eCommerce Trends to Watch This Holiday Season

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Black Friday and the holiday shopping season are fast approaching, and customers know this just as well as retailers. Based on last year, between Labor Day and mid-November we can expect online customers to change their behavior by deferring purchases. As an industry, we have conditioned our customers to expect exceptional offers in the run up to Black Friday.

At SeeWhy, we track both conversions and shopping cart abandonment rates, and you can see this change in behavior in the data. Shopping cart abandonment rates normally average 70 percent, i.e. 7 out of every 10 people that place items in the shopping cart do not complete the transaction. But last year from Labor Day through November 15, the number of online sales fell by almost 56 percent compared with the volume for the previous month, and the shopping cart abandonment rate shot up, peaking at 83 percent.

But once holiday promotional offers were rolled out, the transaction volumes rose sharply, and the abandonment rate fell dramatically. You can see this in the graphs below.

Note also how the day of the week is very significant: During the weekends, customers were researching, not buying. The pattern of high shopping cart abandonment rates during the weekend is normal throughout the year as customers research online before potentially making a purchase during the week. However, this pattern was much more pronounced from mid-September through mid-November, reflected in a peak abandonment rate for the year.

What happened in mid-November, of course, was that Black Friday-specific promotions were being rolled out across the board, triggering seasonal buyingnot browsingbehavior and the ramp up to the peak on Cyber Monday.

Based on last years pattern, we should expect that, until the big Thanksgiving promotions get rolled out in mid-November, many customers will defer purchases, having become conditioned not to purchase online but to wait.

This reinforces what we have known for decades; promotions shift the timing of revenues and may not provide significant lift overall.

Well be monitoring both the discounting trends and the shopping cart abandonment rates through the rest of the holiday season, and it will be interesting to see whether the Holiday 2010 will be a rerun of 2009.

How to shop a proper E-Commerce package

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Your business is flourishing, now you want to develop by establishing yourself an online store. So when you want to procure any e commerce package, you have countless options of having them. Right from the solutions of free shopping cart to other effects which can charge you thousands of bucks, you find a amount of options for the online store shopping solutions. If you looking some instructions or ideas to get a proper product for your online store, then make sure you have landed at a suitable position. The following are the factors which need to be considered while buying them for your online store:

Understand the Programming language: Don’t get confused, you do not need to be an professional to know the programming language involved in the e commerce package. A simple understanding of few effects around the scripting language of HTML is additional than enough. This is important because it will allow you to do a couple of changes or editing part at your end as and when required. In this way you will recognize that your e commerce package is working perfectly. Hence superior choose for the one which comes through html way out or somewhere likewise thing. Avoid doing any kind of hard product as you cannot pay for to learn them all while being busy in your business functioning.

The support factor: The other point to consider is to count upon the holdup factor. The e-commerce package whether you operate from your floor desktops or your laptop or carry out via mobile POS, it must hold up some limited amount of products and the pages. Therefore you can sell any amount of products which should be very well supported by the software which you purchased. So you need to be specific while selecting any package around your set limits.

The compatibility factor: The third thing which you need to look is the compatibility factor. The web hosting corporation to which you are registered might be using different software which may not be compatible to your e commerce software. At such juncture, wearing to fix the problem with few additional money cannot yield you any result, until you take some most important steps. Hence it is important to understand the software in this perspective as well so that you do not face such issues while installing the product. Ensure that you consider these effects with seriousness instead of working out simply on the basis of some wrong assumption.

These are some basic factors which need to be counted upon while procuring any kind of e commerce software for your web store. Indeed the selection process of these packages or software happens to be scary often. You can find countless of options before you while searching them over the internet which can be pretty confusing charge at the start. So at such point of time, the above said points can be a guiding source for you. All you need to check is the amount or budget you have allocated for the thought package along with a couple of positive feedback and testimonials. If you consider these points, you are all prepared to get the one as per your necessities.

How to Get Visitors to Read Your Article and Increase Your Web Site Traffic

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Article writing should be a major part of your internet marketing strategy. In most cases, depending on the content, articles can greatly increase traffic to your web site. But there is a problem.

The internet was built for those of us who love to surf through the information rather than read volumes at a time. Since many people do prefer scanning, there is a pretty good chance your entire article will not be read. Visitors usually look for sentences or paragraphs that capture their attention, and then return to the search engines to continue surfing. If they happen to come across a poor or mediocre article, they will leave even sooner. You can bank on that.

So what does it take to get your visitors to read more than a few sentences and view your article as a quality resource? The answer is to provide a well written article with plenty of useful content. You can get more web site traffic by using the following tips.

1. Use Sub-headings

A good sub-heading can peak the curiosity of your visitors and get them to read more of your article. Do not try to be too cute. The sub-heading should be relative to your subject without overwhelming the content of article. The whole purpose of a sub heading is to lead the visitor to the next section of your article. Integrate your subheadings without allowing them to be distractions.

2. Use Bullets and/or Numbers

For whatever reason, people like lists. Most of us will take reading articles with bullets and numbers over those with long drawn out paragraphs. With so much information available today, attention spans are not what they used to be. People get bored very easily, so you must capture their attention fast and hold it. Formatting with bullets or numbers allow you to keep the pace and momentum of your article moving forward. Think in terms of the soundbytes you see on television; descriptive and catchy but very brief. Apply that to your article writing.

3. The Hook

Each paragraph of your article must hand off to the next one. Develop a main point for each paragraph without giving too much information away concerning the rest of the article. Think of each paragraph as steps that get your visitors to take action. The action in this case is you want them to continue reading your article and click on your web site link in the resource box. Give your readers just enough in each paragraph to get them to the end of your article.

4. Your Credibility

This by itself can determine your site traffic. If you are just starting out, the best credibility is to provide good content. The product or service you offer might be great but let us face facts: among millions of websites, people do not know you. Earning credibility does not happen overnight. It is going to require a steady flow of unique content before you stand out from the crowd so get started writing now.

Whether immediate or long term the point is get readers to go beyond just scanning your article. Utilize these tips while staying focused on providing informative content and watch your web traffic steadily increase.

Moving Toward Ecommerce Site Design

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Ecommerce has been a major player in the retail market place for more than a decade now. Initially invented in 1979 by Michael Aldridge, a British entrepreneur, the trend only exploded with the widespread popularity of the internet. Industry statistics this year estimate that 44% of consumers will shop online for holiday gifts this year, and as the market share is ever increasing, a number of companies continue to turn to the world of online shopping almost every day. For most companies looking into this type of website, however, there are a number of different concerns that must be addressed before you can ever begin to build a site that attracts customers and promotes sales.

Industries where Ecommerce May be Useful

Before a company ever starts down the path toward online sales, it may be helpful to take a look at which industries get the most out of the process. The answer is a pretty simple one – almost any industry. Take the city of London, for example. Long a mecca of shopping for people around the world, you couldn’t visit this city’s unique shops without actually visiting the UK. With the popularity of ecommerce, however, everything from famed department stores like Harrods to much smaller venues like Honest Jon’s are finding real success in the online marketplace. Whether you market auto parts to do-it-yourselfers or used books, you’re likely to find a home in the world of ecommerce.

The Site Design

Designing your site is key to the process of online shopping. That, however, is the case with any online venture. Customers must be able to find exactly what they’re looking for. Wandering around the forlorn virtual aisles of your e-store will do little but make them abandon their shopping cart and visit a competitor, leaving you without the online sale that is so essential to your bottom line. Here are just a few of the most important tips necessary to help your customers find the product they want:

Keep the Number of Clicks Required to a Minimum: If your customer has to click eight times to buy a single used book, you have a real problem on your hands. Perhaps one click is the search through the various categories. The next click leads them to a category description. From there, perhaps they have to click on a sub category. The process can get endless and frustrating. The rule of thumb is that more than four clicks to the point where they must provide their personal information is unnecessary and can cause a poor buy rate.

Add to Cart or Buy Buttons Must Be Obvious: It’s the first rule of any website design. Your customers have to understand what they are supposed to do, and nowhere is this more true than in an online shopping experience. Your customers should never have to scroll below the fold to find the right button to push to purchase their item from you.

Show the Price: This one may seem like an obvious marker, but many online retailers require more than one click before the potential buyer can look at the price of any given item. If you don’t show them what the item costs immediately, you risk losing them right away.

Customize your business website with the best ecommerce web development solutions

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E-commerce is the online business, supposedly the latest trend of selling process preferred by majority. It is one of the best and a much better reach with the lowest possible cost mediums to stretch out to global markets. If you can implement it successfully, it will surely provide exponential escalation to your business and in a way multiply revenues and sales for your organization. To attain success in your business hire a professional ecommerce developer. The developer will provide you with reasonably priced ecommerce web development and web design services in a specialized manner backed up with the excellent web developers, best web designers and proficient SEO experts.

E-commerce development rules in our present industry. It is the main keyword that should be there in every business. E-commerce means exporting and importing your business services and products over electronic systems. You can say, it is just a simple electronic marketing. This concept of buying and selling products online has become a most important activity over the internet. This ecommerce web development has developed as a new business for every individual web developers. Perhaps this is the most popular and widely accepted online business in todays world. No wonder this e-commerce development is having a great impact on the online business due to its best e-commerce solutions.

With this kind of impact, many business may it be small or big, has started running online stores for a great business prospect. This has resulted in raising many demands of e-commerce shopping cart expansion. This ecommerce web development has quite a few dimensions of approach with easy and quick dealings to understand the desires of the clients. An e-commerce website must have an attractive design in order to draw the clients attention with the help of good software applications. There are several companies all across the world specializing in ecommerce site development. This helps in building trust, confidence and reliability in customers who has their online business. You can hire an ecommerce web developer from any of these companies to develop your business site. Make sure you employ the developer from a reliable and renowned company who will help you to build a good relationship with each of your clients.

Before going for an online or e-commerce business activity, you must select a good and trustworthy ecommerce development concern. Making a right pick of ecommerce website developer will guarantee proper promotion of your services and products. Thus this will help your business grow higher. The developers make your ecommerce site attractive and eye-catching thereby driving in good number of traffic to your site. Make your website such attractive so that it can be easily accessible, trustful and reliable to the clients. E-commerce web development companies usually specialize in tailor-made programming and development for various projects irrespective of their sizes. Web developers in this field have extensive knowledge in the latest development version control systems, languages and methods. No wonder e-commerce website development makes a good business in the global industry.

Author: Nick Robinson