Should you market your store globally, locally or both?
The usual response to this question would naturally be to market globally since the main reason why most people set up online stores is to get a piece of the global pie.
But there are situations that might require a merchant to only concentrate on certain countries, demographics or niches, thus curtailing their plans for world domination.
Christmas is just around the corner. Both merchants and shoppers alike are already excited. Merchants look forward to an increase in sales and shoppers looks forward to their yearly “therapy” sessions. Although I doubt the pandemonium last minute shoppers and bargain hunters create at offline stores can be deemed therapeutic … This could explain why more and more people shop online.
We’ve already put up articles on store preparation and marketing ideas for the holiday season. But there are still one or two ideas we would like you to try to help you boost sales. Different merchants experience different degrees of success with different ideas because of varying store and customer dynamics. Our suggestions should help as they’re all geared to help merchants improve sales.
Current sales figures may seem fine to many merchants out there but these can always be improved. You just have to know where to look for obstacles that have been preventing your store from registering even better sales. And when you find these obstacles, do not panic. A solution is always close at hand.
Here’s an example. For those of you who do not check your aborted order list, it might come as a shock to you that as many as 7 out of 10 orders are aborted. That means for every 10 visitors that begin the checkout process, only 3 actually go ahead and complete their orders with a purchase. It’s a “so close yet so far” scenario. This is a frustrating situation but fortunately there are steps merchants can take to remedy this problem.
Read on for quick shopping cart abandonment remedies …
The success of online stores owes as much to using a secure online shopping cart solution as it does to marketing and SEO efforts. There are many unscrupulous characters out there who are bent on making money through illegal means, more specifically through identity theft via the Internet.
Therefore, it is imperative that when looking for an online shopping cart software solution, you choose one that places paramount importance on security. Online shopping cart software packages from top online shopping cart software solution providers like InstanteStore come packed with the latest security features to give merchants as well as their customers peace of mind.
Cyber Monday – the Internet’s version of Black Friday – marks the start of the holiday online shopping season that runs from right after US Thanksgiving till Christmas. Many merchant shopping cart owners report that they record their highest sales figures between December 5th and December 15th every year. By now many of you, especially those who have read our article on store preparations for the holidays, will have your stores ready for the biggest shopping period of the year.
To help you get the most out of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the rest of the holiday shopping season, we have prepared yet another tip that could help you increase your sales without much effort. The best thing is that you can also make use of this tip year-round.
So what exactly do we recommend? Read on to find out…
There are many website analysis tools available on the Internet. The most popular of these is Google Analytics. Merchants can easily install the tracking code for Google Analytics at their InstanteStore web hosting with shopping cart Website Statistics page. It’s basically a quick and easy copy-and-paste job. Once the tracking code is installed, Google Analytics will track your site and relay information about a number of different criteria.
New merchants usually get overly excited over the number of hits they get. However, this is not the most important statistic on display. In fact, it’s far from it.
To find out how to make the most of the information provided by Google Analytics, read on…
There are many payment gateways to choose from, just as there are tons of online shopping carts. Choosing the right one for your store is equally important with both as well. If you sign up for InstanteStore’s free ecommerce hosting shopping cart trial, you can see from the “Configure Online Credit-card Processing” page that InstanteStore is integrated with an extensive list of payment gateways. Most gateways are easily integrated into online shopping cart software packages.
In this article, we follow up on our previous article in which we took a look at Authorize.net and 2Checkout by going over the features of 2 more popular payment gateways that are integrated with InstanteStore as well as other online shopping carts.
The definition of ecommerce is commerce that is transacted electronically over the Internet. Ecommerce allows customers to purchase goods online, mostly via credit card, within the comfort of their own homes. Payment gateways play an important role in this process. They securely validate credit card transactions in real-time. Payments from successfully charged cards are then automatically debited into merchant accounts.
Most of the best shopping cart software solutions (such as InstanteStore) support quite a number of payment gateways. If you are looking to buy shopping cart software, make sure that it supports (or can be easily integrated with) the payment gateway (or gateways) of your choice.
When choosing payment gateways, merchants usually want to know 3 things: How long has the payment gateway been around, how much do they charge, and what are the services that they provide. In this article, we will take a look at the features of 2 payment gateways that are integrated with InstanteStore.
Payment processing is a key element of an online business. It’s vital that online merchants ensure that they provide a secure and convenient checkout process at their web stores. There are many ways that merchants can accept payments for customer orders, but the most useful and direct is via an online payment gateway.
Now, there are lots of payment gateway providers out there, and it’s important to do some research to find the most suitable one for your online business. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at a pretty major payment processor, 2Checkout.
Online video marketing is a great tool to boost sales. Video marketing on the Internet effects have so far been positive. The success of Internet marketing companies in increasing client sales via video marketing has been well documented. But this does not mean that your conversion rate will automatically increase tenfold just by uploading a video or two. An effective marketing video does not have to be costly to produce but it does take a bit of skill and effort to create one that will garner the response you desire.
Many small business merchants produce their own videos and have done pretty well. You can too.
To help you out, here are 6 simple video marketing tips for websites that you can follow…