Are you a small & mid-sized business looking at expanding your sales by selling online but don’t know where to start?
Look no further! Subscribe to our E-commerce SME Plan and Learn from our Google Adword Professional (Hmmm…it’s me, sorry for hard selling) on the fastest way to kickstart your e-commerce marketing. This courses comes Free for SME that subscribes to our E-commerce Plan for SME, from just RM299 / month only.
Below is the full slide of our Google Adwords Kick Start Course! (It’s not a preview! It’s full slide! and NO, we are not insane!) Feel free to download and share it.
Why do we do that? Well, there’s NO Secrets in the slide. In the end of the day – the testing, the execution, the creativity of your copywriting will determine whether you lose or win the Internet Marketing Battle (with the ultimate winner – Google, laugh all the way to the bank, of course)
Apart from Google Adwords, we will also reveal more on other means of Internet Marketing to kickstart your stores. Below slide is barely scratching the surface. In our complex world, you need multi-channel traffic strategies to hit the jackpot!
E-commerce would not be complete without FULFILLMENT – The most important process which get the merchandise Picked, Packed, and Shipped to the hands of your customers. If your customers is getting their orders shipped to them both “in time and in good condition” (manage expectation!), voila! You probably have just sealed a lifetime customer.
Mom, i got shipped to you (in 1 piece) !!!
He/She will be a happy client that will buy repeatedly (and more!) from you. He/She will even help spread the word (WOM is powerful) around on how superb your service is, and leave a testimonial on your stores or a 5-star rating (we now have customer rating feature on webShaper!) on your products that will help you earn the trust for new visitors coming to your online store so that they will buy without hesitate. All these will have a positive impact that will ignite the money loop that will grow your business further and beat the competition!
5-star-rating from your clients – worth dying for
Now you understand how important fulfillment is. No online merchants can afford to screw up, or letting your shipping company screw up. and that’s why it’s important to pick your shipping partner right from the start. When it comes to the world of shipping, there’s also the very famous Big 3, namely UPS, Fedex and DHL. Among them, UPS is the indisputable big brother (more than 100 years old) among them all. UPS is so big that, if today UPS decide to quit delivery services and join the airlines business competing with AirAsia in the “business of shipping people”, they will be the 3rd largest airline in the world.
Just imagine all these planes turned into passengers plane…
An UPS truck delivery driver makes sure the packages in his truck are organized (we wonder, do they check on parcel bomb too?)
Sleeping with the enemy, You gotta be kidding me!
Study the competition, let the figure blows you away!
UPS is best known for its superb IT infrastructure and value-added services delivered via software tools. And we are proud to annouce that – webShaper e-commerce now supports UPS Tracking, UPS Rates & Services, UPS Address Verification (US Address only) as well as Shipping Label (Airway Bills) Printing directly from orders management in webShaper e-commerce! We are the first company in Malaysia (very likely in ASEAN) that does this, for more details, take a look at UPS-Ready Shopping Cart.
Don’t miss out the nice cartoon clips by UPS below >
Hold on a second… before you leaving this post, another reason for you to sign up UPS service? Mamamiya… i’m sure they can easily double their account if every delivery employee look and dress like this!
But reality is always cruel
well… don’t lose the focus! Most important is your package get delivered in time and in good condition!
Happy selling online!
Satisfy your curiosity, learn more about UPS here!
Notice the name card i’m holding, it got super huge fonts that you can see from 2 miles away.
Guy kawasaki (famous apple evangelist and silicon valley VC) and also Vinton Cerf (father of TCP-IP) were here – Thanks to Malaysia for being the host of WCIT 2008, we have a chance to meet some of the very top brass of Silicon Valley.
Off topic:- If you wondered where i got the CNET t-shirt, i enrolled in Cnet Malaysia back in 2002 as an intern before it was dissolved – i swear the closure got nothing to do with me. Now CNET is happily acquired by CBS for a whopping USD 1.8 Billion and damn! i don’t get a single cents out of it!
So i’m not going to delve in details here. I will just touch on some of the highlights that manage to leave an impact (very likely less than 72 hours) to my tiny little brain.
First on Guy Kawasaki.
One most inspiring thing mentioned is D.I.C.E.E. – the way of creating a truly world class products that sells like nobody business (think ipod & iphone), else risk being listed here. Btw,
If you miss the event, you can still grab some of the crucial point of the presentation by Guy here at:
Vinton Cerf gave another inspiring speech in a special appearance arranged by MDEC 2 days after guy kawasaki. He touches on the very future of the Internet, IPV6, Silicon Valley Wannabe, Mobility etc.
One interesting he brought up is how many “silicon wannabe” that fails. reasons is you cannot just simply copy silicon valley without realizing the substances that make it successful. He describe Silicon Valley as an “fine-tuned turbo engine” where all the components fits into each other perfectly to keep pumping out great and optimum horse power.
So What does it take to be Silicon Valley?
Venture Capitalist (VC)
Unlike the traditional banks, VC dare to risk in new venture without holding on any collateral, it’s like they are banking on the idea, the business model and the team behind it. Out of every 10 investments, VC expects 6 to fail, 3 to do so-so and 1 hitting the jackpot.
Don’t shoot capitalism, embrace them.
Matured Capital Market
US got Nasdaq. Singapore got Sesdaq and we follow with Mesdaq. IPO is an important route for high growth technology company to gather capital and expand their business, it’s also the most crucial channel for VC to cash out on their startup investment (apart from being bought out by the industry stalwarts).
NASDAQ – Where you find Micro$oft, Intuit, Intel, Cisco and lot more!
Supply of Trained Employees In technology business, it’s all about the People. Silicon Valley doesn’t accidentally “grow” around top university like Stanford. It’s the continuous brain capital supplied by the Top Universities around the area that made Silicon Valley. Likewise, we have our Multimedia University (MMU) too, the only different i can see is that MMU is planted there as part of the MSC Grand Plan. Isn’t it ironic this ERP company claiming they will lose half their staff strength moving to MSC Cyberjaya?
Do we have enough supply of geeks?
Steve, where are you?
Access to Experienced Manager
Very simple fact, young and bright engineers starting up companies need experienced leaders that can guide them and lead the company forward. Just like why Sergey Brin and Larry Page hired Eric Schmidt and even made him a billionaire.
3 makes a company
Tolerate Failure
Vinton mentioned Steve Jobs highlight this point to ex-UK prime minister, Tony Blair when he asked the Top CEOs of Silicon Valley on what makes Silicon Valley a success. Steve Job said:”I dunno what makes us successful, but i think every CEOs here in the room have fail at least once before.” Seems like in Silicon Valley, Failure is the rule rather than the exception, remember, what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. See how apple co-founder steve wozniak learned from failure.
This is very interesting, who would have thought this is one of the “substance” of success? And can failure be bought with $? (even if you can, nobody sane would buy failure) If not, how do you replicate it?
I would say it’s part of the cultural trait that’s hard to mimic. In US generally, failing is not seen as a bad mark of incompetency, people are willing to give you the 2nd chance (or more). In Malaysia and many parts of the world, Failure is being seen as a bad mark of incompetence. If you fail once, not just VC will ditch you, probably your girlfriend will dump you and you stand a risk of your parents disowning you too.
Market Size
Is the domestic market big enough? If not, then think Global, how an you reach and serve the market outside of the country? You gonna THINK BIG! ACT Locally by moving forward one step at a time.
Notice one point missing ? Yes, he did not mention anything about HARDWARE aka building or so called “infrastructure”. Silicon Valley is what it is today all because of the “software”, it has got little to do with hardware.
The blind spot in our MSC Grand Plan (and alot other silicon valley wannabe) has been the sole focus on hardware instead of software. Why? it’s because you can buy your way through hardware and you get instant gratification! Hooray! As long as you got the cold hard cash, hey, u can even hire alien to build highest building in the world to fill your ego. Make no mistake that there’s no shortcut for software (ppl development), it takes a long long time to develop people and talent. Money just cannot buy you this shortcut no matter how deep your pocket is.
As an entrepreneur myself, can you tell me why Malaysia need Yet another MSC Cyber city? In what way does it really benefit the technopreneur? Does a nice office transform a mediocre programmer into a super hacker that can cramp up codes like nobody business? Does paying higher rent psf that enrich the property owner instead of yourself make your product more likely to succeed in the market? It just doesn’t make sense to me. All i see is that it only benefits the contractors.
Instead, why don’t the government just focusing on bringing up the level of the skilled knowledge workers and give the country a cheap, reliable and abundant broadband and let the entrepreneurs take care of themselves.?
Last but not least, Vincent also highlight that FDI (Foreignt Direct Investment) will create jobs, but not creating wealth. To create wealth, you need to own the company. So if you are reading this, why wait? start your own company today and if you are thinking of e-commerce, Don’t forget to drop us an email to find out how we can help you on that. Nite.
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.
These 2 guys, Mark Chang from Jobstreet.com (on the left) and Tony Fernandes from AirAsia.com, which needs no further introduction. They are among the most successful of new breed of Internet Savvy, Young and Aggressive entrepreneurs in Malaysia.
One of them is the founder of Jobstreet.com – the most successful Internet Company (actually they are no longer “just an internet company”, they are a full swing service oriented company that use the Internet Extensively to compete in the “people industry” ) in Malaysia. We know that they have done something terribly right when we also become their customer. There’s tons of jobstreet-wannabe but none of them come close.
Another is the maverick which had made it possible for most Malaysian to fly, fly often, and now even can fly to Australia for just RM9.95 only. Thanks to him, even small company like us can now thinking of having our company trip at Gold Coast too.
Recently they are touted as one of the most Innovative firm by FastCompany, alongside with well-known Giant like GE. It’s really quite an achievement.
And interestingly, it seems like these 2 companies have a knack for fast cars (think speed, think high risk aka high return), Jobstreet is sponsoring the Malaysia A1 team while AirAsia is sponsoring the William F1 Team – so they do share something in common ya..
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!
What does it mean by running a GREAT business? below are some of the very good point brought up by Jay Abraham, one of the top marketing guru we admire most:-
>> Great means doing more for your prospects and buyers.
>> Great means giving more value, service, contribution.
>> Great means seeing more needs and filling them in far more superior ways.
>> Great means falling in love with the people you serve rather than being a simple servant to mere moneymaking.
This is done by one of our web design partner – Nouman Q.Khan, a friendly, sharp minded, entrepreneurial and extremely Internet savvy guy from Pakistan, who’s now starting his Internet Business in Malaysia.
We met first time about 2 years back, he can still remember me (this guy got photo memory>?). He practically visualize what our webShaper CSS Template System has offered to him, my hats off to him.
If you make your partner or customers fall in love with your products, they will do amazing things beyond your expectation, and below is just one of the proof.
The Star interview on one of the early local e-commerce player – Acmamall.com, which started since 2000.
Some notable remarks:
“Acmamall.com has registered a 150% increase in its Malaysian customer base this year (2007) alone.”
“No doubt about it, the potential of e-commerce in this region is enormous and it has become ubiquitous in our daily lives – banking, booking airline and cinema tickets, for example. “
“80% of our customers live outside the Klang Valley“
No online merchants can afford to screw up, or letting your shipping company screw up. and that’s why it’s important to pick your shipping partner right from the start. When it comes to the world of shipping, there’s also the very famous Big 3, namely UPS, Fedex and DHL. Among them, UPS is the indisputable big brother (more than 
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.
This is done by one of our web design partner – Nouman Q.Khan, a friendly, sharp minded, entrepreneurial and extremely Internet savvy guy from Pakistan, who’s now starting his Internet Business in Malaysia. 
