Ten Great Ecommerce Ideas for April 2010

Practical eCommerce asks industry insiders each month to share a great, innovative idea that could help an ecommerce company. Here’s what ten of them had to say for the April 2010 installment of “Great Ecommerce Ideas.”

Drive Short-term Sales

“To drive short-term sales volumes, try these marketing techniques: Offer 24-hour deep discounts on selected products for one day only. Or, offer free shipping over a limited time period, such as ‘Place an order this weekend and get free shipping.’ Repeat at intervals to drive traffic to your site.”

Kate Holroyd
Marketing Manager
Tiger Commerce

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Learn HTML, Save on Design Fees

“Make sure at least one of your core team members learns and understands HTML very well. You can potentially save a bundle in web design fees by being able to make easy and quick updates yourselves.”

Brina Bujkovsky
CEO/President
The Younique Boutique

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Squeeze Images to Web-friendly Size

“When looking for ways to speed up your site’s performance, be sure you have squeezed your images down to the most web-friendly size. Free online services, such as Smush.it from Yahoo!, are great for compressing your images without losing any visible detail.”

Rob Mobberley
Owner
Performance Motorcare

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Don’t Get Hung Up on Cool Tricks or Gimmickry

“There are a lot of great web tools that promise to do big things for your online business. Look into them if they interest you, but remember the core values that drive your business, and find ways to infuse those into your ecommerce site for long-term growth and revenue.”

Mike Sprouse
Chief Marketing Officer
Epic Advertising

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Put Text in Bite-sized “Chunks”

“Web pages that present a wall of solid text and information are intimidating to shoppers—it seems like too much work to slog through. So separate text into short, discrete paragraphs separated by white space, and use bullets when you can.”

Mason Wiley
SVP Marketing
hydra

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Make the Most of Free Shipping

“One of the most significant draws to a product listing is free shipping. When you offer free shipping, be sure to populate the shipping field with a zero (0) for all eligible products in all your data feeds on comparison sites and other product databases (such as Google Base).”

Matt Thompson
Director
Indigo Sky

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Use Advanced Analytics to Maximize Conversions

“Optimize your site at its full potential to convert visits to sales by using advanced traffic and sales analytics tools, such as Google Analytics. By tracking patterns during visitors’ shopping experiences, you can determine which pages should be most advertised, and which pages need adjustments.”

David Farache
COO
Fortune3

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Return Policy

“Place your return policy link immediately under the checkout button. You need to give users comfort that they can return without risk. If you can accept returns without penalties and fees, you will find yourself in even better shape.”

Stephanie Leffler
CEO
Juggle.com

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Use All the Free Tools at Your Disposal

“Use all the available free tools to market and maintain your website, such as Google Product Search, Xenu’s Link Sleuth, Twitter and Google Webmaster Tools. And, use that other great free tool, the Internet, to find more available tools.”

Richard Westerbeek
Lead Developer
Evolution Internet Ltd.

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The Power Of Online Video

“Using video to promote products and services online is one of the most underused, ecommerce strategies today. Video is highly viral. YouTube is now the number one search engine behind Google, and Americans watch double the number of videos compared to the number of online searches conducted. This gives video the potential to make your ecommerce campaigns incredibly successful.”

Bobbi Leach
General Manager
RevenueWire

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Got a great ecommerce idea? Email Kate Monteith at kate@practicalecommerce.com.