetize your pages.

Put yourself into the mind of the common visitor to your site. What problems are they going to be facing and seeking solutions for? Are the solutions to those problems typically process or product based?

If the answer is process based then you have a good site for running adsense on. Especially if the process is usually performed by some type of professional.

However, if the solution is typically product based, meaning any sort of tool or even a learning aid that would help your visitor eventually perform the process for themselves with no professional help required, then you would be foolish to put adsense on your pages and earn pennies for clicks where you could have earned dollars by putting an affiliate ad for the product in that same place.

I know adsense is easy to setup and start seeing fast money with, but it’s small potatoes compared to what you could earn with the same page real estate through an affiliate product.

So, when appropriate I love adsense, but most of the time I just don’t think it’s appropriate.

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Technorati Tags: AdSense, internet marketing

If you run an eCommerce shopping site built from affiliate data feeds (and many of us do) then you’ve probably encountered that giant obstacle we often face with this “easy to use” catalog building architecture… the lack of ability to create a comprehensive inventory search feature for your visitors.

Since data feeds aren’t actually databases, and most CMS systems that import products from data feeds to build your site pages for you don’t do any sort of conversion on the data which would lend itself to creating a decent site search index, giving your customers the simple (and expected) ability to search your catalog can be a tough task even for those of us who program regularly, for the non-programmer it’s near impossible.

There are some 3rd party options, and Google’s site search service has been a long favorite in cases like this, but they’ve all basically been less than spectacular in performance.

Mainly due to the fact that only the pages of your site which were indexed by the search engine or service would be available to searchers, so some old and most new pages on your site wouldn’t appear in any results for your shoppers. Not good.

(more…)

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Technorati Tags: eCommerce, Google, site search

I’ve talked here before about how I’ve taken a lot of what I learned in my life of brick and mortar retail sales and applied it online. It’s true that many of the concepts transfer from real world to online store quite well.

One example is cross-merchandising where you build a page or site about one topic then promote multiple related products on it. For instance, if you visit the Butcher’s aisle at your local grocery store you’re likely to find not just meats on display, but also Steak and Bar-B-Q Sauces too.

The reasoning is simple and sound, a customer might just be there for the meats but by displaying the sauces that often go with those meats you can spawn “impulse” or “reminder” purchases of the sauces to generate additional sales.

That transfers to the online world perfectly. If you run a web site about web coding or programming then you would be foolish to not be promoting web hosting services and coding/programming software tools on your pages.

Your visitors are there for the information on web coding, and it’s a good bet that while they’re interested in the topic many won’t yet have a hosting account or the software tools they’re eventually going to need–so you can use your information resource as a platform for promoting those related tools and earning commissions for yourself.

However, there are also certain points about retail that don’t transfer to the online world naturally.

The biggest is the assumption that visitors to your online store are shopping.

Think of a guy sitting at home playing Madden Football 2008 on his X-Box. He’s playing and having fun, but is a little disappointed because it’s last years version so the player rosters are outdated and he doesn’t have his favorite rookie from this season to use.

So, he makes the decision to buy the latest 2009 version of the game and get the updated rosters as well as the new feature or two they include each year.

Does he go online to buy it? Probably not.

There’s always exceptions, but most people in this guy’s shoes would jump in their car, drive to Wal-Mart, buy the game and go home happy. Very few are going to make the decision to buy the game and then do it online where they’ll have to wait for it to be shipped to them.

Then who are all those people visiting your online store?

A majority of them are potential shoppers who are in the middle of the decision making process. They haven’t decided to buy the game yet, they’re going through an internal debate over whether or not the game is worth $50 to them right now.

Most site owners I’ve talkied with seem to get this, yet they don’t take the logical next step to improve their online sales.

Think about what you see on most product description pages of online stores:

• the product name in the title
• a brief description of the product features and options
• a pretty product picture
• the price point and a “Buy Now!” button

Everything a shopper needs to make the decision and purchase, right?

Well, sure if they’re ready to make the purchase. And maybe a few now and then will even make up their minds while looking at your page and buy from you–but still you’re not really giving them anything that a dozen other retail sites could are you, so why would your page convince them to buy the game today and from you?

Change the question!

In a brick and mortar store the majority of people coming through the door are ready to buy something so the retailer really just needs to make their products easily findable and the checkout process customer friendly to get sales.

But online that’s reversed and a majority of your visitors are likely still in the decision making process over a purchase, so you have to retool the process to fit.

One simple way to do this is to take the average product display page and change the title to change the question.

Instead of having “Madden 2009″ as the bold page title across the top of your product sales page, use something like this:

Who Doesn’t Want to be Super Bowl MVP?

Madden 2009

And then below that will be your product description, image and purchase button.

That simple addition of “who Doesn’t Want to be Super Bowl MVP?” right at the top like that changes the question completely for your visitor as soon as the page loads in their browser.

They came to your page debating whether the game was worth $50 to them, but now they’re debating whether the joy and excitement of feeling special when they become Super Bowl MVP is worth $50.

It changes and personalizes the decision process to transfer the focus from the product to the customer.

That’s huge because people rarely have an emotional investment in products, it’s easy to enter the purchase decision process with a “take it or leave it” attitude.

But, we all have a huge personal investment in our own happiness–so if you can reframe the question visitors are debating to be about them instead of the product you’ll find more people willing to spend their money and also willing to spend more money.

$50 can be a lot to spend on a game for anyone watching their budget, but $50 for personal happiness won’t be the same mental obstacle for most people.

I just did this very thing on a retail site that sells Halloween Costumes as part of the product line over the past 2 months, and while retail sales in general are down this year my site saw a 70% increase over the same period from last year.

I directly attribute the majority of that sales increase to my changing the question in visitor’s minds.

All I did was add an image of a very poor attempt at a home-made Halloween costume to my costumes product pages, then basically asked “which will you wear to the party?” so it compared the bad visual with the costume on the page.

Instead of debating whether to buy a costume, or how much they were going to spend on a costume this year… I changed the question for my visitors to “do you want to look good, or do you want to look like a fool?”

And I’m happy to report that a lot of my site visitors prefer to look good.

So, my secret to selling products online is simple, DON’T! Don’t sell the product, change the question and sell the happiness or other benefit for the customer from your product display pages.

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Technorati Tags: purchase decisions, retail, selling