Since the inception of eCommerce websites there have been a growing number of brick and mortar businesses expanding their sales online. With this growing trend it means more competition and less market share. I have mentioned that eBlogs are becoming more popular as well (an integration of an eCommerce shop with a blog) and I spoke more about it in the post I wrote: e-Commerce With Integrated Blog (e-Blogging). The question Internet businesses face is: how do you stand out from the crowd?
Design and User Friendliness
This is almost too obvious but I still see poorly designed websites lacking user friendliness and easy to use navigations. A well designed website is easy to use, looks professional and instils confidence in potential customers. This reassures them that they can safely buy on your website knowing their products or services will be delivered on time. Furthermore a professional website conveys high quality and strong branding, just how you would attend a business meeting in a proper suit and not a pair of Billabong shorts.
Ease of use of your website is equally important. If a potential customer can not navigate through your website easily and find the information they are looking for, they will go to the next website on the list. It is very easy to lose a sale because of poorly designed navigations. One way to test the ease of use of your website is to watch friends and family while they complete a few simple task of purchasing and finding specific information. A few things to observe are:
Do they have to keep backtracking through the website?
Can they find what they are looking for quickly?
Can they easily click on images to enlarge the product?
Does the search function work and return the appropriate results?
Are the images of high quality without sacrificing time to load the website?
Is it easy to add items to the shopping cart?
Is the checkout easy to use?
Additionally, ask them for their feedback and thank them for their time. Be sure to take these findings and implement them to your website. Once you get this right, you will have a higher conversion rate.
Show Your Testimonials
Testimonials is a powerful tool for any Internet business. In the past I’ve utilised this tool to promote and market my products for Dragonboating and it increased my sales by two fold simply by having them displayed. Prospective customers will also feel confident to purchase from you because they see positive feedback from others. With the right mix of testimonials including website’s easy of use, quality of product, speed of delivery and fast resolution of issues, it will cover all aspects of the buying process for a prospective customer. So next time when a customer receives their product, follow up with them 7 days later and ask them to write a testimonial for your website.
Help Customers Find Your Delivery And Returns Information
It’s important to show a link to your delivery and returns page which should be displayed prominently on your website. Most customers want to know whether or not you can deliver to their location, how much it will cost them and how you will handle returns if there is a problem. I have had customers tell me how frustrating it is to find the cost of delivery at the end of the check out page, which is why I have it clear displayed on the website. It shows you are transparent and operate with integrity. This builds stronger trust with your customers as well. They will thank you later in repeat and referral business.
Extra eBlogging Tips
With these basic principals in place, your eBlog should start appealing to more customers. We want to give them that extra incentive for them to buy from you because you will be competing with other popular websites in the marketplace.
Offer Customers To Join Your Loyalty Program: A great way to attract more customers and to keep them coming back for more is to encourage them to be part of your loyalty program. In the past I have set up e-Commerce websites with an option to reward them with 1 point for every dollar they spend. The more points they accumulate, the more chances of earning a nice reward. Your customer will be able to exchange their points for a new gadget – an iPod for example or a product in your range.
Reward Purchases: You can reward customers who come back and order from you by giving them a discount on their next order. The more purchases they make, the more discounts they receive. It encourages them to purchase from you every time.
Bulk Discounts: If you sell products that people buy in large quantities consider offering a bulk discount rate. It’s a great way to encourage larger orders and higher turnover of product for your Internet business. We love to think that we have saved money, even though we have spent twice as much to get that discount. Aldi, the supermarket chain is a classic example of buy in bulk and save, which encourages shoppers to spend more.
The UPOD principle (Under Promise, Over Deliver): This is a principle I practise all the time in my businesses. Let’s say you offer normal delivery to deliver a product, which takes between 3 – 5 days to receive. What if you sent the product overnight via courier and it arrived the next day. Would your customer be ecstatic to receive their product earlier than expected? Of course they would! They would refer it to their friends and family because of fast delivery and good customer service. This is the under promise and over deliver (UPOD) principle that you can apply in your Internet business.
There are a lot of similarities between a brick and mortar business compared to an online business. Businesses that offer good products and excellent customer service are able to capture market share much faster with smarter techniques. They will be the businesses that succeed and do well online. Gone are the days where you just put an eBlog website and hope for the best. You need to implement strategies and be smart to attract good quality customers for your Internet business, then you will reap the rewards.
Lately I’ve been exploring different e-Commerece web applications and e-Commerce plugins for WordPress. Since this blog mainly focuses on how to create profit from an Internet business, the first thing is to choose which web application is suitable for your Internet business. There’s not a one size fits all because each Internet business has different needs and requirements. Though, the foundation (system) can be the same across the board, whether you choose to use WordPress as a customer management system (C.M.S) or an e-Commerce solution such as Magento, OsCommerce or Zencart. All of these systems work very well and they are constantly being updated and developed for users.
I Am Still Not Convinced With Using WordPress e-Commerce Plugins
I wrote a post comparing Using A Blog Vs. Using A E-commerce Website?, which discusses the differences between a blog and an e-commerce system. Then over the last few weeks I’ve been writing reviews looking at the different e-Commerce plugins available for WordPress. If you want to see the various reviews, read the articles section under eBlog Reviews. What I am exploring today are the different options available to integrate a blog into an existing e-Commerce system. If you have read all of my reviews about the different e-Commerce plugins for WordPress, you will see that I am still not completely convinced. WordPress for blogging is a fantastic system and is more than capable of handling large volumes of data. Though, once you add on an e-Commerce plugin it does not have the same functionality in comparison to an e-Commerce system, which are more robust to handle large consumer transactions. Now, the big challenge is, most e-Commerce systems do not have a blog interface built-in, which raises the question of how to integrate an e-commerce system with a blog?
Why Have An e-Commerce System Integrated With A WordPress Blog?
Over the years, web users have found blogs to be more compelling to look at than just shopping sites. Most blogs have written reviews and information relating to a product or service, allowing any web user to do their research before making a purchase. Imagine that you were looking to buy the latest iPhone and you wanted to look at some reviews and read other people’s opinions before spending your money. If you typed “iPhone review” in Google, the first site that appears is usually a review site such as Cnet or Smart Company, which all run a blogging application such as WordPress. These review sites usually only provide a review and opinions, but don’t have a link saying where to buy. This is where having an e-Commerce system integrated with a WordPress blog can benefit your Internet business. Instead of the customer going to other websites to read reviews and opinions about the product (by that time they may have forgotten your website), you can have your own reviews and comments linked to your products. This encourages the customer to stay on your website and helps them save time looking for other places for reviews and opinions.
Additionally, the benefit of having a WordPress blog integrated with your e-Commerce system, is that it helps to increase your search engine rankings. With higher search engines rankings, your Internet business will be found much quicker and also help with becoming an authoritative site.
How To Integrate An e-Commerce System With A WordPress Blog?
Luckily for us, most e-Commerce systems have a special add-on package which has been developed by experienced programmers. At this point, I would recommend you hire a web developer to install or modify an e-Commerce system because it will can save time for you to focus on other important business tasks. Though I will explain to you how it generally works with some systems I have test:
Magento: This is a relatively new e-Commerce system that is taking the e-Commerce Open Source market by storm. It’s very user friendly and is very powerful, just like how WordPress has been very successful for many Internet businesses. Magento has an add-on extension called Lazzymonks WordPress Integration 2.61, which allows WordPress to be integrated with their system. You can easily access WordPress from Magento’s administration as well and would save you the hassle of logging out of Magento and logging into WordPress.
OsCommerce: This system has been around since March 2000, which shows a long history of e-Commerce development for them. OsCommerce also has an add-on which is quite easy to install – the WordPress Integration. Unfortunately this add-on does require you to log onto WordPress separately. Once you have installed WordPress with OsCommerce you will be able to still post your articles as normal and all the posts will be integrated into the OsCommerce theme you choose.
ZenCart: This is the system I have been using for many years for many of my clients and own e-Commerce shops. It is easy to set up the WordPress On Zencart add-on with a few installation files to upload. Though, I found it wasn’t matching the style of the shopfront at first with this basic add-on. I did hired a programmer to modify some files which generated a good result in the end.
With many Internet businesses seeing the growth of web users searching on blogs and search engines today, it would be unfortunate to see you lose sales because you did not have a blog integrated with your e-Commerce shop. There are great benefits with having both these systems integrated into your Internet business and someday e-Commerce with integrated blogs will be the new community called e-Blogging.
Amongst the other e-commerce plugins I have reviewed such eShop and WP e-Commerce, YAK Shopping Cart has come to my attention and the author Jason R Briggs describes the plugin as follows:
YAK is an open source, shopping cart plugin for WordPress. It associates products with weblog entries, so the post ID also becomes the product code. It supports both pages and posts as products, handles different types of product through categories, and provides customisable purchase options (cheque or deposit, basic credit card form, standard PayPal integration, PayPal Payments Pro, and Authorize.net).
Therefore I was interested in testing to see how it would compare to the other plugins I’ve tried. So let’s get straight into the pros and cons of this plugin.
THE PROS
Includes Sales Reports And Graphs YAK Shopping Cart comes with a Sales Report option under the Tools menu. In comparison to other plugins it is definitely a positive with more reporting available to see sales progress. The reports in this plugin are:
Best sellers for the year
Best sellers for the month
A simple graph to see the sales for the month
A Good Range Of Payment Options Available YAK Shopping Cart has many payment options readily available and it’s built into the plugin. Unlike other e-commerce plugins which are limited or require you to purchase additional payment gateways, YAK covers a majority of them. This plugin offers:
Manual Credit Card Processing
Credit on Accounts Receivable
Authorize.net
Paypal and Paypal Pro
Google Checkout
As long as you have an account with the above payment merchants, it’s not too hard to link your shopping cart to them. Though, I’ve noticed they are still lacking payment options such as cash, cheque / money order and cash on delivery. Also YAK does offer a secure SSL connection for all of the above payments.
THE CONS
Documentation And Help Is Hard To Find
I found the plugin quite easy to install but found it very hard to navigate through YAK’s administration panel. It is partly due to a lack of documentation on how to use this plugin. Without documentation most people would struggle to use YAK and would not find it to be user friendly. Additionally I was very surprised to find I had to pay for a handbook to get the documentation, giving the impression the plugin was designed solely to make money not from usage but documentation. I would have rather paid for a plugin with documentation than be given a plugin that you have to waste time figuring how to use it yourself.
Lack Of Functionality For Products
After setting up a product in a post and linking it to YAK I’ve found it to be really basic and lacking a lot of functionality. There are no fields to insert product images. It was not easy to find the fields for obvious product attributes such as weight and quantity. I felt lost when trying to add products.
Not User Friendly And Lack Of Design On The Front End
As I have mentioned already without documentation a user has to spend time working out how this plugin works. What makes it worst is that each section in YAK’s administration is not self explanatory. At first after installing the plugin I went to find a menu called YAK, but after realising there was nothing there I found it had been added to the Tools menu. It added 3 new links: Orders, Products and Sales Reports. I think the developers at YAK thought I could work out how to use this, but they were wrong. It made more frustrated!
To mention, there is a YAK link under Settings which does allow you to change the options for Basic, Products, Download, Payment, Special, Advanced, Shipping, Promotions. It did alleviate some of my frustration when I found this, but I still couldn’t see much on the front end. As you can see, a very poorly designed plugin and lack of user friendliness on both the front end and administration.
Conclusion
I decided to let this plugin go as I had spent over 3 hours just understanding how the plugin could fit into a WordPress blog. Overall there is a lack of user-friendliness and without the user manual it is very difficult to work out yourself. For users who want something simple and a shopping cart that works straight away, YAK is definitely not your solution. I would go back to using WP e-Commerce or eShop any day.
WP e-Commerce plugin for WordPress seems to be one of the most commonly used (currently 175,000+ downloads) shopping cart system across the board. I’ve been testing the latest version 3.6.10 and it has a lot of additional features compared to review on eShop I wrote recently.
The WP e-Commerce WordPress Plugin was developed by a New Zealand company called Instinct. Since this company has dedicated funds and resources to this plugin, I presumed they would want to make money from selling this plugin. Lucky for us, they didn’t and have been giving away this plugin for free. Though, the first thing you will see on the front page of their website is the following:
Home of the famous WordPress e-Commerce Plugin
The WordPress e-Commerce plugin is a state-of-the-art e-Commerce platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards and usability. It is both free and priceless at the same time.
Now, being the state of the art e-commerce plugin is a bold statement and I have tested out numerous e-commerce software that I will be comparing this too. Let me review this plugin to test if their statement is true.
THE PROS
Easy Installation
It took me less than 5 minutes to upload and install without any errors or conflict with other plugins so far. I could easily find the newly created section in WordPress administration called e-Commerce. It contained Sales, Products, Groups, Variation, Marketing and Settings links making it very easy to find what you need. I am glad they did this and made it simple.
Well Defined Categories / Groups Section
There is a self-explanatory tab that says Groups which allows you to add unlimited categories and subcategories to your shop. It’s very standard to see this available in e-commerce systems and it’s great to see this part of WP e-Commerce plugin. In comparison to other WordPress shopping cart plugins they utilise pages to separate categories and it becomes a total nightmare without proper documentation.
Adding Products Is Easy
Adding products is easy when you click on the Products link. It offers a wide range of settings to customise your products including price and stock controls, shipping and weight settings, product variations, merchant notes, product downloads, coupon codes and promotions. These are very important when you have different products to sell and helps you distinguish between A and B product.
Widgets make customisation a breeze
What I’ve found quite handy are the customisable widgets that you can install on your sidebar as part of this plugin. A common widget people have on their website is the shopping cart. Having this displayed allows a customer to see what they have currently selected, then head to the checkout section to pay for all their items. The new widgets you’ll see in this plugin are: Shopping Cart, Groups, Categories, Price Range, Product Specials, Latest Products, Price Range and Donations. You can select anyone of those to display on WordPress at any time.
Profit Using Marketing And Cross Promotion Tools Provided
Under the Marketing link it allows you to offer coupon codes for any product in your range. It’s a great way to encourage your customers to shop with the coupon code to follow through with a purchase. It’s a definite plus for me to have this tool built into the system. Some additional options you can switch on are:
Cross Sales within your shop
Show Share This (Social Bookmarks)
How Customer Found Us Survey option
Many Payment Gateways Available and SSL Connection Included
WP e-Commerce comes with a few pre-installed payment gateways including Chronopay, PayPal, PayPal – Express, Google Checkout, and manual payment (for cash or money orders). If you want other payment gateways they offer such as Authorize.net or eWay, then you will have to purchase the Gold Cart Module. Also all transactions are processed securely through an SSL connection if you have SSL installed on your server.
An e-Commerce Plugin That Is Free
Lastly to top off the PROS, WP e-Commerce Plugin is FREE and it’s worthwhile to try it if you are considering using a shopping cart facility in WordPress.
THE CONS
Lack Of Documentation
I am quite surprised from a company that has devoted resources and time to develop this plugin that they do not have a detailed documentation available. Especially when programmers develop a software there needs to be a way to track back and make changes, which is where documentation helps. So I was a bit disappointed. Their website has a very good “description” of each section but lacks in details on how to install, modify and add other functions. If you’re a beginner and do not have any programming experience then I would forget trying to tweak any of the files yourself because you will get frustrated reading through poorly organised code, with insufficient comments. I suspect they want to keep the details of the code within the company so they can offer add-on solutions they can sell.
Invoice Printing Is Not Available
This may sound simple to implement, but I am very surprised that this is not standard in their plugin. Most e-commerce software have options to allow you to print invoices, packaging slips (which is available) and labels. This is one area I believe they have totally overlooked. How do I print out an invoice to send to a customer or a label to put on my shipping box? I know you can just hit print on your Internet browser screen but what if I want to customise the invoice or label in different sizes? This is an area that Instinct needs to look at.
Inclusive of Tax Option Is Not Available
For business owners operating in Australia like myself, our customers expect that prices displayed have tax included. Unfortunately the plugin forces you to add tax separately at the checkout and only show prices excluding tax on each item. It’s another issue that needs to be address for future upgrades.
Lacking Reports
If you click on the Sales link, it will take you to a page showing sales for the month and columns of basic data, such as sales, pending transactions and closed transactions. There are no reports to say where your customers come from, no reports for sales of dollar amounts, quantities sold and customer item was sold to. These are usually standard within an e-commerce software and also very important to have if you’re running a business. One just has to look at ZenCart’s reporting system to get an idea of how comprehensive their system is.
Lack Of Template Options
A few other reviewers have mentioned about the lack of template options available. At the moment there are 4 or 5 of them, and most of them have proven to be not very useful. Additionally if you have a customised template for your blog, integration of this plugin can be a real nightmare because there are no detailed documentation on how to edit certain areas of this plugin.
Conclusion
I am still on the hunt to find a state of the art e-commerce plugin for WordPress. I think Instinct have made a very bold statement about their plugin and personally I still see further development needed for this plugin to be a complete turn-key solution for an e-commerce site. For a beginner to use this plugin it maybe sufficient enough to do a few transactions per month. But for a business owner, I would still stick to other solutions available such as ZenCart, OsCommerce and Magento.
This is where the profits are really made and it’s important to understand how it links together with the front end of the sales funnel as discussed in the previous articles. Furthermore I will provide you with an example of how the back end process works and in a future article you will see practically how to apply the back end to your Internet business.
What Is The Back End?
It’s very easy to use these terms in your Internet business and assume that most people know what it means. I want to go back to basics and explain what the back end is. When a prospect purchases your products or services at the front end for the first time you are building a relationship with them and they become a customer of your business. Hopefully if your products or services have provided value for them, then they will be more inclined to come back and purchase more. This is where the back end starts to take place and offer your customers higher priced items. As mentioned before your back end is your most profitable avenue.
The back end consists of products and services of significant value to a customer which generates higher profit margins and referral sales. It’s basically meeting the same needs for a customer with different media. Examples of products provided in the back end are
CDs, DVDs, MP3s or Podcasts (audi0)
Video or Movies (visual)
Conferences, Seminars, Workshops or Retreats (live)
Phone Calls or Coaching (personal or private)
Essentially the biggest difference between the back end and front end of the sales funnel is how a customer perceives your product or service and the price they pay. These customers have already sampled your products and services at the front end and because they have enjoyed them so much, they are eager to purchase more from you. This is an ideal customer to have and it makes the sales process much easier.
Back End Profits
Most of the time front end products are sold for under $100, whilst back end products are priced in the range of a few hundred to a few thousand. The idea behind having these different prices is to create value and offer something extra to a customer. In turn the back end has significantly higher profit margins compared to the front end. As a result your relationship with them is stronger and they become a loyal customer who will make repeat purchases and referrals. Not only will you be more profitable but have the additional time to look after these customers who will become your AAA client base.
Let’s take a look at how a back end works successfully and helps profit an Internet business. A friend of mine recently wrote an eBook on the topic of “Saving For The Rainy Day” and created an exceptional full-page sales advertisement on his website. This eBook was actually given away for free even though it costed him a couple hundred to get the cover designed and to have it proof read. Since it was given away for free, readers logged onto his website and over 10,000 people downloaded the book and subscribed to his database. This is the front end of the sales funnel.
A few days later, he sent an email out to these people to offer a special promotion to attend a one-day “How To Build Wealth Saving” seminar that was valued at $199. The offer was to attend the seminar for only $49. It created such a buzz that over 100 people came along, profiting him almost $5,000 minus the costs of renting the venue. It was the first of many. But ultimately his goal was not to run the seminars, but to find potential students to coach which he could charge $10,000 a year to coach them to build their wealth. Essentially that’s what the back end process allowed my friend to do and helps build a long term sustainable Internet business.
The Future Of Back End Internet Businesses
Many successful Internet businesses with a significant back end today will outlast many other businesses without it for many decades to come. Personally when I ran my Dragonboat business I did not have a strong back end which means there was still huge potential. This raised questions such as:
What are all the additional purchases my customer should be making in using their existing paddle?
How can I offer additional services to help maintain their dragonboat equipment?
By simply asking those questions, it allowed me to see what additional back end products and services could be offered to generate more revenue. Take some time to ask yourself what additional products and services can I offer to my existing customers? Please add your comments below as I would love to hear what your thoughts are.
In Spreading The Word: Turbocharge Your Traffic, I discussed about the different ways of driving more traffic to your Internet business using social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. Once you have an increased amount of traffic to your website, what do you do next? In today’s post I will be talking about how to convert this traffic into leads which will be part one of a three part series of Converting Traffic Into Sales.
For reference, I will be using the term “sales funnel” instead of “converting traffic into sales” for simplicity.
To understand how the sales funnel works we look will look at it from a systematic process, starting at where your prospects come from, to how we will pro-actively guide them through the sales process and become a long-term client. Before any of this can happen, we need to look at how to capture these prospects into a database using some creative flair.
Generating Leads From Traffic
Generating Leads is the most challenging, though fun aspect of the sales funnel. It requires constant testing and monitoring using endless proven methods, which are only limited by your resources and imagination. Where we capture all of this information is from the front-end, or the face of your business on the Internet. As soon as a prospect is interested in a product or service you may offer, we want to qualify and encourage them to opt-in on your website. When this occurs, it starts the first step of the sales funnel and begins to transform an everyday web surfer into a lead showing their interest in receiving more information.
There are many ways for a person to opt-in on your website and it’s crucial to have these mechanisms set up to begin generating leads. Here are some examples of how other Internet businesses capture leads:
Subscribing to a blog via RSS subscription
Signing up for a Free Report such as my Internet Business Blueprint located in the column on the right
Ticking a box to receive further information when purchasing an product or service from another site. For example, telephone companies such as Telstra always has a little tick box allowing you to opt-in to receive further marketing material whenever you complete a transaction with them.
When a potential prospect opts-in to your website, then they are agreeing to receive information from you. This is called permission marketing and it was first coined by Seth Godin. If you haven’t read his book Permission Marketing, you can get grab a copy of it on his website or buy it at any book store.
Now I must point out, some Internet marketers have been very successful in selling their products straight off the front-end and have made a lot of money doing so. Though you have to see what type of authority they have in the market and the systems they have in place to do this. I can assure you it has taken them many years and lots of resources to set this up and it’s not an overnight get rich story. Rich Schefren is a classic example of this and has extremely refined front-end and back-end systems that help him continue to generate profits even if his not working. My point here is, not to start selling any products to your new leads but to offer them value through content and building strong rapport with them first. The front-end is a mechanism to generate and qualify leads for your Internet business and is probably the least profitable.
In the next Converting Traffic Into Sales article I’ll go into more detail about how the back-end process works together with front-end and you will realise that the front-end are mostly ways to generate leads and are not necessarily profit centers. You will also learn why the back-end process will be the most important aspect for the long term growth of your Internet business and how it will outlast your competition.
For many people who are just starting out or have been running an Internet business for some time, driving traffic to their website is a key factor in marketing products and services. The more traffic gained, the more expose to your products and services. Furthermore, traffic isn’t the end result, it’s converting this traffic into sales. I will talk about how to convert this traffic into sales tomorrow, but for now I’ll show you some great ways to turbocharge your traffic using the latest technologies: (by the way, these are not in any order and try the ones that would fit your Internet business model)
Twitter Twitter, a highly talked about social networking tool has done wonders for many Internet marketers and you either use it or turn a blind eye to it. I started using it only a couple of weeks ago and it’s helped increase my traffic by up to 500% in a few days, follow me at Twitter to see. It is easy to join and sends out a short 140 character message to all your followers letting them quickly see what you are currently doing. It works well if you approach this strategically by attracting people to follow you from your target market. If you have a blog, then tweet your posts automatically using a WordPress plugin called Bird Feeder. It works wonders and Twitter is also a great way to monitor what people are saying about your products and services.
Linkedin
To join Linkedin, simply create a profile and you will be promoted a professional online network. Linkedin mainly targets business people allowing them to stay in touch with industry professionals. It’s great for people changing jobs and looking for business opportunities. Furthermore make sure you promote your website if your an Internet business. Many people look for products and services via Linkedin as well, and usually refer others to your website if it’s not relevant to them.
WordPress Blog
If you’re reading this post, you may not know but you are actually reading it from a WordPress Blog. This is an excellent way to promote your ideas and get your messages out on the Internet. Also search engines love blogs because they provide new content on a regular basis and that’s what people want, new fresh ideas to read about. It helps drive organic traffic to your website and builds your ranking on search engines.
Digital Press Releases
Have you ever wondered how people get their stories in newspapers, radio and other media channels? Lots of journalists nowadays look at digital press releases listed on sites such as PRWeb, Pressbox or PRLog to write their articles. Create a news story for your Internet business and submit it to generate free publicity and traffic to your website.
Web 2.0 Social Sharing
Have you noticed after reading an article there are icons and a button that say “Share This“? It’s commonly used in blogs and if a reader likes your article then they click on it and it will automatically distribute it via many of the Web 2.0 social networks. So why not add a simple social “Share This” tool to your website? If you want to also learn how to make money from Web 2.0, read my free report: “Make Money From The New Web 2.0″.
Social Networking Presence
Leverage social networks such as Facebook and Myspace by creating a fan page for people to see. Promote yourself and Internet business by developing a personality and brand which people will associate you to. So whenever they visit your fan page then your website they will see a consistent branding across the board and will rave on about you to friends and family.
Create A Mash Up
Feature news and videos from your industry by streaming free content onto your website. Yahoo Pipes allows you to pull in RSS feeds for news and YouTube helps you create and feature videos on your website. It helps drive more traffic from different sources in your market and increase your presence on search engines.
Crowdstorming
By asking your clients what they want you get free ideas on what products or services to create for them. You can leverage their needs and turn them into articles which you can post onto your blog. If there are enough people who demand for these needs, then you have yourself a product and more business will come along your way by simply asking a question.
Over the next few weeks I will be reviewing the different plugins available for e-commerce users who want to keep their WordPress blog and want to integrate a shopping cart to their site. Today I am reviewing the eShop Plugin by Quirm
Recently I installed a copy of the latest eShop plugin, version 3.0.0 onto a test site to trial the store before allowing it to go live. I was pleasantly surprised how simple eShop is and well integrated into WordPress. The HELP section in the administration proved to be quite helpful and I was able to get the shop up and running within 30 minutes.
PROS OF ESHOP PLUGIN Allows For Featured and Special Products
Most ecommerce sites have this ability and it’s a good thing eShop implemented this module. It allows us to feature any products and promote any products on special.
Simple Ordering System
I’ve run Zencart and OsCommerce for various e-commerce stores in the past and they are somewhat quite advanced and definitely not for the faint hearted. The first time I used those stores it took me almost a week to learn how to use them. The admin section of eShop is basic and simple to use, showing the most important menu that we want to know when a customer has purchased a product from us – the order page. It has pending, awaiting payment, shipped, active and deleted options to mark the order and allows you to add comments in each process (a very handy field to have when tracking orders)
Google Feed Base
This is a plus, since most e-commerce sites don’t utilise Google Feed as much as they should. It’s very similar to RSS feeds, though instead of having posts and content syndicated into the Feed, it allows products to be syndicated and helps promote your store products on Google.
Customised Layout or CSS Styling
New in this version is the ability to customise your layout of the store and I know that this is very handly for me. It’s especially handy when your blog is customised and you want to keep similar colours and fonts consistent through the shopping cart.
CONS OF ESHOP PLUGIN Limited Payment Methods and Payment Gateway Integration
For beginners using eShop, having Paypal, Payson and cash maybe enough to sell your products. Though when you are dealing with customers wanting to pay directly with their credit card, only has cheque or money order facilities, or wants to directly transfer money into your bank account, then eShop is lacking in this area. I hope they will be adding more payment options in the near future.
Unable To Print Invoices From Admin
If you don’t have Paypal or Payson and only accept cash via eShop, there is no function for you to print an invoice and send to the customer. Even if you needed a hard copy one as a packaging slip and one for invoicing, eShop doesn’t have that facility. If they add this function later on I hope it will automatically create an invoice in PDF and email it to the customer.
No Sales Reports
Reporting in eShop is lacking and there’s no where to see your overall sales on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. It’s important to know how much business is coming in from your shop and most e-commerce software has at minimum a sales report function.
Unable To Edit An Invoice If An Error Has Been Made By A Customer or refund an item
If a customer at no fault chooses the wrong item by mistake then it should be simple to edit the order and update it to the correct item. eShop doesn’t allow for this and furthermore there is no option in admin to offer refunds if a customer decides to cancel. The process becomes tedious because you have to delete the order and either start again or the order is completed deleted when you just want to refund a customer.
How Would I Rate eShop?
Overall eShop has a lot of pros and can benefit a first time user allowing them to sell some of their products online. An important aspect that I believe they need to improve on is to offer more payment gateway options. Though, there are still a lot of developmental issues to overcome to get it up to comparable e-commerce solutions such as Zencart and OsCommerce. I would still stick with fully functional e-commerce solutions over eShop if I have hundreds of products to sell and a large database to manage and run the WordPress blog separately.
I have mentioned in the last couple of months that I’ve been part of the NEIS program and have been attending the small business management course provided by BEC. During the course I’ve put together a very detailed business plan for my business idea, which is also part of this website that I created. Here’s a video presentation of my business plan:
On Saturday I went to check out the Travel Expo with my partner to get some ideas on places to go for a mini retirement. There were a lot people in the expo and lots of different stands offering travel packages to multiple travel destinations. Normally entry fees were $15 per person, though we were lucky to have found a special voucher that was printed off from the Internet so we entered for free. We also entered a few competitions to have a chance at winning a holiday and saw Natalie Gruzlewski at the Getaway booth promoting a stay at the Hilton hotel in Sydney valued at $900 for two nights. I knew these competitions were marketing tactics to get your email address and contact details for them to market more products to you later on, but I didn’t think too much and did it for fun.
We searched for tropical island destinations and some interesting sight seeing places that we could travel to. One place that caught our eyes were to Cook Islands. It looks like a beautiful destination and a romantic location to have our future wedding and possibly mini retirement. I love dreaming of nice places to go to! Another location that we have talked about going to is Japan is to see the snow monkeys at Yamanouchi-town. Since it is snowing in the area I can’t miss any opportunity to go snowboard as well. Japan is a surreal place from what I have heard and many of my friends have mentioned to go during the Spring time where we could see the flowers blossom. I could definitely stay in Japan for a few months to capture both.
Why A Mini Retirement, Not A Holiday?
I’ve been reading a book called The 4-Hour Work Week written by Timothy Ferriss. It has had a huge impact on my perspective of life and work leading to the changes I am gradually implementing into my business. What has really struck me the most is taking mini retirements in life, rather than working really hard now and saving for the day when I can retire. So you must be wondering what is a mini retirement and how does it sound different to a holiday? The biggest difference is, mini retirements allows you to take time off ranging from a month to as long as 15 months, or however long you fancy. It also allows you to develop new hobbies, interests, travel and live in different locations for that period of time with the freedom to pursue whatever you want without having to think about work. Whereas a holiday would last for a few weeks and when you come home, work would be ready to start again.
What my goal is within the next 12 months is to set up the systems for this business to allow me to travel to another country and live there for a period of time. I will not have to worry whether or not my business continues to run without me because it will be automated and provide the income needed to live a lifestyle in another country. I know it sounds very far fetched to some people, I believe it’s achievable!
Since the inception of eCommerce websites there have been a growing number of brick and mortar businesses expanding their sales online. With this growing trend it means more competition and less market share. I have mentioned that eBlogs are becoming more popular as well (an integration of an eCommerce shop with a blog) and I spoke more about it in the post I wrote: e-Commerce With Integrated Blog (e-Blogging). The question Internet businesses face is: how do you stand out from the crowd?
Offer Customers To Join Your Loyalty Program: A great way to attract more customers and to keep them coming back for more is to encourage them to be part of your loyalty program. In the past I have set up e-Commerce websites with an option to reward them with 1 point for every dollar they spend. The more points they accumulate, the more chances of earning a nice reward. Your customer will be able to exchange their points for a new gadget – an iPod for example or a product in your range.
My name is Tyrone Shum and I'm on a journey to outsource and automate my business to allow me to work only 12 hours a week. On this website I share with you my outsourcing strategies to achieve this goal and I have a passion to teach others about what I do. Read more 