A new year is almost upon us. Many of you would have budgeted to give your store a whole new look or at least a fresher-upper. Though having a nice looking store helps in getting visitors to stay longer and browse along, having a store with customized features targeted at your customers can help you convert better.
While doing keyword research, especially for products, some of you may have noticed that the hottest or most searched terms usually end with the word review or reviews. In this installment of Free Shopping Cart Features Tip, we will be looking at the benefits of product reviews, where you can source product reviews and how to write balanced product reviews that evaluate your products critically while focusing on their strengths.
Some people buy on impulse while others need a little convincing. It’s for the latter group where reviews can have the most impact on a web store. It is not surprising why Amazon posts as many product reviews as it possibly can, even negative ones. In fact, slotting in a couple of negative comments among the dozens of positive ones helps give some credibility to the overall authenticity of the reviews as a whole.
Blogshops have sprouted like mushrooms after the rain with more and more people seeking to make some extra cash on the side. However, for every person that buys something from a blogshop, dozens more give it a pass. Security, transition from product browsing to checkout and the general user-friendliness of a blogshop cannot compete with that of a proper shopping cart.
In this article, we shall look at 3 key shopping cart features that are not found on blogshops that can help improve conversion rates. (more…)
Our free online shopping cart tip for the day is ‘Do not neglect customer experience.’ Here’s why. Practically everyone who runs an online store knows the importance of SEO, be it on-page or off-page, paid or organic. The thing is many of us concentrate so much on getting ranked and channeling visitors to our site, we forget the purpose of all this effort – getting people to buy our products. So we end up with a scenario where an online store gets lots of visitors but it also suffers from a very high bounce rate.
There was an article today entitled Where You Might Not Shop In 2010 at Forbes.com. The stores featured were famous brick and mortar stores. None of the stores featured were virtual shopping cart software backed stores. The article talked about stores having to close for all sorts of reasons – overcapacity, liquidity issues and the need to consolidate – stemming from the economic slowdown. Fortunately, the situation is not as dire with virtual shopping cart software powered stores. In fact, some virtual shopping cart software run stores such as consignment stores have actually thrived during the economic downturn.
According to economic consultant Retail Forward sales are expected to pick up, increasing by as much as 3% in the second half of 2010 but more needs to be done to reduce excess inventory and align supply with demand.