ProductCart Tips and Tricks: Issue 1

Red Leaf Development wants to help your business increase sales, reach new customers and drive more traffic to your site. We are constantly trying to keep you up-to-date with changes to the eCommerce landscape. That is no easy task lately! Here are some industry trends that we have been following this year.

ProductCart already has some of these features built in while some of the additions require a minor customization; and still some require more advanced development. As always, contact Red Leaf to determine which will be easy, moderate or difficult to add to your site.

Personalize your site
Each shopper is unique, and several of the Internet Retailer Hot 100 e-Retailers tailor their sites to the individual. Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Add cross-selling. Red Leaf has developed an "Automated" cross selling add on that links the product a customer is viewing to other products that customers have purchased. This functions exactly like the "Customers who bought this product also bought…" feature on Amazon.
• Add recommendations. Add a spot on your site where a group of recommended products can be displayed that is based on a customer's browsing history.
• Send targeted emails. When done well these campaigns are perceived as good service; customers accept and value these approaches. When delivered through email, recommendations, suggestions and relevant content gets very high open rates, and low unsubscribe rates. Add a coupon code to encourage a click-through and measure your results.

Facilitate buzz
More than eight in ten people say that their personal networks are among the two to three best sources for new information. "Social networking is ingrained in our corporate culture because it is ingrained in the lives of our customers," says Eric McCoy, founder and CEO of shoe e-Retailer Heels.com. The goal is to connect with your customer and get them to like and trust you. Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Setup a Facebook page for your company (be sure to link to it from your website).
• Enable product ratings and reviews and be sure to feature a best seller list on your site.
• Add the "Share This!" or the Facebook "Like" button to your product pages.
• A blog allows you to engage your customers and listen to their feedback. It also will help boost your natural search engine rankings.

Convert and remarket
Let's face it - you can't call a site visitor a customer until they purchase from your site. Step back and look at your site, ask yourself "What would compel someone to buy from you?" The goal is to convert your visitors into customers and follow up with excellent customer service, every time. Ideally your customers will come back again and again to buy from you! Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Offer a simple email sign up on your homepage.
• Feature a 1-800 number prominently on your homepage.
• Offer more than one payment option - enable PayPal for example.
• Use the emails you have collected whenever possible - send targeted email based on browsing behavior or prior purchase information, for example, "As someone who has shown interest in you might also like..."
• Keep it simple and favor your existing customers by making it exceptionally easy for a returning customer to make purchases.
• Use tools to track drop-offs, conversions and ROI.

For a free consultation and quote, please contact our Sales Department today at 1-603-319-1922 x103 or at Sales@RedLeafDevelopment.com. For more information about our Social Commerce offerings, visit us online at www.redleafdevelopment.com/social_tools.

Excerpt of an April 2009 Article about ProductCart

Here we profile ProductCart, by Early Impact, Inc. Based in Mission Viejo, Calif., the company offers the licensed cart for a starting price of $695 with optional add-ons. We interviewed co-owner Massimo Arrigoni about the cart.

PeC: Please provide some general background on the cart.

Arrigoni: “ProductCart is a licensed shopping cart. We started in 2001, and we’re currently shipping version 3.51. Several thousand licenses have been sold.”

PeC: What are the cart's biggest strengths?

Arrigoni: “Eight years of development based on a constant stream of customer feedback, which translates into a feature depth that is hard to find in other shopping carts. It also means that we have had the opportunity to implement approved integrations with FedEx, UPS, eBay, QuickBooks, Google Website Optimizer, Google Checkout and dozens of other systems.”

“For companies that sell custom-made or configurable products and services, our ‘Build To Order’ version with conflict management can provide solutions to problems that are hard to solve. A quick example: Being able to provide online quotes for catered events where some of the prices change dynamically based on the number of guests, and some don’t, such as a fixed price for the jazz band, but variable food costs."

PeC: What are some of its weaknesses?

Arrigoni: “Multi-lingual support. The feature set is so broad that to make everything from custom search fields to gift wrapping options available in multiple languages would require substantial changes to the system architecture. So it’s an area where we simply say, ‘Sorry, it doesn’t do it.’”

PeC: What plans do you have for future cart development?

Arrigoni: “We asked our users what they were missing. It’s incredible the amount of smart features they came up with. We haven’t made final decisions on everything that will make it into the next release, but we can say that ProductCart v4 (coming in September 2009), will have a slick, AJAX-powered one-page checkout, more sales and coupon management features, stronger content management tools and lots more features.”

PeC: How specifically would switching to ProductCart improve a merchant's business?

Arrigoni: “I’d say three areas: It can solve business problems other shopping carts can’t solve, such as the Build To Order system mentioned above. It contains a lot of time-saving administration tools that can really make the difference on a day-to-day basis, such as automatic synchronization with QuickBooks. And it provides storefront features that can improve the customer experience, such as AJAX-enhanced search that makes for quicker, friendlier searches in the store catalog.”

PeC: Any other thoughts for our readers?

Arrigoni: Your needs may change over time. Go with an ecommerce system that can change (i.e., be customized) as your needs change. Choose robust, proven software like ProductCart that’s been successfully put to the test for years.

Read the Full Article in Practical eCommerce - Cart of the Week: ProductCart

Necessity breeds innovation

E-retailers responded to the recession with a burst of creativity. Here are 10 ways this year’s Hot 100 online merchants kept sales flowing during the downturn.

Read the article in Internet Retailer

The 4 Steps to Achieve Top Search Engine Rankings

The success of your online business requires that potential customers can easily find you. One way to increase your online presence is through a well thought out website marketing strategy. The 4 steps below detail specific areas of focus that would be part of a typical web marketing strategy.

1. Website Optimization - This involves maximizing your website content so that it targets your specific business niche. Meta tags and particularly meta titles should reflect the keywords that best describe your site content. Pages should be organized hierarchically with a clearly defined and organized site map. Also consider linking to your best content (that content that is most important or defines your business, product or service offered) directly from the home page.

2. Link Building - The more inbound links to your website, the better it is for you. Every inbound link is like a "vote" for your site. A link building campaign seeks to not only increase the number of inbound links but also to ensure that these links are relevant and accurate. This is one case where quality is just as important as quantity. For example, the inbound link anchor text (the wording that you click on when you select the link) should be descriptive of the page that it links to. Achieve relevance by focusing your link building efforts on sites within your topical niche. Focus your marketing efforts on the biggest, most authoritative sites within that niche.

3. Website Marketing - This is the ongoing process of creating relevant and interesting content for your site and then getting that content indexed in the places that you've identified above. The information must be topical and you should use the search keywords and phrases you're targeting throughout your page or article as they apply. For an e-commerce site this might include adding specific keywords to a product description or title. Another great way to achieve this is to create a press release for the content you would like to feature.

4. Measurements: Analytics and ROI - Once a customer visits your site each action they take can be tracked and recorded. These cumulative records become the measurements that are translated into useful information to give you the results you need. For example, where does a user come from when they access your site? How long on average do they stay and what pages are most visited? What is your conversion rate, in other words how many visits turn into actual sales? Obviously, these are questions that any business owner is interested in the answer to.

Your online business can benefit in numerous ways from a web marketing strategy that employs the steps listed above. Once you apply these changes and implement the tools needed to track and measure your site visitors you will see the results.

How to Convert a Visitor Into a Customer, and Get Them to Return Again

Your website may represent a major source of revenue for your business. Or, maybe it represents a very small source of revenue. Regardless of what that percentage is converting the people that visit your site into customers, and ideally into repeat customers, is important to the success of your online business.

Did you know that you can actually measure how your website is doing in regards to converting new visitors into customers? It's called a conversion rate. Here are a couple of pointers to get you started on thinking about ways to improve your conversion rate on your e-commerce website.

1. Price your product competitively: This goes without saying. You must know who your direct competitors are and price your product competitively.

2. Offer discounts and coupons: This is a wonderful way to encourage someone who might be on the fence about making a purchase. Offering free shipping can help convince a customer to purchase from you instead of from a local competitor that may have a physical storefront.

3. Make sure that your products are easy to find: Setup and use categories on your site so that your customers can find the product they are looking for easily. Many sites today have a search-like filter feature that allows customers to filter the results returned by options like price, size, or brand.

4. Make customer reviews available on your site: A great price is important to customers but a great product is just as important. Reading what other customers think of your products and service helps potential customers make that final decision about their purchase. Sometimes a customer will even suggest another product that may compliment their purchase!

5. Provide fast, excellent customer service: Another one that goes without saying. Once a customer places an order keep them up-to-date on their order status through email updates. Clearly post your return, shipping and privacy policies on your site.

6. Provide an incentive for them to return: Once a week send your customers an e-newsletter including a discount or offer. Also, designate a section of your site and e-newsletter to include links (and images) to new products.

Follow up by implementing tracking tools to report on visits and conversions so that you can measure the success of your efforts. Happy selling!

Leverage Your Website to Survive in a Slowing Economy

Your Ecommerce site serves your business in many ways. During tough times business owners must cut costs, look for new opportunities, and provide excellent customer service just to name a few things. Making improvements in the way you conduct online business is essential to surviving in this economy.

Let's look at a few concrete examples that will illustrate how your business can implement new strategies in order to streamline, expand and increase revenue for your business.

1. Cut Costs: If you already have a website, consider what your return on that investment has been. Maybe you are already selling online and making a decent profit, but you spend too much time processing credit cards, shipping orders and tracking inventory. Consider an automated payment gateway, printing your shipping labels right from your ecommerce administration area, or synching your inventory control system to your website.

Maybe you don't have an ecommerce website. That doesn't mean that your website isn't generating money for your business. Every visitor to your site is a potential customer, so your website is a marketing tool for your company. Have you engaged in a web marketing campaign in the last year? A web marketing campaign can be a third of the cost of a traditional print campaign and a quarter of the cost of a tv or radio campaign. When your customers need a product or a service they go to a search engine to find what they are looking for. Web marketing is one way to make sure that they find you first.

2. Look for new opportunities: Now is the time to think about what direction you are taking in regards to the technology you have implemented. If you offer a product and you aren't selling online then you may be losing potential customers. Your first assignment is to get your product online. Make sure that you also allow your customers to purchase gift certificates as these can represent substantial revenue for your business.

If you are selling online already then you have a customer base. Create a new opportunity for your business by marketing to your customer base. If you have a list of customers that have bought from you before then send an e-newsletter with an offer or a coupon. Make it a habit to send one of these out every month.

If you are not selling online it doesn't mean that you can't start collecting customer information and sending a monthly update. Keeping your customers informed about industry news and providing them with your expertise is a great way to keep your company (and the service you provide) fresh in their mind. It is a wonderful value add and the return on this investment can be huge.

3. Provide incredible customer service: We have already discussed the value an e-newsletter when it comes to customer service. If you have an online store consider using that e-newsletter to send discounts and offers. Customers that have established a relationship with a business will likely continue that relationship if they are being offered a great product at a great price.

Another sure fire way to please your return customers is to offer a rewards points system. This will help increase the rate of return which helps to increase revenue.

Potential customers coming to your site are looking for a great price - but they are also looking for a great product. Consider implementing customer reviews, these are reviews written by your customers about the products that you are selling. These are an important tool in converting a potential sale into an actual sale.

Again, just because you don't offer a product for sale you must still keep current customers happy. We already discussed offering a monthly e-newsletter to share your expertise and recent industry news. If you are not sure how your customers are responding to your business why not create an online survey to help identify areas that you may need to improve.

Your website is a marketing tool for your business. It has the potential to be a major source of revenue as well. If you leverage this peice of technology in the correct way you can save money, grow your customer base and survive in this financial downturn.