If like most e-commerce sites you’re looking to increase sales and conversion rates during 2010, it’s important to understand the reasons behind users buying decisions. There are a number of factors which when understood could help you turn more visitors into customers.

Here are 7 factors which influence your conversion rates:

• 1. Prices and availability -  People go online because they expect to find a great deal for less. They also expect to find the item in stock and with them within a few days. Therefore it makes sense for the business to ensure prices are always competitive and items are in stock. Plan well ahead and always keep your competitive edge intact.
• 2. Product positioning and merchandising - Similar to any high street shop, where products are positioned within your e-commerce site can have a huge effect on conversion rates. Merchandise your site in such a way that best sellers are never more than two clicks away from the homepage or main category pages, that products are always categorised and that there’s always a clear call to action.
• 3. Product offers and promotions – Take another example from the high street and make sure to always have a few offers online. Some visitors might find free delivery offers appealing, some find discount offers appealing and some find buy one get one free offers appealing. Plan well ahead and draw yourself a type of promotional road map to maintain your competitive edge and make your offer irresistible to both new and existing customers.
• 4. Level and expertise of your staff – Before making a purchase some visitor groups might place a call or send an email to the business. The way in which your staff is able to response, and in particular how quickly and thoroughly will effect your online sales and bottom line revenue. The key is to train your staff and adopt business practices which put customer support ahead.
• 5. Trust and credibility – Before handing over their money and personal details, visitors are looking for signs that the e-commerce site is credible and trustworthy. These signs can vary from displaying a physical address to listing terms and conditions in a clear and easily readable manner. Other trust factors are displaying a telephone number, displaying 3rd party accreditation and professional affiliations.
• 6. Seasonal fluctuations and trends – Some types of products might be selling better or worse at different times of the year. For example, you’d assume that greeting cards will sell better during the major holidays compared to the time in between. Use your historical data to promote different products at different times of the year. If you haven’t gathered enough historical data, try one of the trends perdition tools such as Google Trends.
• 7. Level and depth of your information – When visitors arrive at your e-commerce site and hopefully at the product page you should aim to answer all the questions they might have. Any uncertainty due to the level and depth of the information on the page can cause visitors to go elsewhere. When adding new products or services, ask a few people to read your descriptions to ensure there are no unknowns and later on tweak as you go along.

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Article by spectacles seller Glasses Direct. Sellers of spectacles and sunglasses online.

How About This:

• Find an item for sale on one site EG eBay or a wholesale site.
• Relist the item for sale on another site EG Amazon.
• Then if the item sells use the payment from the buyer to purchase the item from the original source, in this case eBay or the wholesale site.
• And then either send the item to the buyer yourself or get the supplier to send it to them directly.

This means an almost unlimited choice of products you can sell! And as with traditional dropshipping you can work out your profit margins etc, so is it a genuine way to run your business?

My Thoughts
In principal it could work. But I personally don’t think long-term it is a viable business for several reasons, and I’ve seen 2 cases of it not working.

Fail Examples
A relative of mine tried doing exactly the same a few years back. A new Paul Mckenna book was selling like mad, and the prices on amazon where about a fiver cheaper then on ebay. So he listed loads on ebay and then just ordered direct from amazon and had it sent direct. But the customers were not happy when the book arrived, fresh from amazon with an invoice in and amazon branding all over the packaging! To say they wernt impressed is an understatement! So he stopped immediately. I also came across a business selling fish tanks this weekend, and from reading reviews on the web it transpired the owner didn’t hold the stock, they waited for orders and then sourced it. This resulted in all sorts of problems and so this fish tank sellers reputation is awful on review sites, and several people had filed complaints against them (via the Direct Gov site!).

Direct To Customer?
I don’t think you could just make an order from another company and then send it direct to your customer. It is going to have some kind of invoice, logo branding on packaging, returns info etc. So you would have to get it sent to you first and then send it on. This would also incur extra costs for you of using a courier.

I personally wouldn’t want to do it because the whole point of dropshipping is you don’t handle any goods. To handle goods I would just stock them in the traditional way. Also the nature of constantly going back and forth for me is not a nice one. What if you list a watch for sale, sell it and then go back to the place you were going to buy it from and find it is out of stock or there is a problem, then you are stuffed. You have no way of ever truly being in control unless you ask a seller to reserve stock for you.

Sale Returns
And the issue of dealing with returns would not be pretty either. It would be a nightmare for you to get the item back to you, refund the customer and then try and resell it on. You would end up making a loss when you think of the ebay/amazon listing fees and paypal fess + double postage costs (sending it once, and then sending it once resold). And with ‘distance selling regulations’ you can’t avoid it.

What Will The Bank Think?
I also wouldn’t like to sit in front of my business account manager and tell him by business model, I think he would quickly be asking me if my name was really Del Boy! I had my 6 monthly business review this morning and everytime they are very keen to know exactly my activities at the moment on how my websites make money (this is after 3 years of running it on the same business model!) which they pay close attention to so I don’t think telling them porkies about the nature of sourcing products would be possible.

Other Negatives?
And then when you add in the other negatives such as; listing fee costs, warranty issues, potential payment delays etc I just think it is so much of a nightmare business model that even if you could sell a few items per month it simply wouldnt be worth the headaches. So for me I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, much better of holding stock in the traditional manner or using proper dropshippers.

It’s Your Business
Having said all of that. It’s your business and I always encourage people to do what they feel is right, so although I wouldn’t do it don’t let me stop you at least trying it for a few months, at least then you will know first hand whether it is viable!

Next time you are about to stop working, and start watching TV, just remember:

There are people in life who are watching what others are doing, are you watching, or doing?

Image from flickr.

Amongst the many online marketing channels, search engine optimisation is the most cost effective and most accurate way to drive qualified web traffic to your e-commerce site. Unlike other marketing channels, for example display advertising, web users who click on your search result are actively looking to make a purchase (hence qualified) and best of all, it won’t cost you a penny (hence cost effective). Now that you understand how important seo is for your e-commerce site, here are a few tried and tested tips for 2010.

1. Get Singular Keyword Vs. Plurals Right – If you’ve red a bit about seo for e-commerce sites you know that every page (and in particular product pages) must have unique page title and page description which includes your keywords. The search engines use this information to determine how relevant or not the page is to the user search query. Despite this, most e-commerce sites miss the connection between singular and plural when choosing the keywords and optimise around one or the other. My tip is to include both terms in your metadata, based ‘product title [singular] order product title [plural] at store name’ e.g. ‘blue iphone cover – order blue iphone covers at store name’.

2. Use HTML and XML Product Site Maps - For many e-commerce sites, especially sites with many product SKUs, the battle is sometimes getting all the products into the search results index. If the product is unique for your site and isn’t blocked from the search engine crawlers, there’s no reason why it should not appear in the index. Unless the search engines could not find the product when visiting your site. To ensure all the products are accessible and found by the engines, consider using two sites maps. HTML site map which is placed close to the root, for example www.sitename.com/sitemap.html will ensure it will be found. While XML site map will require you to submit it via Google Webmater tools, which is a simple and free service from Google.  

3. Intelligently Deal With Out of Stock and Discontinued Products - Unless you know better, in most cases you’ll take those products off the site and web users reaching the page will receive an error message. The missed opportunity is that those pages have some seo value, maybe some back-links pointing to them and possible high ranking. To save some of the value from those pages, consider redirecting them to a more appropriate product page. To maximize this, use a 301 server header from the old product to the new product so the seo value will be transferred from one to the other. Here’s a useful how-to redirect guide.

4. Always Rewrite, Refresh and Reinvent Content - Great content is an essential long term seo strategy. Content in the shape of product descriptions, products guides and even products reviews will include your keywords which will go hand in hand with the keywords in the page title and page description making the page appear even more relevant. Quality content will also make the page more sharable thereby increasing the likelihood of sites linking to the page and fresh content will ensure the page gets crawled more often by the search engines. For e-commerce sites, getting new fresh content is easy by simply encouraging customers to leave reviews.

5. Don’t Forget On-Site Optimisation -  This type of search engine optimisation relates to on-site improvements which will contribute to the seo mix. e-commerce sites should pay extra attention to:

A. Image naming – use the product title as the image name to gain web traffic from Google image search.
B. Image alt text – populate the alt field for all your images, in particular for product images.
C. Title as H1 – turn the product title into an H1 HTML tag.
D. Link internally – Link between relevant products to increase their relevancy.

I hope you find my e-commerce optimisation tips useful. Good luck for 2010.    

—
Guest article by Michelle Strassburg, head of sales and marketing at hardwood flooring store Wood and Beyond. The online store which was re-launched in 2009 offers timber products from worktops to decking.

One of the temptations is to just think “oh my business probably can’t really benefit from using Twitter, so I won’t bother”. You’ve seen it on the news and heard all about it, but yet you think it’s not for you – this could prove very costly.

On a personal level I am not a big fan of Twitter, but from a business point of view I am a huge fan. Say for example you run an ecommerce retail shop. You could create 2 separate accounts, one for yourself as an entrepreneur to connect with lots of other entrepreneurs, and the second account purely for your ecommerce business.

What Could You Then Do With These Twitter Accounts?

The first one you could use purely to build up business2business relationships, connect with other entrepreneurs, suppliers, marketers, consultants etc. From following them and communicating with them you could learn heaps of stuff and you never know what opportunities you may open.

The second account could be for your customers and website visitors to follow. You could then communicate directly with them on an individual personal level, just sending them a message to check they were happy with their order could do wonders for their loyalty! But even more powerful perhaps, would be when you have special offers or new products. Tweeting about them will instantly open you up to lots of highly targetted potential customers who are following you. Now your brain is starting to imagine the possibilities!

Need Help With Twitter?

If you’ve never used twitter, or are using it but not very successfully then there is lots of information available. You can either buy a book from Amazon, they have quite a few available for under a tenner (at time of writing) and you can also read reviews as to whether they are any good. Or you can search the web for advice and build up your knowledge that way from articles on blogs and other information sites.

A very easy thing to do is make excuses, we all do it, “I’m not going to go for my jog today because it’s raining!” or “I missed revenue targets this month because my internet was down for half a day”. But not making excuses means you get more done and you become a more disciplined individual.

So when you have a list of jobs to do when working on your business, make no excuses. And always take the blame where appropriate, if something goes wrong – you miss your sales targets for example – take the blame yourself and make sure next month you hit the targets.

This is easier said then done of course! What I have done is made it part of my set of rules I keep in one of my business folders.

If you ever feel like this (image below), remind yourself why you are doing what you are doing, and get back working.

Here is a video I found which is worth a watch. It has a tips about ecommerce websites from a selection of experts. It is worth viewing a couple of times just to really take the information in, otherwise you can forget some bits within minutes of hearing them.

This the second article in a series about protecting your website, the first article published was about stopping content stealers who damage your website with duplicate content issues.

Stopping the hackers getting into your website is obviously hugely important. Here are a few methods to protect yourself and keep your website secure.

Passwords
Change them often for the login to your website. Make them strong so use lots of letters, numbers and symbols. It may be a pain but for something so simple and important it must be done.

Index.html In All Folders
For every folder on your server make sure it has a blank index.html, otherwise if a hacker visits the folder directly they will be able to see all other files inside the folder.

Monitor Error Log
Check your stats, or 'Error Log' and keep an eye on it. You may spot hackers trying to find web based programs on your site to later attempt to use them. Alternatively you may also find missing files, images not loading etc which is good to locate to improve your users experience.

Htaccess File
Use the .htaccess file on your hosting.

Stop kiddie hackers with this code:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} libwww [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(.*)=http: [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [F,L]

Stop other people viewing the content of your htaccess file with this code (do the same for any other file just change the name):

<files .htaccess>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>

Block IP addresses with this code:

Order Deny,Allow
Deny from ENTER IP HERE

Robots File
Use your robots.txt file to prevent indexing of important folders and files on your website. Here is the code, change folder names to your own. Learn more about this at robotstxt.org

User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder-name/
Disallow: /folder-name1/
Disallow: /folder-name2/

Chmod Permissions (Unix servers only, not Windows)
Change the permission of your files to 644 when possible. This basically means the owner gets 'read and write access', but all other users only get 'read' access preventing programs from running. Obviously if you have a shopping cart script and other functions it may not be possible to have all files 644. You don't want to leave files unnecessarily vulnerable so have the right chmod in place when possible.

SSL
Try and use SSL on your whole website, not just during payments. You may need to pay extra for this so enquire with your web host provider about whether it is possible and for how much.

Backups
Remember to also do regular back-ups of your website should anything happen to it.

Your PC
Make sure it is free of viruses and well protected. Always update and run anti-virus software as often as possible. If your computer is hacked they could get the details to hack your website as well.

Surfing the web on mobile phones continues to grow in popularity. With the rise of smartphones such as the Apple iPhone, Blackberrys and devices from other brands such as Nokia the ‘mobile web’ seems to have become more and more in use.

Worth Becoming Mobile Friendly?
No doubt this is one market that will continue to grow over the coming years, and potentially rapidly, so ignoring this opportunity would be madness. It improves your reach to potential customers, means you are more accessible and also being involved already means you are ready for the future as mobile web develops even further. It also acts as another promotional method as there are directories specific for phone surfers.

Is Your Site Mobile Friendly?
Most websites aren’t automatically suited for use on phones, the formatting can end up all over the place. Get your website up on your phone (if it is internet enabled, which most new ones are) and take a look. Chances are it is isn’t.

Do Any Companies Yet Have Special Websites For Phones?
Yes. Lots of major companies, and much smaller ones, are now creating specific mobile-optimised websites. Amazon, Travelodge & Swiftcover are just a few of the companies already live – test them our on your phone to see what they look like. Another site is DropshipBog.co.uk, that’s right (see image on right), you can read all our content on your device, check us out on your phone now!

What’s The Difference Between The Sites?
Sites for mobiles have to be much ‘lighter’ so they load a lot quicker – compressed images, stripping out design elements and removing scripts are just a few of the changes. A script on your website means it detects the browser a visit is using and shows them the website as appropriate.

How Can I Make My Website Mobile Friendly?
You can either install a script yourself, search in google for things like ‘mobile friendly’ and there are lots of blog posts and articles with advice. Alternatively you can use a service to create one for you (it is free for basic services or paid for a more premium service). One I have tried out is MoFuse.com which is very easy to do and a quick solution. The benefits of doing it yourself are; you have complete control and your content doesn’t get redirected to another domain (like it does with services like MoFuse). However the services are a quicker and easier.

Conclusion
The web really is going mobile, and it is an area you can attack now before other ecommerce sites get in on the act. Be one step ahead of the game, it should pay off!

This is the first post of a series on protecting your website.

It is all very well building your business up, but if you don’t protect it you could end up losing it all, or taking a hit. At the moment one of the things I am focusing on is protecting my business, I’m happy with what I have and don’t want others taking advantage of it, or trying to hurt me. One problem is people stealing your content, that you own the copyright to, and unfortunately it goes on quite a bit.

Content Stealers
This has been a real problem with this blog. People copy my articles and publish them on their own website as their own work. Google then thinks it is duplicate content and hits the rankings. Other people are also able to profit from my hard work. I created the work so I own it and no one can copy it.

The same goes for an an ecommerce store or any type of website. If you research a product you are selling and create a brilliant point of sale that will draw in visitors from search engines and increase sales, don’t let people copy it, it will harm your business!

How To Try And Protect Yourself From The Start
In the footer of this website I have a notice saying “all content may NOT be used without permission”. Will that deter these sort of people? Probably not, but I recommend you put one in your footer anyway. The notice is there on every single page so if you have to take action against someone you made it clear they can’t copy anything.

Also date your work. EG “This article was published on January 1st 2000 by Mr Biggles on mrbiggles.com”. Or if you don’t want to explicitly put that on a page try and keep some kind of proof when a page was published (server records maybe?). This then proves you were the original creator of the work.

How To Find The Thieves
The simplest way is to use copyscape.com. Put the URL of your page you want to find copies of, and it will draw up results from the web of copies it finds. You can then click on them and at the top of the page it shows you how words are duplicate. There are other tools around, search in google for things like ‘duplicate content checker’ to find ones that suit you.

Then What To Do – First Action
First thing is to contact the offending website. Give them the evidence you have found – your page URL, and where they have copied it on their website. Tell them to remove the content immediately as they have no right to use the content because you own it and it explicitly says on your website content may not be copied. If they don’t remove the material tell the person you will inform their web host their client is acting illegally, and you are going to take legal action against them and submit a DMCA infringement. You could also threaten them with a smear campaign on public forums proving how their company behaves and that they are not to be trusted.

Second Action
From here how you act depends on how the other webmaster responds. They may apologise and remove the content immediately, in which case it’s a result, job done. They may blank you altogether thinking you are not serious. They may not even get your email. In these instances send another email stating you contacted them on ‘X date’ and are following up. You should also ‘request a read receipt’ and make the message ‘high priority’.

In a few cases I have found the offender removes the content, but doesn’t email you back. They obviously know they have done wrong but won’t email you to apologise for being a thief. So check the copied content before emailing for a second time as they may have removed it. If they think you aren’t serious contact the host and tell them what you are doing, who knows they may even suspend the website!

Third Action
If they still don’t respond after the second email, or are not cooperating, then you have to decide what to do. If you don’t believe the offending content is having much of a harmful effect (it may be copied on a crappy website with virtually no rankings or visitors) you are best to forget about it – better of spending your time on other issues that can help your business. But if the content is on a major website, or has been copied a lot then you want to go through the effort of a DMCA infringement request, or/and a public smear campaign. A positive result may really help your website getting better rankings thanks to no duplicate content.

Is This A Real Problem?
This is a genuine problem which you should be aware of, because people are behind a computer screen a lof of them think they can get away with it. One of the main articles on this blog was copied by an Indian freelance writer (about 365 words duplicate) who sold it to someone who then distributed it all over the web on article sites, blogs and other publications. It has completely killed the rankings of my article and I’ve made no money from it. So I’m taking action. Many of my articles have been copied many times, harming my rankings. There are also ’scraper sites’ which automatically scrape the content from your website and publish it on their own. So don’t think this doesn’t go on much as their are a lot of people out there copying content.

How To Manage Your Time
This isn’t something I recommend you go mad over and start spending days hunting down content stealers. But it is worth spending an hour or two at the start of each month to check their are no duplicates of your most important work. If you spent a long time on amazing product descriptions don’t let all your good work be wiped out by some illegal acting rat who thinks he can get away with just copying your content because he is behind a computer screen. And often a simple email can get the offending material removed, and an improvement in your pages ranking, definitely worth the effort!