The most important thing to consider when putting together ecommerce blog posts is your audience. Who are your writing for? Hopefully your answer will be the same people who visit your website to make purchases. You want to brainstorm about possible topics. Generating topics can seem daunting, I challenge you to grab a pen and paper and write down every idea that pops into your creative mind. Before you know it, you will have a list of topics right in front of you. If you still find yourself struggling, and made it past the step of grabbing a pen and paper here are a few suggestions to get you going.

Customer Feedback and Knowledge -Do you ever have a question that you hear over and over again from your customers? A post is a great way to address the question.
 

History of your product – People like to know where their products came from. If you provide a brief description of the items you are selling you increase your chances of selling the product. People appreciate the extra step and added personal touches.

Benefits of your product – Listing the key features of your products helps potential customers go from the mind set of “I want it” to “I need it”. Explaining the features will help potential customers clearly understand how they could benefit from using your product.

 
When posting your blog topics never lose focus of your audience. As soon as you get side tracked with your posts, your customers will be doing the same thing. You want to earn your customer’s one post at a time.

Happy Blogging!  

Using the internet as a sales channel can be a highly beneficial business activity that can lead to significant growth in customers and revenue. For small businesses, ecommerce makes it possible to grow from a local presence to a global one without the costs and hassle of an actual physical expansion.

Often times, when it comes to owning a small business having limited money and expertise, ecommerce may seem like a risk not worth taking. You might be concerned about the technology of selling online, how to manage an online store, or whether or not selling online can be a successful investment.

Technology Concerns
Some small businesses do not have the expertise, infrastructure, or budget to support high-tech ventures. You do not need any of these when it comes to setting up an ecommerce site. A hosted storefront is the way to go today. Enter: FoxyPress – Your solution. A hosted storefront like FoxyPress provides a simple template-based environment for designing and operating an online store. Technology concerns are taken out of your hands. Literally.

Concerns about success
Success is not guaranteed, but if you never take a risk success may never come. Many simple and affordable online tools are available for a small business to take advantage of. Online marketing tools are cheap, accessible, and innovative which can help your business keep up with larger competitors. Bringing a personal touch to customers no matter where they are is always important. Today there are online customer service and social tools that can do just this.

We all want to believe we have a perfect online store. Reality is, we all have a few things that could use an update. If you are guilty of any of the following items I will be discussing in this post (we have a problem). If your analytics show you have a high bounce rate, or the number of repeat customers is steadily decreasing there is still hope. It might be something as simple as making a few updates to your product descriptions, or stepping up and increasing your customer service.

Your site is too busy and confusing.
Whitespace is your friend. Embrace whitespace. If you try to jam pack your homepage with 50+ items you “think” people will love, it will actually have the opposite effect. Your site already looks cluttered, and your site visitor hasn’t even begun to navigate around the entire site. People will be confused and overwhelmed. This may be why you have a high bounce rate. Make it easy for potential customers to see your value, and easily find what they are looking for without any trouble. Display your top 5-10 products people love and organize your products effectively.

Customer service – how do you rate?
Mastering customer service online is difficult. The first and most important thing to do is being responsive. Letting your customers know how to contact your company and then following through with being there 100% of the time you are supposed to be.

Be helpful and get to the resolution as quickly as possible. Customer surveys are a great way to see where you stand with your customer service skills. Send a short email survey when your customers make a purchase. You

want your customer to know they are valued. Their input betters the service they receive from you.

An outdated website
Think of window shopping. The purpose of a window display is to draw in customers. The same goes with your homepage. Your homepage is the front window of your store. Keep your site alive and fresh. It man not require a re-design, but adding features customers expect and appreciate is always a good idea. But be careful, you do not want to overdo it and end up with a confusing and overly busy website.

• Over 500 million users
• Over 250 million logins from members per day
• More than 700 billion minutes spent on this site per month
• 150 million users can access this site on their phone through an app

Impressed?

Facebook has the largest and most active social network on the web which means that it is a phenomenal venue to market and promote your company. You have the ability to create pages, post comments, maintain discussions, and so much more to achieve an amazing online reputation through this one site alone. However, the only way to verify the effectiveness of what you are doing is through Facebook Page Statistics.

Whether the results are good or bad Facebook Page Statistics can significantly alter your behaviors and marketing methods through the social network site. Below is a list of statistics you should keep track of. The information you track can be transferred into revenue.

Monthly active users – the most important number on a statistics page. Monthly active users reports the number of “fans” utilize your site each month. With this statistic you have the ability to determine the level of interaction for your current following as well as adjust your marketing behavior depending on the results.

Activity – Instead of trying to input Google analytics into Facebook, the social network has it’s own measurement of activity which displays the unique and returning page views. You have the ability to view logged in views as well as unique views which gives you great insight into who is finding you. To utilize this information, you can start to update your content to target either your returning visitors or unique visitors.

Demographics – The demographics tool gives you almost every demographic piece of information that you could ever imagine. From gender to age range, or a combination of both, to fan countries, cities, and languages. If you want to target a particular niche location and you are getting majority of your users from alternate locations it is important you modify your marketing style and determine the best way to get back into the localization of your promotions.

Take advantage of the information Facebook provides and adapt to the conditions the statistics displays.

Want to drive traffic and sales to your website? What if I told you there is a marketing tool that is proven to do just this? Read further to learn what it is and how to use it to your full advantage.

You use this communication channel almost every day. Email.

When was the last time you emailed a marketing message to your customers? You have a full database of addresses from current customers; do not be afraid to reach them via email. How long did it take for you to acquire your current customers? It does not happen overnight. Keep in mind, it is more timely and expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep a returning one.

If you are not striving to either get started with or improve your current email marketing strategies you are missing out on a huge opportunity to not only increase sales but most importantly increase customer satisfaction.
Success does not happen overnight, but if you take the initiative to continuously improve your current marketing practices you are well on your way to being a successful business owner. Here are a few tips on how you can improve your email marketing strategies. Take notes!

Bad Subject Lines
Before your customer sees your email design they need to actually open the email itself. Your customer needs to be enticed by an effective email subject line. Keep the subject line short and concise. These critical words should summarize the content of the message while enticing the recipients to WANT to read further.

Poor email design
As your design evolves, remember to keep your email aesthetic similar to your website. Consistent branding is critical across all communications. If you need inspiration with your email design, look at messages you receive from your favorite brands.

Inconsistency
Before committing to email marketing you must decide on how often you want to target your customers. How often do you have promotions or sales? These are important factors to take into consideration before sending out your first email. The worst thing you can do is send out 5 emails this month and then come April you send zero. To help balance and organize your email frequency build a schedule that gives you sufficient time to design, create, and organize the content you will include in the email itself. Once you send out your first email check your response metrics. You want to know what is working/not working.

When it comes to your ecommerce site, there are several actions to avoid at all costs. If you find yourself nervous or perhaps sweating a bit while reviewing our list don’t worry we are not secretly laughing or judging you. We want to help you fix the problem(s) and be thankful for a chance to save your store. Be ready to take notes!

Unimpressive site design.
Plain and simple – if your site design does not impress, you are already in trouble. Experience is everything when it comes to online shopping. Make the investment in your site design. First impressions are everything. If you establish a lasting impression your customers will return. Trust me.

Your product photos are…blah.
How you present your products is your only chance to show customers what they are purchasing, so make it count. If your product photos vary in size, lack dimension, and are super pixilated you are missing out on a BIG opportunity to wow your potential customers.

Product descriptions that only describe.
Like your product images, your product descriptions are your best opportunity to make a sale. A successful salesperson can describe a product in a way where customers can’t say no. You want to focus on highlighting the benefits of the product versus the boring details. Sell the dream!

Keyword stuffing.
This one coincides nicely with product descriptions. Making your website pages appealing to search engines is important. However, over stuffing keywords into your content will destroy your website ranking. Be creative when it comes to your website content. Remember, your customer’s first impression is what counts.

 
Outdated information.
If your content or images are from 2009 you are guilty of not updating your content. Shame on you! Displaying outdated information turns away customers. Who wants to buy a product that is outdated? It demonstrates a lack of attention to detail. Remember, search engines want new content. Updating your pages regularly and adding a blog to your site is a great way to keep your site fresh.

If you found yourself saying “Oh crap” at all while reading this post do not panic. The first step is pointing out the flaw, which is what you did by taking notes and writing down what needs to be corrected on your website. The second step is taking the initiative and following through with your corrections.

More often than not, website visits and revisits depend on the intensity of the relationship between the visitor and the site itself. This is why you tend to gravitate towards certain websites, while others lack something of interest to you. A relationship between the visitor and the website does not happen overnight, it takes time along with other factors that affect this sort of relationship.

Besides the appearance of the website being an obvious deciding factor,  things like simplicity and reward play a crucial role in the relationship. How? Simplicity and rewards are complementary to each other. If the website is very simple, after several visits the visitor may feel bored and then stop visiting at all. This implies that being too simple can affect the performance of the website.

Simplicity.
A Web designer wants their design to be unique and effective. Sometimes things get a little too complex and it becomes difficult for the user to navigate around the website. When this happens you are losing repeat visitors and the quality of your website is declining. Finding a happy medium with simplicity is key to the success of your website.

Reward.
A relationship depends on rewards that the visitor gets for buying and or using the services offered through the website. The reward can either be virtual or physical. When you think of physical rewards think gift vouchers being sent to the user. A virtual reward could be something like social networking. These types of websites reward the individual with friendship and acquaintance with likeminded people. For example: Gaming websites offer medals/badges to the players after successfully completing levels. The rewards do not have any physical entity, but of great importance to the players of the community that visit these sites regularly.

A website that offers rewards and is designed around simplicity builds a relationship with its visitors that is strong and long lasting.  How do you think your website rates? Have you recently conducted usability testing to see if your website meets your user’s needs? If you answered “No” it may be time for you to conduct a usability workshop to see how you can enhance your website’s uniqueness and meet your user’s expectations.

Introducing: FoxyPress 0.37

We are proud to present you with some new features! They are outlined below. Please let us know if you have any questions.

Advanced Email Template Functionality
We’ve upgraded our email template management to allow you to set an email template to be triggered for a specific product purchase. So for instance, if you had a product that you wanted to send rebate information with, you could now set this from the product add/edit view in WordPress.  Simply create your template and then set the dropdown values accordingly

Coupon Code Generation and Reporting
We’ve had requests to allow for coupon code generation for a product. At the moment, these coupons do not work with your FoxyCart coupons, but what it would allow you to do is generate a list of coupons per product and then input them into FoxyCart admin or provide to another merchant if you were offering a deal for them.  We’ve found a few uses for it, but hopefully you all find more! Let us know how you implement this new feature.

 
If the above features didn’t fancy your taste check out what else FoxyPress has to offer! FoxyPress Demo
Still not quite satisfied? Tell Us what you want! Nicely of course :)

For businesses that need a little help managing the market and distinguishing their brand from the rest of the mobile web. Here are four mistakes most commonly made.

Not having a mobile site. This one is obvious. Not having your website optimized for mobile devices is hurting your business/company. You are failing to connect with at least 80 million users that regularly access the mobile web from their Smartphone devices.

Goals? What are goals?

Not having goals is another mistake. Deciding what you want users to do with your mobile site is critical to any mobile marketing strategy.

Producing a negative mobile experience

Brands can engage mobile users much more successfully by providing a positive mobile experience that makes it easy for mobile users to navigate the site and access information or data. Mobile sites that consist of one page (home page) are frustrating to users driving them away from the site. By including 2-3 pages on your mobile site you allow users to explore content and learn more about services/products.

Overwhelming mobile users

Your mobile website should not include all the content that your website contains. By trying to jam everything into just a few pages on your mobile site, you are putting way too much information into too tiny of a space. Keep things simple, clean, and presentable.

We hope these tips are helpful whether you are working on your first mobile site, or are working to perfect your mobile marketing strategy!

How can you get the most from your content and make it as effective as possible? Re-use, Re-purpose, and make it portable. You want to get as much out of each effort as possible.

1. Re-use content

Whenever you’re re-using content on the web you want to make sure you’re not creating duplicate content. So, the question is how do you take the same content and use it on multiple sites? A blog is the answer. Each blog article can also feed social media websites like Facebook and Twitter, which in turn increases your reach. (Blog content also makes great website content – just add links throughout your site to the blog articles) Readers love this because it allows them to go even deeper into a subject they want to know more about.

2. Re-Purpose Content

Allowing users to have access to printable materials on our website is easy to do. Add a link to a PDF, or require users to fill out a form.

 These are just two quick and efficent ways you can get the most out of your work. Do you have any techniques you use to make the most of your site or blog’s content? We would love to hear your thoughts!