AddMe Blog » eCommerce

The Road to Making Your First Sale Online – Infographic

Steve Baik — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 17:24:31 +0000

Here’s a beautiful infographic brought to you by WebStarts. This one gives you some basic tips on running your own ecommerce business, accompanied by some interesting stats.

Give us your feedback on this infographic, or offer advice to the other ecommerce site owners who are just getting started.

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F-Commerce: Turning Facebook Likes into Buys

Steve Baik — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 20:04:53 +0000

At the risk of stating the obvious, Facebook is booming. The daddy of social media platforms recently announced its billionth member. Business usage in terms of Facebook pages stands at over 11 million (and counting). Most savvy business owners recognize the value of Facebook when it comes to communicating with their customers. The majority will recognize the importance of word of mouth recommendations and where better than Facebook to get those? The real question is how to win over those customers sufficiently to turn that engagement into revenue and growth.

Building a Page

This step may seem really basic, but it’s where every successful Facebook centric business has its roots. Getting this step right is crucial for future success, so spend some time perfecting your page. It should reflect your business, as it is where your most important interactions will take place. The cover photo is the best place to start – choose one that encapsulates what your brand is all about. While it’s okay to change your cover photo as you move forward, perhaps to advertise a competition or sale, for consistency your profile picture should always display your company logo.

Next on the agenda is to add important milestones to bulk up your timeline. This is where you can get creative and use pictures to maximum effect. You might include an image of the launch of your physical store or pictures of the awards your business has won. The final step is to encourage any existing customers to head over to your Facebook page to like it. Make it super simple by adding a “find us on Facebook” icon to your website and other communications.

Quality Content

When your page is up and running, the next task is to engage your fans with interesting content. Indeed, engagement is the key driver for maximizing the benefits of Facebook. You should balance the need to update your audience on Facebook with your need to get on with other tasks crucial to the success of your business. A good start can be made with as little as two or three posts a week. Since user likes appear on their newsfeed, each post you make should be considered as an opportunity to not only touch base with your existing audience, but also to reach out to their network of friends as well.

Although not all of your interactions on Facebook should be about sales, from time to time it’s a good idea to reward your fans with a coupon or exclusive offer. Otherwise keep things human by asking questions, soliciting opinions, and sharing third party content your users may find interesting. Make sure you’re on track by setting a reminder to review your timeline every month or so. When you look back, it should be filled with useful posts, videos, images, and the odd special offer. If yours doesn’t look this, it could be time for rethink.

Make Advertising Work

If all that seems like it will take longer than you’re prepared to wait, you’re probably not a million miles from the truth. If you want to build your fan base more quickly, consider Facebook ads as a way of finding fans that can ultimately be converted into buying customers. You have the option of setting a budget so you’ll never end up spending capital you don’t have if a particular ad attracts a record number of clicks. Be sure to experiment with different well-targeted ads. At first, you will have to make tweaks to your ads regularly, making use of the simple reporting tool to discover what ads better suit different audiences and adjusting appropriately as you go on.

Research suggests that over 50% of Facebook users are more likely to purchase a product after they have “liked” it. That’s a fairly compelling number for a marketing channel that is to all intents and purposes free to use. Following these tips to getting started with Facebook for business will have you up and running in no time and start you on the road to converting fans into customers.

About the Author:
Linda Forshaw is a Business Information Systems graduate from Lancaster University in the UK. A contributor to Degree Jungle, she is a full time writer and blogger specializing in education, social media, and entrepreneurship. Contact her on Twitter @seelindaplay

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Payvment: A Storefront for Facebook

Addme — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 13:28:21 +0000

Social commerce is fast becoming a major trend in online retail, what with Facebook, Twitter and other social networks paving the way for greater, wider connection across the world. A number of e-commerce applications and platforms have been developed so that merchants can take advantage of this growing trend. One such application is Payvment’s social media selling platform for Facebook.

Payvment is an e-commerce solutions provider. Its social media selling app is integrated into Facebook and lets businesses, organizations, and individuals import their e-commerce products to a Facebook fan page, thereby allowing buyers to make transactions straight on the social network.

Business owners can set up a variety of products, categories of products (e.g. shirts, hoodies, shoes), photos, shipping options, terms of service, and more. After setting up an online shop on Facebook, a separate tab will appear on the seller’s profile or a page under “Storefront.” Selling on Facebook has never been so easy.

The social media selling app provides a number of advantages. First, customers won’t have to navigate away from Facebook in order to make a purchase. Payvment’s Open Cart Network lets customers finalize the purchase on any Facebook store. This means buyers don’t have to go through hoops trying to buy your goods, and there are fewer chances of customers dropping their shopping cart while in the middle of a transaction.

The app is free and easy to set up. Ever since Payvment was launched in November 2009, more than 20,000 individuals and businesses have used the application, and more than 500,000 FB users have bought items using it, according to Payvment. Clearly, merchandisers have recognized the potential of free ecommerce on Facebook.

Presently, Payvment supports over 20 currencies and is TRUSTe-certified. Merchants don’t have to sign up for an account to use the app, but should have a PayPal account to collect payments. Customers can pay using Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Discover, and American Express.

Open Cart Network

One of Payvment’s free ecommerce Facebook features, the Open Cart Network is like any other online shopping cart. What sets the system apart from other carts is that users only have to use a single shopping cart across thousands of Payvment-supported Facebook stores.

The feature increases the chances of closing a sale because the items remain in the cart until the user either removes the product or complete the purchase. The items can be paid all at once through PayPal.

Open Cart Network’s main goal is to lessen shopping cart abandonment. Since Facebook isn’t a shopping site in essence, many users are less likely to leave the website without making a purchase.

Every Facebook fan gets a shopping cart. Shoppers can pick out items from different stores, and then check out in one place.

Facebook Shopping Mall

In February 2011, Payvment launched the first ever Facebook “shopping mall,” an online mall with more than one million searchable products, over 50,000 retailers, and over 250 sign-ups daily. The mall includes a directory that lists a wide range of Facebook stores, from local businesses to celebrity brands.

Payvment encourages merchants to have their own Facebook fan page. To get top-of-the-line products virally noticed, the mall makes use of the “Like” button.

Within the Shopping Mall, users can view items according to price, the most likes, seller, bestsellers, and more. To get more products noticed, Payvment also promotes items based on products users previously liked.

To add a personalized touch, the app allows users to know what their friends like by looking at the “Your Friends like” section. There’s also a “Your Cart” function that holds on to the items previously selected even if the user doesn’t buy. Aside from products, visitors can also “like” retailers.

Fan Incentive Pricing

This feature can be activated from the seller’s storefront settings. Fan Incentive Pricing allows the business owner to set a discount amount to anyone who becomes a fan. Once the “Like” button is clicked, the discount becomes available store-wide.

While the special discounts applies to fans only, Payvment prompts non-fans to like the fan page.

Secure Payments via PayPal

To say that shoppers never leave Facebook throughout the transaction is somewhat misleading because the payment transaction technically is made through PayPal, one of the safest online payments solutions.

Selecting items happens within Facebook, but once users are ready to pay, they are redirected to a PayPal webpage. When a customer gets to the part where they have to enter their credit card information, a secure window opens. After the transaction is completed, the window closes.

Conclusion

Payvment’s fast growth and development on Facebook are remarkable. The online shopping mall and the rest of Payvment’s features certainly make sense considering that Facebook is increasingly becoming a destination for online commerce.

On the other hand, it’s perfectly possible for Facebook to open up its own virtual shopping mall, and there are currently several other Facebook apps that offer similar services. Even so, none of Facebook’s current apps offer the same level of integration as Payvment.

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Search Engine Optimization & Shopping Carts – eCommerce SEO

Addme — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 11:52:48 +0000

Did you know that your choice of ecommerce shopping cart is critical to the success of your online business? It’s true. The search engine optimization of the shopping cart you use, and in particular, the way that the shopping cart software deals with products and creates pages can make it impossible or easy for your product pages to show up directly in search engine results.

One key issue is that some shopping cart designs are constructed in a way that prevents the search engine spiders from crawling product pages, so even product phrases that specifically match your offerings won’t show up through natural search engine rankings. Other shopping carts are designed to make the spiders welcome, having what is sometimes called “spiderability,” and that’s the kind you want to choose.

A second important element for an SEO shopping cart is forming URLs for products, categories, and other content that are keyword rich, rather than centered on product numbers or other difficult to interpret elements. Closely related is a feature that creates canonical URLS for pages that have other URLs pointing to them. This could happen, for example, for products that fit into multiple categories. Another URL feature that any SEO shopping cart should have is the capability to use hyphens (and not just underscores) in URLs.

Of course, many shopping cart features are designed especially to make selling to customers easy once they reach your site and while they may optimize your site, it’s not search engine optimization. But there are some other features to look for in an SEO shopping cart besides those already mentioned, that can help get customers to you in the first place. They include:

Automatic generation of an XML sitemap of the kind that Google, Yahoo! and other search engines use. Submitting an appropriately formatted sitemap to Google, for example, makes Google aware of the pages on your website that are available for indexing, which makes sure the spiders are deployed to all desired pages.
Underpinning the sitemap is the ability to create the site the way you want it, so another key feature is completely customizable templates that don’t force an etailer into any corners in terms of site design
Dynamic generation of unique meta tags, particularly title tags, which are considered an important contributor to page rankings.

Finally, it is being suggested that shopping cart software that generates HTML web pages, rather than using languages such as PHP, Perl, and ASP, will make more headway with search engines. This claim is worth considering as you make your SEO shopping cart choice.

Author: Mary Elizabeth, staff writer at 100 Best, Inc 100 Best, Inc owns and operates webmaster related directories such as www.bestshoppingcartreviews.com and www.websitehostingreviews.com.

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The Google Gadget that Makes Selling Online a “Snap”

Addme — Tue, 18 May 2010 11:16:32 +0000

If one or all of the following applies to you, please raise your hand – “I want to sell something on the Net”, “I have no technical or coding skills”, or “I don’t want to be bothered with a merchant account”.

Do I have your attention now? How about if I told you that there’s a quick and easy solution to your online selling problems? Well, thanks to Google, your prayers have been answered. Google Labs is a testing ground for new services thought up by the geniuses who work there. One of their latest concoctions is called “Google Checkout Store Gadget“. Its basic function allows you to copy and paste some code onto any webpage or blog, and become an instant merchant selling your own products.

Let’s take a look at the “man behind the curtain” to see how it all works. The very first step is to open a Google Checkout Merchant account, which is easy to do by going to http://checkout.google.com/signup Fill out all of the required information, and you’ll also need to input a bank account here your hard earned sales funds will be sent to. Google Checkout will process all incoming orders for you. The orders will appear under the orders tab”. On another note, make sure to uncheck the box that says, “my company will only post digitally signed carts”, then hit the save button. Also, make sure to write down your “Merchant ID” number as you’ll need it later on.

The next step is done using a Google Docs Spreadsheet which will track all your inventory. Google provides a template that can be copied which can be found here, http://tinyurl.com/yhebl4y . Take out the “dummy” product information and replace it with your own. There are separate columns for each item, even for shipping information. Each product can have its own separate shipping charge if need be. Keep in mind when filling it out that it can be viewed by the general public, so don’t include any private information in it.

After you’ve entered all your items, hit “share” in the upper right hand corner, and publish as a “web page”. Also, check the box that says Automatically Re-Publish when changes are made.”

Google makes it easy to set up your online store by using http://storegadget.googlelabs.com . It takes you through the process step-by-step, and when finished you click on “start publishing” and select where you’d like to embed the code, for example your website, Blogger, etc. Copy the code and paste it where you want the gadget to appear. There are no coding skills necessary, and anyone can do it. Really, it’s that simple.

If adding to a Blogger Blog, go under “edit layout”, add a “gadget”, then click “add your own”, and paste the gadget code. Now you’re selling items from your Blog that quickly.

So what’s all of this going to cost? There is a small transaction fee charged by Google Checkout for any monthly sales as follows:

Under 3,000.00 2.9% plus .30 per transaction

3,000.00 to 9,999.99 2.5% plus .30 per transaction

10,000 to 99,999.99 2.2% plus .30 per transaction

If you’ve been putting off getting up a store front because you thought it was too difficult or technically complicated, Google really has simplified the process. With “store gadgets” even a child can sell online.

For more information see these resources:

Google Checkout Blog

Google Docs blog

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Merle’s Mission Blog – a passion for net marketing, affiliate marketing, social networking. An avid Blogger and writer with several niche sites to her credit. Find out more at http://merlesworld.blogspot.com

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