Each month, Practical eCommerce asks industry insiders to share a great, innovative idea that could help an ecommerce company. Here’s what ten of them had to say for the May 2009 installment.
Optimize Comparison Shopping Engine Feeds
“Start inexpensively with Google Base. When the feed is optimized well, the results can show up on the first page of Google within hours (over months with SEO) and conversions are easier since the traffic is qualified for ‘shopping’.”
Manjula Higginbotham
Support Manager
AmeriCommerce Shopping Cart Software
The Evolution of the Payment Provider
“With the status of the financial market, the standard payment service provider tries to provide innovative solutions. A preferred option is to combine their services with affiliate, marketing and alternative payment methods. Today’s providers are elevating to complete ecommerce service providers offering the merchants what they require.”
Dennis Michael Gannon
Marketing Communications Representative
Gate2Shop
The Human Face on Your Website
“Make simple product videos, upload them to YouTube, and then embed the video on your product page. Just standing in front of the camera and demonstrating your product will set you apart from 99 percent of other online retailers. Demonstrating on video shows that you really know your product, and it puts a human face behind your website.”
Lars Hundley
President
Clean Air Gardening
Eliminate Guesswork
“Track, measure, and test to eliminate guesswork. Evaluating traffic patterns reveals ideal places for cross-sell and up-sell. Identifying points of abandonment exposes weaknesses in your system. Conducting A/B split tests on everything from emails to landing pages to checkout steps allows your customers to show you exactly what they want.”
Sarah Brown
Founder
Two Blue Peas
Manage Deliverability
“Use E-mail marketing tools to effectively manage your deliverability and monitor the performance of your campaigns. Focus on the customers that are more receptive to your E-mails to reduce the costs of campaigns and improve your return on investment.”
Al Pascale
Director of eCommerce
Dydacomp
Discount Coupons for Affiliates
“Especially in these tough times, the discount coupons will be the most convincing argument an affiliate could have. Give ‘classical’ coupons to affiliates or offer them tools to make their own coupons, from the commission they already have.”
Cristian Dorobantescu
Marketing Manager
Avangate
Maximize Revenue by Offering Value Added Services to Your Existing Clients
“By offering value added services through strategic partners you can strengthen existing client relationships, increase loyalty and generate additional revenue. Solid partners should offer recurring revenue to you, truly competitive pricing and automated tools to make it easy for you and as seamless as possible for your clients to enroll in their 3rd party service offering.”
Nathan England
Vice President of Reseller Marketing
Recurring Revenue Resellers
Build Rapport
“Merchants often underestimate the value of relationship management in regards to eCommerce. If you build great rapport with your customers, suppliers, credit card processor, etc., I assure you that your Internet retail business will be better off.”
Jon West
CEO and Co-Founder
3tailer – The Online Retailer
Take Total Control
“Take total control of customer interactions instead of outsourcing critical operations such as customer service and shipping. It may be easier and cheaper to hire a call center to answer phones, or to have a manufacturer drop ship orders, but customers will not feel the personalized and expert service that can be offered in house.”
Chris Moleskie
President
Wetsuit Wearhouse Inc.
Explorers and Hunters
“Your biggest pool of prospective customers may be people who are ‘exploring’ for ideas or ‘hunting’ for options. Anything you can do to help them find and choose products will set you apart from your competition and open up a large and untapped area of revenue.”
Alan Cox
Managing Director
LeftClick Ltd.
Got a helpful ecommerce tip? Email kate@practicalecommerce.com.
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