osCommerce Watch

The Shopping Cart: How to Answer the 5 Unanswered Customer Questions

Good discussion of "unanswered questions" an online shopper is likely to have before making a purchase. Definitely worth a read. Here are the 5 questions they identify ..

Here are 5 key, unanswered questions (beyond shipping costs) of the shopping cart:

1. Do you offer alternate forms of payment (aside from credit card)?
2. Are you safe and secure?
3. Why are you asking for this information?
4. Do I have to set up an account to buy?
5. Do I get to review my order before we transact?

Top 10 Online Retailers by Conversion Rate: March 2009

An interesting list of top converting online retailers. Check out these sites for new ideas for your site.

From Affiliate to E-Commerce Mogul - The Real Secrets To E-Commerce

Eli from BlueHatSEO.com writes a great article on one of the central problems facing any ecommerce store, creating and building relationships with suppliers. He covers some of the business issues suppliers will be considering when dealing with someone who wants to sell their products online. Whether you follow his approach or not, understanding a potential supplier can help you preempt some of their objections to dealing with a new online store.

Online Stores and Lenses - promoting your store on Squidoo

How Squidoo can help you promote your online store. A quick guide to building a lens for your store.

Don't know about Squidoo? Besides being an entertaining website, it has some great benefits for store owners. Basically, Squidoo allows anyone to create a web page about a topic they know or care about. They call these pages "lenses". You don't need to know about HTML, their system makes it easy to create a lens.

Why is it useful? Besides being a potential new source of traffic, if you create the lens right there are potential search engine ranking bonuses for your website.

Check out the lens we created on using Squidoo to promote your store. It covers in detail why Squidoo is useful for online stores and provides information on how to create a great lens for your store.

2007 Merchandising Calendar from Marketing Experiments Journal

The Marketing Experiments Journal has been recommended here before. It provides consistently good research of relevance to online store owners.

Their latest edition covers the key retail seasons throughout the year and how to benefit from them. It also includes 11 key practices to help merchants take advantage of the seasonal fluctuations throughout the year.

Worth checking out is a PDF download they provide which features a full calendar with important dates for online stores. Any merchant could use this to plan and develop ideas for the coming year.

Definitely worth the time to visit and read.

Christmas Ecommerce Suggestions

Last year we featured a collection of ideas from 37signals with some specific ideas on how to improve your store for Christmas. With only 15 days to go is there anything you can do?

Sure! Here are some links to some of the tips you could implement today in your store:

• Add a "holiday help" page - when will I receive my product? what gift wrapping options do you offer? are you closed for the holidays? what is your returns policy? Provide answers to all those specific questions in one place.
• Add a category for stocking stuffers - create a category that groups small and affordable items.
• Help your visitors find gifts - feature products men/women, by age and by price. This could be as simple as adding some extra categories or adding a section to your homepage to feature specific items.

Good luck for your Christmas sales!

Make Money on eBay

An interesting blog entry about a study on Ebay. Testing on Ebay revealed that a lower opening bid price and higher shipping charges led to higher overall revenue. Whether this is generalizable for all product types or for shopping sites is up for debate. It does raise the question of whether you as a merchant have tested the relationship between various costing strategies and overall profit.

Marketing Experiments Journal tested this explicitly for shopping sites: Shipping Charges — How to Use Shipping Charges as a Marketing Tactic (requires free registration).

As well as covering three common tactics for setting relative levels of product prices and shipping charges, this article goes on how to effectively offer free shipping as an incentive.

Valuable stuff.

Conversion Chronicles

Conversion Chronicles offers some great content on improving the conversion rate of your website traffic. They have a couple of ebooks available as incentives for signing up to their newsletter and then telling someone about the site. One of the ebooks is a case study of how conversion rates were improved on a specific osCommerce-based site by 1300%. While not talking about osCommerce specifically, alot of their suggestions could be applied to any osCommerce store.

Holiday E-Commerce Ideas from 37signals

OK it might not be quite Christmas yet, but it will be before you know it. Here are some good suggestions for how to improve how customers experience your site this Christmas. There are plenty of examples from top ecommerce sites.

Plenty of great suggestions, from "holidizing" your logo to ideas related to how you offer and feature gift wrapping.

Calls-to-Action, Points-of-Resolution and Resolving Doors

This article from GrokDotCom discusses the use of links in marrying the sales process of a site to the buyer's decision process. Links allow you to move the customer through your sales process, answer anticipated questions, and then offer the customer reentry into the sales process.

What does this mean for your osCommerce store? I am briefly going to comment on what it doesn't mean. Don't limit yourself to one page of product information! Communicating and selling effectively online requires that you do not limit your content on the products you offer to a single product information page.

Think about the types of people you are attracting to your site, the type of people who know buy your products. Think about the questions your potential customers have and how you can answer them. Think about how you present your product information to your different customers. Are you allowing for the variety of ways people make their purchase decision?

If you are interested in improving the way your site sells, I highly recommend the articles at GrokDotCom. Another taste: 3 Tips for Great Web Content.

Conversion Chronicles - Without Conversion Rates You Don't Know If You're Mickey Mouse Or Mickey Man

Good article covering the importance of measuring conversion rates and how doing so allows you to assess the effects of small changes to your site.

The whole point of running an online shop is to sell your products. Here are some links related to effective online selling.

I will add to this list over time.

ROI Marketing Clickz Articles by Bryan Eisenberg
GrokDotCom Conversion Rate Marketing
Nick Usborne Articles on copywriting online