Are you a Paypal users? Love it? Hate it? Tell us about it and walk away with a Limited-edition Paypal Car Sticker (stick on your car, when someone bump on you, tell them you take PayPal too) and additional USD 10 paypal directly to your account! It’s very simple to take part and we have ten set of such prizes to be given away!!! Just answer 2 darn simple questions and link back to us!
Just answer 2 very simple questions about PayPal on Your Blog Post
1) Do you use Paypal to Shop, or to take money selling something (eg at ebay)?
This simple competition is opened to any genuine bloggers who possess a blog and a PayPal Account (else we cannot PayPal the $$ into your account). PayPal is NOT directly or indirectly affiliated with this competition. Our decision is final.
Want to know more about PayPal? Checkout the slide below to learn more!
10 years in internet is a very very long time. Paypal has come a long way – setup 10 years ago as a personal finance beaming tool, now has become a world giant in online payment processing.
Don’t miss this interesting report on Internet Attitude, it might give you a glimpse on where the next huge growth engine lies (where else? internet of coz)
As promised, another new e-commerce store template !
This time the cameras are used as dummy stocks, check out how it looks below. If you are selling digital cameras and accessories, just imagine how nice and easy to start out your online store by utilizing the existing templates.
All the supplied e-commerce templates that comes with webShaper e-commerce are designed for easy navigation and fully optimized for speedy loading. Did i tell you that by utilizing our webShaper CSS Template System, we actually cut down the time needed for template integration with the ecommerce system significantly? (From one week to one working day, and we don’t mess with programming code!).
If you are a web designer, do check out how our CSS template system benefits you by helping you to save time and take charge of your e-commerce design.
Till then, stay tuned. We have more e-commerce templates in the pipeline.
Master Template- The Look & Feel, the Layout and the Colors
Category Display – How products in each category are being displayed
This is part of short media interview conducted for the MIRC E-SME Week we are taking part as the speakers. We will speak on topics like “Driving Traffic to Your Online Stores”, “Top 5 Mistakes for Google Adwords” and “All you need to know about Online Payment Gateways (M’sia Merchants)”.
Do come join us if you would like to know more about the topics. It’s free admission as this is regular community events held by MIRC to boost up SME competitiveness.
If you are curious, the nice toys picture we actually “borrowed” from one of our client – www.mylofttoys.com – check out their nice store done by one of our web design partner optima solution, they rocks!
We realize how important template selection is to clients, More new & nicely design templates to come together with webShaper e-commerce soon, stay tuned!
PS: In case you did not realize, there are already 6 ready templates comes together with webSHaper e-commerce. to access it, just go to webShaper > Design > Manage Design > Select New.
Master Template – The look & Feel, the layout and the colors
Category Display – How products in each category are being displayed
And of course, both webShaper e-commerce & webShaper e-catalog are 100% compatible with Exabytes Ebiz Windows Hosting. Just buy and we will provide you the installation for free!
Check out our latest newspaper print ad below appearing on Star Intech. PC Fair is one of the most happening consumer event in Malaysia (only Matta Fair come close…), drawing tens of thousands of crowd and also multi-millions worth of business to the exhibitors in just over a 3 days period.
But heck, what happened after PC Fair? Don’t merchants want more sales and more importantly, repeat purchase? So do you offer them a way to order and buy from you again? After all, PC Fair is held only 3 times a year and each time it lasts for only 3 days. While on the Internet, consumers are hunting for deals (especially for technology products like Mobile Phones, Notebooks, Digital Cameras, PDAs, GPS devices etc ) 24 x 7 x 365 a year. Don’t you want to grab a piece of the market?
Below are just some eg of what our clients did – throwing their own pcfair.
www.orderzones.com
www.renoraine.com.my
www.notebookshop.com.my
www.freshgear.com.my
www.ewarehouse.com.my
Last but not least, our ad! Did i mention we will help you to Get Free Traffic if you are a technology product retailers purchasing our e-commerce solution during this promotion period?
To be the best, you need to benchmark against the very best. Starting from this month, we will publish (on a monthly basis ) a new e-commerce success series – PDF files with quotes by those successful e-commerce or Internet entrepreneurs who’s been there, done that.
E-commerce is a hyper competitive and challenging business, who doesn’t needs motivation? I’m sure you will be inspired by some of the tips given here.
Feel free to share around with your friends on this! Coming on Series #2 are Zappos.com (world largest online shoes retailer) founder – Tony Shieh, subscribe to our blog feed now and stay tuned!
Quick excerpt – the key drivers behind Amazon’s Innovation:
Be long term oriented: Innovate in good or tough times and get ready to handle criticism in the meantime.
Manage the Innovation spectrum: Leverage the kind of fine-grained Innovation that happens on a daily basis and embark in selected large scale innovation projects.
Develop adjacent markets and new competencies: Deliver things your customers care about and improve the customers’ experience.
Frugality and constraints drive Innovation: Be creative.
Like Human Relationship, E-commerce is all about Trust
1. Building Trust via Web Design
First impression counts. It’s not a must for your online store to look pretty or stunning, however, it’s important that your design, layout, color tone etc tailored to the taste and expectation of your targeted group of online shoppers.
If you sell all sorts of products without a specific niche, you might want to adopt a simple & clean design to suit a broad base of taste. But if you sell baby or kids products, then you bet your site must appear to be cute and liked by all the young parents esp mothers! Remember, your design communicates trust subconsciously to the online shoppers! Make sure all products details are easily searched and accessible too.
2. Sign-up for Payment Services that Your Customers Trust
Online shoppers are intolerant with risk, if they have a single doubt about the security of the payment gateway you are using to process their credit card details, I can assure you that you will lose them as a customers almost instantly as your competitors are always a click away.
Bottom line, sign up a trusted online payment system widely recognized by your targeted customers. If you are selling Internationally, use something that’s recognized worldwide, eg PayPal or Worldpay. If you are selling locally, use whatever services that is well known and trustworthy in that particular country – eg Maybank2u for Malaysia, eNETS for Singapore or Protx for UK.
Lastly, don’t forget to put up related payment gateway logo on your website! Click here to download high quality Visa, Mastercard, Amex Logos to place on your store (Use it only if your payment gateway supports it).
3. Get Testimonials from your Happy Customers
Nothing beats genuine testimonials from your happy customers! What others say about you once is ten times more powerful and convincing than what you said about yourself a hundred times. That’s a true reflection of the power of Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing which you can apply to your e-commerce store.
So, grab some testimonial from your happy clients. Best if can get permission to publish their photo (together with your products if possible).
4. Blog Your Way to the Top
Blog is probably one of the most interesting creation of the web. It’s a tool letting you share your thoughts or knowledge the informal way. It lets you connect with your customers or prospects and letting them having a peep at your wacky personality so they don’t need to hire paparazzi to hunt you down.
Why blog?
1) Dell also blog (ok..this probably is not really a good reason)
2) Expert always command trust and respect. It will help you to establish yourself as one of the perceived expert in your niche (works only if you share serious content and insights. no BS please)
3) Openly communicate with customers or prospects
4) Adding personal, human-touch into your store, telling them there are real people behind the website!
5) Good side effect – GYM loves blog so much that they will index your content almost instantly if you blog constantly with genuine content.
So, start blogging now! Take a look at how one of our customer – scrap-n-crop.com did it!
5. Buy a 3rd Party Trust Mark for your Online Store
The reality is, most people don’t feel completely safe when buying online, especially when buying from small and medium-sized merchants that lack a strong and widely recognized brand, like Walmart or Amazon.com.
Let’s take a look at the stats, 93% of U.S. online shoppers say it is important for an ecommerce site to include a trust mark of some kind on their site. In addition, three-quarters of online shoppers will only make purchases through sites that include a trust mark. Online consumers now are more security savvy than ever, they look for 3rd party logo, persuasive indicator telling them your store can be trusted. You want their business? Then get a trust mark for your store. Below are some of the options available:
When it comes to online purchase, customers have a lot of questions in mind – Is it safe to purchase from you? When will the goods arrive? Do you provide guarantee on that particular product? Is their data guarded securely? Without any of the information, how can you expect them to confidently press the “Add to Cart�? and “Checkout�? buttons? Below are some of the “must have” contents for your store.
About Us Page – Who’s behind the team? What’s your business philosophy? What story you have to tell?
Security & Privacy Policy – How do i know you are not going to sell my information to make extra cash?
Shipping Policy – Do you ship to my country?
Return & Refund Policy (if any) – Can I refund my goods if i’m not happy with the products within 30 days?
FAQs – Anything (almost) your online shoppers would want to know or probably will ask.
Contact Details – Where are you physically located? Can we get in touch with you since International call nowadays are so darn cheap thanks to VOIP technology. Tips: Put your phone number in International Dialing format if you serve International Market, and of course don’t forget to provide your time zone, you don’t want people calling you when you are having a sweat dream..
By putting all these details and making it easily accessible, you are helping the customer to help yourself, apart from trust it communicates, it saves you money and tremendous time in handling customer enquiry, it’s definitely a win-win situation.
7. Get your store listed on high quality, human-reviewed directory Getting your e-commerce store listed in high quality, human-reviewed directory (not spammy link sites) is another good way to boost confident of online shoppers in your business. People trust the directory, and they trust the websites that has gone through the stringent review process and placed in the related categories.
8. Build Quality Store that confronts to GYM webmaster guidelines Search Engines likes high quality websites that provide Quality and Unique Contents, same rules apply to e-commerce store. GYM (stands for Google, Yahoo, MSN – the big 3 Godzillas of search) have a set of quality guideline for website. Just follow the guidelines when it comes to preparing contents for your products or your online marketing efforst (eg link building, we will cover more in future articles) for your store.
Do it right, search engines will drive Free, Organic and Highly Targeted traffic (as they are searching for keywords related to your products) to your online stores which could mean extra leads and extra profit.
9. Always Show your visitors your Address and Contact Details
It’s amazing how many online stores don’t list their postal addresses and contacts. Ask yourself, would you even bother to buy from one website which you cannot locate the contact details? What if something goes wrong? If your customers don’t know who you are and where you live they might refrain from doing business with you. Don’t waste their time guessing – Give them the assurance they can trust you, show them where you live and how you can be contacted.
You will be surprised how companies treat email. My own experience, I contacted 5 vendors (all with websites & emails, obtained from yellowpages) for a price quote on the banner stands we are buying for exhibition purpose, guess what, only 1 bother taking time to reply, and of course they get our business. The other 4 we never heard of them until today.
Email is an important tool and we need to use it wisely, especially for e-commerce business as we use email extensively (from purchase confirmation until the email newsletter) to communicate with the customers. The speed of you responding to the customer matters, don’t forget to remind them to put your email (eg yourstore.com) in their email whitelist (approved list) so your email won’t accidentally blocked by SPAM filter.
Remember, how fast you reply genuine customer email (if you ever reply at all) makes a huge different on how “trustworthy” you are.
Summary
To sum it up, Trust is the most important thing when it comes to selling online. Trust is no doubt challenging & time consuming to build, you need to take a long term investment view and approach. Once the trust is built, it will lead to customer loyalty that generate more referral business and repeat purchase for you!
Start doing it now, show your visitors that your business is real and that they can trust you by using the tips above. Happy Selling Online!
Happy selling online!
Search Engines likes high quality websites that provide Quality and Unique Contents, same rules apply to e-commerce store. GYM (stands for Google, Yahoo, MSN – the big 3 Godzillas of search) have a set of quality guideline for website. Just follow the guidelines when it comes to preparing contents for your products or your online marketing efforst (eg link building, we will cover more in future articles) for your store.
