Do You Make These Mistakes With Your Ecommerce Business?

As an ecommerce coach and mentor, I frequently get asked questions from store owners on many different aspects of how to run a successful online business. A large portion of the questions are different, but there are a handful that always make me step back and wonder how so many store owners can make the same mistakes time and time again—not know how to, or be willing to correct them—then ask why they are unable to generate sales.

In reality, this list of mistakes could be very long. There are so many factors that affect the success or failure of an online store. Afterall, running an ecommerce business is not as easy as some make it out to be—but it could be with the right blueprint.

If I developed a complete list of all the mistakes I come across while working with store owners, it would likely span many pages and be difficult to determine where to start prioritizing your attention. So what I have done is taken that overwhelming list and broke it down into what I consider the top fifteen mistakes—in no particular order—that many ecommerce stores make.

Here are what I consider to be the top fifteen mistakes most ecommerce stores make:

1. Thinking that driving more traffic to your website will increase sales. This is one I see all too frequently and is one that just drives me nuts. It’s this simple, if your website is not setup to convert traffic properly (which means you must understand your target market, ideal customer demographics and profiles to speak to them properly) then it doesn’t matter how much traffic you drive to your site … you’re sales will not increase.

   Furthermore, if you are targeting the wrong traffic type but your site is ready to convert, your sales will not increase. More is not always better—that is, unless the right elements are in place to maximize sales from it.

2. Weak site design in relation to your target market. Do you design your for your market or do you design your site thinking that alone will sell your product?

3. Not marketing enough or properly. You can’t generate sales if nobody knows you exist. Marketing is critical but it must be done correctly to gain the maximum benefit.

   I get store owners telling me they have had a site in place for “xxx” amount of time and still no sales … what’s wrong? That’s a loaded question as there is often a list of things they are missing, but I’m amazed to hear some reply “No” to me when I ask them “are you performing any marketing for your site?” Sometimes you gotta spend money to make money.

   If you aren’t willing to spend money to advertise then your chances of success are reduced and you can’t expect to magically generate sales.

4. Not testing your site to find what really works. Continual testing is a vital component to reaching the upper echelon of conversion rates. Another question I get from store owners is “how do these other stores achieve such high conversion rates?” Once again, the question is loaded.

   There a many multiple factors that contribute to achieving higher conversion rates. One of the common factors across all successful ecommerce stores who see some of the highest conversion rates is that they test all the time. If you ignore your site, you can’t be disappointed when your bottom line reflects it.

5. Not optimizing your product pages for increased conversion. Your product page has a single overall objective with sub objectives that help support and meet that main objective.

   If potential customers can’t get past your product page they have no chance of ever entering the checkout process (for some reason store owners have a hard time understanding this.) An optimized product page (from a conversion perspective) takes advantage of multiple factors that combined help the visitor do their job to achieve the objective.

6. Inadequate site usability. Usability in a basic sense reflects the “ease of use” with which a visitor can interact with your website. Proper usability is all encompassing. It’s role it so provide your customer with an easy, smooth, un-interrupted path to their destination—a sale. There are a number of things that can help you determine if usability is a problem and then help you improve upon this.

7. Lack of comprehensive marketing plan. This is one of the number one reasons most ecommerce businesses are destined for failure before they even start. Without a marketing plan you’re like a ship set sail in open waters without a compass.

   It doesn’t take that long with the right tools to complete a marketing plan. Your marketing plan is your guide for moving business forward. It is essential to your survival and success.

8. Too many obstacles to shopping. This is very much a usability issue and could have been included in the point six above. Adhering by the KISS principle is crucial to helping customers do their job.

9. Poor customer service. Do you answer your customers questions before they ask them? Knowing what they expect and at what moment will improve your customer service.

10. Failure to prepare a proper foundation for success. Proper planning is the first step toward ecommerce success. A weak foundation yields weak results. A strong foundation results in great rewards.

11. Poor order fulfillment. This is self explanatory for most … for others the answer is not so clear. One of the fastest ways (albeit not the only one) to lose a current customer is with poor order fulfillment.

12. Not taking advantage of optimizing the Customer Experience your business provides from beginning to end. If you don’t know what that means, or how to do it then you are in real trouble.

13. Poor checkout procedures. Don’t think that providing a checkout alone will close the sale. Without the right elements in place you’ll find the only thing that increases is your shopping cart abandonment rate.

14. Failure to focus and specialize. You can’t be everything to everybody. Doing so will get you no where.

15. Failure to provide proper customer assurances at the right times and in the right locations. A few simple tweaks of your site can mean the difference between increased sales or increased frustration.

Remember, this is just the tip of the iceberg in a long list of mistakes that prevent ecommerce stores from achieving success.

If you want to find out answers to all your questions, correct the mistakes you are making, and learn how to build a successful ecommerce business, I invite you to join me and the other store owners who have taken advantage of my online coaching system, Ecommerce Amplifier.

You’ll get instant access to a number of invaluable tools, resources, and expert advice, that help you maximize your online store—increasing conversion and winning more sales. Plus, I’ll also teach you the same six step blueprinted process I developed and use to help others build sustainable and successful ecommerce businesses—regardless of your level of experience.

Got any mistakes you want to add to the list? Post them in the comments section below, I’d love to hear them.

Open Source Ecommerce Winners and Losers of 2009

I just read this interesting article that gives the results of a year long process in which 23 free or close to free ecommerce platforms were reviewed.

Some interesting movement in a few areas—no surprise in others.

The rankings and findings are based upon the total number of Google pages reported for each program via boolean search methodologies at various monthly intervals combined over a period of time. So in essence this might tell how many “active” users there are of each platform (and even that could be false in some cases) but it doesn’t tell which of the carts performs best (which in my opinion is most important.)

By performs best I am talking closing the sale. A number of carts on the list I have seen or worked with and they simply lack the features (and support) needed for building a sustainable ecommerce business. Others on the list do a wonderful job of this. In my opinion, the ideal Open Source cart is rich with features that help it win the sale and is stable and friendly enough to enable scalability. I want a cart that has the features of some of the big guys yet is easy enough to understand for the end user.

A list of some of the features (a very small list mind you) I would see as important are:

1. The ability to cross sell and up sell products
2. Product reviews ability
3. Ability to run split testing with tools like Google’s Website Optimizer
4. Ability to conduct a recover cart type program for follow up on previously lost sales
5. Ability to easily integrate analytics (such as Google Analytics) into the framework—this includes ecom tracking and paid search conversion tracking
6. Ability to assign unique landing pages for targeting traffic to (outside of the catalog portion of the site)
7. Ability to control the checkout experience including the options of one page checkout, multi-step checkout and guest checkout.
8. Ability to integrate with and accept multiple payment methods easily including paypal.
9. Some type of sales reporting tool in the background
10. The ability to assign a unique home page apart from the design of the rest of the site
11. CSS Driven with the ability to easily change look and feel as needed without a lot of work
12. Complete customization of product pages including image rich features that rival the custom carts (zoom features, lightboxes, etc…)
13. Easily run and or automate promotions (both banners and coupons) on a pre-determined schedule that coincides with your promotional calendar.
14. SEO Friendly URLs
15. Ability to customize META Data, Titles, Descriptions, etc… down to the product level.
16. Integration with shopping comparison sites through automated data feeds

Again, this is just a small list of some initial items that come to mind off the top of my head.

Read more about the results of the year long review from Ecommerce Guide.

5 Easy Steps for Developing and Integrating a Social Media Plan

I’ve written several posts this year that explain how to use some of social media’s most popular functions. I’ve concentrated on Facebook and Twitter because they trend as some of the most popular social media sites in the world. While knowing how to use these sites is helpful, putting them to good use can be an entirely different proposition.

Similar to a business and its business plan, when you decide to start using social media to market your brand, you should also have a social media plan in place.

If you’re stuck on how to develop and integrate a social media plan, I’ve laid out five easy steps to get you up and running in no time at all.

Step 1. Alerts and Analytics. You’ll want to begin this R&D phase of your plan by checking your analytics, specifically, your keyword content. Keywords are not solely responsible for driving traffic to your site; however, they are a good indicator of what is leading people to your site. Once you’ve narrowed down your top 5-10 keywords and phrases, create email alerts with these words or phrases as topics. The alerts will keep you up to date on any online chatter taking place about your topics.  Be sure you’ve also set up an “ego” feed to alert you whenever your site or url have been referenced on another site.

Step 2. Check out the competition to determine how you will use social media. Head on to Twitter, Facebook and any other social media sites you’re considering so you can see what your competitors are doing. Be sure to observe the frequency of their posts or updates, any discounts they offer as well as how they’re communicating with their followers or fans. Do you want to follow a similar track? Will you use social media strictly as a marketing vehicle — talking about upcoming promotions or discounts — or will you use it to communicate with current or future customers?

Step 3. Create your accounts and promote the heck out of them. Once you’ve done your competitive analysis, factored in your keywords, and have seen the online chatter, you should feel comfortable enough to set up your accounts and start talking. “Talking” can be as simple as a “Hi, this is our website and this is what we do” or “Have you seen this great article on how to use ornaments all year round?” or even a “Welcome to our Facebook Page, Did you know we’re also on Twitter and we have a blog too?”. Once you have your accounts set up and conversations started, make sure you’re letting people know you’ve got a presence there. Facebook and Twitter both have badges and widgets you can add to your site. If you’re sending out electronic alerts, make sure you’ve added your Facebook and Twitter profiles to them as well. You want to make your presence known so others will follow and friend you, thereby increasing the odds of new customers.

Step 4. Launch a social media-based promotion. One of the best ways to see if your social media plan is working is to launch a social media-based promotion. Once your social media sites have been running smoothly for a few days (or weeks, however long is comfortable for you), begin to use your new friends and followers as a means to make a sale. Offer a Facebook friends discount or do a Twitter promotion and watch to see if anything converts to a sale. If it does, then you’ve witnessed your first social media marketing ROI. Not sure what to discount? Check back to your keywords to see what trends high for you. That’s what you should be promoting.

Step 5. Review and revisit your social media plan often. Don’t rest on your laurels once you’ve converted a social media promotion into a sale. Continue to review your analytics to see how much traffic you’re getting from your social media efforts. Make sure you also don’t drop off the face of the social media earth once you’ve landed a sale. Keep the conversations going and continue to promote and review your progress.

The How-to and Why of Twitter Lists for Ecommerce Retailers

Twitter’s recently added list functionality has turned the social networking site into a list-maker’s paradise.

If you’re asking yourself what the point is or why use a Twitter list if you’re an ecommerce retailer, then you’ve come to the right place. Below, you’ll find a brief introduction to Twitter lists as well as reasons why web retailers might want to use them.

What are Twitter Lists and how do you use them?

In the simplest definition, Twitter lists are a way to organize – into lists — brands, associations or people you want to keep together in a group. You can put together up to 20 lists containing up to 500 users each of whomever or whatever you choose.

Creating a Twitter list is fairly simple. Using my own Twitter account, we’ll create a list for my Chicago Tweeps (that’s Twitter People for those not up on the Twitter lingo).

Once you’ve logged into your account, find “New List” on the right column.

Once the dialogue box appears, begin typing the name of your list. This name is unique to you in that it’s attached to your Twitter profile name. You needn’t worry about copying someone else’s list name.

You may include a description with your Twitter list if you so choose. This might be helpful if you choose to make your Twitter list public or if you need to remember why you put the list together in the first place.

Finally, choose whether you want to make your list public or private. If you choose the public option, other Twitter users will be able to see who you have on your list. If you choose private, only you will be able to see who is on your list.

Once your list has been created, you can now start to add people to it.

There are several options for adding people.

You can use the search function:

You can search for Twitterers you follow (click on the ‘list’ icon and check the list you’d like to add them to.)

You can search using other Twitterers’ lists. To do this, click on their list(s) in the right column to open up a list. Select individual Twitterers to follow or choose “Follow List”

If you chose to follow another Twitter’s list, the list will be added to your list of lists in the right column.

Why would you want to use Twitter Lists as an Ecommerce Retailer?

Twitter lists are a great way to organize the people you do business with. If you’ve been on Twitter for any amount of time, you’ll notice that it can be cumbersome to find and follow specific users you may consider important.

Twitter lists allow you to organize those users into easy-to-follow screens.

Say you have 900 followers. A third of your followers are customer-based; another third are vendor-based and the final third are industry-based.

With 900 followers, you’d have to be on Twitter all day long just to keep up with everyone. With Twitter lists, you can segregate your customers from your vendors and industry experts and concentrate on a specific group of Twitterers.

With Black Friday coming up, wouldn’t it be a great idea to call attention to your loyal customers (whom you have showing on a public customers list) and give them all a discount? Same goes for your vendors. If you love Paypal and your newsletter software so much you wish you could marry them both, why not give them the attention they deserve by pointing your followers in the direction of your vendor list.

Complete Ecommerce Holiday Checklist

The holidays are quickly approaching and you should already be pushing promos geared toward that (and have others planned). However, this timely post provides you with a checklist of things to consider while moving toward the holidays.

1. Ensure your checkout process is stable and the shopping cart is streamlined.
You should be aware of this part of your site all the time, but take one good look at it and make sure it is working (and across multiple browsers) before the holiday shopping season hits big. It does you no good to get an customer who is interested in your product(s) put items into their cart and then abandon due to circumstances that could have been avoided.

2. If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.
If your website is working and is smooth, now is not the time to try new programming alterations etc… You might risk introducing a bug or problem into the current process and if it can wait, you should put all your major changes off and sit tight until the holiday season passes. Instead, focus on sales efforts. Sales are more important than new innovations during the 4th quarter.

3. Ensure your search marketing and ads reflect the holiday things people are looking for.
Free shipping, big discounts, buy one get one free, etc… are all big items people consider during the holidays especially. Also consider running ads during the holiday season only that reflect products people are looking for (that you offer).

With the major engines you can easily schedule your ads to run during a given period (I recommend creating a new campaign(s) and calling it “holiday” or something like that.) You can break this new campaign into various ad groups that all target different holiday products.

Schedule it to run during the holiday season only and end it when the holidays are over. This is something that can really help boost sales.

I recently worked with a retailer that had some holiday products (limited time) which just arrived. A quick search of Google Trends told me the exact points in time each of these products was in it heaviest demand on the internet and thus we setup a number of ads targeting those keywords and products. The results were immediate with new sales coming in within a few hours.

4. Utilize your Social Media channels to ensure you spread the word about your offers.
Viral marketing during this time of the year is something you simply can’t overlook. Good news (and offers) spread fast!

5. Tweak navigational elements to cater to the holiday shopper.
Consider adding the following temporary categories to your navigation during the holidays.

Gifts by Price: Organize and suggest gifts by price range. For example, highlight gifts under $10, 25, 50, 100 or whatever price points are appropriate for your business. Maybe try a “Gifts Under $10″ category or something.

Gifts by Person: Organize gifts intended for different people groups such as kids, teens, parents, and grandparents. Consider a “Gifts for Him” or “Gifts for Her” category as well as “Gifts for Boys” and or “Gifts for Girls.”

6. Showcase stocking stuffers.
Be sure to highlight low cost products that would make good stocking stuffers. You may even want to utilize these types of items for “cross promotional selling” as a way to increase your average order value.

7. Make sure your shipping and return info is clearly marked on your product pages.
Again, this is something that I say should be there all the time anyhow, but during the holidays you better have it. Shipping and return issues will be top of mind for your customers at this time and one of the first places the begin to seek answers to these questions is on the product page. Be sure you display or link to your shipping and returns pages from your product pages.

A favorite way I like of doing this is to provide a “tabbed” experience as is the case with many big online retailers and providing tabs for the product description, shipping info, returns info etc… This is a super way to keep the user on the product page and still provide them with the information they seek.

8. Consider offering gift wrapping.
If your business can do it, consider offer gift wrapping services to your customers. You can add this as an “upsell” on the product page (and remember to cross sell it on the shopping cart page in case they missed it) but be sure to add enough additional charge to cover any labor and materials associated with this.

9. Create product bundles.
Product bundles are a great way of increasing average order value and sales across the board. Consider taking several related products and grouping them into a “gift package” at a discounted rate than if the items were purchased separately (this too will encourage sales.) Gift selection is much easier when related items are grouped together in some sort of gift basket or bundle.

10. Consider gift messages.
If you r cart enables you to do so let your customers add a personal message to their gift. For simplicity, you can have the message appear on the packing list which will already be included in the box. If your cart doesn’t enable that, consider using the “Additional Comments” box (which many carts have by default) as an opportunity for them to add their gift message. Just ensure this message appears on the packing slip as well.

11. Determine shipping cut-off dates.
This is probably one of the most important pieces of information to communicate to customers during the holidays. Check with your shipping carriers to determine what the cutoff days are for the various methods of shipping. Ensure you add a “guaranteed arrivel in time for (name your holiday here) if ordered before (name your date here.)”

12. Prominently display your return policy.
As mentioned above, your return policy should be easy to find. Consider re-wording it as a “no hassle” policy in order to calm the fears of first time buyers (if you are not already doing so).

If your current policy is stiff, consider loosening it up during the holiday season. While a 30 day return policy is commonplace for the rest of the year, it may scare off early shoppers during the holidays. Make it clear to your visitors that you will accept returns and exchanges on all Christmas (or name your own holiday) gift purchases. This ensures them that they can expect total satisfaction.

QVC always does a super job of wording their return policy during the holidays—Why? because it works.

13. Show holiday spirit in your graphics.
Go ahead, decorate for the holidays! Consider redesigning some of the artwork on your site with a holiday theme. If you do any shopping (or searching) on the internet you’ll see all the big players do this. Even Google decorates for the holidays by reworking their logo to get you in the buying mood.

14. Ensure your server can handle any increased capacity.
If you don’t host in-house, talk with your web host about how you can increase your server performance during the holiday rush. The quickest way to lose sales is to have a website that is not online or is very slow. This will not only cost you holiday sales, but will likely cost you many future customers as well so the effect can be long term.

If you are on a shared hosting platform and looking for hosting, I recommend Media Temple as an option.

If you are looking for a dedicated hosting solution, no one beats Rackspace in my opinion. (I would not recommend moving your site to a new hosting platform if you are in the midst of the holiday shopping season though!) If you weren’t prepared for the rush then you’re just going to have to wait till next year to make the move. Lesson learned.

15. Enable customers to ship to alternate locations than the one they are buying from.
If a customer is buying a gift for someone that does not live near them they may want to have it simply shipped to to the recipient’s address as a holiday gift surprise.

16. Communicate with fulfillment & customer service.
Make everyone involved in the order process aware of any promotions etc… you plan on running. Don’t surprise your customer service and fulfillment staff with an unplanned 24 hour blowout sale.

Taking 10,000 orders in a day is great, but if your warehouse can only ship 5,000, you’re in for trouble.

17. Ensure your email campaigns promote the holiday offers and your website backs those up.
If you are running any email campaigns you need to ensure that offers presented in the emails are easily found and similarly presented on your website. Consider using similar graphics and pushing the traffic to specific landing pages on your website that are setup to convert that traffic.

It’s all about relevancy here. The more relevant the site is in comparison to the email offer, the more success you’ll have generating sales.

18. Consider offering gift certificates.
Even if you do not offer gift certificates any other time of the year, consider offering them during the holiday season. These often provide an added option for shoppers who may not have a “wish list” but know someone they are buying for likes to shop at your store.

These might also be a way to get “last minute” shoppers to buy—that is, providing your cart offers the ability to generate “digital gift certificates” that are sent and redeemed online (rather than printed or sent in a traditional “gift card”.

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