The MightyMerchant Ecommerce Blog offers advice, insights, and articles focused on Ecommerce for small business owners. We hope you find information that will help your Ecommerce website succeed. You can learn more about us at our other websites:
HEROweb and
MightyMerchant. We encourage you to comment or ask questions about our blog posts!
by Vanessa on December 17, 2012
Consumers in the United States, and around the world in fact, are using their smartphones more and more. Mobile marketing, or “M-commerce” as it is now coming to be called, is growing in importance.
Did you know these facts about mobile usage?
1. Mobile use is growing at a rate 14 times that of traditional laptop access.
2. 10.3% of all global searches are made from mobile devices.
3. 28.5 % of searches in the U.S. are made from mobile devices.
4. 1 in 4 Americans use only a smartphone to connect to the internet (not a computer).
5. There are 5 times as many cell phones in the world as there are PCs.
6. Nielsen reported an 89% increase in mobile data usage between 2012 and 2011.
7. Research from Prosper Mobile Insights says that 81% of smartphone users have done product research via smartphone and 50% have made a purchase with one.
8. Traffic from smartphones and tablets jumped 155% on 2012′s Black Friday compared with average daily mobile traffic for a group of 26 retailers that are part of the Branding Brand Mobile Commerce Index.
9. 57% of smartphone owners who made a purchase, did so after receiving a marketing email message.
10. By 2014, mobile internet is expected to overtake desktop usage.
Maybe by now you’ve figured out what all this means…The Top Trend in Business for 2013 is Mobile Access.
What does this mean for you? Are you considering mobile marketing in your budget for the coming year? Have you investigated what percentage of traffic your site gets from mobile devices? (Learn how to check Google Analytics for your mobile traffic stats.)
by Michael Stearns from HEROweb on December 5, 2012
In the romanticized version of the web business, blogging is holds great appeal: you set up a blog, start writing some posts, attract scores of visitors, and see your revenue climb as these visitors morph into devoted customers who continually buy your products.
And then there is reality. Blogging takes perseverance, killer writing skills, and a strong tie-in between your blog theme and your product line. In order to actually convert your dedicated readers into paying customers, you have some work to do.
We see many site owners start a blog with grand ambitions, only to have the ambitions quickly whither as they struggle to find a voice and a readership. A blog lying fallow, with one or two posts during the course of a year, can cause more harm than good.
If you have an Ecommerce site and are considering getting start with a blog, we have a better recommendation: get started with an articles section on your website.
A simple articles section might not be quite as cool as a blog. But we urge you to forgo the fancy bells and whistles, plugins, and social widgets – at least when you are getting started – and focus on writing a handful of great articles at a pace that feels right to you. Your users won’t feel let down if you have an articles section on your site with occasional high-value entries. But if you have a blog link on your site, you better be prepared to back it up with some action.
Once you develop your voice, assuming you do write enough posts to develop a clear voice, you can upgrade your article section to a full-featured blog, including comments, a calendar, and some of the other niceties that come with blogging platforms, like WordPress. But before you get ahead of yourself, write a few simple articles. One step at a time is the surest way to get to where you are going.
