Today’s ecommerce merchants have plenty of options when it comes to online payment systems.
That’s why, in this article, we’ll be reviewing my top solutions for accepting payments online. This list will help you understand some of the most popular online payment solutions and choose the right one for your business.
Len Markidan of Groove HQ explores ways of taking care of our bosses, customers!
Businesses who deliver a superior customer experience are the ones that will win.
Businesses who deliver a superior customer experience are the ones that will win.
Your customers—all customers—have a choice.
They can choose to do nothing at all.
They can choose to do business with you.
Or they can choose one of your competitors.
What influences their choices?
While pricing is a complex subject that involves psychology, marketing, revenue modeling and more, customer experience is the easiest win you can get that will instantly set you apart from your competitors and let you charge higher prices.
Take a look at these stats:
In Oracle’s 2011 Customer Experience Impact Report, the company cites research that found that 86% of customers will pay more for a better customer experience.
It’s not a fluke; American Express found a similar result in their 2011 Customer Service Survey, with 70% of Americans willing to spend an average of 13% more with companies they believe provide excellent customer service.
And the benefits go beyond those first customers, too: that same AmEx study found that on average, happy customers tell an average of nine people about their experience. Read more of this in https://www.groovehq.com/blog/improve-customer-experience
This a post by Vantage that can help you make some game changing tweaks to your online business.
Today, with the right tools almost anyone can be an online ecommerce all-star. However, unless you’re intentional about how you construct and run your online store, it’s highly likely you’ll make simple mistakes that could seriously harm your brand. Don’t worry though; there’s good news. By learning to avoid these mistakes, you can win more customers, earn more sales, and boost your brand’s ecommerce growth.
Whether you’re an ecommerce professional or a complete beginner, making these 7 mistakes will damage your results. Are you guilty of any of them?
It goes without saying that if you’re like most businesses, you have competitors. What’s more, those competitors are out there trying to claim the same business you are. You need to pay attention to what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and how successful their efforts are.
Competitive analysis should be a large part of your launch strategy, but you should also conduct it regularly. To take a hands-off approach, use an alert system to let you know whenever your competition publishes a piece, targets a particular keyword, or develops a new item. This allows you to stay abreast of the competition and ensure you’re not missing out on obvious opportunities. We also recommend keeping an eye out on their social channels to see what they’re putting out, how their engaging and what approaches they’re taking.
The key to a successful ecommerce store is a solid marketing strategy. If people can’t find your products, they don’t know they exist. Unsurprisingly, purchasing from you then becomes impossible. It’s critical to invest in a blended marketing strategy that includes SEO, social media, paid advertising and content creation. When you do this, you will enjoy the benefits of more customers, more sales, and more conversions. The keyword here is plan, make sure to map out your strategy and progress to stay organized and on top of what’s working and what isn’t.
Need help monitoring the performance of your ecommerce store? Vantage offers retailers a free analytics dashboard to gain insight into what is driving their growth, learn more.
Customer service is one of the most critical aspects of a successful online store. If you don’t invest in great customer service, you can bet your clients will jump ship, sooner rather than later. According to HelpScout, 78% of customers have abandoned a cart or a transaction because of poor customer service. As if that weren’t enough, customers talk about bad customer service experiences twice as often as they do good customer service experiences, which means news of your company’s service shortcomings could go viral.
With that in mind, remember that customer service is essential to ecommerce growth. To succeed, you must adjust it according to your customers, the growth of your platform, and the suite of products you’ve chosen to offer.
If you’re not creating buyer personas, you’re missing out on business you should be claiming. Buyer personas, or fictionalized people who closely represent your target customers, allow you to target your marketing message and product distribution, and ensure the people you’re trying to reach are paying attention.
If you’ve never created a marketing persona, now is the perfect time to develop a few for your brand (HubSpot’s guide can help). We recommend aiming to create between 2-4 different personas of your likely or desired customers. If you have marketing personas that are outdated or inaccurate, update them accordingly. Remember that your buyer personas can change with time, so it’s worth adjusting them every few years or even months.
For your online store to succeed, you need to create a unique voice. This differentiates your online store from those of your competitors and promotes brand recall. Creating a voice also serves to make your ecommerce brand more recognizable, and ensure that customers can pick you out in the online environment. Using a unique tone in your content helps to make your brand more fun and relatable. It makes people enjoy seeing your content come up on their Newsfeed and even want to share it with their friends.
Think of how brands like Dollar Shave Club and MeUndies have done this. There’s no mistaking these companies for anyone else.
For best results, use a fun or engaging tone that represents your brand and will strike a chord with customers.
If you want people to do something as important as give you their money, you have to make it easy for them. This applies to your checkout process as much as it does everything else. Instead of asking customers to jump through a dozen hoops to purchase your product, make it fast and straightforward – people will be more likely to buy and more likely to recommend your site to others. A great and easy way to enable this is offering a guest checkout option. Less work, quicker transaction.
If you want customers to interact with your products, you need to make it easy for them to search your site. Excellent site functionality makes all the difference between a pleasing and a disappointing user experience, so be sure your platform is simple to navigate. For help, use a platform like Nextopia, which offers ecommerce site search and navigation services. Using a service like Nextopia can help increase conversions and customer satisfaction by ensuring that your customers can quickly find the products they want to buy.
source: https://gotvantage.com
This an article by Kristen DeCosta
Selling products online is unique because of the massive range of customers you can reach. In some ways, this evens the playing field, but remember, the millions of potential customers you can reach also have possibly thousands of competitor websites fighting for their attention.
First, you have to drive traffic to your site, then deliver great service and great products. The good news is, your overhead cost selling products online is significantly lower than opening a physical store.
Secret #1 is simple: work works. Things will probably move slowly as you are first getting started, but the more time and effort you put into creating and promoting your online store, the more sales you will see. Keep in mind that you will need to build multiple channels for marketing your products. Social media, content, SEO, and paid advertising all take time, tweaking, and a little bit of work every day.
Don’t worry if this sounds overwhelming- we’ll get into helpful resources for these approaches later in the post. Know that you will need to gradually invest energy into your store to grow your customer base and get to the point where you are mostly focused on upkeep.
The first question most of us ask when starting a new business is what to sell. There’s not necessarily a right or wrong answer.
That being said, considering the niche market you want to target is vital to the success of your business. Smaller niches will have less competition, giving you a better chance of connecting with potential buyers. On the other hand, your pool of customers will be smaller. Spend some time thinking about your niche and balancing the level of competition with the size of the market.
Think about the role location plays in selling products online. You will need to include the costs and logistics of delivery in your planning. Keep in mind that digital products like software, music, and eBooks can be sold internationally and delivered instantly, and thus have a slightly different cost structure.
Visitors to your website or blog tend to have a short attention span, so you generally have about 10 seconds to grab their attention when they first land on your page. Don’t put obstacles in their way or make them overthink. Many visitors will leave your site the moment they hit a snag.
Three golden rules are:
A lot of ecommerce software isn’t easy to use from a buyer’s perspective, forcing them to pause and fight their way through to the eventual purchase. Hint: try buying your product as a prospective buyer would. Can you do it quickly and easily without too much thought?
When consumers consider purchasing from a website, they are looking for reassurance before they buy. Help them shop with confidence.
Fact: 33% of Americans say they’ll think about switching companies after just one poor service experience. (Source)
One technique for selling, regardless of whether the business is online or brick-and-mortar is to offer a guarantee that if the customer is not satisfied, you will refund them with no questions asked.
Another is to show that your site is secure and verified by trusted third parties like Symantec or McAfee. If you are planning on handling credit card information, your website or blog will need to be on a secure server and PCI compliant. This takes a lot of work, time, and investment. A better alternative would be to build your store via an ecommerce platform. Selz securely handles the credit card payments for you without requiring you do anything to your blog or website.
If you sell digital products, the delivery should be automated. If you sell physical products, prompt shipping is important, as is providing the buyer with the ability to track their shipment.
Having a great website or blog alone is not enough to bring in traffic and sales. You need to attract people to your store and help them take the step of making a purchase.
Put yourself in your prospective buyer’s shoes. What will they do? Most likely…
You will need to invest a considerable amount of time and energy each week to promote yourself. Try writing relevant articles or blog posts on your site, or finding guest posting opportunities on other websites that your prospective customers will visit. Get other people to review your products on their website.
Focus on getting prospective customers to visit your blog or website. Click here to schedule a free audit that will show you how to market your business successfully.
Use Google Analytics to see which sources bring the most prospective customers and which convert best to sales.
If you are selling products online via Selz, you can easily connect your Selz Store to Google analytics by copying and pasting a single piece of code.
The techniques to help your website appear higher in search results are called Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO for short. This process has spawned a whole industry and is the subject of a separate post. You can read a great overview of the benefits of content marketing and SEO in business blogging here.
You can also spend money advertising your website on search engines or other websites – this is called Search Engine Marketing (SEM for short) or Pay Per Click (PPC). The two big advertising networks are Google Ads and Facebook Ads.
Encourage your customers to share a link or two on their social media accounts. Remember, you’re not just asking them to make a purchase, you’re asking them to share your online store with their network – personal recommendations and endorsements can be extremely valuable and will convert well as a source of new customers.
Our final piece of advice is to be patient. It takes a lot of time and effort to build up an audience and to build up a business. But don’t give up. It is challenging but rewarding, and you will get back what you put in.
source: https://founderu.selz.com
