Archive for the ‘eCommerce’ Category

Interesting Book on Successful eCommerce

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

Found this online. Kind of repeats a lot of what we usually recommend clients do with their eCommerce.


[recaptcha_form]

www.ProBlogService.com

Friday, December 5th, 2008
Hi Everyone,

Yes, this is a shameless promotion of my new business.

My company Indy Associates is winding down its operations to focus on a new business we started several months ago. Some of you may have received an email about “Professional Blog Service.”

In a nutshell, www.ProBlogService.com is a new service that provides ghost writing, promotion, and social networking management for companies that want to blog, but don’t have the time or resources to do it properly or effectively.

Why blog?

Traditional Search Engine Optimization has been going through changes over the past several years. In Internet Marketing, “shoppers use keywords, buyers use phrases.” Corporate blogging helps companies connect with the buyers in their market because GOOGLE wants “FRESH, HOT CONTENT”.

The challenge is, it takes a lot of work to keep up a corporate blog. Most companies don’t have the resources to do it. Nor, do they know how to do it right and make sure the activity is measured properly for an ROI. This is where we help.

Lloyds of Indiana is a local retailer that sells printing equipment, supplies, and binding machines through their webstore. We have been blogging for them and manage their social media profiles. We continue to grow their list of marketable prospects and have even converted sales off their MySpace page.

These guys were a local print shop for years. How many print shops have you seen go under in your local market? They changed their business to sell the supplies people need in their office, including high-end printers and corporate displays.

Blogging is helping them do this.

The cost is simple:

$135.00 per post – written, promoted, and managed through social network
$75.00 per post – written only.

So, if you have any friends or family that are complaining about their traditional marketing being expensive and unmeasurable, send them my way.

My office number is: 317-644-3034

####

(I am Paul Lorinczi and I approve this message)

Buzzwords – what do they really mean?

Monday, November 24th, 2008

We live in a buzzword world.

Everything that even smells of something new gets a buzzword. I have visions of smartly dressed people with stylish glasses and fancy haircuts going, “let’s give a name.” Then we come up with a sample like this:

3-6-3 Rule
A Ton Of Money
Accounting Noise
Acquisition Indigestion
Across The Board
Active Box
Activity Based Budgeting – ABB
Affluenza
After The Bell
Agency Cross
Agflation
Air Pocket Stock
Alligator Property
Alligator Spread
Alternative Energy ETF
Alternative Investment
And Interest
Angel Bond
Angelina Jolie Stock Index
Ankle Biter
Anonymous Trading
Antitrust
Arbitrageur
Aspirin Count Theory
Sourced from www.investopedia.com/categories/buzzwords.asp

What usually happens is a small segment of the population actually understands what it means. People in the know sound really smart because they can repeat the buzzword and sound really intelligent. The Internet has spawned all kinds of them. Example: “It is important that your GUI design captures the eyeballs. Make sure that you employ search engine optimization (SEO), pay per click (PPC), and Web Analytics. ” The genius ones use a lot of them in many sentences. (Wow, he’s smart, he is buzzword compliant). And people buy it all the time. (I guess that why they work).

I will be the first to admit that I loved buzzwords too. I used to sit around with my collegues who dressed nicely and play the buzzword game too. I was a buzzword expert too. I would do it in front of clients and feel really good about myself.

There is one constant in human evolution. Human interactions have not really changed. Despite all this technology introduced into our lives, we as a species still function pretty much the same way. While we may not feed each other to lions, we find new ways to be cruel just the same. And our fears and desires are pretty simple too. We can still be made to fear and sex will always sell.

So, what is all this social media hype about anyways? What’s all this Internet stuff with My Space, Facebook, Linkedin, and Plaxo about? Well, the reality is human evolution in buying has gone from the bazaar to the store, to the electronic store. Buying and selling is still done on emotions. Doing it on the Internet is no different. Now we have to either visually or through words impact people’s emotional reaction to buying from us. Just like we did when people stood in front of our table at the bazaar. There is no buzzword to describe this. Businesses just need to learn how to sell in this new market. It is old fashion buying and selling that is going on today.

Cold calling is dead. People no longer pick up the phone and talk because caller ID says I don’t have time for people I do not know. So, they are changing from having the world come to them to opting into the world of their choosing. People are quorom sensing beings. They will naturally gravitate towards those people that have similar interest and become part of a community. Instead of going down to the Church Hall, they may now choose to join the forum on under water basket weaving because there are not many people at church who are into under water basket weaving.

Business professionals globally are also trying to connect with potential colleagues with like interests. They no longer pick up the phone and listen to sales people. Instead they pick and choose what information interests them or could help them. The challenge today is learning how to generate the information they would be interested in reading. Or, creating an environments that gives them the option to participate. Again, it is old fashion buying and selling.

In the end, humans have not changed. We are still creatures of habit. We still gravitate towards shared interest. The only difference is that we do it in a different environment today. So, if you peal off all the buzzwords and narrow down the basic human behavior we see today, success is simply watching how humans behave in their new environments. If you observe the Internet from this perspective, you will see that nothing has really changed, only the location where people congregate has.

We are all suckers…

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

Buying and selling is an emotional endeavor. No matter how logical we think we are, the ultimate decision to buy or do something touches an emotional nerve in the buyer.

I am attending a blogging conference and one of the presenters is making fantastic claims of 1st page Google positioning and high conversion rates. It is the greatest way to market yourself because it is inexpensive. (Though he prices his product by the number of blogs he has).

What was interesting was his ability to use persuasive language to get his audience emotionally bought into what he was saying, despite the facts of his argument. We like to think we are smarter than this, but the reality is, we are all suckers….

If we weren’t, Woot would not being doing so well. (I love Woot)

eCommerce Checklist

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

We have come across many clients that have purchased eCommerce platforms for the wrong reasons. The only reason to select an eCommerce platform is for merchandising and marketing. After all, it is your company’s business online. Most important, you need to make sure that you “Rent the building, NOT THE STORE”.

What does this mean? Well, we have had several clients select a hosted solution for the eCommerce. It is a Store Rental situation. While there are perceived lower costs with low monthly fees. The hosted solutions own your business. The contracts are all one-sided. They charge high rates for custom development or changes. They may not have the right features needed to properly market your sites.

We have a client that gets charged $185 an hour for changes. Adding tracking code to the site is considered development. It takes a week to get into their development queue. They act like the big company IT department, when it should be a 5 minute job. It is a rip-off. They are controlling my client’s business.

So, what do we recommend? There are numerous options to choose from out there. The most important thing is that any eCommerce must have excellent marketing and merchandising features. eCommerce is a retail operation and retail centric is what it should be.

eCommerce should be able to do the following:

These are recommendations for companies planning on aggressively selling their products online with hundreds or thousands of items.

Marketing Features:

1. Title pages
2. Page descriptions
3. Meta data
4. Search engine friendly urls
5. Track on-site searches
6. Support affiliate marketing
7. Alternative tags for images
8. Catalog creation
9. Coupons and specials
10. Affinity program management
11. Discounts and specials

Hosting:

Be wary of hosted solutions that do not allow for changes on the site, or access to the site. Any eCommerce solution should be controlled by you, not the vendor. Vendors can hold you hostage by requiring all changes to go through them. This should be an immediate deal breaker. You will regret it the day your site goes live.

We also recommend Linux as the platform to host. It supports Search Engine Friendly urls. It generally provides a more secure platform. Most important, your site does not go down because of a mandatory Windows update.

Here are the platforms we generally work and recommend:

1. X-Cart – www.x-cart.com

X-Cart is a full featured eCommerce platform that is very affordable. Most of our clients are on this platform and have found their sites generate healthy sales. The most important features in X-Cart are its SEO capabilities. It has search engine friendly urls, cataloging and all our clients find their products are indexed in Google. It is a marketing machine. All clients find their shopping cart conversions to be above average at 20%-25%.

X-Cart also has a reporting package called Sales and Stats. 2 features that make it excellent.

1. Real-time reporting – online CRM tool
2. Chat support
3. Click to call support

You can actually watch visitors go through the process on your site. It helps identify where visitors may be getting hung up and allows you take action. It also gives you individual information on visitors. What pages they have visited. What they have purchased. It is simply and excellent online CRM tool to help provide a superior customer experience.

Also, it is released as an open source software package, so clients have access to the software.

2. ZenCart

Zen Cart is an open source shopping cart that also has many of the features of X-Cart. It too is based on marketing. We have a client using it because his parts management system interfaces with Zencart beautifully. With good SEO, he is able to get his parts database indexed online.

There are some newer Open Source carts that give you some Web 2.0 features and should also be considered. They include:

1. Magento
2. Freeway

Both provide most of the marketing features listed above and the software is free. The cost is having someone implement it, which would have to paid, even with commercial software.

eCommerce is about sales. If the shopping cart platform you are using does not assist in sales through effective SEO, merchandising, and support, don’t buy it. OWN THE STORE, rent the building. It is your business, take control. Learn how to sell online and merchandise. Make sure the platform you have can help you.