Google offers powerful and useful searches that help customers find online stores, like yours. But did you know that Google offers a “Product Search” that is specifically designed to help customers find your products? To see this great tool in action, simply go to Google’s website and click the “Shopping” link at the top of the page.
Google Product Search allows your customers to search for their favorite products and see a list of merchants offering them, along with prices and seller ratings. Many customers find this tool an essential part of their online shopping.
Not all products and online merchants are listed in this search, though. Only products that have been specifically uploaded to “Google Base,” Google’s special database of products and other information, are included in these product-specific search results.
There are many advantages to having your online store’s products listed in this database. Customers don’t have to sift through as many irrelevant search results because this special search is specific to products they are looking for. This makes it easier to see your online product. Additionally, customers will get more information about your product using Product Search than they would using the regular Google search because special data fields are included in the product uploads. These searchable fields include the following: Product Name, Category (Product Type), Manufacturer, Condition, Long Description and Price. Webplus Shop automatically includes most of these fields without you having to specifically set them.
To upload your products to Google Product Search, you need a “Google Account.” If you use Gmail as your email provider, you can use your Gmail login as your Google Account. If you’re not sure if you have a Google Account, you can ask Google to check for you. Additionally, all products uploaded to Google Product Search must meet the Google Base Program Policies, Editorial Guidelines and Content Policies, or Google will remove the products from its database.
It is easy to include your online store products in the Google Product Search using Webplus Shop. The easiest way is to simply click on the “Inventory” tab and then click on “Google Product Search Feed.” This page will tell you how many products are marked to be included in the feed and which products are not. By default, each product is marked for inclusion.
Click twice on the Play/pause button to start the video.
To maximize the power of this marketing technique, make sure that your product descriptions accurately describes the product, using keywords that your customers might use to find your product.
Another important field is the Google Category (Product Type). Although you can use anything in your Google Product Type (Category) field, Google recommends using it’s product type taxonomy for best results.
Google Product Search is a powerful tool to get the products in your online store in front of your customers. It is growing in popularity and many online merchants say it has significantly increased the number of visitors to their online store and sales. Webplus Shop makes submitting and updating your products very easy and we highly suggest you take advantage of it.
What makes these techniques work, though, is to choose the right keywords that will bring in customers who buy. The term “keyword” is a bit misleading. Normally, effective keywords are not single words, but are normally 2 – 4 word phrases. Here are some tips for deciding which to use:
Use short phrases instead of single words. 1-word keywords are too broad and competitive. For example, if you sell jewelry and choose “jewelry” as your keyword, you are competing against 261,000,000 other web sites that are returned by Google when someone searches for “jewelry.” If you use “men’s jewelry”, only 3,100,000 pages are returned. That is a reduction of nearly 99% in competition.
Choose phrases that are specific, but not too specific. The goal is to have keywords targeted that will land you on the top pages of search engine results and are actually used by real people. To continue the above jewelry example, choosing “jewelry” returned 261,000,000 results in Google. Modifying that to “men’s gold bracelets” returns 674,000, which is reasonable since not too many websites are returned and people might reasonably search for that. However, if you targeted “men’s gold and ruby bracelets in minneapolis minnesota”, you would have a great chance to be on the first page, since only 4,940 websites are returned, but extremely few (if any) people would reasonably search using that phrase. The value to your online store is the same if you’re #1 on for a keyword phrase nobody uses as it is if you’re #4,000 for a broad keyword that everyone targets. Exactly $0.
Use your search engine log as a guide. One of the best ways to know which keywords to target is to see what people have already used to find you. If your use Webplus Shop for your shopping cart software, a short search engine log is shown on your Merchant Dashboard page at the bottom, showing you the top 15 keyword phrases used in the last 60 days, along with the number of times that phrase is used. To use this report most effectively, you should do searches yourself using those top 15 keywords in various search engines like Google, Yahoo and Live Search. Write down which position your online business comes up in the results for each keyword phrase. You will probably find that you are not on the top page. If that’s the case, you should use the optimization techniques listed at the beginning of this article to increase your ranking with those words.
Research your competitors’ keywords. Going to competing websites and looking at their meta-tags can give you some good ideas for keywords. To see their meta-tags, right-click on their web page and choose “View Source.” Then press CTRL-F to bring up a mini-search box. Enter “<meta” (without the quotes) to have it highlight the meta tags. Also note the keywords your competitors use in their title bar (shown in the <title> tag in the “View Source” window).
Analyze your keywords using keyword tools. A couple of the most popular keyword tools include Keyword Discovery and WordTracker, both of which are not free. Popular free tools include Google AdWords Keyword Tool and Google Trends. These tools will show you how often keywords are searched, indicating how popular they are.
Optimizing your store to target effective keywords is by far the best free method of increasing the number of customers visiting and buying. It costs you nothing except some time and the payoff can start within a week and will last for years. Every week or two, you should re-evaluate your search engine rankings and they keywords you targeted, along with your traffic and sales. This will help maintain and increase your SEO marketing efforts and your sales.
All online stores experience the problem of abandoned carts. This happens when a potential customer places something in their shopping cart but does not complete the purchase. There are many reasons this happens, some of which are preventable. They include:
Customer is only browsing and is not ready to purchase yet.
The shipping and handling charge was too high.
Your store has to charge sales tax to the customer’s shipping address because of your location.
The customer does not feel comfortable buying from you.
Your shopping cart is not easy to navigate.
It is too long or complicated to checkout of your online store.
Some of these reasons are out of your control. It is normal in all stores, both online and brick-and-mortar, for people to browse and not purchase. They might be comparison shopping or they might be looking to just get ideas on what to buy. They might be looking for a store located in another state to avoid paying sales tax.
Some reasons for abandoning online shopping carts are within your control to improve. Here are some effective things you can do to reduce abandoned carts.
Build trust and confidence. Make sure you have your contact details showing in your online store. If a customer has a question, they want to know they can contact you easily with any questions or concerns. Using a simple and easy-to-find “Contact Us” page makes customers feel more confident in your store, while reducing spam you would get by just showing your email address on your website. If your shopping cart software is Webplus Shop, you can verify this on the Settings > Store Settings screen of your Merchant Interface.
Make sure your pages download fast. The best way to do this is to make sure your image files are compressed not too large. Many shopping carts rely on the merchant compressing their image files before uploading them to their online store. Others, like Webplus Shop, will do this automatically when the file is uploaded. Also make sure there aren’t too many images on each page. It’s ok if there are a few to show the product and make the website attractive, but if there are a lot of unnecessary graphics, it will slow down the pages and many customers will leave.
Explain your return policy clearly. If a customer knows they can return a product within a certain number of days without any hassle, they will be much more likely to complete the purchase. A short statement describing your return policy should be on every page, such as in the footer. It is rare for customers to actually return a product, but they will feel much more confident in ordering if they know they can.
Reduce Sticker Shock. Explain your shipping and taxation policies clearly. A brief mention could be in the footer on every page of your online store, along with a more detailed description on a custom page. Your shopping cart should also allow the customer to see estimated shipping and tax costs before checking out. Ideally, it should show this estimate on the shopping cart page, as Webplus Shop does. If you use Webplus Shop, you can create custom pages for this and anything else you need by going to the Appearance > Custom Pages screen in the Merchant Interface.
Provide alternative payment methods. Different customers have different preferences for paying online. Some prefer the convenience of entering their credit card number directly in the store. Others prefer to use a payment service like PayPal. And some are simply not comfortable paying electronically and would prefer mailing a check or phoning their payment details to the merchant. If you offer multiple payment methods, barriers some customers perceive in completing the purchase will be reduced.
The shorter the checkout process, the better. Most online shopping carts have long, multi-page checkout processes. The customer enters their shipping address on one page, their billing address on another, their payment information on the third and then are asked to confirm on the fourth. This is a very large source of shopping cart abandonment. Many experts say that if you email people who have started the checkout process but abandoned it later, you can email them to encourage their return to complete their purchase. This is an inefficient and unproductive way to handle cart abandonment. The best way is to have the whole checkout on a single, simple page. This shows the customer exactly how easy it is, shows all details at once, and allows them to complete their purchase in the fastest possible time. There is no chasing after them after they quit. One shopping cart that offers this highly effective single-page checkout is Webplus Shop.
Offer a reason to return. It is a well established fact that it’s much cheaper and easier to get an existing customer to return than it is to find a new customer. The more repeat business an online store has, the faster it will grow. There are many easy ways to encourage repeat business. One simple way is to offer a coupon after a customer checks out to come back. For example, display a custom message on the Receipt saying something like, “Receive 5% off your next purchase! Enter Coupon Code XXXX when you return.” This can be done easily in Webplus Shop by going to the Settings > Store Settings screen in the Merchant Interface and entering your message in the “Custom Receipt Thank You Message” box. You can create your promotions and coupons in the Marketing > Promotions and Marketing > Coupons screens.
It is also important to measure and track your abandoned carts to know if your efforts are being effective. Analytics software, such as Google Analytics will help you understand your online store traffic patterns. You can also see exactly how many carts are abandoned and what items were in the abandoned carts if you use Webplus Shop by going to the Orders screen in the Merchant Interface and setting the Status field to “Abandoned.”
Periodically reviewing your abandoned shopping carts are an excellent way to measure your online store’s effectiveness in completing sales. While keeping in mind that there are some abandoned carts that cannot be prevented, there are many things you can do to avoid them. Using the right shopping cart software and following the seven suggestions will go a long way to reducing cart abandonment and increasing sales and profits.
If you’re looking to open and online store with no up-front investment or want to cheaply supplement your existing online store’s inventory, keep reading. This article will help explain some of the pros and cons in regards to the no-fee and per-order drop shippers. What is a dropshipper?
No-fee dropshippers simply require that you sign-up with them to use their services. Per-order dropshippers charge a small fee each time you place an order for products. We maintain lists of dropshippers here at Webplus Shop. Call us toll-free at 1-866-338-8883 (international: +1-605-229-0307) to talk about specific wholesale companies.
Pros of Per-Order & No-Fee Dropshippers
You have very little or no overhead on your inventory. You don’t have to keep any stock on hand and you don’t have to worry about packaging and shipping from home.
“No Sales, No Fees.” This means that if you experience a slow month, you won’t be paying a monthly wholesaler fee that eats into your profits.
Cons of Per-Order & No-Fee Dropshippers
Often the products will be at a higher wholesale cost and you won’t have as high of a markup.
Sometimes the products are not name-brand which can, but doesn’t always, indicate questionable product quality.
Leverage a Per-Order or No-Fee Dropshipper Relationship
You can easily use a no-fee or per-order drop shipper to your advantage. Not only does it have zero or very low overhead cost, it also allows you to widen your catalog with no initial fee. A larger catalog can quickly widen your customer base.
Lastly, keep an eye out for drop shippers with steep minimum order requirements or consistently low quantity-on-hand (i.e. in stock) amounts. These can result in an inconvenience to both you and your customers.
For more information about wholesale dropshippers or starting your own online store, call us toll-free at 1-866-338-8883 (international: +1-605-229-0307) or send us an email.
Since your webstore will need to collect personal/private info to complete a sale, you should consider writing a Privacy Policy for your business. Having a written policy gives a customer confidence in purchasing from your website. The people over at Trust and Security Online seem to agree.
Having a privacy policy builds a large amount of trust in this area because:
The customer will know what is going to happen to their information once they provide it to a company.
The customer will learn what they need to do to keep themselves from getting any unnecessary newsletters, emails, or other unwanted material.
The customer also knows where their information will be stored once they provide it to you.
Although there are a few Privacy Policy generators available to you, your best bet it is to clearly and simply state what you intend to do with customer information. We here at Webplus Shop indeed follow our own advice and have our own clear, short privacy policy.
Finally, to create a webpage for your Privacy Policy, use the Custom Page tools already built-in to your Webplus Shop store.
Have you always wondered how many people a day visit your online store? Do you want to see what keywords are bringing those visitors? Do you want to keep track of how promotions, referrals and ads are working for you? There is an easy way to find out that information by using Google Analytics.
Google Analytics makes it easy to improve and track your results in bringing people to your online store. It allows you to write better ads and strengthen your marketing efforts. Best of all, Google Analytics is free to to use. You can use Google Analytics to track all kinds of visits to your online store. For a tour of Google Analytics, you can go here for their slideshow and here to sign up.
Webplus Shop makes it easy for you integrate Google Analytics into your store to track visits to your website. Once you sign up for a Google Analytics account, take the code they provide and then log into your store. Navigate to the Marketing->Advanced and then simply insert the code into the Analytics Tracking Code box and you are ready to start tracking visitors! ( Click on the Image to make it bigger). It will take around 24 hours before Google will show anything in the Analytics Dashboard.
From there you just need to log into your Google Analytics home page and watch how people are coming to your online store. This will allow you to better tailor your search engine optimization and marketing efforts to draw people to your online store!
Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving and signals the opening of the Christmas shopping season. Usually there are lines of people waiting for the stores to open so they can get great deals on products. These stores create the desire for these products by using “door buster” promotions of loss-leader items. You can use these same kinds of promotions and ideas to draw people to your online store.
Ways to attract people on Black Friday
The first way a store can draw people in is by having a Door Buster event. Products offered as part of a door buster are typically extemely low-priced, low-supply items that create a high demand among consumers.
Create a door buster promotion for your webstore by creating Black Friday Door Buster coupons. Make sure you know how to create and distribute your coupons well in advance of Black Friday. This way you can carefully plan your Door Buster event.
Loss Leaders can, and should be used in conjunction with Door Buster sales to help draw customers in. A loss leader is product that is sold at or below cost to help stimulate other, more profitable sales. Set the price of a product so that you either make no profit or a small loss on an item. Market this item via Google Product Search. If somebody using Google Product Search filters by lowest price for your type of item, your product will be at the top of the list!
Cyber Monday Cyber Monday is the term for the Monday that immediately follows Black Friday and signifies the start of online Christmas Shopping. Here is some more info on Cyber Monday.You can use the brick and mortar promotions for your online store to bring in customers this holiday season!
The opportunity to make a discounted purchase is a strong attraction for a potential customer. With Webplus Shop, your online business can utilize coupons as marketing tools just like the paper coupons that arrive in your mailbox and newspapers. By distributing online coupons to specific places on the web, your coupon based marketing will cost very little, yet still have the potential to reach more people than a typical mass mailing campaign.
Creating a coupon in Webplus Shop takes two steps.
Create a promotion in the Marketing > Promotions area by clicking the Add New Promotion button. Enter the settings for your new promotion and make sure that you change the Require the Customer to Enter a Coupon Code setting to “Yes” and save your changes. (If this is your first promotion, click the Help button in the upper-right of the Promotions screen to learn more about how promotions work.)
Create a Coupon Code in the Marketing > Coupons area by clicking the Add New Coupon button. The customer will need to enter the Coupon Code to redeem the offer, so make it easy-to-use; one word and all uppercase (no spaces!). Set the Coupon Reusability to “Indefinately” so that many customers can use the same coupon. Set the Promotion to the one you just created in step one and save your changes. That’s it! You’re done!
Now that you have a Coupon Code that’s ready for customers to use, you need to let people know about it. Luckily there’s plenty of bargain hunters online and lots of coupon sharing websites that cater directly to them. Below you’ll find a few links to get you started. Simply fill out the form with your Coupon Code information to let people know about your store’s promotion.
There’s plenty of other coupon sharing websites available besides those listed above. Unfortunately, many of these are affiliate marketing sites that only offer coupons from select stores instead of using simple Submit Coupon forms. Fortunately though, many of these affiliate coupon sites have Message Boards or Forums that you can post your coupon to. Look around on their homepage for a Message Board or Fourm link/button, sign-up, and start posting your Coupon Code.
You are acting as a Copywriter any time that you use your writing to promote your products or services. (Wikipedia has a longer definition.) One of the strongest areas to turn a customer into a sale is in a product’s description. Webplus Shop calls this a Product Long Description and they can be found on the Inventory > Products > [Edit] page.
There are plenty of resources available for writing a compelling product description, such as TheMauritius.com’s How to Write a Product Description article.
A good product description conveys the benefits of using the product and not just the facts around the product. A good product description convinces the customer that they need the product and they need to purchase it from you.
In short, don’t just explain what the customer is looking at, but also why they want to buy it. Before you begin editing your descriptions though, understand that it is important to have a consistent “voice” used in all of your copywriting. FutureNow’s 2 Simple Steps to Finding Your Website’s Voice article explains more about voice and how to give your own store an identity through writing.
I would argue that copy is perhaps the most important element for conveying your website’s personality or voice. As a copywriter, there are two things you must do:
Have a clear understanding of your personality, brand or voice
Convey that personality, brand or voice to your audience
Use these resources and keep these ideas in mind to write better copy, especially in your product descriptions. If you want to learn more a copywriting, start by reading Copyblogger. The insight you’ll gain there will be invaluable as an online business owner.
Although Webplus Shop offers a variety of places to add content to your Homepage – the Homepage Header, Store Intro, Featured Products Header, Category Header, and Homepage Footer – the key to using them effectively is to not overload your customers with information. The good folks over at Smashing Magazine, a web design blog, echo this idea in their How Simple Web Design Helps Your Business article.
“E-commerce sites have taken this “scatter shot” approach of trying to slap the potential buyer with as many options as possible. Instead of making the landing page solely about one product, sites usually clutter the page with unnecessary information, ads and related products.”
Setting up to feature just one product might be a little extreme, but if you feel like your homepage is a bit cluttered, here’s a couple of ways you can create a clean, simple store landing page.
Have too many Featured Products? Try using a featured category instead, or better yet, group similar products and create a unique category just so it can be featured. Since products can belong to multiple categories, you won’t have to “move” the products. Name it descriptively, like “This Month’s Sunglass Specials”.
Have too many Categories? It might be as simple as adjusting your Number of Levels to Display in Category Tree setting in Appearance > Home Page. If it still seems like you have too many categories, consider a new structure where you have a fewer “top-level” categories. Think of it like the areas of a department store – Men’s, Women’s, Kids, Shoes, Jewelry, and Home Goods. The less specific, the fewer. The fewer, the better.
Trying to say too much in your Intro HTML area? Make use of your About Us page. You can find the editor for this page in Appearance > Custom Pages. Now your Store Intro HTML can be clean, short, and to the point.
Does it still feel like too much? Did you know you can actually hide your Categories and/or Featured Products from your homepage? Simply go to Appearance > Home Page and make sure that the options for Display Categories and Display Features are -not- checked.
A final consideration is that there is no requirement to using each and every Homepage HTML area. If you’re not sure how to best use your Category Header or Features Header, perhaps it is just best to simply leave them blank. At least then they can’t get in the way.
All online stores experience the problem of abandoned carts. This happens when a potential customer places something in their shopping cart but does not complete the purchase. There are many reasons this happens, some of which are preventable. They include:
