ProductCart Blog

Category: Tips & How-Tos

  • Tips for Turning ECommerce Shoppers into Buyers

    ecommerce conversionGiven the increased traffic to ecommerce websites during the holiday season, your site is likely to see more visitors than usual. But how can you convince holiday shoppers that they should buy from you instead of another online store? Here are some tips on how to convert more of those shoppers into actual buyers.

    • Focus on trust. With data breaches in the news, shoppers are on the alert for any sign that an ecommerce site isn’t taking every precaution possible to protect their information. If you’re not a known brand, site visitors may also have concerns that they won’t receive their order or that their information will be sold to others who will pepper them unmercifully with marketing materials.

    Trust factors you can include on your ecommerce site include:

      • Secure payment validations
      • Information about tracking numbers and shipping timelines
      • Statements about company policy regarding selling email addresses, physical addresses, and phone numbers to other organizations
      • Frequently Asked Questions page
      • Prominent contact information, including a phone number
    • Create a sense of urgency. This is particularly important during the time of year when shoppers are likely to be anxious over finding the perfect gift. Close the sale by letting shoppers know when only a small quantity of an item is still in stock.

    Writing great product descriptions helps create a sense of urgency too; emotion is an important part of the buying process. If your product descriptions are just a few lines long, they won’t entice users to stay on the site or compel them to make purchases. If competitors are offering similar items at the same or a lower price, it will be tough to stand out without product descriptions that make it clear why buying from you is the best value.

    • Help your customers shop. The key is to actually be helpful, not pushy. Customers are savvy enough to realize it immediately when a “Frequently Purchased With” grouping doesn’t make sense, for example. Other constructive ways to help your customers include:
      • People Also Viewed
      • Q&A (you can post the answers to user questions on your product pages or use them to revise product descriptions)
      • Care instructions and/or demo videos
      • Reviews (entered by users; these are far more effective than Testimonials that prospective customers know you could have added yourself)
    reviews example
    Product reviews on DanielGreen.com draw the user’s attention immediately.

    What does “optimized” mean? No matter how good your marketing is or how amazing your products are, online shoppers are impatient and will quickly abandon your ecommerce site if pages load too slowly or are difficult to navigate. Be sure to plan for increased site traffic over the holiday season.

    • Make checkout easy. Have you ever abandoned a cart because shipping costs were unclear or because you had to complete a long profile? Your prospective customers will too. As they proceed through checkout, their anxiety over completing the sale will increase. Don’t give them a reason to ease their nervousness by simply leaving the site without buying. Be transparent about shipping costs and make the checkout process as simple and fast as possible.

    Check back soon for more great tips on managing your ecommerce store!

  • SEO for E-Commerce: Long-Tail Keywords

    search enter button keyAll e-commerce company owners know that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical to driving website traffic and increasing revenue, but many have no idea where to start in terms of improving their SEO. SEO is comprised of a number of ongoing digital marketing activities. Here’s how to get started without feeling overwhelmed using long-tail keywords.

    What are long-tail keywords? Simply put, long-tail keywords are phrases that describe what you’re selling in three or more words. Long-tail keywords allow you to compete where you can be effective. If your competitors for the top spot in search results for your main keywords are Amazon, Target, and Overstock, you have a long and painful road ahead if you go after those keywords. Instead of wasting resources against businesses that can afford to hire teams of internal and external experts to focus on just one area of SEO, find relevant long-tail keywords and build a content strategy around them.

    So if you sell baby clothes, you might build your content strategy around long-tail keywords like “roll tide onesies” and “red lacy baby dress.” Though there aren’t as many searches for those terms, there’s also less competition, so you have a better chance of being found. An added bonus is that while a user who types in “baby clothes” is likely to be at the beginning of the shopping process, someone who types in “red lacy baby dress” is ready to select a specific item and make a purchase.

    The fact that “roll tide onesie” is very specific doesn’t mean that your e-commerce shop won’t appear in search results if the user types in “crimson tide onesie” instead. Search engines, including Google, are very good at inferring intent from search terms. Remember, Google’s goal is to provide the best-quality search results to their users, so if the webpage is appropriate to the query, they want to serve it. And as search engines get better at inferring intent, users get more specific in their searches.

    The next step in your SEO strategy is to write content on the appropriate product pages around your long-tail keywords. Google’s Keyword Planner (Note: An AdWords account is required) can help you determine which long-tail keywords have the most search volume with the least competition, but don’t choose a keyword just for the numbers if it doesn’t make sense for your product; that’s likely to increase your bounce rate and cause frustration for potential customers.

    If you have a blog, there is no need to generate large volumes of content around a specific keyword like “roll tide onesie.” Instead, write interesting, helpful, and entertaining articles about baby clothes. Sample titles might include: How to Get Stains Out of Baby Clothes, How to Accessorize a Baby Boy, and Best Shower Gifts for a Second Baby. These will attract visitors to your site and give them something valuable that enhances their perspective of your business and makes it easy to start shopping, sign up for your email list, or follow you on Pinterest.

    Optimizing your webpages and blog posts for specific keywords means including them in strategic locations, like:

    • Page title
    • Meta title and description
    • Paragraph copy
    • Product description copy
    • Image file names
    • Image alt tags
    • URLs

    However, be careful not to “stuff” keywords. For example, your meta title and descriptions should entice users who are viewing them in search results to click through to your website. This in turn will improve your SEO, because it proves to search engines that your content is relevant to its users. When it comes to keywords, never sacrifice quality and usability for volume and repetition.

    To enjoy all the SEO benefits of long-tail content strategy, your e-commerce site must have a search-engine friendly architecture. If you have questions about e-commerce SEO, please call 800-804-1680.

    About the Author: Rachaelle Lynn is Google Certified in Analytics and AdWords and has over 12 years of experience in website development and digital advertising, including e-commerce, SEO, PPC, and social media. She has helped many businesses, from small local companies to large international organizations, establish online presences and leverage them to increase revenue.

  • How to Select a Shopping Cart for Your E-Commerce Customers

    Leading her ecommerce teamIndependent web designers are often tasked by their customers to offer enhancements to their customers’ websites. It’s a compliment, because it means that their customers trust them; it’s also a big responsibility, because the website needs to continue to work just as well it did prior to the addition of the new solution. Plus, new functionality is a source of revenue for independent designers, and no designer wants to lose control of the site because they can’t provide what their customer needs.

    Most business owners are aware that they could increase their profitability by adding shopping carts to their websites. For web designers, it’s not a matter of if this request will be made, but when, so it makes sense to have an answer for your customer ready and waiting. Designers, here’s how to select a shopping cart for your e-commerce customers.

    • Flexibility: Look for a solution that offers themes to keep costs down for your customers and help you get comfortable with the product, as well as customization for your more demanding clients once you understand the technology.
    • Top-of-the-Line Technology: Select an e-commerce option that is built around HTML5 and CSS3 and offers mobile commerce, fluid responsive design, and microdata mark-up to help your customers’ sites stand out across devices and browsers.
    • Search-Engine Friendly: If the e-commerce solution doesn’t give you the tools to take control of SEO and achieve better visibility in search results for your customers, prepare for some uncomfortable conversations with your customers.
    • Longevity: Don’t force your customers to be guinea pigs or set yourself up to spend hours trying to find workarounds for which you won’t get paid. Find a shopping cart solution that has been around for at least 10 years.
    • Support: Find a shopping cart system with robust online support resources, including user guides and forums, that are updated regularly.

    Selecting a designer-friendly shopping cart system will enable you to create amazing e-commerce websites for your customers and increase your revenues while you help them achieve their sales goals. For more information about how to become a ProductCart reseller, contact us.

    About the Author: Rachaelle Lynn is Google Certified in Analytics and AdWords and has over 12 years of experience in website development and digital advertising, including e-commerce, SEO, PPC, and social media. She has helped many businesses, from small local companies to large international organizations, establish online presences and leverage them to increase revenue.

  • Should You Add a Shopping Cart to Your Website?

    e-commerceMany shoppers appreciate the convenience and flexibility of buying online. They can shop from the comfort of their favorite recliners at any time of the day or night, and they can choose from a wider range of stores than if they visited a physical store or even a shopping mall. Store owners who have relied on a brick-and-mortar presence for 100% of their revenues are often disappointed to find that they cannot compete with the world of e-commerce and wonder, “Should I add a shopping cart to my website? Will customers still want to purchase my products if they cannot see and touch them?”

    The answer to both questions is yes, especially when a robust, feature-rich e-commerce solution is selected. According to USA Today, 56% of consumers will purchase online during the holiday season in 2014. With the right support, even the most tech-resistant store business owner can maximize the potential of an online shopping cart and increase their revenues with a huge customer base that would not have been possible prior the existence of the internet.

    Adding a shopping cart to your website is not simply about having the ability to allow customers to place items into a cart and pay for their purchases online; there are many other benefits, including:

    • Offering multiple large, clear photos and detailed descriptions of your products
    • Providing customers with an opportunity to read reviews of your products from other customers, which offers credibility and generates trust in your company
    • Multiple payment options, including online payment methods such as Paypal
    • Giving customers the ability to view and purchase your products on mobile devices; even local customers will appreciate being able to shop via phone or tablet when they’re too busy to visit your brick-and-mortar store, or when your store is so crowded that they might have to wait in line

    There are also many revenue-generating opportunities for your company when you add a shopping cart to your website, including suggesting related products and even offering custom pricing to different customer groups. If you have questions about how to make e-commerce work for your business, contact us today.

    About the Author: Rachaelle Lynn is Google Certified in Analytics and AdWords and has over 12 years of experience in website development and digital advertising, including e-commerce, SEO, PPC, and social media. She has helped many businesses, from small local companies to large international organizations, establish online presences and leverage them to increase revenue.

  • Holiday Ecommerce Prep: 5 Things You Should Be Doing Now!

    If you’ve weathered at least one season of online retail commerce already, you know the drill.  If you haven’t already started planning out your Holiday sales season, now is the time!  Here are some things you should be thinking about and setting up right now in order to make the most of the single biggest retail sales season for ecommerce.

    Presentation and planning are crucial for shipping Holiday purchases
    Presentation and planning are crucial for shipping Holiday purchases

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  • How to Take Product Photos That Impact Your Bottom Line

    Product photography is one of the biggest selling points in an ecommerce website. Without being able to visit a tangible store and touch, smell, hear or taste the product, potential customers only have images to interact with, and according to this infographic, more than 90 percent of buying decisions are influenced by visual factors. In other words, cell phone photography or pictures from your early 2000s point-and-shoot camera just aren’t going to cut it if you want to be successful in ecommerce.

    One ProductCart store that takes full advantage of the importance of good photography in ecommerce is equestrian apparel website Kerrits. In this blog, we examine Kerrits as an example to give you some ideas on how to maximize the user experience in your ecommerce store and ultimately achieve better sales.

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  • ProductCart v5 Themes: Choosing a Pre-Set Theme or Creating Your Own

    If you have a shopping cart or are currently evaluating shopping carts, then you have probably heard of themes and/or templates.  As it applies to a store design “theme” and “template” are two different words for the same thing.  Essentially, they are a set of files (CSS, HTML, JavaScript, etc.) that control the look and feel of your store.  When a theme is applied to a store, the store instantly transforms to the specifications of the theme.  A theme could do something as simple as changing the background color to light blue, or it could go as far as redesigning the entire cart layout.  That is the beauty of themes: it is a great way for store owners to get up and running with a unique, professional design quickly and at a reasonable cost.  Today we are going to examine ProductCart v5 themes.  Specially, let’s talk about what makes ProductCart v5 themes so important to web developers and store owners alike,  what separates them from other ecommerce systems, and how insanely simple it is to choose a pre-set theme or create your own. (more…)

  • Capitalize on Marketing through Pinterest with ProductCart

    pinterest_logo

    It is no secret that using the popular pin board website, Pinterest, is a phenomenal strategy for getting your products seen on social media, especially for retail companies. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, which are great for raising brand awareness and creating fans, Pinterest allows the consumer to bookmark specific products of yours to their personal profiles and – if you have the right tools in place – even allows them to click through and purchase the product. (more…)

  • Introducing Unlimited, Customizable Product Detail Pages

    We recently talked about the ProductCart v5 One Page Checkout system, and with good reason!  The One Page Checkout system has an incredibly important job helping customers place orders, so it is no wonder that most merchants focus solely on the checkout system while evaluating shopping cart solutions.  However, there is another component that is just as important, but often overlooked… and without this component customers would not even reach the checkout: the humble Product Details page.  Today, we’re specifically talking about the impact of creating custom layouts with ProductCart v5 Product Details.  At the end of the day, if your shopping cart limits your ability to display products in a clean, logical way that makes sense for your products, then you may be losing sales. (more…)

  • Using Google’s Universal Analytics Tracking Code

    On April 2, 2014, Google officially released Universal Analytics, a new tracking code put in place to replace Classic Analytics. According to Google, the Classic Analytics tracking code will continue to function for two years; however, being proactive in upgrading will help ensure you don’t lose any Google Analytics data.  ProductCart 5 has added the ability to use either Classic Google Analytics or upgrade to Google Universal Analytics in your store.  You can easily update your store through the Control Panel once you’ve upgraded your Google account. (more…)