In the Internet business, with rapidly evolving technologies and platforms, many ideas have a short half-life.

I was pleasantly surprised to revisit an article we wrote in 2005: Thirteen Ways to Evaluate an Ecommerce Provide, and to see the article was still relevant.

Ok, maybe the Google Page Rank reference is a little dated. But in hunting through the hundreds of Ecommerce providers, you really need to be able to seek out a company that is going to be able to grow with your business.

Back in ‘05 you could get away with selling generic products on a generic website. But those days are coming to an end as the web shopping audience matures and the competition continues to increase. Your Ecommerce vendor needs to be as much a service provider and strategist as a technology agent.

What factors do you see as the most important for choosing an Ecommerce vendor to work with?

It’s a Friday afternoon in early November. You have all your holiday implementations in place on your website. (Ok. Maybe that is wishful thinking.) It’s time for a short breather, and here is a fun and constructive exercise for you to do.

Why don’t you take a moment to look at your web site with fresh eyes. Put yourself in the mind of a customer coming upon your site for the first time. They have just come from Google to your site and are deciding whether to keep on clicking through to place an order or hit the back button and visit one of your competitors. What could you offer on your site that your customer absolutely couldn’t do without? How could you encourage that customer to stay on your site and win them over for life?

As competition increases across the Internet, and there are so many venues for purchasing identical products, you really need to figure out how to add some value to set you apart. Here are a few ideas, just for starters:

• Preferred customer support forum or hotline
• An easy-to-access custom quote or consulting offer
• A downloadable planning guide
• Very rich and detailed product information
• A loyalty program that rewards repeat ordering
• A meaningful gift offer for the first order
• A new and unique add-on product offering
• A clearly stated commitment to care about the customer and what their needs are
• An assurance that the shopping experience is going to be simple (backed up by a simple shopping that is, indeed, simple.)

Perhaps you have already implemented some or all of these features on your Ecommerce website. If not, you could have a real opportunity to punch up your message, add functionality, and provide value to your customers.

If all you have on your site is pages of products with Add to Cart buttons, you are probably selling yourself short. A little brainstorming can be a great way to spark some new ideas. Be sure to write all those great ideas down and when 2010 comes around, you will be ready to take your site to the next level.

I expected to wake on this post-Halloween Monday to the sight of ecommerce websites, plastered with holiday splendor. Surprisingly, the holiday spirit seems quite subdued.

Many of the big-boxers – Amazon, BestBuy, and the like – seem to have sparse holiday messaging and specials. They are taking the scattered snowflake approach. Target.com is pushing their Christmas message more strongly.

I can’t believe it won’t be long before we are hammered with the holiday sales blitz -  uh, I mean, spirit.

If you are a “little box” retailer it is time to get on your game. In the words of GaryVee it is time to Crush It!

We won’t repeat all of our past holiday strategical offerings, but in this year of high unemployment and frosty revenue forecasts, do your best to make some low-cost, high impact moves and dress up your website with your best holiday cheer.

We have two quick suggestions.

Task #1: Make sure you do in fact have a holiday strategy.

If you just passively sit on the sidelines and hope that holiday shopping is just going to happen, you are likely to be in for a few lumps of coal and not much else.

Task #2: Start to tune  your site with some up-beat holiday cheer. Make it clear, when your shoppers arrive, that you are ready for them with the best you have to offer.

If you want some feedback on your site and your plans, let us know. We would be happy to talk.

Web shoppers are getting smarter all the time. A website that you created five years ago might have passed muster for the typical shopper, but with increased competition from other small merchants as well as the big players you need to make sure you are covering every aspect of putting forth a professional and trustworthy presence.

How are you doing in these areas:

1. Providing relevant third-party certifications.

2. Developing on-site and off-site reviews of your products and services.

3. Keeping your website up-to-date and filled with relevant information.

4. Building your personal identity and credibility.

5. Creating a professional-looking web presence.

We have just posted a detailed article on our HERO-web.com website discussing a range of areas you want to consider to build your credibility.

View the full article:  Establishing Your Credibility

No, I’m not talking about the newest bestseller or what you have on your Kindle 2. I’m asking about how you read web pages.

What do you look at first when you visit a website? How much time do you spend on a page?

How you answer these questions will give you insight into how much text you should have on your homepage or how much text you should include with your product descriptions.

The truth is that website visitors rarely read web pages, they scan. Typically, they scan the text first and then look for the navigation.

Why do website visitors scan text?

• In our modern busy life is we don’t have the time or energy to work for the information
• We have been conditioned to click on links… immediately!
• There are so many pages to see and not enough time to see them
• Reading on the computer for long periods of time is tiring to the eyes

Become a Scan Master

There are several key things you can do to increase the “scan-ability” of your website content:

• Use bulleted lists
• Draw attention to keywords by using links, color or bold text
• Limit each paragraph to one idea
• Cut out the fluff  -  visitors tend to tune-out “marketing speak”
• Reduce the word count – about half as much as conventional writing
• Use subheadings

If you can master these techniques, you will capture your visitor’s attention and keep them coming back.

I have always wanted to coin a term and maybe this is my chance. How about “The Law of Just Simple Enough”. Here is how it goes:

Software has a certain difficulty threshold; when the software stays below the threshold, it will be used productively, but when it passes the threshold it will cease to be used at all.

So many software packages have slick Flash demos that make them look like the cat’s meow. But once a user starts using the software day in and day out, and really gives the core features a workout, many features will be quickly abandoned because they are too hard to use or just don’t make any sense at all.

We have come up with (what we thought were) some great features in our software, but when a user starts clicking down the wrong path or produces an unintended result, they will often give up rather than persevere.

A lot of work and thought goes into making software obvious to a wide range of users who have varying thought processes and needs. There is nothing more educational than sitting down with a novice user and watching them use your software and seeing where they succeed and where they fail.

When software is done right it makes a difficult task seem easy enough for a small child.  That is exactly how MS Word was – six versions ago!

People often ask why they should invest in a hosted web application. Paying a monthly fee for someone else’s software doesn’t sound like a very good deal at first. I recently joined MightyMerchant’s team, and I can tell you from personal experience, hosted web solutions are a very good deal! I wasted thousands of dollars and hours trying to get an expensive desktop application to do the job I wanted before finally giving up. A little research led me to web-hosted applications, and I quickly realized the benefits of having a professional team of programmers and developers at my disposal. Web-hosted solutions absolutely make the most sense for business owners who want a profitable web presence.

There are a few people who seem to have an innate knowledge of the mechanics behind those glossy webpages we love to surf. They don’t mind spending the extraordinary amount of time and effort it takes to get professional results. Those are the people who’ll tell you you’re better off buying the software. Without their training and experience, you’re treating your business like a DIY project. I’m going to give you the same advice you’ve heard from friends the world over. “Save yourself the headache and hire a professional!” Personally, I’d rather enter a few dozen lines of copy, download an image or two, and go to lunch. I’m happy to let the professionals do the work for me. At the end of the day, I’ll total the sales and smile. Teh nice.

I shared my experience comparing hosted web solutions and desktop applications in detail on the MightyMerchant website.

Paige Pryor joined MightyMerchant in June as the new Account and Project Manager and self-appointed Environmental Coordinator. Her background and experience in marketing, sales, and database administration led her to web-hosted solutions as a convenient and cost-efficient method of relaying products and services to customers.

Get from Point A to Point B, quickly and with the least effort.

Your Point A is that you are a small business owner and webmaster. Your Point B is that you need content on your website. Get from Point A to Point B faster by creating content using what you already have. Whether you manage an ecommerce website or large informational site or anything in between doesn’t matter. In order to keep yourself in the game, ranking well in the search engines and getting a healthy amount of traffic coming to your site requires that you all play by pretty much the same rules.

What do the engines want? 

The engines do have preferences, and your job is to give it to them. They want freshness. Serve the engines new content to see each time they come your way. They want quality. No keyword stuffing, no spammy content, no content written by word generators. Just real, useful content that is of the highest quality you can provide. They want quantity. It’s not fair but the more pages you have that an engine can index the more they like you. They want links. Links means other sites trust you and want to share with other sites what you have to say. Linkbait content such as videos, podcasts, white papers, newsletters and other content that is useful to people and easily shared provides incentive for people to link to you.

Marketing guru John Jantsch has written a post called “Reduce, reuse, recycle and repurpose,” a slogan which he’s borrowing from the green movement and applying to the notion of  using content you already have to create more online content on your web pages. The post is from February 20, and I’m just reading it today (I’m behind on my blog reading…tell me you’re not?), but this advice never goes out of style. As I was reading it my thought process went something like this: a) Dang, I wish I wrote this post! b) Gee, our readers would find this really useful. c) Heeey, this matches up with advice I had given in recent posts about adding multimedia or other video content. d) I’ll keep the ‘reuse’ theme going by ‘using’ John’s post myself!

So here you go. I highly recommend clicking through to John’s original post, but here’s a tidbit of his advice.

• If you get the same questions over and over again, answer them all in an audio format.
• Take those same questions and turn them into blog posts.

Speaking at an industry event? Record all of your slide presentations and upload them to sites like YouTube and Slideshare.
Check out John’s “Reduce, reuse, recycle and repurpose” post for more easy ways you can utilize content you already have.

Tags: website, ecommerce, seo, search, engine, optimization, content, indexing

Is there a good, better and best way to categorize your items on an ecommerce website? I would say yes, definitely. Whether your site has hundreds or thousands of products or thousands of pages doesn’t really matter; the goal is to enable your site visitors to find the information they seek quickly and easily. Let’s look at some strategies for the best navigation experience you can offer your customers.

Top-level categorization 

There should be clear top-level categories. There could be only a handful or twenty, depending on how much information you have to spread around. The name of the category does make a big difference. If your site offers books, DVDs or other informational how-to products along with your regular product line, you might have one link titled ‘How-To,’ or ‘Media.’ Maybe ‘Books & More.’ The idea is to avoid naming your link something generic like, ‘Stuff.’ The top level category names should be general enough to encompass what you want them to contain but specific enough that customers immediately know what’s there.

Looking at one of our sites, PondBiz.com, their large and successful pond products site lists 24 categories in the left navigation bar. It could be really annoying to have to click through each category and then click again to get to the products or information within. But their site makes good use of another good usability idea, minimizing clicks.

Minimize Clicks

One way to allow for easy, quick navigation is to keep the site structure somewhat ‘flat’ so users don’t have to click many times to get to products.

The PondBiz.com navigation utilizes popout dynamic menus. Mousing over the navigation links reveals new subcategory options, saving a click.

Another of our sites also uses the click-saving technique in a different way. PrewittsWorkWear.com uses an expandable menu. With this option, a little plus sign appears next to the main categories that have subcategories within them. Clicking the plus to the left of ‘Specialty’ reveals sub-menus for ‘Flame-Resistant’ and ‘High-Visibility’ work wear. This does involve an extra click to open the subcategories, but it is another way to keep navigation tighter, and some people don’t like to chase the expandable menus.

Give More Ways to Shop
MightyMerchant’s site manager allows the option to set up different category structures to give visitors more ways to shop. For example, it can be easy to set up Shop by Manufacturer, Shop by Brand, Shop by Season, Special Discounts, or Shop by Theme, as just a few examples.

LearningServicesUS.com is one of our sites with a huge product catalog of educational materials for teachers. They utilize the same dynamic pop-outs for navigation that PondBiz uses, but what I want you to notice on this site is that they have a regular search but also cross-category searches. These narrow down searches by subject, manufacturer, and grade level. If your catalog is huge, or even if it’s not and you just have multiple brands, provide multiple ways for people to find what they’re looking for.

The important thing is to think of the experience for the customer. We want to have navigation that allows customers to have a good experience that makes it easy to find items, but not be split up or mashed together to the point that it’s silly. It doesn’t make sense to have one category with only two or three items inside, and neither does it make sense to have too few categories with many items inside.

If you’re in the business of selling products or services online, I’m of the opinion that you really only have two jobs to do, both equally important. One job is to provide your customers with quality information, so when they’re searching and find you they stick around because you have what they want. The other is to provide them with a quality experience while they’re on your site, so they feel comfortable buying from you. A customer that does not trust you will not make a purchase. Customer anxiety is a common cause of shopping cart abandonment, and there are some key elements that your site can and should provide to help people feel comfortable with your site’s security and make the sale. Let’s look at a few customer anxiety issues and along with solutions.

Present a professional appearance – This is probably the hardest to define but perhaps the most important. Often a site just “doesn’t look right,” possibly due to a clashing color scheme, too many flashing and whirling animations, misspellings and poor grammar, or just a tone that is “too commercial.” Use clear language and a familiar navigation. You only have a few seconds in which to impress upon a potential customer that you are trustworthy, and if your site doesn’t meet expectations it’s only too easy to click away and go to the next one.

Display your guarantee - Guarantees give customers peace of mind. There’s no doubt in your mind that you are a legitimate business that sells quality products you stand behind, right? Give your customers that same confidence with a guarantee. Place the guarantee on your home page for all to see, as well as include it on the order now, view cart and check out pages.

It makes sense to display guarantees and credibility indicators near the actions that they are most closely related to. Credibility indicators are affiliations with or endorsements by trusted companies or trade association such as Better Business Bureau Online, TRUSTe, and Hacker Safe. These should be displayed on your check out pages as well as home page.

Testimonials - Include positive customer testimonials throughout your site. If the testimonial is from a customer with a website, link to them so people can click through. I have been amazed in the past to look at sites offering search engine optimization and marketing services, promising incredible results and providing testimonials that don’t link to the customer’s sites! That makes their claims really hard to believe. If you have a testimonial that mentions the ease of ordering, responsive customer service, or the ease with which a return or exchange was made, consider adding that to the order page for some extra reassurance. [MightyMerchant's article Gathering and Using Testimonials has more info about this topic.]

Contact info– Prominently link to your contact information, official company address, and customer support phone number and other support information. Include your support telephone number on the check-out page. I’m a big fan of About Us pages to give a sense of the people behind the products, and I think they engender trust.

Privacy policy – Include a statement outlining how personal information will be used, or not used.

“What will happen next” statements – Let people know what to expect before they complete an action. Let them know if they will they receive an email or phone call, what the expected delivery date is, and any other pertinent information.

Prominently display shipping prices and policies. It stretches the limits of acceptability when these appear to be hidden or choices in shipping costs aren’t offered.

And finally, avoid unexpected redirects to another site. Link out when you have to in order to provide complete and necessary information, and have the link open in a new pag. In the event that this is not possible for some reason, provide a warning message that people will need to leave the site.

These simple elements combine to give potential customers a high-quality experience on your site, which will in turn reflect how comfortable they are giving you their money. As your website’s usability works together to reduce customer anxiety, you should see an attendant rise in your sales or other conversions.

Tags: ecommerce, website, design, optimization, usability, reduce, customer, anxiety, increase, sales