However at the same time, you are also competing with thousands of other sites offering similar products. Most consider the defining factor would be the price, but I tend to disagree. Yes, customers have the tendency to shop around first and likely to make a purchase from a seller who offers the best deal. This is not always the case though, and if you follow this model then it is much harder to make your business sustainable because there is always possibility a competitor to be able to offer even lower prices than yours.

Give your customers a great shopping experience, then they will be back to buy more from your online store

After setting up the most important element: a running e-commerce site, business owners are typically focused on the marketing to attract customers into the website and eventually make it generate some revenue. An understandable strategy, as the the whole idea of creating the website is to make profit from the transactions. But usually first-time customer acquisition cost is higher than the profit generated from the first purchase. To ultimately get them to come back and order more items from your online store which probably costs much less is by giving them a great shopping experience.

The key is to be able to create measurements of your e-commerce operations and continuously monitor the performance of these areas:

Order fulfillment time

Rule #1: do not sell items which are not in-stock, or if you have to then give your customers a very clear lead time and stick to it. Nothing is more upsetting than having to just sit, wait and not getting the items you already paid for. This is an easy situation to get your customers to never come back ever.

Next thing is to calculate the average time required to get your order shipped. Ideally this should be completed within 2 day working days.

Clear communication

Do not hesitate to contact your customers if there are problems with their orders, such as delayed shipment or if you need to validate the transaction or address. This goes the other way, make it clear for your customers how to reach out to you. Customers might change their mind after placing an order more often than you think. Give them an opportunity to amend or cancel their order. It will build trust and next time they will not hesitate to place a different order from you.

Communication is not always limited to contacting through your website. If you manage social media profiles like Twitter, Facebook page, Instagram etc, be sure to check those regularly.

Human interaction is the great opportunity to give the true personality of your business. You will gain valueable feedback which could make your business much better.

Customer support

Still related with communication, but more specific is customer support. Your customers might have questions or problems when they have received the products they ordered. You and your team need to be an expert with every product that you sell, even it is not your own brand. “No fuss” return policy is always good to have if you can offer it, but often a customer just wants to be guided in using or maintaining a product. For more advanced type of products, you can consider providing them to the manufacturer’s website or document to answer the questions.

Just as important is to measure your response time. Generally customers expect to get a reply within 1 business day for their inquiry. Consider implementing a support ticket system to streamline your customer support process.

The post Non-marketing e-commerce checklist appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

Nowadays, businesses have become more aware that having great looking websites is just not enough. With every competitor also owning a website, it takes more beyond good development for this particular digital channel to be able to contribute to the business. It needs to be discoverable, incorporates interesting content to make potential customers or clients stay and browse, and ultimately have proper call-to-action elements to convert them.

The work after a website is launched is much harder and requires more dedication to achieve the targets. While all those elements above were already considered during design and development phases, it is almost impossible to create the right formula without field tests and make data driven decisions based on the site’s analytics results.

All these lead to 3 components in general: online marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) and e-commerce strategy. The first problem to tackle is, most people (read: clients) may not be aware of the differences and consider them as the same. They might come to you and mention any of the terms and expect it covers everything.

Different agencies or professionals may have different interpretations to give explanation of each of those. Some just want to make the client’s life easier by not bothering about technical definitions and just provide a “full digital service”. These are really smart guys. However there are times when you really need to draw lines regarding each of these services to define scope of work and priorities between them.

Online marketing

I consider it as a marketing effort if you need to create an outline to be done in order to generate traffic to the website. Usually involving consistent actions over a course of time period.

In general, I classify online marketing into 4 categories:

1. Organic or non-paid online marketing
   This is done by promoting the website through different networks to gain some backlinks. Few examples:
   • Posting links to landing pages or blog posts on online discussions/forums
   • Notifying bloggers to review or feature a product or service offered on the website
   • Offline promotion (word of mouth) to lead customers to the website
2. Social media
   No company these days will be able to generate massive inbound traffic without the help of social media. By setting up a good social media profiles and consistently posting latest news and updates through these channels, it would increase the brand awareness faster than any other channel.
3. Email marketing
   Still one of the most effective channel. Never ever take this one out from your online marketing strategy, unless no ones literally uses email anymore.
4. Paid online marketing
   This can be done by creating ads on multiple networks, such as search engines and social media. My favorites, because of the ease of use, effectiveness, and popularity, are Google AdWords, Facebook Ads and AdRoll. Although keep in mind that every industry may have different niche and types of market, so you need to select carefully and always be ready to try different ones in order to get the best result.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Unlike online marketing which requires financial investment in order to run, SEO is the organic solution. It is also the most difficult and complex to get positive results. The challenge is, you need to compete with billions of other websites and make the search engines to see your website as the most relevant when someone is searching with a particular keyword or key phrase.

The copy of your content is still the most relevant factor. However other technical elements such as site speed, URL format, page structure, sitemaps, they all weigh into the overall score. If your site is bloated and slow to load, it will probably end in lower search ranks compared to other sites with similar content.

It is not possible to break down everything about SEO in a single post. But to keep it short, when you work on your site’s SEO, it means trying to make it as friendly as possible to the search engines and ensure the content is relevant to your target audience.

E-commerce

In case your website does not actually sell anything online, we can also refer it as Conversion Rate Optimization. Every website has a function: to generate sales or leads, business branding, as marketing tool, etc. While the first two’s primary purpose is to drive people into the website, e-commerce or conversion optimization goals are to create a better experience to the users and ultimately increase the conversion rates.

There are many ways to achieve those, depending on the your set goals. For example, if it is an online store, then it will be to sale as many items as possible. This can be achieved by implementing these:

1. Very clear call-to-action (Buy) buttons
2. Product recommendations to cross-sell
3. Product bundles to up-sell
4. Free shipping offer
5. Special promotions
6. Featured products

In order to have a successful website, aside from having a well designed website, you need to consider all components mentioned above to ensure the online channel of your business is getting the results you expected.

The post Online marketing, SEO and ecommerce: how do they differ? appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

Countless threads have been created asking the simple question: should I use Magento or [name other popular e-commerce application]? I can very confidently answer this now: if you never had any experience managing e-commerce site, limited budget or resources, then look elsewhere. Many other e-commerce applications will save you money and headaches, while you can build up your revenue before moving to the next level.

Do not get me wrong, as stated in the beginning, I really like Magento. It opens up new possibilities of actions and automations that I could not do with previous systems I worked with before. But until you can see the limitations of other applications in your list, then keep it with lower priority in your list.

Here are a few reasons why Magento could create more problems than solution to your business requirements:

Magento requires more time and budget to develop

Given its complex nature, you cannot turn finalized HTML pages into Magento templates overnight. It involves break them into tiny blocks and combining them again through its XML-based layout file. Tons of free and premium extensions can also be very tempting, but implementation may not be as easy as adding plugins to your WordPress blog. Conflicts will be expected and your developer needs to have full knowledge in how your e-commerce site is set up in order to be able to debug effectively.

It is much harder to find good and experienced Magento developer

Unless you have very huge budget of course, in which you can just go to the best digital agency specializing in e-commerce and/or Magento development. Many developers may offer affordable budget and can actually build the site as specified, but they might sacrifice Magento’s strict rules which lead to more problems in the future. Or you could also spend a lot of money but do not get the results you expected. Bad coding will only make your site slow and vulnerable.

Related to the next point, if your developer does not have server or networking skills at all, that is another reason to look for another one. At the very least, Magento developer should be able to recommend a good configuration and setup.

Magento needs to run on a very good server

If you are not willing to spend more than $50/month, then you should forget about it. Even VPS might not be enough, depending on the traffic and how good the server is optimized. My suggestion: go with Magento optimized hosting providers. Installing and properly configuring full page cache will also improve the performance significantly.

Magento admin has long learning curve

You want to use e-commerce platform that does not require a formal training? Then Shopify is what you are looking for. Magento settings have so many layers which you can easily get lost or forget. Google is always your best friend, but if you do not want to go through the trouble just because you want to change the contact email address, then Magento is not for you. I even feel that it is not designed to be self-managed, instead you need a dedicated person to help you manage it.

Taking The Risk

All the reasons above will be worth if you have identified the restrictions of other systems and could only find it on Magento. For me, here are some:

1. You need advanced price and marketing rules. This one is very obvious. You can create extremely complex promo rules out-of-the-box, or even extend them further if needed. This is achievable because you can create multi-level conditions and actions within Magento’s Shopping Cart Price Rules.
2. Integrations with other systems. Including accounting, warehouse, fulfillment.
3. Multi store setup. This is always one of key decision factors against other systems. Magento multi store feature is very mature and deeply integrated with everything else. It is part of the framework and very solid.

Still confused of which e-commerce platform you should use? Please share it here.

The post Things to know before choose Magento appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

Website: www.shopify.com

[rating: 4.5/5]

A shop in minutes, a business for life. JadedPixel, developer of Shopify, is certainly not exaggerating its tagline, you really can set up your online store in minutes.

It all started a year ago. I had zero experience on working with e-commerce system. I always thought it had to be customized by someone who had absolute knowledge of programming that supports the system, whether it was PHP, ASP, anything. Surprisingly, it only took a few days to fully understand how the themes work and I could create a customized theme in a few days. Note, you can start building your online shop using the provided default themes.

Customization
Just like stated above, it is super easy to learn and create a new theme. It uses its own Liquid templatling system for dynamic content, but believe me it is easy to understand. Of course you still definitely need to have at least an understanding of (x)HTML, CSS and basic programming algorithm.

You only need to modify 6 or 7 theme files and one CSS file, compared to dozens on most of other similar systems. Worth to note, it is also convenient to add a customized JavaScript modules without interfering with the rest of system most of the time

Backend Admin
This is also one of the biggest point why we love it so much. The look and feel is very clean. AJAX support makes it possible to drag and drop to sort your products.

Shopify's Admin interface screenshot

Support
The first place you need to go when you are experiencing any problem or bug is their forums which can be a good or a bad thing. The good thing is there are so many nice and skilled people on the community that will gladly share their knowledge and help you out. The bad thing, you just sometimes need a direct respond and explanations from the developers and it may take a while to get their attention.

Improvement
Shopify is growing along with your business. There are countless updates and new features that have been added since the first time we use it, and they plan to keep on doing it. Although there are some features that we wish they should have added, but not yet. They listen to their customers, so I am sure one day they will be added.

Price
Shopify offers a very unique pricing. You only pay a very reasonable monthly fee plus a small percentage of your transaction fee (ranging from 0.5% to 2%). This makes sense, if you want to start your first online business you possibly do not want to spend hundreds or thousands of dollar each month. You can check their detailed pricing plans here.

Final Words
I have worked partially with other systems since then, nothing is as simple as Shopify. It really stands with its concept, to make everything as easy as possible. For a small and medium business, Shopify is perfect! But if you need more detailed features like bulk shipping update, more flexible coupon code creation options or customer membership, you might have to wait until they include them to the system.

The post Review: Shopify appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.