Web Shop Manager News

It is a well known fact that in business it is easier to keep customers than it is to find new ones.  The same goes for subscribers to a site.  It is worth a bit of work to gain and keep loyal followers rather than spending copious amounts of time looking for one hit wonders.  It is crucial that you engage them by giving them the fresh content that they expect from you, their trusted source for information.  For a little help developing content for you blog, you may want to refer to the series “Developing an eCommerce Blog” specifically "How do I Develop Innovative Content for my eCommerce Blog?".

There are two main ways to keep your newest content in front of many sets of eyes.  First, there is the newsletter.  There are advantages to newsletters, you can control content and make it specific for your audience by including an introduction, point them toward some other links, provide updates etc.  Then there is RSS, RSS most commonly is referred to as “Really Simple Syndication” which means people choose to subscribe to your articles.  They will automatically be notified when you have new content from the feed reader of their choosing.  They will receive your blog post as is without additional content.  Both the newletter, and RSS are available through Web Shop Manager’s content modules.

How do you get users to sign up for a newsletter or RSS feed?

• Free Report – Upon registering for your newsletter or RSS offer your subscribers a report that is well written and in a different context would be worth paying for.  They gain insight into your knowledge base, and you gain loyal readership.
• Contests – In general people love free stuff and are willing to sign up for something if there is the chance they’ll win something.  The offer should be something that they would find of value, and is related to your brand or service. 
• Repetition – You will find that people are more apt to do something if they are asked more than once.  Try adding a link to the bottom of your blog post asking for them to sign up, and make it abundantly clear that you have a newsletter available.  Note how Atlanta Antique Gallery, designed by Web Design Solutions, asks you to sign up for the newsletter easily with just an email address right in the middle of their home page. 

Now that you have your faithful flock, how do you get them to interact?

• Thoughtful Posts - Be honest, interesting, and personable (not spammy) in your posts.  Providing meaningful content is the best way to gain returning visitors.  Also, respond to the comments that people make to your posts.  Engage them in further discussion, and use those comments as inspiration for new blog posts. 
• Love is a Two-Way Street – If you want others to comment and interact on your blog, be sure to pay the comment love forward.  Focus on a small group of people that you particularly think would add value to your blog.  Interact with them by visiting their website/blog and commenting, sign up for their newsletter, ask questions, etc.
• Connect via Social Networking Sites – Find out where else your targeted audience ‘hangs out’ online.  Join them on facebook, twitter, or bookmarking sites.  Forming genuine relationships is the best way to gather a loyal following.

Whether you ask your audience to sign up for your newsletter or RSS feed, do interact with them by providing fresh content, and a friendly place for them to voice their opinions.  Each interaction places you in front of your prospective customers before they need your service, ensuring that they turn to you first when they do.  Blogs serve as an informal way to create a forum like feeling, and have greater control over the direction of the conversation.

The next post will discuss how to use Social Media as a platform to drive traffic and keep the conversation going.  In the meantime be sure to sign up for Web Shop Manager’s RSS feed. 

Emily Dunn

Brown Bag Agency

Interested in a fashion (or fashion planning) website?

There are many reasons why someone may be interested in starting a fashion website, and all reasons are relevant.  As the web is the fastest way to share information, you may be someone who is interested in following trends, keeping up with celebrity trends, or looking for new ideas for your own wardrobe (ex: http://stylebubble.typepad.com/).  You may be a fashion designer or stylist yourself and need a website to easily show your design portfolio to employers, photographers, models, or potential clients (ex: http://elleleary.com/).  Or you may already have a business in the fashion field and need an online presence or eCommerce website...maybe you own a retail boutique and you want your customers to be able to take a second look at what they already saw on location, or vice versa.  They may look online, find a piece they like, and then come to the store to try it on (ex: http://playcouture.com/).  In any situation, having a fashion website is crucial in developing a name for yourself worldwide.

How do I start my own fashion website (fashion website development)?

Before you begin your fashion website development, you should draw up a plan to figure out what you want to get out of the site.  Once you’ve established that, you want to think about what key pages are essential to get your point across.  In the fashion industry, some of the most important pages to consider are a photo gallery, a fashion blog, calendar of fashion events, and quite possibly an eCommerce website with a shopping cart for retail fashion items (ex: http://bcatthreads.com).  In the photo gallery, you can share photos of fashion events that you attended, highlights of seasons’ trends, photo shoots, and wardrobe ideas (ex: http://christiesboutique.com/gallery.html).  The fashion blog can be created as an online journal of your travels through the fashion world, it can be made informative about events that your viewers might be interested in, exciting news about your fashion business, it can show how-to pictures of mixing and matching looks, and can highlight other places to find more information (ex: http://bcatthreads.com/news.html).  A calendar can pinpoint fashion industry special events that you know are going on in your area, around the world, on television, or something your business is involved with.  You can list fashion shows, fashion design contests, the upcoming “Project Runway” episode, or new fashion related movies coming out in the theaters (ex: http://fortune421.com/p-1148-events.html).  And, of course, the eCommerce shopping cart can be used for items in fashion that you wish to sell to your customers.  Boutique owners would want to sell the merchandise that they offer in their store online, or you may strictly sell retail merchandise online.

How do I design my fashion website (fashion website design)?

Once you have an idea of what substance you would like your fashion website to have, its time to think about designing the site.  The design of a website is just as important as the information that is found on the site.  It is the first thing that people see and it is the one thing that captures their attention immediately. In knowing this, you should keep in mind that too much clutter (as in too many words, too many pictures, or too much information on your home page) will drive a person away from your site.  You want to develop something simple, clean, and interesting to look at.  But, you also want it to be unique and represent you (ex: http://calyxclothing.com/).  Also, if you don’t have experience in web design, it is best to go to an outside source to help you in developing your fashion website (ex: http://webdesignsolutions.com).  While most people in the fashion industry have a great eye for art, and understand the appreciation for art, this does not mean that they have the ability to develop a tasteful website.  There are people who design websites for a living and know what works and what doesn’t.  If the web designers have any credentials at all, they will have worked with both successful and failures of websites and know what is the most appealing to the general population based on their previous experience.  So the saying goes “do what you do best, outsource the rest”.  You can find an established web designer in many different ways, but one of the best ways is doing research on well established designers who have positive reviews from their clients.  Web Design Solutions has very creative designers with a vast portfolio of work, who have designed a number of fashion websites - they are well established, and have great reviews from their already existent clients.  A case study of some of their successful fashion websites are listed here: http://webshopmanager.com/p-695-clothing-apparel-fashion-ecommerce.html

How do I gain success from my fashion website (fashion website marketing)?

Once your fashion website is up and running, the most important thing to do is keep it updated.  People often get discouraged when they visit a website and see that nothing is changing, and so they stop visiting altogether.  Even if you are using your website as a portfolio, but haven’t created any new work, you may want to change other things.  This is why a blog is very beneficial to a fashion website - when you have a fashion blog on your site, you not only have the opportunity to talk about your own work, but you can also talk about related fields or topics that the same reader may be interested in.  And writing new blog posts will keep the reader coming back and finding new information every time they visit the site.  Another benefit of having the blog is so that you can create an online experience for your viewer.  You can harvest a social network of people who have similar passions for the fashion industry, or may have similar style and taste that you may have.  While most trendsetters tend to go out on their own and develop a never-seen-before look and don’t want their own style to be compared to anyone else, there may be someone else out there who appreciates that you took that step in a new direction, or they want to follow your new trend. 

When I first heard that Web Shop Manager was upgrading to a one page checkout, adding to an already awesome ecommerce web software, I thought to myself, why? What is a 1 page ecommerce checkout? What does it do for my ecommerce business? What does a one page checkout mean to my customers? What makes it a revolutionary one page checkout? What the heck is AJAX, besides a cleaner for my house!? So I completed some research to find my answers and discovered why Web Shop Mangers one page ecommerce checkout using AJAX is a must have for anyone who wants to sell products online!

What is it?
We all know that you have to go through a checkout in order to purchase products. Whether you are in a brick and mortar store or online, this process is required. Can you imagine being at the grocery store and having to go to 3 different stations to checkout? The first station, to inform the sales clerk what type of customer you are (existing shopper, new, or a guest). The second station, to provide them with your billing/shipping information and to decide if you need help carrying your products to your car. Then, finally the third station, where you would provide them with the payment for your goods. If this was the case we would probably get fed up and not continue to shop there and see several shopping carts full of food that had been abandoned!

So why do we put up with all those stops when shopping online? Why do we go from page to page providing a little information at a time to get what we want? Well, not everyone does. In fact I found that abandoned shopping carts is a common occurrence online. Several independent studies have corroborated cart abandonment rates of up to 75%, while it’s been noted that about half of all prospective customers bail out of their purchases sometime between selecting products and clicking the buy button. Also, research has shown that the longer it takes for a customer to complete a sale, the higher the shopping cart abandonment rate.

Well the great news is with Web Shop Manager’s revolutionary one page, one step checkout your customer’s no longer have to make all those stops. They will go from cart, to checkout/purchased in one step! Web Shop Manager’s one page checkout process allows you to close your sales quickly and easily.

What makes it work?
You may think to yourself why is this on page checkout such a big deal…I’ve see other one page ecommerce checkouts! But believe me you’ve never seen one as dynamic as this one-page ecommerce checkout! What makes web shop manager truly one page is AJAX!

To help understand AJAX I turned to Wikipedia. Ajax, sometimes written as AJAX (shorthand for asynchronous JavaScript and XML), is a group of interrelated web development techniques used on the client-side to create interactive web applications or rich Internet applications. With Ajax, web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. The use of Ajax has led to an increase in interactive animation on web pages and better quality of Web services due to the asynchronous mode. Data is usually retrieved using the XMLHttpRequest object. Despite the name, the use of JavaScript and XML is not actually required, nor do the requests need to be asynchronous.

AJAX’s use on the one page checkout enables the checkout to function so your customers do not have to wait for a new page to load or the existing page to reload. The information is evaluated and process behind the scenes, creating this seamless checkout process. This provides immediate customer feedback and error detection. This allows your customer to quickly complete the checkout and their purchase without stress or frustration.

Why must I have it?
As an ecommerce site owner you will see a drastic increase in your sales and cart conversions with this enhancement. Effectively and significantly reducing your cart abandonment rates. Existing Web shop manager customers are already experiencing an increase in sales. Less cart abandonment and more returning customers.

This revolutionary one page checkout is included when you using Web Shop Manager to maintain your ecommerce site with no additional cost. Also included are several enhancement features for the business owners. Offering you more tools to manage your orders, see additional information by customer, and advanced searching tools. You decide, based on the products, which fields you don't need. For example, if the product does not require shipping then the customer will not be asked for shipping information.

Combine all this with an already extensive list of feature and you will never want to use anything else to manage your ecommerce website. If there was ever a checkout system that was fun to use, this is it!

The ultimate goal of an eCommerce blog is to make money.  It may be a simple goal of paying your hosting fees or perhaps you have grander visions in mind.  Whatever the goals are for your site you will need to get consistent traffic in order to make any of the following revenue generating suggestions profitable. 

In order to drive traffic to your site I suggest you take a look at a previous post in the series “Developing an eCommerce Blog” entitled "How to Title an eCommerce Website Blog Post and Promote it too!".

Now let’s explore a few options for monetizing your eCommerce blog:

SELL PRODUCTS

• Sell Your Own - WSM’s eCommerce Modules makes it easy to post your own product and get paid for it.  The new 1-step checkout system should make it even easier to convert ‘lookey-loos’ into paying customers. 
• Create Branded Items - You can create products with your own logo or designs to sell using sites like Zazzle, or Café Press to further your brands reach with promotional items.  Both sites use your designs, and when a customer orders an item they print the item and drop ship for you.  You can create a separate site, if the look doesn’t suit your current site, or integrate it directly into your existing offering. 
• Affiliate Sales – The apparel and fashion site designed by WSM, Bcat Threads is a great example of combining several designers into one site.  This not only makes the site look full of unique products, but allows the individual designers great exposure to a larger audience. 

AD NETWORKS 

• Pay per Click (PPC) – This means that you, the host, only get paid when an ad is clicked.  There are many ad networks that work this way and several include: Google Adsense, Chitika, and Commission Junction.
• Pay by Impressions (CPM) – (stands for cost per thousand) – These networks pay you for each 1000 page views rather than actual clicks.  The cost is usually $1 or so per 1000 page views.  Consider these services as examples of this method: Tribal Fusion, and ValueClick Media.

DIRECT AD SALES

• Individual Vendors - If you are interested in vendors buying ad space on your site, prepare a media sheet with analytical data including how many visitors, page views, average time on site, etc, so they can see the value in their advertising dollars.  You should make it clear on your homepage that you are happy to entertain more ads. 
• Trading Spaces - Consider trading ad space with another complimentary but not competitive site which can attract other companies to buy direct ad sales or at least generate more traffic.  This will benefit sales of your products and earnings from ad networks affiliation. 

Which ever method(s) you explore for your particular tastes and efforts I encourage you to read the fine print and don’t commit until you’ve explored a substantial amount of opportunities.

Next month I’ll explore attracting and retaining loyal RSS subscribers, and how to keep them happy and commenting members of your community.

Emily Dunn

Brown Bag Agency

Before you begin thinking of a strategy for post promotion you must first think of a riveting title to get your audience searching, thinking, moving, and of course buying.  There are many ways to create an attention grabbing title, here are (4) of my favorites:

1. Ask a question – This is a great tactic for engaging an audience.  Provide an answer to the question in your post and then ask for comments that will add value, and perhaps a few ideas you hadn’t thought of yet.  Here is an example from the previous post in the series “Developing an eCommerce Blog” entitled "How do I Develop Innovative Content for my eCommerce Blog? "  Form the question in terms of what someone may type into a search engine as a keyword search.
2. List – If you take a look at the title "5 Important Questions to Ask before Starting an eCommerce Blog" you will see that a list exhibits your thoughts in an organized, succinct, and manageable way.  If the title were “Starting an eCommerce Blog” the reader might think the post was all encompassing and may pass it up because of time constraints. 
3. Use searchable phrases – If the terms you use are different than what people are looking for, you could be missing the boat.  Take a look at Google’s Insights for Search tool, which should be incredibly helpful when looking for searchable phrases to inspire a post title.  For instance, when writing this post I noticed that “eCommerce Website” was trending higher than “eCommerce Site”. 
4. Say what you need to say - Perhaps John Mayer was on to something.  A blog post title is no place to be short and sweet.  Take for instance,  "List Hundreds of Products, Organize Thousands of Items, Import Millions of Parts". The title could have been something like “Products, Items, and Parts” which wouldn’t have been as effective or attention grabbing.  Sometimes an adjective can go a long way to get your point across and engage a reader. 

Now that you have an informative, engaging title it is time for creative blog promotion.  It is not necessary; in fact, it wouldn’t be a good thing to use all of the following ideas for every single post.  It may seem cumbersome at first but once you get in the flow of things it will become second nature.  I promise!  Here are (8) post promotion ideas to get you thinking:

1. Bookmarking sites - sites like StumbleUpon, digg, or delicious are a small sampling of the bookmarking sites available for eCommerce blog promotion.  I find it beneficial to link up with users on sites like Twitter to take those contacts over to a social bookmarking site.  Then you can bookmark each others posts and see the visits increase. 
2. Social media sites – It should seem pretty obvious to share a link with your followers on sites like Twitter when you have a new post.  Do keep in mind that only about 1 in 10 posts should be a shameless promotion of your site.  However, sites like LinkedIn allow you the chance to add your post to the “news” section of the groups you are a member of.  This can be an incredible place to post valuable material to a targeted audience.  Do not post to every group, every time.
3. Forums/ participation on other blogs – There are forums for everything now.  There are also blogs for just about every collection or hobby too.  Seek out related forums or blogs to the items you sell and on occasion leave an insightful comment that brings the viewer back to a specific post on your site.  Never leave a link to your home page, leave a link to a related article that helps further your insightful comment. 
4. Send a link to bloggers for possible link back - If done correctly this tactic can be very effective.  Let’s say you find a site that has a related article to something you have written about.  Your article may expand on what they were saying, or offer another opinion, etc.  Send a thoughtful email to the website owner and provide a link to the specific article you have in mind for them.  If they like the post or believe their audience will gain something from reading it they may link back to it.  Don’t expect hand outs, but if you get one, fabulous!  You may also want to provide a few link backs for other people and they may return the favor. 
5. Interlinking in ones website – The content on your site will naturally build upon itself, and it will make sense to hyperlink to previous posts, and relevant pages on your site.  This will keep visitors on your site longer, and make their visit a meaningful one.  Also, consider going back to old posts and linking them to relevant newer posts you have written. 
6. Photo submission sites – Photography is a great way to get the attention of browsers.  Sites like craftgawker, and flick can be used to upload great photos of your wares and drive traffic back to your site. Web Shop Manager has a Photo Gallery Module to help reel in the buyers hook, line, and sinker.
7. Newsletters – Use newsletters to feed your subscribers with great content that provides insight and will lead them back to your site and store.  Link to specific items in your store and talk about the benefits, or perhaps a widget vs. acme widget style piece.  See “How do I Develop Innovative Content for my eCommerce Blog” for greater detail on developing content.
8. Feedburner and other blog syndication sites – These basically work like a syndicated TV show and will help you get exposure for all your hard work!

There are certainly more options for blog promotion that haven’t been included in this list.  What are some of your favorites? 

In the next blog post we will cover some ideas to monetize your blog now that you have traffic and momentum building. 

Click here for more of the “Developing an eCommerce Blog” series to further your brand identity and grow readership.

Emily Dunn, Brown Bag Agency