It’s not a surprise that business from all across the board in New York City, corporate to local shops, have been shifting from physical sales to digital purchasing of their products or services. More and more people are simply ‘Googling’ the products that they want to find online and clicking on the first online shops that the see above the fold.

This form of selling and marketing has proven to be truly effective on large and small scales for any kind of business. Ecommerce; defined as online shopping, selling, and business, has swept the world as the emerging dominant form of sales and there are many reason; especially in places like New York City where people don’t have time necessarily to physically visit all of the stores they see in newspaper ads, magazines, and commercials. Yet like everything, Ecommerce can quickly become a double edged sword with both advantages and drawbacks.

With everyone shopping online in New York, businesses are shifting their products to online shopping carts; many of this digital entrepreneurs are quickly swayed by the advantages of ecommerce. These advantages include things like:

Being able to sell products 24/7 and make money while asleep.
Being able to appeal to a wider audience not limited by the physical. What this means is that people don’t have to live in the same city or state to buy your products
The ability to use ecommerce as a marketing tool to a businesses name out into the world to drive more sales and game to a company or business.
Speed. Much to my personal dismay, computers seem to not only be able to think faster than humans, but they can sell products faster tool.
Effort. Much of the effort of having to ring up a customer, fill out their information, and serve the customer are stripped away and essentially put on the customer themselves. This is also known as self service.

All of these advantages however seem to cover up the most apparent disadvantages despite their over-reaching repercussions. Drawbacks such as the ones listed below could destroy a business if they ever occurred.

100% online businesses rely on platforms, servers, and technology that can crash at any point in time rendering the business useless.
Online sales completely take away the personality that you get from human interaction. These human interactions sometimes drive sales up and open new leads
Lawsuits. Ecommerce websites are vulnerable (no matter what people say) to hacking and digital theft which will leave you and your business wide open for lawsuits if any of your customers suspect this happened because of purchasing something through your website.

The disadvantages could go on for pages, but those three should get across the point that ecommerce web design can be a tricky business for some people. Yet New York consumers and retailers don’t seem to pay any attention to the disadvantages and continue to shop and sell online.

Fred McCoy is a New York Ecommerce Web Design critic who works for Blue Fountain Media; his articles are on point, descriptive, and insightful.

Ecommerce is the way to go. E commerce web design and web hosting steps are quite similar to what obtains in designing a website for other purposes. However, for ecommerce web design and web hosting, you will need design features such as word processors for editing your website. Shopping card stores as well as retail pricing can be designed with word processors, so also are other features such as credit card acceptance and invoice creation. You will also need to design photo galleries, guest books and online calendars, calculators and shipping information for all products and services purchased on your website. Technical aspects of ecommerce website hosting and design can be given to a professional at no extra cost. If you compare the financial gains you tend to make with the money you spend on running your website, you will discover that it is worth the trouble and hardworking.

Search engine Optimization and marketing

After designing and hosting your ecommerce website, you need to engage yourself in search engine optimization and aggressive marketing of your website. You must ensure that you use a search engine placement system that will allow a global access to your website. Every page and product of your website must be displayed in search engines’ map system. You need to seek information and advises on getting a Google AdWords pay-per-click advertising mechanism for instance and other forms of placing classified adverts on some other affiliate websites. If you can do all these, then your ecommerce website design is complete.

Fabian Tan is a well-known Internet Marketing expert and the author of the popular 45-page Report:

“Murder Your Job: How To Build Cash Sucking Autopilot Businesses In 30 Days Or Less!”

Head over to http://www.MurderYourJob.com to get your FREE copy now!

Also, quickly download his FREE “Explosive Traffic System” report that shows you how to generate 10,000+ visitors per month at no cost! => http://www.ExplosiveTrafficSystem.com

General:

1. Get your senior management’s support and commitment on your efforts to improve your website.
2. Identify the changes required and build a good operations team.
3. Always remember that your goal is to sell products through your website.
4. Set achievable goals for every webpage.
5. Make sure you have an about us page filled with your company’s information.
6. Set a key performance indicator (KPI) for every online marketing campaign you conduct.
7. Never depend totally on technology.
8. Help users to reach you by different means - email, telephone, physical address, live chat, etc.

Retail ecommerce usability/merchandising tips:

9. Don’t use animation in your home page.
10. Display top-selling and newly launched products on your home page.
11. Make sure every product page is reachable within 2-3 clicks.
12. Recommend product accessories for items that have been added to a shopping cart. For example, if a customer buys a notebook, then recommend laptop accessories like a USB mouse or bags. Just recommend! Don’t add them automatically to the shopping cart.
13. Add a buy button to your recommended list or wherever you show a product.
14. Also show product prices for each product in your recommended product list or anywhere else you display your products.
15. Make sure your content has compelling call to actions - buy now, limited offer, etc.
16. Wow customers by offering surprise gifts, offers, and price discounts.
17. Have good site search functionality within your site.
18. Also include advanced search functionality, such as search by color, size, etc.
19. Add breadcrumb navigation, which helps users understand their depth of their visit to your site.
20. Allow users to modify their shopping cart lists. They should be able to add or remove products and change the quantities that they want to purchase.
21. Avoid hidden cost - imposing additional cost on the total value of the purchase. Allow user to add associated products manually. Don’t ever automate it. Hidden costs lead to shopping cart abandonment.
22. Don’t force users to register, even for adding items into their shopping cart.
23. Glean only necessary information during the sign up process.
24. Display security badges clearly.
25. Give alternate payment options. About 74% of online merchants provide alternate payment options.
26. Offer free shipping for a certain price threshold.
27. Install an analytics program to help you better understand user behavior.
28. Use a visual analytics program to facilitate easy interpretation.
29. Avoid having a long check out process.
30. Provide all necessary information, such as shipping, privacy policy, return policy, delivery date and time, etc.

Retail ecommerce design/development/technology tips:

31. Ensure that the site’s html code meets web standards.
32. Minimize graphics like flash, scripts, etc.
33. Graphical links are of no use. Make sure that your links are text based.
34. Ensure that your site loads quickly.
35. Use secure server include (ssi) files.
36. Be creative with your 404 page. You can merchandise it, add site search functionality or link it to another section of your website.

Retail ecommerce SEO tips:

37. Conduct SEO competition analysis.
38. Conduct keyword research.
39. Use about two keywords per page.
40. Focus on long tail keywords (e.g. canon power shot 4x digital camera).
41. Don’t use the manufacturer’s product description. Use your own instead.
42. Use keyword rich titles and meta tags, headings, etc. However, make sure you don’t spam. If you do it right, you get it right.
43. Use keywords in your product descriptions.
44. Get quality back links to your product pages steadily, but not suddenly.
45. Recommend products and accessories on your product page. Smart and sophisticated interlinking helps in SEO (a good example is shopping.com).
46. Ask customers to review products that they have purchased from your site. Unique content helps in SEO.
47. Allow customers to tag the product.
48. Use keywords in interior links.
49. Don’t have more than 100 outgoing links.
50. Optimize images for fast loading and for search engines
51. Create a sitemap - it ensures that none of your webpages are orphaned.
52. Create search engine friendly (SEF) URLs that are easy for both users and crawlers. Opt for URL optimization like mod_rewrite to static URLs.
53. Write blog posts about the products you sell.

Ecommerce email marketing tips:

54. Conduct an opt-in email campaign.
55. Invite users to sign up for your newsletter after a sale.
56. Avoid spam words like free in the subject line.
57. Make sure you have an unsubscribe option.
58. Provide a proper mailing address.
59. Include tell-a-friend functionality.
60. Email consistently.
61. Offer exclusive discounts to opt-in customers.
62. Include compelling call to actions in your email message.
63. Make sure your offer is visible above the fold in the email.

Pay per click (PPC) marketing tips:

64. Start by advertising top-selling products.
65. Bid on popular and relevant keywords.
66. Use negative keywords as well.
67. Use keyword options like phrase and exact match.
68. Focus on improving your quality score.
69. Add keywords in the ad copy.
70. Add call to actions in the ad copy.
71. You don’t have to hold the very top position. Find a balance.
72. Make sure you give the right landing page, otherwise you’ll meet with a high bounce rate.
73. Turn off the content network.
74. Test your ad copy.
75. Test your PPC ad campaign.
76. Test your landing pages.

Comparison shopping engine (CSE) marketing tips:

77. Choose the comparison engines for your campaign and start slow and steady.
78. Choose your top performing products to start with.
79. Prepare feeds according to the shopping engine’s requirements.
80. Use common product names or street names in the feeds.
81. Don’t forget to use recommended data feed fields.
82. Try to use optional data feed fields as well.
83. Make sure your feeds are placed in the right taxonomy of each shopping engine.
84. Use the exact MPN or SKU.
85. Update your data feeds daily, weekly or monthly (daily is highly recommended).
86. Send feeds to Google base.
87. Don’t advertise out of stock products.
88. Provide the appropriate landing page.
89. Remove poor performing products.
90. Conduct CSE competition analysis with other merchants in context with title, price and other promotional offers within each CSE.
91. Track your rankings in the CSE.
92. Track clicks and sales at the product level.

Ecommerce customer support service tips:

93. Provide exceptional service to repeat customers.
94. Provide good customer service to first time customers as well.
95. Make sure you respond to customers in a timely manner.
96. Get a toll free number.
97. Train customer representatives properly. For example, offer product and sales training.
98. Make sure your contact info is available in all your pages.
99. Thank the customer either by calling or sending an email about the purchase they have placed.
100. IM is very effective for servicing frustrated customers.

http://www.Retail-eCommerce.com offers free e-commerce articles, tips and tricks to optimize and market online retail business effectively.

In this article we take a look at the ecommerce businesses that are not making sales and our goal here is to help these businesses start making more profits. Ecommerce sales keep getting stronger each and every year, more and more people are shopping online now, people are just getting lady and want to sit in their boxers and buy online.

Let’s sat that I want to buy a new video game and I decide to go to Google and type in the name of the video game, if I find the listing for the video game and your online store is not part of the listing , then that is another sale that you lost.

Ecommerce websites are all over the internet, there are millions that are competing with each other and the market is somewhat touch and saturated, the way you can escape this madness is to make your site and business standout and different compared to the other online businesses.

The very first thing your store needs to have is a clean catalog. Navigation menu, If I went into a website and their navigation was not friendly and it was hard fore me to find what i was looking for, then you can forget about making a sale. Your website has to have a clean layout and people must be able to find what they are looking for without getting a headache.

Your merchandise should be categorized well, if you have a john deere pilliow in the tennis section, then your site will not look professional and your customers will not take your website all that serious and leave.

Your shopping cart has to be flawless, millions of sales are lost due to a poor shopping card system on a website, folks will be ready to buy and they choose their gifts and get ready to buy and then the shopping cart stars to fail, invest in a good shopping cart system, paypal is a great shopping cart system that seems to please everyone.

Now that you have your navigation menu looking good, and your shopping car seems to work great, we now have to focus on how we can draw traffic to your ecommerce website.

This is a method that I have used that has worked like a charm, take 5-10 of the most popular product on your site and start trying to get those items ranked higher in the search engines, the reasoning behind this is this, if you can bring quality traffic for 10 hot products, then your whole website will get tons of exposure and your overall sales will also increase.

Suppose you have a very large catalog of john deere merchandise, what you want to do is to use a keyword tool and come up with tons of john deere keywords that have high search amounts and low competition and then optimize your site for these keywords.

If you keep working on this method, then your traffic will come from all different side and your overall catalog will be noticed and sales will improve. Seo is one of the most powerful techniques that all webmasters need to use in order to bring tons of quality traffic to their sites.

Learn how to Increase Website Traffic and sell more ecommerce products today!

Terry is a writer who likes both SEO and business management.

Most ecommerce tips for beginners start out by talking about selling a product by doing this-or-that. The, “this-or-that” may be all well and good, but it rarely gets into how by doing this-or-that you may be wasting your time or doing damage to your program right from the start. Ecommerce tips for beginners rarely get into how you can run afoul of all sorts of written and unwritten rules set up by the search engine companies. Knowing some of the more basic rules will get you started, without making you start from two steps back.

Been there seen that

Ecommerce tips for beginners, when it comes to playing by the search engine rules are fairly basic. They are basic because the search engine web crawlers have seen people try to bend them in millions of ways before. Bend them enough and you’re ranking drops, you’re banned from using that search engine under that name and your address. For the most part, you’ll need to start again from scratch. The biggest suggestion to not run afoul of the web crawler is to keep your ecommerce with the bounds of common practice and not get fancy.

Good guys do win!

Oddly enough, ecommerce tips for beginners that work toward guiding people toward commerce as a “white hat” (honest marketers) report that disciples do better then those that work as “black hats.” Why then it would seem, would anybody want to put all the extra effort into marketing as a black hat when there is little if any extra payoff for doing so?.

Fabian Tan is a well-known Internet Marketing expert and the author of the popular 51-page Report:

“Murder Your Job: How To Build Cash Sucking Autopilot Businesses In 30 Days Or Less!”

Head over to http://www.MurderYourJob.com to get your FREE copy now before it’s gone!