]]> AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. It’s the oldest trick in the sales book, but rarely thought about when it comes to eCommerce. The idea is that a sales person should follow these four steps when pitching a product to the potential buyer. In the world of eCommerce, you don’t have your sales person, so this process is (should) be done by your online store.

Attention

Using search engines, in most cases visitors will land on product or category pages. We will concentrate on your product pages within the AIDA process. Once the visitor lands on your product page, you have merely a few seconds to grab his attention. In these few seconds, this visitor will decide weather this is what he was looking for or he’ll move along. We are talking about attention, the first part of AIDA process. In the real world, you’d be trying to catch the attention of the buyer in this step, but online, you already have his attention. All you need to do is make sure you don’t lose it.

You’ll lose the attention you’ve been given in case your product page is to crowded and doesn’t give the impression of what it’s really about from the first look. Too many distracting items can cause your visitor to think he didn’t find what he was looking for, even though he was on the right product page. You can spot this behavior if you are using Google Analytics. Try finding people that landed on the right product page that perfectly fits the keyword they entered into search engine, but right after they landed they used your internal site search to try to find the product they were looking at. In case there are none of these in your Analytics, your product pages might be built pretty good from the attention retention point of view.

Interest

In the real world, you would try to make the buyer show some interest in your product. Luckily for you, visitors that came from search engines searching for your product already showed the interest, now you need to show them why they should act. You need to make them desire the product.

Desire

The visitor landed on the product page and you managed not to lose his attention. Awesome! In this step, you need to make him desire the product. You can do this in several ways, but what really works well is good product representation – readable, scan-able product description, high quality multiple images from different angles and if possible, video showing the product. If the product can be shown “in action” that would also be a thing that encourages desire.

Look at the product page and information you provide there from the visitor’s perspective. Ask yourself if you could envision this product’s size and feel if you’ve never seen / felt it in the real life. If you can’t, work on the description, images, and video.

Action

Visitor landed, you have his full attention, you made him desire the product. Now it’s time to make him take the one last step, to click the button. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have a clear call to action. Your “Buy now” or “Add to cart” button has to be the most easily found element on your product page. It has to be big, in different color than surrounding elements and on a logical spot. Bring in a person that never saw your website and show him the product page. Tell him to add the item to the cart. If he can do it without reading anything or looking around the site for more than few secunds, thats a good button. If not, you should improve it.

Some elements can distract the visitor from completing the last step of the AIDA process. Those can be different banners, or some other buttons that compete with your “Buy now” or “Add to cart” button’s attention. I know you want multiple things from your visitor and several call to actions are likely to be placed on modern online stores, but always ask your self, is it more important for you that visitor checks some other item on discount on your store, to follow you on Twitter / Facebook, to subscribe to your newsletter or to buy the item he is looking at at this point. All of these other calls to actions can be present on other pages – such as category page, CMS pages, checkout success page – but the product page should be as free of these distractions as possible.

]]> What a title, right? When I say Googl’s AdWords free coupon is not free, I don’t mean like you’ll probably spend some of your money afterwards (which is also probably true) kind of not free. I mean literally, if Google gives you $100 free coupon, Google will earn $100.

There is no trick, no small hidden text, it’s all out there, perfectly clear. The thing is, it’s not the person who is receiving the coupon that’s going to pay Google $100, it’s other already existing advertisers that are going to do so.

Google AdWords is bid based system. Once you inject more money into it (free coupon), you are automatically raising the keyword bids needed to advertise. So when Google hands out a $100 coupon to a new advertiser, this advertiser’s competitors who are already Google’s most valuable paying customers are going to loose $100. Unbelievable, right? Google didn’t just attract a new customer for free, Google actually earned money by hurting its longterm customers. Do no evil… right.

Now that you know this fact, you’re probably not really happy about Google’s new campaign in which they will give $100 coupons to first 1 000 000 small businesses that sign-up for local search advertising. Yes, you got the numbers right, Google will take 100 million from our pockets for this campaign.

]]> One year ago, I did a research on world’s most visited one million domains to see which TLDs are used the most. I did the same research today and compared results. Findings of this research are very interesting.

This is how it all looks like this year, compared to the last year:

• com – 545 894 (was 578 717 last year)
• net – 63 444 (was 66 783 last year)
• org – 41 413 (was 48 253 last year)
• info – 17 076 (was 14 647 last year)
• biz – 3 773 (was 3 888 last year)
• other – 328 400 (was 287 712 last year)

Compared to the last year’s research, we can clearly see that domains sorted in “other” are quickly becoming more important and they are taking over a share from all TLDs except .info, which actually grew in year-over-year share. These domains listed as “other” are mostly ccTLDs, such as .co.uk or any other country specific domain.

For all of you who like fancy graphs, here is this year’s research in my favorite pie charts (click on image to enlarge it):

]]> Finally, it was about time to release one of my Ninja posts to the public. Who knows, maybe you will find another ninja post from time to time…

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just check this post.

OK, now lets continue with e-commerce part of the post. Here you can find some tips and tricks for increasing e-commerce conversion rates

1. Customer’s Safety – let them feel safe!

Invest your time and energy in giving customers signs of protection and safety. Try to use secured socket layer (SSL) encryption or some other specialized services to reassure users of the security of their information. Also, if you use this technologies, make sure that the customers know about it by displaying the logo of the services you use.

2. Specify what you are selling – be simple and clear!

Simple but very important thing is to introduce visitors about what you are selling because visitors are more likely to leave if they can’t understand what your site is all about and what you are selling. Your focus should be apparent in the pictures on your homepage, page titles and tagline, and also in the text on your homepage.

3. State your privacy policy – build trust!

A privacy policy is one of the most important documents on any website. It details your company’s views and procedures on the information collected from visitors. So, one of the essential components of building trust online is treading carefully when it comes to privacy.

Customers are more likely to give their information if they know how the information is going to be used. Reassure them that their privacy is important to you and specify whether you are planning to share or not to share their information with other marketers.

4. Do a spelling check on your site – be a professional!

Making sure that your site has no spelling errors is an important credibility indicator that can give your visitors confidence in your web site. Spelling and grammatical mistakes give the impression of the site as unpolished and unprofessional. Always review your copy for any mistakes, or hire a professional to improve and edit your copy.

5. Buttons and styling – pay attention to details!

The key is to make the buying process as simple and as easy as possible – and ease of use on the Web always translates to dollar. Make your call to buy signals consistent and prominent. Your “buy now” buttons should be prominently placed in your product pages.

Many e-tailers say that bigger “buy buttons” in bold and in a color that stands out can help increase conversion rates. Buy buttons should be placed above the fold to keep it prominent and in view of the customer. Avoid making the user scroll to find your buy buttons.

6. Get a toll free 1-800 number – show that you care!

Really nice to have. For many callers, it will mean that your company is legitimate given the fact that they know they can easily reach the company when they need to talk to a human. Plus, given that the call is free to the customers, they won’t hesitate to call you to inquire about your products and services.

In some cases 1-800 numbers have increased sales by more than 30 percent.

7. Enable Live chat – enhance interaction!

Explore the possibility of using live person chat on your site. Live chat can give you the opportunity to engage a customer during the sales process, whether the customer has questions about your products or they need to be clarified with the ordering process. It is a tool that can allow customers to get to know your business and talk with a real live person in your business and feel that you are responsive to their needs.

Customers are more likely to pull out their credit cards and spend on websites that they know they can easily talk to.

8. Make a sales funnel analysis – study hard!

In order to increase conversion it is first important to know what your clients are doing before you try to influence them into purchases. Sales funnel analysis is important in understanding how you are leading your visitors through your buying process ending in sales. You have to know what visitors do upon landing in your site, looking over your product categories, selecting the products that interest them, putting those products in the shopping cart and eventually completing the purchase by hitting the Place the Order Now button and paying.

The goal is to keep the visitors in your site – and making sure these visitors do what you want them to do – to buy. Also you may find that while visitors are looking at your product categories, they are not putting anything in their shopping carts – is it because you don’t have the products they thought you would have or is it because your pictures are too small or too hazy to help convince visitors that you have great quality products.

9. Use an Upsell Page – show them more!

Upselling is a marketing method used to persuade your customers to spend more money than they had originally intended. It is usually a page added between your normal ordering page and your payment page.

So, instead of chasing new customers, you can always generate extra income from upselling your products. It’s a fact that 30 percent to 67 percent of all people can be up sold at the time of purchase. Make a list of all the different strategies you can use to upsell your clients, then put them into action.

10. Invest in photography – give them a better picture!

People often underestimate the importance of quality photography in their website. Whether you are running a business or just selling your house Photography can be a powerful selling tool, the saying that a picture speaks a thousand words is very true. With the advent of digital cameras people are often taking photography into their own hands. The result of this can often have a negative effect.

So, take care that the pictures of your products should be clear, enough big and devoid of any distracting backgrounds. Your shots should be technically excellent, no blurred or out-of-focus shots.

]]> In this blog post I’m referring to the OldSpice’s hilarious commercial and sometimes even funnier video responses they produced. Although the marketing campaign was mostly recognized by online community as something cool, innovative and fun, there was lots of skepticism in the marketing industry about this campaign bringing any meaningful results in form of increased company profit.

We now know that this campaign indeed was a complete marketing success, earning OldSpice an impressive 107% increase in sales (which when we’re talking about a brand of this size is truly remarkable number). But what leasons can we take home from their success?

Well, first of all let’s examine the transcript of the commercial:

The Man Your Man Could Smell Like

Hello, ladies, look at your man, now back to me, now back at your man, now back to me. Sadly, he isn’t me, but if he stopped using ladies scented body wash and switched to Old Spice, he could smell like he’s me. Look down, back up, where are you? You’re on a boat with the man your man could smell like. What’s in your hand, back at me. I have it, it’s an oyster with two tickets to that thing you love. Look again, the tickets are now diamonds. Anything is possible when your man smells like Old Spice and not a lady. I’m on a horse.

Already at the 2nd word, even the experienced marketers could say they did a terrible mistake speaking to the wrong audience. We now know this wasn’t true. It obviously captures guy’s attention and boosts their egos, making them wish they were him. The sentence continues and slowly but effectively prepares us for the humor.

The text continues with first hilarious and memorable quote “Sadly, he isn’t me”. A marketer could say they just offended their targeted audience, but reality is, the male audience sees themselves in this guy, regardless of their physical appearance. They continue with the first mention of their product. Please note they did not say anything good about their product. They didn’t really “advertise” the product. They just throw it in there, like it’s completely natural part of the “spoof”.

They continue with repeating the theme from the start of the commercial, followed by introduction of parody of female romance stereotypes. The parody continues through the commercial until we hit the final memorable quote – “I’m on a horse”.

The punchline is something that appealed extremely well to the internet audience since it gives the commercial a very strong factor of randomness, while staying on topic of parody. If you look at the modern internet memes, you will see that randomness is extremely well performing “form of humor” on the web.

So what did we learn?

• Don’t take your business too seriously. Humor sells… It sells really well!
• Random humor is good for internet audience.
• Personal video responses are well accepted.
• You can advertise your product without actually saying anything good about it.

]]> Lets start with a question: What are the chances that an online store built just 5 years ago can compete with the modern solutions that embraced all of the awesome stuff that emerged in the past few years?

Just 5 years ago, there was no Twitter, Facebook had no users, basically, there was almost no social interaction going on between online stores and their customers. Things have rapidly changed since then, but many online stores did not. Many online stores you encounter are still stuck with the 5 year old (or even older) layout and features. Five years in web business is probably equivalent of 50 years in medicine for example.

There is something that old, but still extremely successful online stores (such as Amazon or eBay) have in common:

They never stop changing. They never stop testing. They always teach their store new tricks.

Online store nowadays can not be set to autopilot. Your customers expect a lot from you. They expect perfect usability, they expect awesome customer support, they expect your store to be the artificial intelligence that automatically knows what they wanna do next. If you don’t provide it to them, someone else will, and that competitor will take your clients away.

eBay 10 years ago and now (Click to enlarge)

How do you teach your online store new tricks?

There are several fields in which improvements are necessary for a 5 year old online store. I’d start with social media, being the most obvious one.

Online store going social:

I have a customer support number listed on my site, why do I need a stupid Twitter account?

Things have shifted 180 degrees in the past few years. Consumers no longer engage your brand where you want them to engage you. Instead, they hang out where they wanna hang out and expect you as a brand to be there. In this case, we’re talking about social networks, but you shouldn’t stop there. Consumers might be blogging and ranting about your brand or product on their personal websites, micro sites, blogs… and they expect your response. They expect you to listen to the noise of the world wide web and filter the data about your brand and respond to their needs no matter where they are.

Few years ago, “social media experts” were pointing out that this will be expected from the companies in the future. Well, that future came sooner than you thought because you’re living it right now.

New design and layout:

But I like my current design!

Your opinion about the design doesn’t matter. Designer’s opinion about the design doesn’t matter. Customers’ opinions matter. They bring in the money and your design and layout has to be tailored to fit their needs and preferences. It is highly likely that 5 year old (or older) design isn’t up to date with current web design trends and best practices.

Internet users change. They learn new tricks. They adopt themselves to the new usability standards as more and more websites start using them. What was considered usability best practice five years ago may not be such a bespoke solution nowadays.

Changes in the world of SEO:

When we made the site, an SEO consultant told us it was perfect.

It might have been. But SEO is one of the fastest changing industries on the web. Google introduces hundreds of changes to it’s ranking algorithm every year! Just as an example, several years ago, it might have sounded like a great idea to sculpt PageRank using no-follow, but nowadays it produces the completely opposite effect!

Long-tail shift:

We are ranking well for the most important keywords in our niche.

Yea, but did you compare the amount of traffic these keywords are sending you today to the same day 5 years ago? Even considering the fact that the number of internet users has grown a lot in this period you will have to notice that average internet users started to shift to the use of longer keywords. As average user of the internet is slowly becoming a power user, he learned how to use search engine much more effectively to find exactly what he wants. This led to growth of longer search queries.

If you want to take your share of search engine traffic, you will have to start creating content. Content marketing is already extremely ROI effective marketing method if used properly and will only grow in the future. Have a read on why do you actually need a blog on your e-commerce website.

“Smart” navigations, product recommendations, sharing features:

It is highly likely that your 5 year old e-commerce solution is missing some of the really smart features that new bespoke e-commerce solutions have. Have a look at some of the bespoke online stores nowadays. They know exactly what else you might wanna buy after you add a product to your shopping cart. They are using effective new ways of organizing and filtering products. They are using smarter site search engines. They are enabling their visitors to easily share their products with their friends on social networks of their choice.

If you didn’t teach your store any new tricks in 5 years and you’re thinking about doing it all now, it’s easy to get carried away, so please make sure you don’t “overdo it”.

Need help with your Magento store’s SEO? Request a quote!

]]> This post will explain the situations in which removing certain elements of your online store might give you better conversions or improve your search engine rankings. There are lots of online stores out there that tend to add too much stuff to their store in hope of improving their income, not realizing that these things might actually create a completely opposite result from the one they hoped to achieve.

Let’s start with the one I encounter a lot lately: Social Sharing and Bookmarking Icons

On many online stores nowadays you will see a “Share to any” or similar widget that looks something like this:

Although there’s nothing wrong with enabling visitors to easily share all the content on your site, we need to apply the less is more rule here. Less social icons means stronger call to action on those that actually exist.

You need to face the reality here. If you’re not selling some crazy funny products, you have no use of StumbleUpon, Digg and similar social sharing icons. Your product pages will never be popular there and even if by some divine miracle you receive some traffic from there, it will be so random and non-targeted it will not bring any sales.

To make things worse, sometimes they list all of these social sharing icons in form in which they will dilute link power of your page since each and every one of them will be an no-followed link, and we now know how rel=no-follow actually works, right?

Now this is a good practice of how to add Social Sharing / Bookmarking Icons to your on-line store:

They obviously figured out that best performing Social Networks for their business are Facebook, and a very niche specialized one for their products, so they decided to include only these two icons. Smart move. Their call to action is much stronger with only two sharing options to choose from.

Less is more candidate number two: Featured Products

Some stores don’t understand that featured products are supposed to be a few products that you really want to stand out, not a front page full of products. One more awesome thing that tends to happen with featured products is this:

Now why would you feature an out-of-stock product to your visitors? That one needs to go. You have this awesome space on your front page that is able to influence the first impression of your first time visitors and what you give them is an out of stock item? You can swap this product with another one that can actually be bought, or you can apply the magical less is more rule here and feature one less product on your homepage.

Additionally, if you’re using Magento, it doesn’t support Featured Products functionality by default so you will need to use our free Featured Products Extension for Magento.

Candidate number three: Poll and other unused features

Do you have a community poll that features a standard question? You didn’t change the question for over a year now since you don’t have inspiration or anything you’d like to ask your visitors? Then why have the poll? The same applies for the newsletter subscription box if you’re not sending newsletters, twitter account that you’re not updating, live support that’s never actually “live” or online and the list goes on.

]]> I’ve been reading an article at GetElastic blog, one of my favorite resources regarding e-commerce marketing. At the end of the article “A/B Test Case Study: Can Split Test Results Be Trusted?” they showed us a case study in which they tested two exactly the same variations against each other and one of them performed 4.97% better than the other.

The possibility of statistical mistake in optimization tests is a pretty big issue. I’ve seen case studies all over the internet with ridiculous conclusions and ridiculously big improvements all because the performer of the test made a mistake (sometimes I believe they even do it intentionally to show better results to their clients).

There are several things that can go wrong with these tests and here are the most common mistakes:

Low test sample

During the latest presidential elections here in Croatia, some smart people calculated that possibility of statistical mistake with a test sample of 10 000 randomly selected people is ~3%.

They weren’t wrong in all these years that these tests were performed; these tests were always accurate with exactly ~3% deviation.

Please note that this is a test sample of 10 000 people that performed the desired action. If we transfer this knowledge to the world of e-commerce, it would mean that our sample should be 10 000 transactions, not 10 000 visitors.

There isn’t a lot of stores in the world that can get 10 000 transactions in a reasonable time period, so I’m led to believe that most of the conversion rate optimization split tests performed out there are not really accurate.

This calculation (10 000 transactions = ~3% statistical mistake) is true for the election body of 4 402 045 people. In order to get the right calculation for your specific case, you need to calculate the amount of people out there that fit the criteria of your targeted audience. This means that some B2C e-commerce store with wide market of lets say 45 000 000 potential customers would need 100 000 transactions to achieve ~3% possibility of statistical mistake.

Low time period

Let’s say you have a store and you could actually get a relevant test sample of 10 000 transactions within days. You need to extend this test to a longer time period then a few days.

What could happen is, you tested variations during the working days and only a certain population of people with certain behavior comes to your site Monday to Friday. Your test didn’t really capture the behavior of people visiting your store during the weekends and this population might have a completely different behavior compared to your test sample.

Unrepresentative test sample

Choose your methods wisely. I’ve actually explained this in the article before. You could increase the conversion rate of a store by actually decreasing the revenue. It’s highly recommended to read this article to understand how increasing the conversion rate (the percentage) is not the actual goal of conversion rate optimization (I know, it sounds crazy, but just read it).

]]> Features explained in this article should be considered as guides that need to be followed from the beginning of site’s design, wireframing and through development phase. They’re all based on the experience from perspectives of the shopper, the shop owner and developers.

Home page

The one rule that can be applied here would be “Don’t over do it”. Many times you wish (feel or express a strong desire or hope for something that is not easily attainable) that you could show everything to the user (mostly for the first time user) so you try bringing it all out. In many cases that is not the best solution. Here are several reasons why and what to do about it :

Too many products – you can’t show them all, rather give a hint with a few featured products, selected products, new arrivals in an eye-cacthing manner. Big image or a slideshow that will solve the problem for the user trying to find his way around and actually enter the shop. Once she/he is in, the home page served it’s purpose: Showing the way inside the store.

Over categorization – When presenting the categories for the store you should be concise as much as possible with only top-level categories presented. Make the case even stronger by representing those categories with images and text for easy navigation and “Decision making”. It’s all about reducing the “Time to think” factor mentioned above.

No updates or news from you guys – Either being a regular or a first time user everybody likes to see that you’re alive and kicking. Use twitter updates or a facebook update or simply pull some headlines from your company blog. Anything that can help you with presenting yourself to the public should be utilized.

Static is sooo 2008. – If you have a video about your product or company that is actually worth watching on the front page, place it adequately or you can make it as big as a house if you have a flashy animation/video that will excite and motivate someone enough to see it and do something about it afterwards.

Enter the store, oh you’re already here… sorry ’bout that – Mind the lyrics, I mean the verbiage, ehm the way you write and speak to the public. Try, no, try harder when choosing the right words for using the shop’s features, be friendly and don’t point out the obvious while missing the explanation of the “not so obvious”. This will make a tremendous effect on the overall feel for the site and of course the product, the company and YOU!

As she said: “You had me at Hello”

…And for the the users that visit regularly or go straight to finding the product by name or manufacturer there is this thing:

Useful search

Users will search either for a specific product, product feature or they will be using your site’s search for
pure store browsing, therefore you should make your search easy to use, refinable and also give the user more control when they know specifically what they are looking for using the advanced search the way it suits your store.

It is crucial that the search box stays visible all the time on the site for several reasons:

Why not? – Unless you have a secret reason why you should hide the search box, always iterate this feature as much as possible.

Advanced search in the sidebar – For those who know exactly what their looking for

Providing something like this in sidebar gives even more control for those shoppers that want to narrow their search and land directly to the desired result page.

Search Autocomplete – That one comes built-in when you run your store in Magento:)

If you would for example search for a phone the autocomplete would suggest the correct wording providing a reassurance to the user that she/he is on the right track adding to the value of great experience of shopping on your site.

As the man said: “You complete me“.

(O.K. Less of Tom Cruise please and more of catching the point, but you get it;)

Breadcrumbs and sub navigation – find my way around

Show me where I am – Always, except when I know where I am. Magento has breadcrumb navigation built-in and exactly in the places where you need them. You need not to worry about that:)

Show me where to go next – Even with every aspect of the store’s functionality covered, underestimating the power of navigation will for cause a headache and major disorientation leading to low conversion rates since the users will flea from your store quicker than they came in.

Don’t rely only on the drop-down menu provided in the main menu in the header section, place a category sub navigation so that all of the major categories are displayed. Remember the “Over categorization” from the top of the post? Well, now it’s time to display those categories in all their glory, preferably with those fancy expandable menus. See a great example here where we used the only the main categories but once you enter one category you’re presented with it’s subcategories. Nice way of saving the space and clever showing of the categories when they need to be shown. Note: Magento has item count for each of the categories products. This provides useful info about how large the collection. As you see in the image above.

Phew, hope you can keep up with these long sentences, ’cause we’re off to:

Category page or Category listing

Show me what you got- But let me decide how much I need to see at once.

The same principle as on the homepage, don’t over do it. If I want to see all of your 10000 products in one category on one page, well then I’m the one over doing it. If you let me see only 10 by 10 products out of those 10000 products, then you’re arresting my shopping experience. Find the balance and everybody’s happy.

Thankfully, Magento lets the store owner and the shopper meet half-way with options for numbers of products to show as well as sorting them by attributes or whatever suits your/their needs.

I’ve found the product – Let me buy now!

The look and feel of this page and the use of “Buy Now!” or “Add to cart” can dramatically affect user’s experience and convert it into “I’m their customer now” kind of experience if you let the shoppers who already found their product make the purchase. It’s all about who you’re talking to, right?

Note: This relates only to the products that don’t need any additional (required) choice to be made that is.

Image taken from this site we’re currently doing some development.

The Product page

Yes that’s the one- And now, impress me!

First impression is what makes the sale so make that one a success. No matter if your product is “simple” enough to have “only a few” color options present it with the best photo/illustration/3D render you can and describe it well.

This is the tipping point, so you better tip it to everyone’s favor with shopper’s purchase of exactly the right product and you making that sale on the spot.

Image is everything so try to put enough valuable images of the product as you can. Note: Don’t save on getting the best photo/illustration/3D render, you only get one shot so do it right.

There are some additional recommendations you should follow that can be easily overlooked during the site planning:

• Price – Make it clearly visible, don’t try to “minimize” it visually
• Add to Cart button – Make it clear as the summer sky: big, bright and very visible but of course, don’t over do it This one should be used instead of the “Add to Wishlist” button cause it doesn’t stay in the way of user’s purchasing decision.
• Payment – Provide as many payment options necessary: Paypal, Google Checkout, all major CreditCards, money orders etc. Magento has lots of payment gateways built-in for that so use them as many you need.
• Sharing – Allow the users to send this product to the ones that can actually buy it if they are not interested or want their parents to buy it for them, maybe?.

Highly recommended for the product page would be of course “Recommended products”. Hey, I like it when the salesman does his job and finds something interesting for me. Do you?

Magento has that built-in also as “Related products” placed cunningly in the sidebar and sits patiently there while you examine the product and decide in the next second to look what your “Online salesman” believes is related to that product. Take a look at it on the Magento’s official site .

My Shopping Cart

OK, I’m ready to go to the checkout – What’s in it and do I need more or less?

In a great situation where your customer has more than two products already in the cart, she/he is maybe considering to buy more of the same product with or without removing other items. Make sure you provide enough visual cues for adding as well as removing items from the cart.

This IS the way to do it ’cause you don’t go around the “Real shop” and stop people from returning the product back on the shelf.

As on the product page with “Related products”, “Shopping Cart” is a great place to advise the user about some cross-sell products available in the store. Presented like that, they’re easily added to the cart while the shoppers prepares to go to:

The Checkout page:

Keep it simple – Don’t make me dwell or register, please

Since we started this journey through Magento store process, we’ve come a long way and now it’s only fair that this checkout business feels fast, secure and with my shipping options presented well and understandable.

This is where Magento’s “One page checkout” comes in, built with that in mind and ready for action, so use it.

If there’s something not available at that moment or for the particular product, let me know and give me options. Especially for the shipping and handling.

Don’t require registration before the purchase except if it is “really” necessary for some reason. Rather provide some new and now widely acceptable ways of connecting thru:

Facebook connect

It is now possible to allow your clients to register with their existing facebook account. This provides comfort, ease of use and friendly approach for the shopper and by default relieves her/him of those tedious tasks of reentering the same data again, registering for a new account etc. Yes, it is good as it sounds and you should get on that train right now.

Here you can find most of the answers about this service.

That’s it:) Well far from it, please leave your comments about your views as a shop owner or a shopper and it will definitely help everyone’s shopping experience.

]]> Have you ever wondered what is the most used TLD (domain extension) among the websites that become popular? How many of world’s top million websites are .com, how many are .net? How many use other TLDs?

I downloaded Alexa’s top one million websites raw data and started analyzing it from a marketing perspective to draw some constructive conclusions.

As expected, DOT COMs are still kings of the world wide web dominating the top million list by more then half. Here are the results of research:

• com – 578 717
• net – 66 783
• org – 48 253
• info – 14 647
• biz – 3 888
• other – 287 712

For you visual guys, here are the graphs presenting this data:

]]> If you are among the #IMU crowd, you probably have the word “gobbledygook” stuck in your head since one of the famous sentences spam bots like to write over at #IMU hashtag on Twitter is citation of David Meerman Scott:

David Meerman Scott – No business-speak gobbledygook – “Speak to your buyer personas in their language, not yours.” #IMU

The bots run that sentence over and over again spaming us with it, but do you know what gobbledygook actually means and where it comes from? I’ll let Marina (HotForWords) explain it to you in this awesome video (note, video might not be so “awesome” to you if you’re a woman or a homosexual):

Basically, the word gobbledygook was first used in 1944 by Maury Maverick in his memo banning the use of gobbledygook language. Maverick was extremely frustrated with language bureaucrats used. The word “gobbledygook” is also used as an onomatopoeic imitation of a turkey’s gobble. Pronunciation: GOB-ul-dee-GOOK.

Useful gobbledygook resources:

• There is a tool called Gobbledygook Grader that enables you to test your content against the use of this bureaucratic language. As spamers always remind us at #IMU, it’s a good thing to speak to your customers like a person, in a language they understand, a language free of business gobbledygook.

• The Plain English Campaign, that’s fighting for crystal-clear communication since 1979 has created a gobbledygook generator, a simple online tool that generates gobbledygook for you. It’s created to point out how gobbledygook language is ridiculous and has no meaning whatsoever or it’s meaning is to general to accurately apply to anything (can be applied to everything).

Examples of gobbledygook:

• At base level, this just comes down to global incremental programming.
• I can make a window to discuss your optional administrative alignment.
• Our upgraded model now offers total monitored consulting.
• Only geeks stuck in the 90s still go for dot-com policy matrix approaches.

]]> So this is the 200th blog post at Inchoo. We’ve been with you for over one year now. I wanted to do something special for this occasion so with a little bit of help from a nice online tool (zinepal.com) we give you PDF and Amazon Kindle e-books containing our blog posts!

The Magento one might be looking a bit messy at some points with code but I don’t think you really need the code in print versions or on your Kindle

]]> Who should manage social media networking in a company? Is it a job for marketing or sales department? Is it a one person job or should a team of people work on it?

My opinion is that social media networking can be both marketing and sales job. I’ve previously wrote about search & engage technique used with Twitter which pretty much falls into description of a sales job. You can also say that spreading the marketing message to your consumers via social media outlets is a job for marketing team.

The key to successful social media presence of a company is in balance between self promotion, sales activity and general networking. Sales team will always try to sell, and that’s actually good since it’s their job to do so. On the other hand, inbound oriented marketers will often try to network to much and not using sales opportunities enough.

So who should manage social media accounts in a company?

To achieve a nice balance, the optimal solution would be to have as many people from different departments involved as possible. Marketing and sales team can’t write a good piece of engaging content that would be interesting to developer community, so if you wish to target that community, you need a member of that community to engage them.

If you’re a regular here, you’ve probably noticed that here at Inchoo, all of the employees contribute to our blog. So far it’s working really well for us. We get tons of free and pretty targeted leads from search engines, but let me leave that topic for some other occasion.

Our Twitter account and other social media accounts, on the other hand, are mostly managed by me. The reason for this is pretty simple. Although I can’t write a decent article that would be interesting to Magento community, I can easily spread the information about the article to that community. I know where they are, I know how to engage them.

Having several people to manage a single social media account on services like Twitter can be extremely complicated but it’s not impossible.

You would have to make sure you have some sort of task management, to avoid duplicated answers to questions, duplicated engaging of same people and so on. You need this to avoid situations like this one:

• A company engages a target via Twitter.
• During the conversation, another employee also engages the same target with the same company’s account, not knowing that his college has engaged him already.
• Even if we set aside the probability of misunderstandings that would arise, it would look extremely unprofessional for you.
• Your target would feel unimportant or even worse, spamed.

If you’re going to put more then one person on your social media account, make sure they have proper task management and a clean communication channel.

Image attributions: image 1, image 2.

]]> I often see articles on topic of how to get massive amounts of followers on twitter. They mostly describe the techniques that are on a thin line between fair use of social media in marketing purposes and unethical spamming.

Twitter is a social network before all and there are lots of different people on it with different interests. It’s not really important how many followers you have, it’s all about who your followers are.

Let’s say you sell products to interior designers, like our client Pebble Hill Designs does. It would be more important for you to have hundreds of interior designers as your twitter followers then thousands of random folks.

It’s pretty simple math, if your followers are people that are really interested into your services / products, you are more likely to convert them into customers and they are also more likely to retweet your messages and engage you into discussions.

Getting targeted followers on twitter basically starts as any other marketing activity:

1. Define your targeted audience and do some research on them. Find out who are the most influential twitter users among your targeted audience, have a look on what they tweet about and why do people follow them.

2. Use twitter search to find conversations about your niche, services or products. Don’t just search one hashtag and think you’re done. Be creative, try to find any natural order of words that would be used in discussions about your services, products or your general niche.

3. Engage your targeted audience into conversations. This is what social media is all about, conversations. If you manage to give quality info and answer questions about services or products that you also offer, your reputation will grow with time and so will your follower base.

4. Don’t spamm, mass follow, and don’t try to sell your products / services all the time. People don’t like to be sold to. If someone is asking to be recommended a service provider, offer your services, however, don’t just send out spamm to anyone that fits the profile of your targeted audience.

5. Follow the most influential twitter users in your targeted niche and pay extra attention to them. Try to engage them into communication as much as possible. If they communicate with you a lot, you will eventually get lots of followers from them.

6. Use the hashtags in your tweets. It will make your tweets more visible in twitter search and you might get some nice quality targeted followers this way. Once again, don’t abuse these tags, only use them when it’s obvious they fit the context of your tweet.

7. Be active in twitter’s social events such as #FollowFriday. You have to give in order to receive. Hashtag users you find interesting or influential with #FollowFriday tag every Friday and you might be lucky to receive some reciprocal Friday love. This is one of the best ways to get quality and relevant followers on your Twitter account.

8. Join in twitter directories under appropriate category (hashtag). One of the best known twitter directories is WeFollow.

If you liked this article, you can follow Inchoo via twitter. Thanks!

]]> For the past few days there has been some open discussions around the web professional communities about the role of forums in modern internet marketing. It appears that new marketers strongly underestimate the power of forums and look at them as an old marketing tool that will soon be extinct.

I believe forums will not be eliminated by the modern social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter. Forums have been here since mid nineties and survived many web revolutions and Renaissances. If you look at the modern social media you will see not much has been invented on the web since the appearance of modern forum software. New social media websites are in the core, nothing more then differently organized good old forums.

Chris Crum of the WebProNews wrote a nice article yesterday about forums and social media and asked for feedback. As you can see, people tend to agree that forums are still very good source of relevant traffic that new internet marketers should not underestimate.

For better visualization of what I’m going to talk about, I made this table / graph.

If we would assume that all this elements are actually valued the same, we could sum things up and say that forums have 17 stars while modern social media channels earned themselves only 13 stars. This leads us to conclusion that forums are still even more useful as internet marketing tool then most modern social media networks.

SEO value of links

Both forums and most of the modern social networks have really low SEO link value. Forum links have been devalued by major search engines for quiet some time now while most social networks links are either no followed or, even worse, not indexed at all. Using these channels for SEO value is mostly only good for getting indexed but you will get *some* link juice out of it so it’s not completely negligible.

I’d still give a little bit of advantage to the forums in this paragraph as they give you a really good control over the anchors you will use for your links and also give you one really important ability, ability to change your mind. At any moment you can change your forum signatures which will automatically edit all of your life’s work on this forum and turn all your posts into the links to your new point of interest, while in most of the social networks out there you don’t have such an ability.

Traffic value of links

When we’re comparing forums to the social networks in traffic point of view, both of them have really strong and different arguments on their sides. While social networks are winner in short term traffic benefit, forums totally win in the long run. If we look at the modern social networks you will see they are really fast. Once you post a link, you will get a few hours of benefit out of it and that’s a s good as it gets. They have an advantage in general traffic volume potential so forums can’t compete with them in the short period of time. However, most of these networks are not even indexed by search engines and if they are they rank so purely, you shouldn’t expect to get any traffic from a link you posted last year on a social network, while forums have great potential to bring you low but long lasting traffic income.

Niche targeting

Forums have been here for a really long time. This is why there are lots of broad and targeted niche forum communities out there. Social networks on the other hand are still pretty green and new in the niche markets and most of the very targeted markets are still not covered by any social networks. While you can find great social networks in broad niches such as business, you won’t be able to find really targeted social networks with noticeable community volume.

]]> Inchoo team attended a great ecommerce conference called “Etrgovina“. This was the 9th time this conference was organized and it lasted for three days. It was held on Palic lake in Serbia.

Generally, we had lots of fun and met many interesting people. The conference was oriented more to the marketing and business part of ecommerce then to development and technical stuff, which is probably the reason why there were no talks about Magento.

There was a live broadcast over the internet for anyone that couldn’t be there and everything was pretty much covered via twitter tag #etrgovina09. Unfortunately, the conference was in Serbian language so there are no videos or text reports that we can show to non Croatian or Serbian speaking readers. However, we can give you this link to the pictures of the conference, hope you like it!

]]> This is the list of collective knowledge of the top web shop annoyances and frustrations that ordinary web surfers and your potential costumers tend to hate about e-commerce web sites.

I talked with many experienced users and researched many different relevant forum topics to create this ultimate list of most often web shop user experience issues.  If your web shop has any of these, you should seriously consider fixing it as you would probably sell much more. Having any of these reflects in symptoms such as high bounce rates, low conversion rates and negative ROIs.

• Image For Illustration Purposes Only – This is one of the most common issues in the world of e-commerce and users tend to complain about it a lot. If you are not able to provide a valid image of a product (especially in today’s modern age in which you probably have two cameras in each of your pockets) it just shows you don’t care about your costumer experience or, worse, you are trying to hide the actual appearance of the product.

• Not being able to find delivery costs (shipping costs) – User wants to know how much does he have to pay for a product. The user does not care what’s the price of the product without delivery or without taxes, he wants to know how much money does he have to spend on it in total. Do not hide delivery costs from users.

• Flashing flash banners, animated store assistants and similar – If you already brought the visitor to your website, you don’t want to scare them away. Remove these big flashing and annoying banners from your website. Remove the virtual shopping assistants as they are not actually assisting. Users often find them disturbing, more then helpful.

]]> Alexa recently implemented the most useful feature since… well, since the Alexa was first released. I’m talking about ability to see the keywords any website is getting most of their visitors from search engines from.

The feature appears to be generally very accurate, according to the data I have access to. I’m not sure how did they menage to do it and where does the data come from, but accuracy of the Alexa keywords data was something I was most surprised with.

The Alexa rank was never very accurate. With the last big shift in the way Alexa collects data and ranks websites the ranking list became slightly more accurate then it use to be but the list is still not reliable.

It could be said that Alexa ranking is pretty reliable for websites in the top of the list (first few thousand) and as you move to the bigger numbers, the list becomes pretty humorous. The tech and web related websites tend to rank much better then some non tech related websites since Alexa draws it’s data from the toolbar which is most often used by tech guys, web owners and internet marketers.

How can you use Alexa keyword data for your own benefit?

There is almost no business on the web without competitors. If you run a web business it is extremely useful to know from which keywords does your competition draw their visitors. Knowing this data will save you lots of research time and effort and it might give you some ideas for keyword targeting you would never thought of on your own.

By knowing this data you might even find out that some keywords you’re targeting are not worth the effort if you spotted a top competitor on the top of results for the keyword and have data to prove that he does not gain much visitors from it.

]]> I’ve seen many questions about issues related to website localization and multiple languages all over the web. One of the most commonly asked questions is does it count as a duplicated content in the eyes of search engines?

At the SMX Confernece in Sydney Australia, Priyank Garg and Greg Grothaus, Yahoo’s and Google’s search engineers, shared some wisdom with us regarding this common issue.

If you use multiple country domains (ccTLD), even if content is in the same language (identical content) on all of your localized sites (for instance you have it all in English, as it commonly happens with USA, UK and Australia), you will not experience any duplicated content issues / penalties. This is true for both Google and Yahoo, however, you might get some penalty if you abuse this feature (spammy sites) and if you don’t localize your site properly.

A few tips for proper localization of a website:

1. Use Google Webmaster Tools to set a proper website geotargeting.
2. Use ccTLD-s (country specific TLD-s) for localized versions of your websites.
3. Get backlinks from regional sources. Try get listed in some directories specialized for the region you are targeting and try getting some organic backlinks from local websites.
4. Submit the localized website into proper regional category in DMOZ.
5. If possible, translate the website into the language of the region you are targeting, this will actually help a lot.

]]> There is actually no such thing as free website promotion unless you are really lucky. You always have to invest at least some time and effort, and as we all know time equals money which means no promotion is actually free.

However, if you are looking into ways to promote your website online while not spending any money, here are some ways you can do it. Most of these are generally well known but you might find something new and useful.

1. Start a blog. If you already don’t have a blog you have no idea what you’ve been missing. As we all know, content is king and having an ability to deliver fresh, engaging, and interesting content to potential visitors is crucial for any organic SEO success.
2. Be guest author on specialized blog or eZine. You can’t just wait to be invited to write for someone. You should contact respected blogs or web magazines in your industry and ask them if you can be a guest author. In most cases they will allow you to link back to your website and thus for you will gain free promotion. Being a guest author in respected media in your industry is also very good for raising the brand awareness of both you, your company and your services or products. Thanks to Dan in comments, we know about a website that enables you to easily find blogs where you can guest post or find guest authors for your own blog.
3. Get guest authors for your blog. By getting other people to write for you you will save time of writing an article of your own and you will be able to spend that time on promoting your website. In most cases guest author will also promote the article on his own, giving you free promotion. To find guest authors you can search for relevant bloggers and contact them or if you already are established website with community of its own, you can ask your community to participate in blog posting.
4. Comment on other blogs. Most of the blogs will allow for you to make your name on the comment appear as a link to your website/blog. By commenting on relevant blogs you will in most cases bring targeted traffic to your website and raise awareness of your existence to the owner of the blog. If you are investing lots of time and effort into creating valuable content in your comments, the blogger migth decide to award you for the effort and link to you via blogroll. Some of these blogs are “do follow” blogs and commenting on them will provide you with SEO benefit to.
5. Link to relevant content in your articles / blog posts. By linking to other relevant sources you show your give additional value to your content for the readers. Most of the websites track their visit statistics and referral sources and this way you will also raise awareness of your existence in the eyes of your niche. Some of them might be so nice to link back to you in some cases while some websites have automated systems of showing track backs to their articles.
6. Ask bloggers for your product or service reviews. Most of the bloggers are actually looking for something to write about. If your product or service is relevant to the blog’s content, the blogger might agree to test it and write a review of it for free. There is nothing for you to lose, you only need to ask nicely. Send an email to as many relevant bloggers as you can find and ask them to write about you. Eventually, you will get lucky.
7. Create a Facebook page and/or group. Facebook is one of the best social networks out there that you can use in order to bring some targeted traffic to your website. You should strive to create viral marketing effect when dealing with social networks such as facebook. Groups that encourage users to buy your service and / or product will not be very effective. You have to be clever and think of ways to lure people that might be of interest into your products and / or services into your group without being clearly obvious that purpose of the group is to direct traffic to your website and make people buy from you.
8. Create a Facebook application. Facebook applications tend to create even bigger viral effect then facebook groups or pages, especially if you play the cards right. Make something cool and fun that people will love to share and make sure to have a plan on how will you benefit from the application.
9. Use Twitter. Twitter is undeniably the next big thing in social media burning the web with over two million users right now! The ability to promote your product via twitter almost effortlessly should not be ignored. It’s really easy to gain followers on twitter and once you have a nice number of followers it’s as good as an RSS feed. You should read some useful tips on how to use twitter in marketing purposes and how to gain twitter followers.
10. Use LinkedIn. While Facebook and Twitter both have huge user base and potential to bring millions of visitors at your website’s doorstep, LinkedIn can sometimes prove to be much more ROI effective. LinkedIn is a network full of highly educated professionals from different industries and in some industries it will send much more targeted audience then other social networks.
11. Create a LinkedIn group. And by creating a group I don’t mean create a group about your company. Try going much broader and create a group that concentrates on your entire industry. Invest some time and effort to bring people into your group and once you built yourself a nice community you might be lucky enough and your group starts growing on its own. If you succeed you will have an army of your industries professionals at your disposal. You will have ability to send emails to entire group and to make any discussion featured and thus for control where the traffic of your group will be sent.
12. Be involved in LinkedIn discussions. The discussions on linked in (group discussions and questions and answers) tend to bring really nice and targeted traffic if you place a relevant link to your blog post or article in it. Try not to look spammy and only link to your articles when they solve the problem someone asked in discussion.
13. Create YouTube channel and post cool videos. YouTube is currently the 2nd largest search engine in the world! Imagine how much traffic you could pull from there especially considering the fact that in most industries competition on YouTube is pretty low compared to the big search engines. You should try not to put on commercials on YouTube (unless they are extremely funny) but instead put something interesting that might go viral. Be sure to always include a link to your website or the relevant article or subpage to the video on your website into the sidebar.
14. Create accounts on other video websites (YouTube clones). There are really lots of similar websites that don’t actually have as much traffic as YouTube does but they also have much less competition. If you already made a video for YouTube it’s not very time consuming to also upload it to other video websites and it’s really worth of effort.
15. Publish press releases. This is not as effective as it use to be but it’s still worth the effort. There are quiet a number of websites that allow you to submit your press release for free. Just Google it and you’ll find more then enough to fill your appetite.
16. Post a Wikipedia article about your company / website / product. Wikipedia tends to rank really well on Google and appears to be really good source of targeted traffic. You’ll have to invest some time and effort into creating the wiki entry as you don’t want your entry to be disapproved (deleted as soon as editor realizes you are just trying to promote yourself). If this is your first time submitting something to wikipedia, you should spend some time researching the similar wiki entries and reading the guidelines.
17. Exchange links. Use search engines to find relevant websites to your industry and contact them in order to try to establish a link exchange. In most cases both websites will benefit from such a exchange as long as you are exchanging links with websites relevant to yours. Avoid exchanging links with spammy and scammy sites.
18. Exchange banners. In some cases you will find banner exchange more efficient then link exchange. The same rules apply here as in link exchange case. Try avoiding the big banner exchange networks and rather concentrate on setting up exchange deals on your own with websites you actually wont to exchange banners with.
19. Submit your website to web directories. There are really lots of web directories that will allow you to list your website on them for free. Try concentrating on biggest ones such as DMOZ and also on really targeted ones for your website’s niche.
20. Submit your website to CSS / design galleries. If you have a nice looking website design, it’s a shame not to share it with the world. Some of these galleries are really popular and could bring nice traffic. There are also specialized galleries for different type of website such as Magentique (Magentique is showcase of web stores made with Magento ecommerce platform).
21. Use Digg. Recent stats show that digg’s traffic is declining, however, it still remains one of the most valuable sources of free and targeted traffic you can find online. It’s not enough just to submit the article to Digg, it won’t hit the front page by some magical IT voodoo dance. You have to build yourself a network of friends on Digg which requires a lot of time and effort.
22. Use social bookmarks. You should use social bookmark services and be active part of community. The most popular ones are also free to use and only thing you invest is your time and effort. You should try with StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us. Also using less popular social networks might bring you some traffic easier as competition is lower.
23. Be active member of your niche’s forum communities. Most forums will allow you to put a link to your website in your forum signature. Some of them will even allow multiple links in signature which means you can also build some deep links easily. In some cases you will be able to mention some of your blog posts or articles in forum discussions when they actually solve the problem asked in discussion. This will bring highly targeted free traffic to your website.