Disclaimer Nick Valente is fully responsible for the content of this site. The opinons expressed are that of Nick Valente and do not represent his employeer or any of it's associated companies.
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 E-Commerce is growing. Does your shopping cart meet your needs? E-Commerce reduces costs, increases profits and can be infinitely more targeted. The Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce announced in May the estimate of U.S. retail e-commerce sales for the first quarter of 2010, adjusted for seasonal variation, but not for price changes, was $38.7 billion, an increase of 1.5 percent (±1.2%) from the fourth quarter of 2009. See chart below.
Choosing the right shopping cart can make the difference between success and failure.
Some things to consider when choosing your ecommerce shopping cart
- Coupon handling – make sure the coupon options fit your needs.
- Discount handling- can it do tiered discounting, situational discounting, bundling?
- Shipping from multiple locations -especially if you have more than one warehouse or drop ship
- How it handles Customer Reviews – Reviews are critical for success
- Feeds for Google and other shopping engines
Many companies get caught in with the inability to meet market pricing needs and models due to the inflexibility of thier shopping carts. This is where coupon and discount handling become critical. Make sure the platform you choose fits your needs. The best way to see what you’ll need is to check your competitors discounting and coupong efforts. These are but a few of the items you’ll need to look at closely when deciding on a shopping cartE-Commerce platform.
Top 50 Shopping Cart list
Website magazine just published their top 50 e-commerce shopping cart list. The list is put together by the amount of traffic a site gets in combination with other factors. Notably MagentoCommerce, a open source platform has made significant gains in the past several months. It is a free/service model, meaning you get the software free but if you want service you pay based upon a plan. I’ve used this platform before and you can certainly run it without a service agreement but larger companies will want one.
Here is Websites magazines top 10
- www.anetsuite.com
- www.prostores.com
- www.1shoppingcart.com
- www.magentocommerce.com
- www.zen-cart.com
- www.oscommerce.com
- www.bigcommerce.com
- www.nexterna.com
- www.shopsite.com
Here is a chart of ecommerce growth since 2000
No matter how hard I try I keep coming back to the thought that marketers are over relying on Facebook and Twitter. Yes it’s great that we can put their widgets on our sites and it makes us feel good that we have all these friends on our fan pages. Questions keep popping into my head.
How much influence does one person have over their 500 facebook friends?
Years ago, way before facebook we had endless discussions on the virtual community of forums (bulletin boards back then) and how they attracted folks of like mind and how these virtual communities would change everything. Well they did. Now Facebook comes along and folks connect to several hundred “friends” from their present and past, most of which they have a fleeting acquaintance with. In essence, They don’t know much about them and in come cases have little in common with them. Will they influence each other?
How many friends can you really have?
There is the famous Dunbar number of “theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships”, is generally accepted to be about 150. In an interesting post from last year on Inside Facebook they talk about an article in the Economist showing that people with 500 friends. In essence they discovered that Facebook users comment on stuff from only about 5-10% of their Facebook friends.
Back to the Virtual Friends
The problem is that none of my friends are not experts on most of the decisions I need to make in my life, let alone the other 90% I barely know or knew 20 years ago. Yes these folks might be OK to ask about a restaurant or other small purchase of life decision, but do I or anyone else really want to rely on what these folks “like” on Facebook? On the other hand there are 100′s of thousand forums out there with real people who maybe really are experts. What we need is a better way to tap into the mind-meld of virtual communities.
Get back to communicating with Customers
- Put a Forum on your site and link it OUT to the social networks
- Let customers review your products on your site
- Participate in online forums
- Encourage evangelists and promote their posts and comments
- Use facebook to start discussions not just build fan lists
Have more ideas? Comments? Let me know
 Putting web analytic’s at the front of your Internet Strategy is one of the most important decisions you can make. The cheapest way to get into analytics is through Google Analytics, a free service from Google. If you’re like most companies you want to pull all that great data into an Excel spreadsheet and start finding the good stuff.
Pulling data into Excel
However pulling data into Excel can be time consuming and if you have multiple domains to manage and compare a down right pain. Thanks to Google’s API for analytics there are many companies that now offer solutions for getting more out of your data. One Free resource is Excellent Analytics which is free and just updated to version 1.0.0.48 in May. Excellent Analytics requires Excel 2007. For more resources check out Google’s blog.
Remember when AOL was ruling the world as the undisputed online champ? Me too. The number of subscribers they had was just too great for them to fail. That is being said about Facebook today. How long before Facebook’s mounting Privacy missteps or some disrupting technology knocks them off. Look at this chart from Google insights which shows the growing number of searches for the exact term “how do I delete my Facebook account”
Google explains the numbers: The numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. They don’t represent absolute search volume numbers, because the data is normalized and presented on a scale from 0-100. Each point on the graph is divided by the highest point, or 100. When we don’t have enough data, 0 is shown. The numbers next to the search terms above the graph are summaries, or totals.
Successful technology always spawns imitators. When the imitators are pumped up by a social cause (no pun intended) one has to take heed. Witness Diaspora, a privacy focused social networking project funded by Kickstarter and being built by 4 college students this summer.
What does this mean for social media marketers?
At the moment not much. But the lesson from AOL continues to become more relevant as we look at Facebook. We should continue to invest in the spaces that are working today with a keen eye on where things are moving.
Actions to take?
- Continue to work with your Facebook communities
- Introduce your Facebook communities to other ways to interact with your company
- Keep an eye on emerging technologies and communities
- Invest resources in the “old” social media like forums, product reviews, and blogging
As in most investments diversity is key, especially if you can easily see the trends.
From the user standpoint Webpro news asked the question Is deleting your Facebook account a good idea? They also note that Matt Cutts and other Googlers de-activated their accounts soon after the Open Graph initiative was announced. Remember, you don’t have to delete the account to de-activate it.
Also see my article on Social Media, It’s not Just Facebook
 I just read a post at Building43, a site dedicated to small business on the web titled Top Five Reasons No One Reads Your Company Blog. The net net of this was as follows.
- Hiring an intern write your blog instead of the person in your company who knows the most about your product
- Taking before listening and participating in other forums & commenting on blogs
- Talking to yourself. Meaning coming up with content that you’ve got no references for
- Not being timely. Pretty self explanatory
- Hiding your blog. Making it difficult to find on your site
I certainly agree with all of these ideas fully, especially 2, 3 and 5.
Of course there are other reasons folks don’t read blogs
- Bad writing and formatting. The fact is that people still don’t read web sites, they prefer video and pictures
- Run on text with too much content. Using bold headlines and bullets make it easier for your readers to scan
- Not updating on a regular basis. Customers want new, useful information.
- Writing only about your product rather than the challenges your customers face that either yours or a complimentary product might solve.
- Using too much industry jargon leaving the potential new customer feeling left out of club
There are tons of corporate blogging resources out there.
But the most important factor for corporate blogging is to go get started.
 With the advent of Facebooks new venture into capturing and sharing as much information as they can, you will need a strategy to inform your users how you connect to Facebook and what you do with this information. Do you need a Facebook Policy?
Using Facebooks new tools
With Facebooks new tools you can add lots of gadgets to your site that really lock you in tight with your community. Having Sally see that Jane and Bob are also fans of your site or blog could be a big boost. It can also make them wonder how you got that information. Carefully choose which tools you want to use and implement them wisely. Try and think of your sites visitors reaction when they see their name or picture on your site.
Explaining your privacy positions, and your Facebook Policy
You of course have a privacy policy but this isn’t really you sharing the information is it? The quesiton is does the user care who is sharing the information or will they simply be upset with you that you shared their face on your website? Some sites are going so far as to explain to users how to edit their Facebook privacy settings. This is a great idea especially since Facebook is not doing such a good job at explaining it.
Everyone talks about how hard it is to optimize their websites. No one has the time or the ideas as to what do without adding additional resources to call bloggers and other websites to get them to write about your product or service. Yet it is amazing how many websites, large and small don’t use RSS feeds.
What is RSS?
RSS feeds or Real Simple Syndication allows anyone to follow your website updates on their terms. No email sign up and it is automatically delivered to their choice of media; email, RSS reader, Google/Yahoo! home page etc.
Why RSS feeds are important
From both an SEO and a Social Media standpoint, getting people to write about your product or service should be your number one goal. The more mentions you get the better. Getting the attention of bloggers and evangelists should be at the top of your list. The problem is they usually don’t have time to visit your site 3 times a week to see what you’re up to. RSS feeds make it easy for others to follow your latest press release or blog post with practically no effort. While it is true that most blogs use no-follow, negating any SEO value, the link alone could be worth a great deal on a blog that gets 10-20 thousand visits a month.
RSS feeds are easy to setup and use
The best part about RSS feeds are they are easy to set up and automatically do the distribution work for you. They save you valuable time & money and more importantly, they work for you with little effort on your part.
Check to see if you’re sites lack RSS feeds and leaving valuable traffic on the table
 Most companies these days have websites. If you have an ecommerce website it is fairly easy to determine your measurement points; Traffic, Conversions and Average Order Size T/C/A. With these three metrics you can determine quite a bit. But if you’re not an ecommerce site it is not as straight forward.
Determining success for a non-ECommerce website
Every website should have goals for their website even if it is not a commerce site. How do you determine them? First ask yourself what value does your site bring to your business & customers. Here are a few ideas;
- Prospects for your sales team
- Prospects for your dealers
- Revenue from advertising
- Product & brand awareness
- Detailed product specs
- Product reviews
- Product forums
For the examples given above you could measure the following:
- Forms filled out for more information
- Downloads of brochures
- Clicked links to dealer sites
- Revenue from ads
- Number of visits to a product page
- Number of return visits to a product page
- Increase of brand awareness (as measured in social media chatter)
- Time visitors stay on your site
- Number of times your information is shared via a social media tool or emai
- Number of product reviews gathered (if your site has a place for reviews)
- Number of chat sessions (if you have chat)
These are but a few ideas of things to measure. Remember in the old days we’d take out newspaper and magazine ads and usually guess at what customer interactions we got form them. Yet today most companies don’t measure the dozens of items available to them on their sites. What are your measurement goals for your site?
Next: How to assign value to your goals
Time for a little drama. In a great post by Jeremiah Owyang we see how Levi’s used new Facebook tools to populate a shopping cart on Levi.com with recommendations from friends using Facebooks’s new social tools. This is very good for marketers. It remains to be seen how great it is for consumers. With Facebook constantly changing their privacy settings and continually opening up your information to the world, how willing are you to have others see what you like or dislike. More so, how willing are you to let others see what your friends think you’ll like or dislike?
Privacy first
Retailers and websites that move without caution into this space risk user wrath on exposing parts of their lives they’d rather not share for one reason or another. Given that even someones best friend may not know their personal situation fully, how can a company expect to?
Realize you don’t know
Part of any business or Internet strategy involves realizing that there are unknowns. In the case of one-to-one marketing you might know a lot about your customer. This does not mean you should publish this information without their approval. Wait you may say, it’s the consumers responsibility to determine what part of their information is public or private. While this is true, many either don’t know how to manage privacy (especially in Facebooks case) or fully understand its implications.
You win, You loose
As a marketer you might be able to make some real gains by implementing these new social commerce/marketing strategies. You must realize your efforts hit consumers, even just a small minority, the wrong way, you risk damage that could take considerable time to repair. As fast as social media can rocket your company to the top it can drop you to the bottom.
A recent study by Conductor found that many fortune 500 companies are not investing in organic search results or SEO. Instead they are pouring money into PPC advertising. Pay per click advertising has its place, no doubt, but it is not a good long term strategy by itself. Here are some basic guidelines for building your PPC & SEO Strategy.
When to Use PPC
- Launching a new business or product line which does not rank any other way
- Fill in for key missing keyword you are not ranking for
- Tests show that your ROI on your bid price is positive beyond all of the costs involved
- You want to augment a good SERP (search engine results page) ranking
When to use SEO
- You are building a new site, preferably before you build it
- When you launch a new product line, start with the copy and don’t forget your linking strategy
- You want a long term sustainable position for your keywords
Here are some of the key advantages of SEO & PPC
PPC Advantages
- With enough budget you can get to the first page search results instantly
- You can build special landing pages that might only be needed for a short time
- If you show up organically you can double your chances of being clicked on with a PPC campaign
SEO Advantages
- Once you build your site to a page 1 position it can last a Long time, offering a very good ROI
- More people look at natural results than paid
- The cost is often lower than it appears when you amortize it
Both strategies have a place in your Internet marketing strategy. Understanding SEO and its implementation can put you on a path to dramatically increase your bottom line.
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