Magento Go Blog

Quick and Easy Design Edits in Magento Go – Part 2

2013-05-15T20:37:00-08:00

How To Use Google’s Free Web Fonts On Your Site

The right typography can really bring a design together. Google provides a repository of free fonts for use across the web. Why should you consider changing the stock fonts of your Magento Go theme? Using a bold, sans-serif font with smooth lines and curves is a very effective way to convey a high-tech design on a technology retail site like Apple’s. A font with a flowing formal, natural handwritten look is a great match for sites that retail makeup products, dolls, and girls’ toys, because it is something we identify with these items from other brands we encounter. Would you like to use one of Google’s free fonts on your website?

Select the fonts you’d like to use by clicking on “Add to Collection”. At the bottom of your screen, you’ll see a bar that tallies the number of fonts you’ve selected; on the right side, click the “Use” tab. This takes you to the review page, which contains 4 steps necessary to install the fonts on your site. Skip to step three, “Add This Code To Your Website”, where you’ll see three tabs –copy the code there and paste it in your Magento Go store under System > Configuration > Design > HTML Head > Miscellaneous Scripts.

Using the developer tools from above, find the text you want to change, add a new line of code and type in “font-family:” (without the quotes) and hit the tab key; then, refer to step four of the Google Fonts page and copy the font name (with the single quotes) that comes after that and drop it into the box that pops up. Your code should look similar to the highlighted section in the image.

If you’ve made your changes correctly, your text (the Product Title in our example) should look like our sample image. Copy the code into your Magento theme according to the steps we laid out in our “Custom Background” section above, remembering to add a title to your new changes via CSS comments.

Rounding Your Corners with CSS for a Clean, Contemporary Look

If you’re looking for that last bit of extra “flair” to make your site stand out, nothing produces a touch of modern style quite as easily as adding a bit of rounding to your image or button

corners. There is perhaps nothing quite so readily associated with modern web design as rounded gradient buttons. Rounded buttons are used extensively online, from PayPal’s iconic rounded yellow “Buy Now” button, to Apple’s smooth glossy rounded buttons.

Rounded buttons became popular as monitor resolutions and connection speeds increased, allowing higher fidelity graphics to become the standard of “Web 2.0” design. Rounded corner designs have become such a prominent design trend that the language has even translated over to real world products. Apple’s iconic mobile product lines have been using rounded corners since 2001, with the launch of the iPod, which stood in stark contrast to the bleak, hard-edged slabs that represented the MP3 player market at the time. This design language reached its peak with the introduction of the iPhone, which had no rivals in design at its launch, and the trend has spread since.

So, how can you add some Apple suave to your website? This process is very simple –using our developer console training, locate the button or image you want to add some rounding to. Mousing over the HTML codes in the left panel will highlight that element on the web page. Once you’re sure you’re on the right element, in the right panel of the developer tools, add the following code: “border-radius” and hit the “tab” key. In the new box, add “10px”, and you’ll see the corners of your buttons or images round. Your code should look like the example. If you’ve applied these CSS changes correctly, your elements should look like the example image below.

Make sure that you copy the code and add it into the theme in the design backend under Design > Themes Editor > CSS Editor. Remember to label your changes with CSS comments as we discussed in the opening of this article. Once you save your work, your changes will be live on your site. Congratulations!

We’ve covered a lot of ground in this post, and our hope is that you can put these tips to use improving your store, increasing your sales with a custom design that speaks to your audience. For more information on rounded corners, check out these excellent guides from Smashing Magazine and CSS Tricks. Stay tuned for more tips to improve your store through design and sales best practices.

Quick and Easy Design Edits in Magento Go – Part 1

2013-05-10T23:04:00-08:00

Styling Your Store with Magento Go’s CSS editor

In a recent post we discussed how to customize your site’s “Add to Cart” text links and buttons to compliment your store’s design. Today, we’re going to delve a bit deeper into customizing your theme using Magento Go’s built-in CSS editor for quick touch-ups and modifications. Remember, a well-designed, unique theme that speaks to your audience goes a long way to earning consumer buy-in, converting shop visitors into shop customers.

While many cloud-hosted shopping carts feature only a handful of themes and lack the ability to precisely tweak those themes to your desired look, Magento Go comes with dozens of free designer themes out of the box, and many more from our theme partners. Even better, Magento Go allows complex design changes via its built-in CSS editor and multiple options for implementing JavaScript, which we’ll discuss in detail below. Today we’re going to show you how to make some simple enhancements to your site using CSS, along with some good “rules of thumb” when making changes in Magento Go’s CSS editor.

This article will assume that you have a basic understanding of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). If you don’t we encourage you to invest a few hours to learn about this technology. Once you understand how CSS works, you will be amazed at how powerful it is and how much you can truly customize your site. W3 Schools hosts an easy-to-follow tutorial that can quickly get you up to speed.

What You Need To Know To Begin

Before we start playing with Magento’s CSS code, there are some basic guidelines that should be acknowledged.

1. Always label your new changes with CSS comments. CSS comments are sections of notes in your CSS that you can use to add breakoff points between different sections of CSS code, so that if you need to find your work later, you can just search for your code rather than scanning hundreds of lines. We suggest commenting your start point and end point with something like “/* MY CSS SECTION START */ …. /* END OF MY CSS SECTION */”. W3 Schools page on CSS has some great examples and instructions on using comments.
2. Double check all of your tags. Leaving a tag open will cause myriad problems in the way your website displays, including breaking the design completely. The good news is, you can fix this very easily by finding the line of CSS changes that doesn’t have a closing tag, and adding the correct closing tag. W3 provides a great service for checking for problems in your code. Just copy your CSS code in their validator and it will tell you where your trouble is.
3. Keep a local copy of your changes. When making a lot of changes to your site, it’s very easy to make minor tweaks fairly quickly and forget what your code looked like when you started. In this situation, we recommend keeping a “clean” file of the CSS code as you found it before you started making changes. You might keep a copy of the original edits or the daily changes – it’s up to you. Use a lightweight editor like Notepad++ on Windows or TextWrangler on Mac. These editors are free and will highlight different code chunks in different colors, making it very easy to see which section of the code you can edit.
4. You can also upload a “custom.css” file with all of your CSS changes included. However, on Magento Go, this file will overwrite the code in the css inline editor window. We strongly advise that you simply use the inline editor to avoid accidentally overwriting any code.

Applying These New Techniques

Now that we’ve covered the basics of editing CSS on your Magento Go store, let’s apply this new knowledge to an actual store.

The easiest way to make CSS changes to Magento Go is to use your browser’s built-in Developer Tools. We’ll be working in Chrome where you can find the developer tools by right clicking on the store element you want to change and clicking on “Inspect Element”. In Chrome’s Developer Tools, you access the element you want to change (like the website background, or the font and color of a page title, or just about anything else), use “Inspect Element,” and the developer console will appear. The console will be divided into two panels: on the left side is the HTML for the item you clicked on, and on the right side is the CSS code you’ll need.

Let’s start with a very common change many store owners like to make: adding a custom background to your website.

Adding a Custom Background to Your Magento Go Store

To add a custom background to your website, click on the whitespace of your website and the developer tools will usually select the best HTML element (developers call it a ‘node’) for editing. In this example we’re going to use "div class=”wrapper” html tag, which Chrome’s tool auto-selected for us. To add a background, in Chrome’s developer tools, click on the white space just after “padding-top: 33px” in the right column.

A new box will appear below that line of code, and you can add your CSS code.

Type in “background:” (minus the quotes) and hit tab. In the new box, type in “url ()” (sans quotes) and type in the URL of your background image. In this case, we’ll use this wood texture to add a bit of rustic charm to our shop. To get the URL for it, right click on the picture and click on “Copy image URL”, then drop that into the parentheses in your developer console on your store’s tab, and then hit “tab” on your keyboard to see the changes reflected on the website.

Congratulations, you’ve just applied a nice, rustic wooden background to your website!

Now, we need to take the code and add it to our theme inside of Magento Go. Log into your Store Admin panel and go to Design > Themes Editor > CSS Editor. Remember to label your changes with CSS comments as we discussed in the opening of this article. Create a label for the changes using the CSS comment: /* Background change */. Then, hit return to start a new line and type “.wrapper {“ (minus the quotes). Hit return again, paste in the code that we added [background: url (http://source-url-here.com/image.jpg); ] without the brackets of course. Hit return once more for another line and add a “}”, without the quotes. Your CSS changes will look like the example below. Make sure to hit the “Save” button at the top, and your new background will be live on your site.

Now that you have learned how to play with the background, in our next post, we will cover adding custom fonts.

Using CMS Page Hierarchies to Add Navigable Content

2013-05-10T20:12:00-08:00

In our article on how to use SEO to rank your Magento store post-Panda, we emphasized how important it is to build up a strong content base. We talked about writing richer, more detailed product descriptions and using other opportunities, like blogs, to build up a content base to be indexed by Google and Bing. Today, we’re going to teach you about another one of Magento Go’s powerful content management and ranking tools, which is built into the platform and requires no modification to get great results right out of the box.

This tool allows you to structure your content in a logical order for customers to follow, and its built in tools are on the bleeding edge of Google’s recommended guidelines. Even as you’re helping customers, your content is going to look better than ever to the search engines.

What is a Page Hierarchy?

A page hierarchy is simply a way to organize your CMS pages by topic, and it includes pagination, a side navigation panel for quick access to individual pages, and built in metadata tools to help the search engines index your content. A Page Hierarchy is a great way to publish big sets of related content, like buying guides, FAQs, product data sheets, and so forth. For example, here is a Magento Go store that uses a set of hierarchical pages to create an event calendar. The same merchant uses another set of hierarchical CMS pages for its video how-to library.

Page Hierarchies aren’t replacements for blogs any more than blogs are replacements for page hierarchies. Instead, they serve separate and equally important functions and the two should both be considered integral pieces of your content marketing strategy.

Magento Go Page Hierarchies are divided up by “nodes”, or folders of related content. A node is simply the organizational folder you create in the back end of your store – it is not accessible to anyone on the front end of your site.

How does a node work? Nodes and hierarchies of content are like bullet point lists. On both the front end and the back end, your nodes will look like this:

Outdoor Survival Gear 101
- Outerwear
  - Types of Hats
  - Guide to Boots
  - Guide to Parkas and Other Cold Weather Apparel
  - Gloves and Accessories
- Camping Gear Basics
  - Shelter (Tents and Huts)
  - Guide to Cookware and Portable Power
  - Field Electronics

As you can see, we have an unordered list of content that is related by topic. Our topmost node is “Outdoor Survival Gear 101” and we have two more nodes below it. Each of these nodes contains their respective pages.

Remember that on the front end, customers will see the name of the node, but the node itself cannot be accessed, because it has no content. Instead, when shoppers click on a node name on the website, they will be directed to that node’s first page. You can add individual pages to a node, or you can add a combination of individual pages and other nodes to a node, as demonstrated above.

Hierarchies of Pages are great for SEO purposes. First, if you’ve got enough content to warrant putting together an organized grouping of pages, you’re already ahead of most of your peers. Second, ordering related pages together and properly interlinking them follows an established “best practice SEO” guideline.

It’s well established that relevant content helps rank other related content, as opposed to unrelated content, so by structuring this related content together, you’re reducing Google’s workload in sorting it and are therefore making it easier to find.

Finally, Magento Go’s Page Hierarchies feature proper “rel=canonical” implementation, which many competing eCommerce platforms lack. If you configure the Page Hierarchies to specify the “Section” in the meta data, then a new canonical link will also appear, which tells the search engines which page is the first one in that node.

How To Set Up Your Own Hierarchy of Pages

Setting up your own page hierarchy is extremely quick and easy inside Magento Go. For step-by-step instructions, follow our excellent knowledge base article here.

To re-cap the best practices:

1. Create the pages you want to add to the hierarchy. You create pages under CMS > Pages > Manage Content. Pages should be created to address a specific customer need or answer common questions. For instance, if you had an outdoor store like the one mentioned in the example above, you would want to determine which categories of your store customers seemed to need the most help with, such as brands and types of outdoor gear.
2. Once you’ve created the content, it’s time to organize it in the page hierarchy. Go to CMS > Pages > Manage Hierarchy. Click on the “Add Node” button and fill in the fields with the requested info, such as your node’s name & URL key, which meta data you want to use, and then below that, selecting the pages that belong to that node/hierarchy. Most often, you’ll set the “Chapter/Section” to “Section”, enable pagination, and enable side navigation
3. Include a link to your hierarchy/node on other sections of your site. You could use a static block to create an image link on your home page that says “Buyers Guide 2013” and link it to the first page of your node, or you could include a link in your footer that reads “Resources”.

And that’s it! As you can see, hierarchies of pages are another very powerful Magento Go tool. They benefit customers by providing relevant information in an easy-to-follow, understandable format; they help the search engine bots index your data quickly and more efficiently that other pages, and their design is built from the ground up to positively impact your site’s SEO performance.

Customizing Your Store Is Simple and Easy

2013-05-08T22:05:00-08:00

Using Magento Go's built-in tools to customize your site for a more branded look!

Magento Go features some wonderful flexibility, giving you the power to adapt your store as you see fit, in a way that makes customization far easier than the competitors. Whether you're about to open a store, or already have an established store up and running, if you're looking to delve a little deeper into the customization options available to you, you're in luck — today we're going to examine how to change the on-page elements using Magento Go's built-in Layout Editors.

It's a well-known fact that those stores that feature a unique design that speak to their niche will do better in the market than stores utilizing a generic template. One recent study from a Magento merchant showed an improvement of 48% in conversion rate and a 32% increase in average order value. This is a very good return on investment that required no additional marketing expense! In addition to the immediate sales lift, their design overhaul yielded a 10.7 reduction in their bounce rate, and an average time on site improvement of 29%, which are both important factors in search engine optimization.

If you're like many Magento Go merchants, you've probably got your own designs in mind for the "perfect store" to sell your products on. Chances are, in your perfect design, there are some specific phrases or language that pepper your pages; little things that show your audience you're tuned into what they're looking for. Many fashion retailers, for instance, opt to change the default "Add to Cart" title to "Place in Bag", to mimic the actual experience of shopping in-store. When is the last time you saw a shopping cart at your favorite fashion outlet, anyway?

Did you know that you can also change the "New Products" widget title as well? If you've ever set up your best-selling products on the home page using the New Products widget, you've probably wondered how to change the title to better reflect your featured products. Wonder no more, we'll cover both of these customizations below.

How to Change Magento Go's "Add to Cart" button

Customizations of a deeper level like these are just one more way that Magento Go caters to merchants of all types. One of the most common changes is changing the "Shopping Cart" text to read "Shopping Bag" or "Basket". You can do this in three easy steps in Magento Go.

1. Log into the backend of your store, and under the Design tab in the top navigation, select "Theme Text Editor" from the drop down menu. Below that, the store will display "Theme Text Editor" and an orange and white "Launch" button. Make sure that your browser is not set to disable pop-ups, and then click the button. A new tab or window will open with your store's frontend displayed.

2. On the front end, navigate to the page you'd like to change the text on.
Then, hover your mouse over the title you want to change, and a little book icon will appear. Click on this icon, and you can change the text of the title.
Now you can change the text of the title.

Click the green checkmark when you're done to save your work (you may need to save and reload the page).

3. To change your "Add to Cart" button, move your mouse over the "Add to Cart" button and the same little book icon will pop up. Complete the same actions as step two above, and click the green checkmark to save your work. Be sure to click "save" in the top toolbar to save all of the text changes you've made.

How to Change the New Products Widget Text

Now that we've changed the text of our "Add to Cart" buttons to something a little more boutique, let's look at changing our "New Products" widget title as well. Magento Go's New Products widget has two display options âˆ’ it can either display products that have been recently added to the store, or featured products that you mark as "new". Whichever display method you choose, however, it still displays "New Products" in the widget's title.

You can dress that up with something a bit more descriptive, like "Latest Arrivals" or "Staff Favorites" using Magento GO's Layout Text Editor as described above, using the same basic steps:

1) With the editor open, hover over the New Products title block.
2) Click the little open book and change the text.
3) Remember to save your changes.

What to do when text editor can't make the change

There are certain themes or certain fields that can't be changed directly with the Layout Text Editor. In many cases, you can make these changes with a tiny bit of Javascript.

For example, to make the change to 'Featured Products' copy the Javascript code below (removing the outer brackets) and paste it into your favorite text editor (on PC, the default text editor is Notepad). Where the script says "('<h2>Featured Products</h2>')" replace Featured Products with the title text of your choice. Then, save the file as "replace_text.js" (removing the quotation marks).

Upload this file to your Magento Go store under Design > Themes Editor > Java Script Editor.

If you are familiar with CSS but not Javascript, you can use the code to change other elements. Simply isolate its CSS path and html code and making the appropriate substitutions in the script.

Congratulations, your New Products widget will now show whatever title you gave it.

As you can see, Magento Go provides a lot of customizability to the store owner who wants complete control over the design of their store. By utilizing these simple design editing tips, you can bring your best designs to life! Remember to please post any questions in the comments below.

JavaScript code to change the New Products widget title:

[ window.onload = function() {
$$('.widget-new-products .widget-title h2').first().replace('<h2>Featured Products</h2>');
}; ]

Merchant Spotlight: Liquid Courage Helps You Buck Up for Your Big Day

2013-05-03T17:04:02-08:00

Who doesn’t need a little liquid courage on their big day? Hitting on a clever niche for wedding gifts and souvenirs, husband-and-wife team Tyler and Amy Fisk started Liquid Courage Flasks in 2010, personalizing flasks with photos, wedding dates and funny messages. Today, Liquid Courage Flasks has grown to carry a larger line of flasks and accessories that offers handmade designs and the same personalization and humor that got them started. Check out their site and find one that’ll help give you a little liquid courage.

The Money’s in the List : Advanced Email Marketing in Magento Go

2013-05-01T15:43:00-08:00

There’s an oft-repeated saying in Internet Marketing circles: “the money is in the list.” The wisdom behind these words is undeniable, as anyone who’s worked in an online business knows. Building a responsive list of email subscribers is one of the cheapest, easiest, and most lucrative activities that you can do for your online store.

Using Magento Go’s built-in tools, you can quickly and easily build a list of subscribers that you can market to again and again for repeat sales. And, those who are interested in receiving your emails are usually much more responsive to advertisements than the general public that’ve not opted-in, so your conversion rate is higher, while your marketing cost is lower.

In this blog post, we’re going to discuss tips on setting up a high-visibility email opt-in form; offering incentives to get people to provide you their contact information; and best practices for follow up emails.

Visibility = Subscribers

The common trend in most online stores is to bury the email opt-in box at the bottom of the site, consigning it to a single, small line — like a forgotten footnote. This is the wrong approach. Studies have shown that on average, bounce rates for eCommerce sites vary widely, as high as 40-80%, depending on a number of factors. However, about 70% of those visitors will eventually make a purchasing decision and provide a sale to either you or one of your competitors. Wouldn’t it make sense, if you know this, to get their contact information so you can keep them in your sales funnel?

For this reason, we advocate making the email opt-in form visible. There are several places you can position an email signup link — in the header next to the social media icons or search bar; directly below your product slider, above the new products slider; at the top of the right or left column, above the “Compare Products” widget. Next, make sure that your newsletter subscription form stands out- for maximum effectiveness, it should be highlighted or designed so that it doesn’t fade into the background. You can see some examples of well-designed, yet unobtrusive, email opt-in forms below. Notice that they all use a colorful, eye-catching designs to wrap their newsletter subscription field in.

To do this in Magento Go, you will need to have your designer create the email form design. The designer will need to create the lettering, colors, and box layout (width and height, horizontal, vertical, or square design, etc), and add any images. Next, you will place the code into a CMS Static Block and then place that static block in the general area that you’d like it to end up at, using a Frontend App. So, if your store has a two-column left home page, and you’d like your email opt-in to appear at the top of that column, in the Frontend App’s “Layout Update” section you’d select “Display On: Specified Page”, select “CMS Home Page” from the drop down list, and then select “Left Column” in the “Block Reference” menu

You may need to adjust the Sort Order of your different Frontend Apps if something else is at the top of the column. Finally, your designer will need to use JavaScript to overlay the email form on top of the newly-created email opt-in box. If you’re unsure of how to do this, lack design finesse, or don’t have a regular design company, a certified Magento Go Pro can help you with this process for a very reasonable rate.

Bribe Your Customers

Everybody likes a little something extra when they shop — it’s just human nature to want more and pay less. The question every consumer wants answered is “What’s In It For Me?” Recognizing this, the best email list builders provide something of value in exchange for their customers’ email address. If you sell technical products, this can be a setup and optimization guide that ties into your other products, showing the customers how to get the most out of their experience with your products. If you sell exclusive, limited run items, the incentive your email list would provide is advance notice of new items before the general public is alerted. For most businesses, the bribe is as simple as a discount-
either a one-time use coupon for new subscribers (usually 10-20%) or a free shipping promo (if your store doesn’t offer free shipping normally). Using Magento Go’s Shopping Cart Pricing Rules, you can set up a coupon code that can be used only once per customer, which can be dropped into your email campaigns for your new subscribers. If you’d prefer to give out a free shipping coupon, the same steps apply.

Automate Your List

Once you’ve got your subscription form ready and your coupon code ready to go, it’s time to get your email backend ready for the influx of new subscribers you’re going to get! Since it would be very inefficient to email each customer individually, we recommend setting up an auto-responder service like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, or Aweber to automatically handle these follow up duties. You can export your email subscribers list from Magento Go and import them into your auto-responder of choice, or you can follow the steps above for designing your form, replacing Magento’s newsletter subscription form with Mailchimp’s and the email subscribers will automatically be placed into your auto-responder. When building your email list, keep these tips in mind:

Segregate your lists. Smart business owners track everything. Build a new campaign for every promotion and each place you have an email form so that you can track which ones perform higher and avoid mixing up your promotions. For instance, do you get more email subscribers from a form in your site’s header, or under the slider? Do you get more subscribers with a coupon code, free shipping, or exclusive perks like early sales notices?
Hit them with a sale in the very first email. Your subscribers have just signed up to your email because they are interested in your products. Keep that momentum going! Direct them to a specific category or product type that has been shown to convert well.
Build out your auto-responder queue in advance. Automation is an incredibly powerful tool, and you have the ability to build out a sales channel that works for you, 24/7 with no further input. By building out your first few emails (with links to sales and appropriate coupons, of course) you can ensure a high rate of repeat business that you don’t ever have to work for after the initial setup. Of course, you should drop in normal sales emails as your sales occur, but you can buy yourself a few weeks’ worth of breathing room with new customers if you set up an auto-responder queue to send out the evergreen promotions for you. Don’t forget to set up an anniversary sales email for new subscribers!

As you can see from the strategies above, email marketing can be one of the easiest, lowest-cost marketing tools at your fingertips. It can also be a lot of fun to brainstorm sales, send them out via email blasts, and test them! We encourage you to have fun, test, and automate your Magento email list and watch your business explode!

Top 10 Underused Features of Magento Go

2013-04-25T16:43:00-08:00

May 22, 2013 I 10:00 AM PST

Top 10 Underused Features of Magento Go

Most merchants start using Magento Go and, after getting comfortable with the system, stop progressing without exploiting many of the powerful features available to them.

We’ll talk about how you can increase your store’s profitability by extracting the most value out of these core features. We’ll discuss and show examples of:

Customizing buttons, page links and other on-page text with the layout text editor
Using the CSS editor for quick touch-ups
Using CMS page hierarchies to add navigable content
Using custom options to up-sell special services you offer
Add lucrative up-sell opportunities with gift options
And more

Date: May 22, 2013 10:00 AM PST

Presenters:

Paul Byrne, President, Razoyo

Rita Padilla, Manager, Merchant Marketing, Magento

How to Rank Your Magento Go Store with Google’s New Search Results

2013-04-22T21:11:00-08:00

Penguins? Pandas? What do Those Have to do With Search Engines?

In our last post, we discussed how to optimize your Magento Go feed to drive more traffic from Google Shopping. Now that you’re familiar with a great low-cost source of traffic, we’re going to turn our attention to improving your store’s rank in the un-paid (“organic”) section of the search results.

Over the past 24 months, Google has launched 3 large algorithm updates and a handful of updates to those algorithm processes, all aimed at stamping out web spam and producing higher-quality search results. Google’s Panda search algorithm is the primary one we’re going to be concerned with today, because it most directly affects the majority of Magento Go’s base. The Panda update, named after a Google engineer, was launched at the end of February 2011 and was aimed at sites with thin content (sites that have very little content, or the content is shallow, overly broad, or offers no value), content farms, sites with a high ads-to-content ratio, and several other quality issues. The Panda update has since been refined and improved more than 23 times! There are 3 strategies for ranking your Magento Go store in the face of the latest Google updates:

1. Provide unique, original product descriptions.

2. Start a blog that seamlessly integrates into your site.

3. Get social- social media engagement is now a proven ranking factor.

Unique, Valuable Content Rules the Day

The first step to recovering traffic is to understand that duplicate content, and thin content, is the problem that got sites penalized in the first place. Most retailers receive inventory lists from suppliers, which contain descriptions for each of the products. This type of content is shared with hundreds, even thousands of competitors’ sites. If your site is re-using content that everyone else has, then your site is not providing any further value to the searchers. What incentive does Google have, then, to send their valuable traffic your way? To get more organic traffic to your Magento site, start by re-writing the stock descriptions of your products. You can incorporate the voice of the supplier and re-use the product highlights, but come up with your own unique descriptions.
Here are some brainstorming ideas for writing your own product descriptions:

• Write your long descriptions for the lowest-common denominator – you’ll answer frequently asked questions and increase the length of content, removing thin-content penalties. Using the FAQ abbreviation will help you attract Googlers who use it in their searching.

• Be like Duct Tape – duct tape is a simple product, but it has been used for everything from plumbing to prom dresses. Highlight unconventional angles or uses that the manufacturer may not have considered! Do you sell prom dresses? Highlight other uses like homecoming dances, college formals and other keyword-based uses.

• Write a story – provide a personal story from your own experience, or from a friend or customer about how your product worked better than the other guy’s, or saved them time and money. These are great ways to show the strengths of your products and inject unique content into the product pages. Has someone ever emailed you a testimonial about how much they loved your product or posted their story on Facebook? Get permission to use this content on your site. It is golden!

Blogging Your Way to the Top

Multiple studies have shown the value of blogging in increasing traffic up to 5X more than sites that don’t blog. While Magento Go does not have a native blogging function, a qualified Magento Go Pro can set up a custom-branded blog to seamlessly integrate with your store, even incorporating your category menu. For the best results, we recommend integrating relevant blog posts directly on the home page or product pages. In our opinion, the best way to do this is to set up a WordPress blog on a subdomain of your Magento Go domain. This will provide you with a great source of marketing outreach and traffic generation, while solving the unique content issue posed by online retail. Blogs, when updated regularly, and with quality content, meet all of Google’s guidelines for quality sites:

1. Blogs are engaging. Good articles pick a stance, whether for or against something, and promote discussions. Visitor engagement, in the form of comments and average visit length, are metrics Google pays close attention to. The more engagements you have, the more your blog will prove its worth to Google.

2. Blogs have unique, valuable content. When you write an article out of passion for a product or service you sell, you’re adding your own insight and expertise, which can’t be found anywhere else on the Internet. Your words are your own and don’t come from suppliers’ boilerplate copy, which means you have no duplicate content issues and you’re providing value to the community.

3. Blogs are updated frequently. Content freshness is a big indicator of relevance. For instance, if you search for “top summer fashions”, would you be more likely to trust a post from 2011, or one from 2013? Of course you’ll go with the more recent, updated information- the information will much more closely match your intent. Google understands this and now actively looks for freshness factors.

Once you’ve set up your blog, you can style it to match your store’s design for a nice, consistent feeling between the two platforms. Next, you’ll want to integrate the blog posts with your store via an RSS feed, using Magento Go’s Static Blocks and Frontend Apps for placement. Finally, set up a Google+ profile and integrate it with your WordPress blog so that your Authorship profile shows up in the search results, a proven way to increase clicks to your properties.

Get Social

The last piece of the puzzle is to make sure to integrate social media into your marketing efforts. Social Media interaction is a major ranking factor now, being used by both Google and Bing. In addition to setting up a basic profile on Social Media sites for their SEO benefits, you can leverage these sites for traffic to your store. Different product types will require different approaches on Social Media, but it is possible to drive large volumes of traffic from Facebook, Pinterest and Google+ pages. By following this guide, you’ll be on your way to driving higher levels of better-qualified traffic to your site in no time.

Highlights from Magento’s 2013 Imagine eCommerce Conference

2013-04-17T23:31:01-08:00

Last week, 1500 developers and merchants from 45 countries descended upon the M Resort in Las Vegas for the 2013 Imagine eCommerce conference to network and share their ecommerce ideas, innovations and best practices around the Magento Platform. Here’s a recap of the most memorable moments and takeaways.

Day One

Day One focused on how Magento is driving quality in the marketplace and how developers and technology partners can achieve further ecosystem success. The day concluded with sessions on best practice search engine optimization techniques and a networking “BarCamp” event for developers to learn about a myriad of Magento topics in short, rapid-fire presentations. Among the most popular topic “tracks” were “Developing Magento Apps using the Mobile SDK,” “Previewing Extensibility in Magento 2” and an “Open Forum” with Magento Chief Technology Officer, Matthew Mengerink.

Day Two

Day Two kicked events into high gear, with keynotes from eBay Inc. Chief Executive Officer John Donahoe, Magento Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer Roy Rubin, Jeff Jordan of Andreessen Horowitz and Magento Chief Technology Officer, Matthew Mengerink.

Roy Rubin was the day’s first main speaker. He addressed Magento’s amazing year of growth for both the platform, as well as for the customers and ecosystem worldwide. He also spoke to the conference theme — “The Art of Commerce” — and inspired the audience by conveying to them that they are the artists, and with the Magento tools available, they have the continued ability to create something powerful and unique.

Rubin was followed by John Donahoe, whose keynote focused on how technology is “obliterating” the lines between online and offline, calling it all “connected commerce.” In this commerce revolution, he said, the individual is at the center and the consumer is in charge. Jeff Jordan, meanwhile, spoke to existing trends in the ecommerce market, like the physical retailer disadvantage and show-rooming 2.0, and Matthew Mengerink closed out the morning keynotes with a discussion on how to push the boundaries of how we think about things and how the commerce of today no longer marries yesterday’s principles.

Afternoon breakout sessions from the technology and business tracks were standing room only, and included topics ranging from “Creating Successful Magento ERP Integrations,” “SEO/SEM Trends for 2013” and “Where, Why, and How of Responsive Web Design.” In particular, Roy Rubin highlighted how Magento is leveraging the power of eBay Inc. to create an even brighter future and that moving forward, “this will translate into more benefits for merchants.”

Day Two concluded with a keynote by Sharon Meers, Magento’s Head of Enterprise Strategy, who took to the stage to share Magento’s tremendous success within the fashion industry. She kicked off the segment with a discussion of how Magento Enterprise Edition has become the platform of choice for many of the world’s most prestigious brands and concluded with a live, fashion runway showdown with 14 models showcasing the latest looks from Magento customers Custo Barcelona, Erin Fetherston, Missguided, Nanette Lepore, Paul Smith, Rebecca Minkoff and Zadig & Voltaire.

Day Three

Jimmy Duvall, Head of Product for Magento, introduced the Magento Enterprise 1.13 release and spoke to how the release was designed to enable large and growing merchants to scale more effectively and support even greater numbers of visitors and buyers to their core eCommerce sites, while streamlining their back-end operations.

PayPal Chief Technology Officer James Barrese also addressed the crowd on Day Three and announced that two new PayPal extensions – “order ahead” and “in-aisle selling” – would immediately be available on Magento Connect.

Closing out the morning session was “Freakanomics” co-author Steven Levitt, who captivated the audience with his anecdotes and stories. His most poignant messages were that people don’t spend enough time thinking about ideas, and that we often overlook even the most obvious ones. Further, he exclaimed that we can make up for the low quantity of ideas by the high quality of ideas. Even one or two breakthrough ideas per year from each of us can help bring about great change, he said.

For more detailed write-ups and recaps of the Magento conference, be sure to check out the Imagine website and stay tuned for more photos and videos from the event.

Getting the Most Out of Google Shopping

2013-04-15T16:18:01-08:00

Advanced Strategies and Best Practices for Google Shopping

In our last article, Maximizing the Power of Google’s Paid Shopping Feed, we discussed the changes to Google Shopping; why now is the best time to get into Google Shopping with your Magento Go store; and how to get your Magento Go store set up with the basics. Today, we’re going to follow up with some more advanced strategies to help you beat the competition and get the most out of your Google Shopping experience on Magento Go. There are several best practices to keep in mind, they are must-do implementations.

1. First, make sure that your data is accurate. As mentioned in our previous post, part of Google’s impetus to move to paid listings was to force higher quality data standards upon their merchants, filtering out spam listings and over-bidding poor data quality into oblivion. If your data is not at the top of its game, it’s time for it to hit the gym one more time and come back after a little more training!

Besides proofing your descriptions, prices and attributes for typos, this means is that you need to make sure all of your attributes properly match up with Google’s required attributes list.

If a required attribute doesn’t exist by default in Magento Go, you must create an attribute for it, add it to your attribute sets, fill in the data on your products, and map the attribute to Google Shopping per the guides above. Failure to provide clean data means that your average bid rate could be higher, and your account may be at risk of suspension and, eventually, closure.

2. Make sure you get your Product Identifier, Brand, and Condition attributes correct. Google uses these attributes to match products up in Google Shopping, and this can have a significant impact on your cost per click! If your products typically have UPC codes, by all means, use them.

3. Magento Go’s feed sets the Google Product Category by Magento Go’s “Attribute Set”. If you have different products that aren’t of the same Google Category type, I would strongly encourage you to create new attribute sets to map to Google Shopping.

While this can be tedious, the easiest way to accomplish this in Magento Go is to do a product export, delete products from the existing Attribute Set that will be moved, then re-import these products into the new Attribute Set. This can be a lot of work, but it critical.

If your products aren’t feeding into the appropriate Google category, chances are you will not only overspend on ads, but Google may get shut down your account for bad data. As you can imagine, the company that aims to “organize the world’s information” views getting the category wrong as a mortal sin!

4. Make your ads stand out. Using alternative images that no one else has is a good way to get your Click-Through-Rate (CTR in Google-speak) average up. Rather than using the images provided by your suppliers, you might want to take your own. PLAs can also use AdWords’ Promotion feature to highlight your special offers like Free Shipping or coupon codes.

5. Segregate your ads in Google Adwords. You can separate your ads by several different attributes. This is important because, as Mary Weinstein notes, “whatever ad groups you have set up in a PLA campaign, the one with the highest bid will outrank the others.” With this in mind, you should endeavor to determine which products are your best sellers or highest grossing products, so that you can bid them higher than your other, lower selling products.

To set up your different groups of products within AdWords, you’ll need to log into your AdWords account, select your PLA campaign from your current AdWords campaigns, then click on “Auto targets.” Auto targets will allow you to create product groupings with different CPC bids, so that you can place lower bids for lower cost products, and bid more aggressively for products with higher profits or sales.

In the “Auto targets” tab, click the green “Add product target” button, select your PLA Campaign from the drop down under “Select an ad group”, and under “Add product target”, select the second radio button. A drop down menu will appear, where you can select the Magento attribute you want to use for the sorting, with Product Type (Google Shopping additional categories), Brand, Condition, and ID (SKU) available. So, for instance, you could group all of your shoe products by brand and bid more aggressively on Nike. Or, you could tell Google that you want to bid higher on Women’s Heels than on Running Shoes. If you have several standout products, like a new pair of Air Jordans, you would want to put them into their own product target using the ID attribute to set that SKU apart from all other products to market it extra hard.

If you follow these steps and check out the resources above, you’ll be well on your way to Google Shopping Rock Stardom! Fine tuning your Google Shopping Feed and Product Listing Ads takes effort, but is likely to pay off handsomely. Magento Go's Google Shopping feed is already a feature of your store... take advantage of it!

Maximizing the Power of Google’s Paid Shopping Feed

2013-04-10T19:13:00-08:00

Welcome to The New Age of PLAs: Maximizing the Power of Google’s Paid Shopping Feed with Magento Go Google Shopping has been a staple source of traffic in eCommerce for over 10 years. While it’s gone by different names (most notably, Google Base) and possessed different requirements over the years, the basics remained the same: submit a data feed with accurate description, inventory, pricing, and image data, and the world’s largest search engine would send traffic your way. This all changed in the fall of 2012, sending shockwaves through the industry as merchants attempted to prepare for the change just before the busy holiday season. Now that we’re firmly into the New Year, let’s revisit the changes to Google Shopping and talk about how to get the most out of the platform!

What’s New in Google Shopping?

In a nutshell:

All Google Shopping is now based on paid search. Google claims that going the paid route will introduce more accountability to the shopping portal, which for years had frequently featured grossly inaccurate or misleading product listings. If you have to pay to play, they reason, you are more likely to provide relevant data.
Google PLAs now show up in traditional Pay-Per-Click (PPC) spots on a standard Google search result page (above organic results and to the right of the search results), whereas the old listings were intermingled in with the organic results. This provides more visibility for your products, giving them a showcase, rather than being sandwiched into organic listings.
Shopping feeds now require managing and connecting a Merchant Center account to a Google AdWords account. Products feed into Merchant Center, but the real heavy lifting takes place inside AdWords, where you control your bids, promotional text, and ad groups.

Why You Need To Take Advantage of Google Shopping

If you haven’t leveraged Google Shopping to generate traffic before, now is one of the best times to get into it: the holiday rush is over and the new platform is still in its infancy, so merchants can often jump in at lower rates. Many merchants have reported to us that the new PLAs cost less per click and drive higher-quality traffic than traditional keyword search campaigns. The holiday rush at the end of last year provided an opportunity to get hard metrics on Google Shopping’s effectiveness, traffic generation, and cost, and, man, are they impressive! These studies back up the buzz we hear from merchants and show even more compelling evidence supporting the jump on the PLA bandwagon. Google Shopping Rocks!

Product Listing Ad rates average only $0.31/click, while traditional keyword-based PPC ad rates averaged $1.04 in 2011.
Not only are PLAs cheaper, they have a greater Click-Thru Rate (CTR): 73% higher than standard text PPC ads.
Conversion rates for PLA ads are 35% higher, meaning that prospects are finding the right products sooner, so you waste less money on “mis-clicks.”
During the fourth quarter of 2013, Google Shopping was cheaper than Amazon Product Ads by an average of 32.5%, while driving 96.08% more traffic!
Pricegrabber, usually one of the largest traffic-generating shopping portals, was absolutely overwhelmed by Google Shopping, which sent participating merchants 62% more traffic.
All other product comparison engines, except for two, increased their rates, making Google Shopping an even bigger value.

Getting Started with Google Shopping in Magento Go

Getting started with Google Shopping takes a little effort, but, fortunately, Magento Go supplies you with these two guides, which you will want to follow in order:

Setting up your account credentials in Magento Go
Setting up the Google Shopping requirements in Magento Go
For a good step-by-step guide, see Jamie Stead’s Google Shopping Configuration Guide.

Once you’ve got the basics set up and you’ve established your first feed, you can explore ways to increase your CTR while reducing your cost. We’ll be talking about these strategies in a follow up post soon. For now, get your Google Shopping feed set up and feeding your Merchant Center account.

Creating a Promotional Calendar

2013-04-03T20:38:00-08:00

For our closing article on Pricing and Promotional Strategies, we'll provide some guidance on building a promotional calendar that will keep you on track. This calendar should lead you through pre-promotional activities to post-holiday activities. To help you get started: 1. Make a list of items you'd like to include in a promotion. Start with any overstock items you'd like to move off the "shelves."

2. Determine the type of promotions you'd like to run.

3. Set up your promotions and schedule them. Remember to keep an eye on your inventory. Replenish before you run out or set the promotion to turn off when your inventory has been depleted.

4. As you set up your promotional schedule, remember to send emails to your customer base each time a new promotion launches.

5. Monitor the performance of your promotions. If inventory is not moving as fast you expected, adjust the promotion, like lowering the price or increasing the discount.

6. Put your excess inventory on clearance to make room for next season's merchandise.

As with most eCommerce strategies, there is no hard and fast rule. Determine the identity of your store, research different pricing options, and experiment with a variety of promotions to determine what works best for your bottom line.

eCommerce Guide – Leverage Social Media Marketing For Your Site

2013-03-28T22:23:00-08:00

In this Facebook- and Twitter-dominated world, social media has become indispensable in helping eCommerce merchants create new and repeat business and build a loyal shopping community. Some consumers actually spend more time on their social media pages than on their email, sharing favorite products on Twitter and even doing their shopping on Facebook. The social media landscape is large and vast and can initially be daunting. Although there are many social networking sites, eCommerce merchants usually begin with Facebook and Twitter and then expand to include other tools like blogging and Squidoo. In eCommerce Guide – Social Media Marketing, we cover the basic techniques to help you start building your social media presence.

Creating the Right Promotional Strategy

2013-03-26T17:41:00-08:00

As part of our pricing and promotional strategy, we recently covered the pricing portion of it. In this article, we’ll cover the promotional part of the strategy and finally end with building a calendar for your promotions in the last post. Most successful merchants do promotions on their eCommerce storefront to attract customers and increase conversion. And with Magento Go’s features, you can easily set up coupon codes, buy-one-get-one free specials, and other discounts and events. Creating the right promotions strategy can take some creativity. Here are a few ideas that other merchants have found successful:

Create a storewide sale or put a whole category on sale. Try various types of promotions like discounts on multiple-item purchases, percentage off of certain amount of purchase, or a percentage off the whole store.
Use Magento Go functionality to promote cross-sell products in your shopping cart before checkout.
For holidays, like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Christmas, offer digital gift certificates to last-minute shoppers.
Ask customers to fill out a survey to receive a discount. One web store calls its promotion “$6 Off for 6 Questions.” Not only does its staff get valuable customer feedback, it also gets customers buying more.
Create a 7-day “progressional” sale. Offer a 30-percent discount during the sale’s first day, 25-percent off on the second, and so forth for a whole week.
Offer a variety of specials in one day. On Black Friday, for instance, you can run four different specials starting at midnight and changing every six hours. It’s a trick department stores use to spark excitement in their sales.
Offer discounts to people who agree to subscribe to your newsletter subscribers or follow you on Facebook or Twitter. Likewise, give your existing fans an incentive to get their friends to follow you. Wildfire, North Social and Offerpop offer apps that can help you organize these types of online drives. Use those same email and social media marketing outlets to advertise sales and hot clearance items.
Offer a free gift with purchase. Consider this old retail trick that brick and mortar stores often use. For browsing online shoppers, a free gift might encourage them to choose your store if they’ll get a bit more for their money. You may even be able to incorporate this at little or no cost, especially if your vendors are used to doing promotions and agree to supply the free merchandise.
Create a Deal of the Day. Some merchants ask their shoppers to subscribe to an email where they deeply discount one product a day. Be sure to send the email at a time that your shoppers have enough time to open it and still participate in the sale.
Offer free shipping to make sure customers shop with you, whether it’s for any purchase or for a purchase over a certain amount. A study by PayPal and comScore found that a large percentage of online shoppers – 46 percent - say high shipping charges were a “very important reason” for abandoning carts.
Give customers a discount if they subscribe with you. Some cosmetics web stores, for instance, have an auto refill program offering 20 percent off refills, which means subscribers get every sixth purchase free. Customers choose how often their shipments arrive and can cancel at any time. It’s a win-win: Subscribers don’t have to think about replenishing daily-use products, and they get discounts on staples they’re going to buy anyway.
Whenever you hold a sale or promotion, always display the regular price and the sale price so people see that they’re getting a good deal. Shoppers are more likely to purchase when they know they’re saving money.
Be savvy about hot products. Put popular, hard-to-get products on sale to attract shoppers. Get rid of your low inventory items by displaying an inventory count, like “only three left in stock,” so people feel they need to purchase right away to get the discount.

Explore Pricing and Promotions Strategies Best Suited for Your Store

2013-03-19T18:59:00-08:00

Having a sound pricing and promotions strategy is a key component of running a successful eCommerce storefront, but striking the perfect balance is tricky. If your prices are too low, you may not be able to meet costs and stay afloat. If your prices are too high, you risk losing a sale. It’s also important that you run relevant and engaging promotions so that you draw in more customers, make more sales and have an effective way to clear overstock.

Pricing Strategies

Pricing is often determined by a merchant’s market share, how much a merchant wants to make, and an estimation of what can sell. Strategies are different for every store, but most merchants start by answering these basic questions:

COST
What are the costs of running your business? Be sure that you know your variable costs, like materials and shipping, and your fixed costs, like overheard. And don’t forget to give yourself a salary. You have to live on something. Calculate your cost of goods, which is what you must cover for each item you sell. Your product prices must cover your cost of goods and your overhead for you to make a profit.

POSITIONING
Are you opening a discount store or a luxury shop? The market you’re trying to attract determines a lot about your pricing. If you have a discount store, then it’s important to have lower prices than your competitors since people are looking for the best deal when they come to your store. With some products, you can get a good idea of pricing by checking Google Shopping. If you sell a high-end product, it could actually hurt you if you price your items too low. Luxury shoppers feel more comfortable paying for quality and often believe they get what they pay for.

DEMAND
What is the demand for your product? Do some market research to find out how many people want your item and how much they would pay for it. Don’t worry if you don’t feel you have the means to hire a fancy market research company. You can do a quick survey of people you know to see what they would pay for the product you’re carrying and then experiment with your pricing after your store goes live.

PRICING METHODS
Once you have a grasp of your cost, positioning and demand, you can consider the different methods people use to price:

COST-PLUS PRICING
With this method, set the price by adding a certain profit margin to the total of your cost of goods and fixed cost. However, be sure to account for some variations in sales volume. For instance, it’s smart to be able to miss your sales forecast by a factor of at least two and still be profitable.

TARGET RETURN PRICING
Set your price to target a specific return-on-investment (ROI).

VALUE-BASED PRICING
Price your product based on the value it creates for your customer. If you sell an item that saves people $1000 a year, for instance, you could charge a few hundred dollars for it and people would probably pay it since they’d recoup their costs quickly. At the end of the day, however, shoppers will only pay what they think is fair. Be cautious of “skimming”, where you place a much higher margin for a product. If your product only costs $10 to make but it has a $500 value, people will probably have a hard time paying that much for it. You can also offer other value to your customer for shopping with you, like excellent customer service, an easy return policy or free shipping. Price is not a shopper’s only consideration, so clearly state the benefits of why they should buy from you besides price.

PENETRATION PRICING
This happens when a product is priced especially low to gain market share and garner new customers. Once a store has a clientele, the price increases. Make sure you can support this pricing model financially before attempting, since you don’t want to go out of business by offering a low price you can’t afford.

PSYCHOLOGICAL PRICING
A lot of pricing is about perception. If you market your store as a bargain basement, it’s best to have the lowest prices around. It’s even a good idea to offer a price-match with your competitors so that you guarantee customers the absolute lowest prices. Most customers won’t take you up on the offer so you won’t lose much profit, but it goes a long way in instilling confidence. On the flip side, if your store is about high quality, your prices should probably in par with your competition and not be lower to stay true to quality of your product. Keep in mind that from a psychological point of view, there are certain prices that sell more than others. For example, people are drawn to prices under $100, $20 or $5. Prices like $19.99, as opposed to $20, are also more attractive.

OTHER PRICING
Other types of pricing include product bundle pricing, where merchants combine multiple products into one package, like gift baskets. Sellers can use product bundle pricing to move old stock and less popular items by combining them with more popular, high demand items. Another variation of this pricing is product line pricing, when merchants give different prices for a range of products and the pricing reflects what the consumer perceives as fair over that range. For instance, if you sell magazines, one magazine may be a certain price, but if you buy a year’s subscription the price per magazine drops. Through optional product pricing, merchants attempt to increase an order by offering options on a purchase (like monogramming). Captive product pricing occurs when a shopper buys an item that requires a specific accessory to operate, like an inkjet printer that uses ink cartridges or an espresso machine that requires proprietary coffee pods . The merchant can clear a good profit margin and garner repeat sales on the cartridges or the pods because their customers have no other choice but to buy them. Pricing is a challenging balance, but the bottom line is that generally you shouldn’t charge lower than your costs or higher than what customers consider fair. That seems like common sense, but many eCommerce merchants don’t consider this guiding principle. They either underestimate their costs or overestimate what people will pay. If the balance isn’t working, you may have to rethink your strategies. Either cut costs, lower prices, or change your product positioning so that you can justify a higher price.

Webinar Materials for “Reach 100 Million Buyers on eBay” Now Available

2013-03-11T21:33:00-08:00

Summary

In this month’s webinar, Jim “Griff” Griffith from eBay, showed attendees how to sell on eBay Marketplaces and shared best practices to successful selling on eBay. The presentation began with an introduction to eBay and why merchants should enable eBay as an extension of their Magento store. Then, Griff gave us tips on setting up an eBay store, selecting formats and categories, building effective description for products, shipping & tracking solutions and how to meet eBay standards for seller performance. The presentation concluded with highlights of the M2E extension, a solution to push a merchant’s store listings out to eBay.

Purpose of This Webinar

To help merchants extend their sales channel beyond their Magento store and tap into a large customer base of over 100 million buyers to sell their products.

Recording of Presentation – Watch the presentation now.

Presentation Slides – Here is a copy of the PowerPoint presentation.

Shipping Fulfillment Tips to Save Time and Money

2013-03-09T00:25:00-08:00

As part of our series of tips on inventory management, we recently covered ways to maintain productive inventory equilibrium. To continue our discussion, we'll be covering fulfillment best practices in this post. When it comes to shipping and customer service, the typical rules apply: ship within 24 hours; don’t charge a handling fee; and send a tracking number the same day you ship. To save money and time on the backend, try some of these fulfillment tips: Shop Around for a Shipper
For some merchants, the US Postal Service (USPS) offers the most cost savings, while others use UPS or FedEx, so you should consider all your options. Check out a regional carrier like OnTrac. If you offer multiple shipping providers, determine which ones your customers are using the most. If few shoppers are using a certain service, removing it might save you some money. USPS is often the cheapest carrier when you’re shipping two pounds or less. And remember, priority mail ships at a flat rate, so no matter how heavy your items, you can ship whatever can fit in one box for one price. Shopping around for the best shipping price can also help you improve your customer service. For instance, if customers pick a certain shipping speed, and you can give them an upgraded service for the same price they paid, they’ll appreciate the speedy delivery. Try a Hybrid Shipping Option
Hybrid shipping services, like FedEx SmartPost, use private companies like FedEx, UPS and DHL for most of the shipping distance and then partner with the USPS who makes the final delivery. If you’re shipping to residential customers, these services can help you decrease surcharges and save up to 50 percent compared to traditional ground shipments. Ship Online
Save on postage when you use the US Postal Service’s online services. Not only do you save money, but you also save time. Just order free Priority Mail and Express Mail supplies from USPS.com, and they’ll be delivered right to your door. You can create labels, pay postage by credit card, and even purchase insurance online. Then let the USPS know your packages are ready, and your mail carrier will pick them up. Afterwards you can easily view your shipping history. Print Once with PayPal Multiorder Shipping  
Print up to 50 domestic USPS shipping labels at one time, complete with postage, right from your PayPal account. You pay postage costs, but the service is free. If you also use the USPS SCAN form, postal employees can scan the bar codes for every package in your shipment at once. You and your customers are then able to use USPS' Track & Confirm tool to verify that a package was actually sent. Consider an Online Service for Domestic Mail 
If you need a more robust shipping system, an online service like DYMO Endicia or Pitney Bowes can help make your back-end more efficient and cost-effective. Endicia lets you print postage-paid labels for all domestic mail classes, including Priority Mail, Media Mail, and Parcel Post. It offers a slew of features like discounted insurance, electronic delivery and signature confirmation, address verification, pre-filled custom forms, database integration, bulk acceptance scans, weight and zone-based service mapping, and account management tools. One especially cool feature is Stealth Postage. It allows you to hide postage amounts from your shipping labels so you can protect your shipping and handling margins and avoid customer complaints about shipping charges. Use Multicarrier Online Shipping Software 
Incorporate software like ShipWorks and ShipRush into your store to help you streamline your process and save time. ShipWorks, for example, downloads your orders and makes it easy to create shipping labels, print invoices, and manage customer communications. It automatically emails your customers tracking numbers when you ship and updates the online status of your orders. Reports help you cull data, like how much you've made or lost on shipping costs. It even maintains an order and shipping history of all your customers so that you can quickly view how much a particular shopper has spent at your store. ShipWorks has integrated support for FedEx, UPS, USPS, DHL, Endicia, and Stamps.com. And multiple computers can use it on one network. Depending on your volume, ShipWorks ranges from $14.95 to $49.95 a month. Ship Smart Internationally
Again, check out all your options. USPS is often the best option for international shipments, especially for packages that are four pounds or less. Duties are also less costly for USPS packages than shipments with other companies. DYMO Endicia allows you to ship USPS First Class online, the least expensive way to ship internationally. Although you can print Express Mail International, Priority Mail International, and Global Express Guaranteed labels using USPS.com, you can't use the USPS website to print international First Class labels. When using FedEx, compare FedEx Ground and FedEx International Economy. Shipping company InXpress also offers a hybrid solution that’s ideal for smaller web stores that ship a lot of international or air packages.

Inventory and Fulfillment Management

2013-03-01T21:13:00-08:00

Managing inventory and fulfillment is not the most exciting part of becoming an eCommerce merchant, but it can make or break a web store’s operations. Without an effective strategy, web stores can tie up capital in excess inventory, create fulfillment problems in the warehouse, lose out on sales when they run out of stock, and ultimately let their customers down. Yet when done well, inventory and fulfillment management can help merchants build a loyal clientele, optimize cash flow, and improve their bottom line. Here’s how to run a smooth warehouse operation. Smart and Efficient Inventory Inventory is all about accurate sales forecasts, good record keeping, and having a multifaceted plan. It’s a fine balance. If you have too much inventory, you’ll have less money to use on the rest of your business. If you have too little, you could lose out on sales and anger potential customers. Try these five tips for maintaining productive inventory equilibrium. 1. Carefully determine your inventory amounts. Keep good records, monitor your trends, and analyze your performance in past years so that you can forecast your sales cycles more accurately. Also consider product cost, storage space, shelf life, and delivery time. Determine what sells and what doesn’t. Some metrics you should analyze are inventory turn (the time it takes to sell your inventory and restock), average inventory investment period, turnover analysis, and inventory-to-sales ratio. For example, if the latter is increasing, you’re investing too much in inventory or your sales have dropped, and you may have too much cash tied up in your warehouse. 2. Organize your warehouse. Create a system and communicate it clearly to your staff so that all your products are stocked efficiently, shipped smoothly, and tracked accurately. Use clear guidelines, like shipping guides and packaging instructions. 3. Have a multifaceted management system. Consider your operations, marketing, and purchasing. For instance, keep your eye on your promotions calendar when managing your inventory. That way, you know when and how much product to purchase, and you can set up your storage space and prepare your staff and vendors for increased business. 4. Make sure your stocking information is accurate. There’s nothing customers hate more than to order an item and then learn that it’s no longer in stock. Communicate closely with your vendors and have a backup plan during high season, like the holidays. Find a second vendor who can supply you with product if your primary source runs out. 5. Get help. Consider using software, like BrightPearl, that has an API for Magento Go. They can help you manage inventory, orders and returns across multiple channels, send purchase orders to suppliers, issue documents for shipping and invoicing goods, and create customizable inventory reports. Integrate your operations with QuickBooks. You may even want to outsource your warehousing and fulfillment to services like ShipWire. Software and outsourcing can free up your time to concentrate on other parts of your business like design, marketing and customer service.

Blogging Basics

2013-02-20T20:02:00-08:00

As part of our discussion on social media strategy, we've already covered "Facebook and Twitter - Your Social Media Core" and "Social Media: Looking through the Squidoo Lens" in our recent posts. To continue with our topic on social media, we'll be providing guidelines and suggestions to blogging. Blogging is an effective social media tool that allows you to engage your customer base and build your brand, reputation and credibility. A blog can also help you drive traffic and rise in search results, since search engines like the original content. On the flip side, blogs can also be time-consuming to maintain, since they require regular upkeep. But if you follow a few guidelines, they can make writing and posting more efficient and worry free.

Provide valuable information that’s related to your product or industry. A more independent, non-commercial tone makes people trust you and helps you build your expertise. Focus on the information your customers want. Sell high-quality chess sets? Write a weekly chess tip.
Introduce new items from web store, offer discounts and inform people of special offers.
Engage your readers by asking them for feedback on certain items or for recommendations of future products.
Take advantage of the skills and experience you already have. If you sell kitchen gear and used to be a chef, weave cooking and entertaining into your blog.
Write short posts that are easily read and digestible by a busy reader.
Try to write regularly. Blogs require posts at least once a week, and ideally two to three times a week.
Make sure your photos are a reasonable size (10 to 50 kilobytes as opposed to five megabytes) so that they don’t take too long to load when users open your blog. Add meta tags and photo descriptions for search engine optimization.
Make your blog part of your greater social media strategy. Publish related posts on Facebook and Twitter and in your email newsletters. Not only does this multi-faceted approach ensure that you reach more readers and fans, the fresh, unique content also helps you optimize for search engines.
Give shoppers the opportunity to link to your blog from your web store homepage and your email newsletter.
Grow your fan base. Allow your readers to share your posts with their friends by including sharing buttons for social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest, at the end of every post. The buttons will help you get more traffic for not only your blog, but also your store. Sharing buttons take just seconds to add, and they're usually free. Social bookmarking services like AddThis, ShareThis, LockerzShare, and Pretty Link Pro offer a variety of customizable buttons and share counters, as well as analytics so that you can track sharing trends, what’s hot on your site, and which social media sites are the most popular amongst your customers.
Besides writing your own blog, contribute to others so that you can grow your reputation and expertise and gain exposure for your brand. Backlinks to your store from other blogs will also help you optimize for search engines.
Make your blog user-friendly. Organize your blog posts into topics and organize them using an easy-to-read category navigation bar.
Consider running a contest to grow readership, especially if you’re just launching your blog. If you have a fashion website, ask shoppers to send in their best photo of themselves using a certain accessory or clothing item. As people submit and follow the contest, a lot of eyes will on your blog.
Utilize the comments that you receive on your blog to improve your web store. They’re a good source of customer feedback. As you can see, there are many tactics you can experiment with as part of your social media strategy. Whatever hours you commit, do spend some time on your social media marketing. It’s a vital eCommerce tool, and an increasing number of merchants attribute their success to the outreach they do on sites like Facebook and Twitter. We recommend you go at your own pace and try a few at first and then build up.

Social Media: Looking Through the Squidoo Lens

2013-02-14T19:30:00-08:00

In our initial post "Facebook and Twitter: Your Social Media Core", we touched on Facebook and Twitter as part of our social media presence strategy. Besides those social sites, eCommerce merchants are also using Squidoo, a free publishing community and social media site that lets users create lenses, or pages that focus on a specific topic of interest, like “Electronics Toys," "The Best HDTV's for 2012" and “Gifts for People Who Live in Tiny Apartments.” With Squidoo, you can write informative content on your product or industry and then link it to your web store using optimized keyword anchor text. Besides bringing incoming traffic to your web store, it also helps you increase your search engine rankings. That’s because Squidoo has a high Google page rank--you’ll find both your lens and your web store rising in search results. Squidoo is a good alternative for people who don’t have time to keep up a regular blog. As long as you update it every few weeks, Google will see the new content and index your links. Many merchants find that it’s actually easier to get a high page rank from a Squidoo lens than from a blog or website. There’s one caveat: the key is to create unique content. Google has its eye out for lenses that are created for spam purposes. Squidoo recommends that lens creators use no more than two links to the same website per lens and that they don’t link every lens they create to the same website. As an added perk, Squidoo also helps merchants make extra money, since it shares its Google AdSense revenue with popular Lensmasters. Stay tuned for our next article on social media. We'll be covering blogging basics for your store.