electronic business: ecommerce

Showing posts with label ecommerce. Show all posts

Saturday, November 10, 2012

Getting Started with eBay

eBay is a global marketplace and an opportunity for online sellers, including businesses as small as garage-based, family operations — or as large as major ecommerce merchants.
In the second quarter of 2012, eBay's marketplace helped to sell approximately $3.1 billion in clothing, shoes, and accessories; $2.9 billion in electronics, including game consoles, mobile phones, and cameras; and some $2.6 billion in home and garden items.
Add in the dozens of other categories of products sold every day on eBay, and the marketplace facilitated $16.2 billion in transactions in just three months during the second quarter, according to eBay's own data. Put another way, a pair of shoes were sold on eBay every six seconds, an MP3 player sold every 25 seconds, and video game system sold every 24 seconds to name just a few examples.
There is little doubt that eBay is an important sales channel and a good opportunity for some sellers when one considers the massive gross merchandise values mentioned above. The only real question for online entrepreneurs is what to offer on the site. What follows are five suggestions for finding products to sell on Ebay (global marketplace).

Purchase from Existing Suppliers

If a would-be eBay seller already has an online store or a physical store, it may be possible to sell the very items currently in inventory on the eBay marketplace. Be sure to check any dealer agreements before posting to eBay, or any marketplace, as there could be some restrictions or manufacturer approved pricing requirements. Even suppliers that won't normally allow products to be sold on eBay will make exceptions for closeout or clearance products.
Sellers that are just getting started may also purchase items directly from manufacturers or distributors. To locate suppliers, try going directly to the manufacturers' or distributors' websites and searching for dealer information.
There are also many tradeshows for each industry every year, if a seller has the means, going to these shows is an excellent way to locate suppliers.
Finally, there are many sites that specialize in connecting wholesale buyers and sellers. One of the best is Alibaba.

Buy Product at Auctions

Auctions are an excellent source of products to sell on eBay. Storage lockers, estate sales, going out of business auctions, and government surplus auctions are just a few examples of the kinds of sales that eBay merchants should consider.
There are a number of excellent online auction or auction announcement sites. Some of the best of these include the following.

Shop on Craigslist

Craigslist is the Internet's ubiquitous online classified's site. It has pages for many cities and each page lists hundreds of items for sale daily.
For example, entrepreneurs could purchase $1,000 worth of collectable comics from a guy in St. Louis, and make $10,000 selling the individual comics on eBay. Pick up used, but functional laptops from sellers in the Houston and Dallas, and resell them for twice the price on eBay. Get salt-glazed pottery from a grandma in Greensburg, PA, and sell it for a small fortune one item at a time on eBay.

Empty Out Garages

In warm weather, going to garage sales can also be a good way to find products to sell on eBay. An eBay entrepreneur might buy items one at a time, offer to take everything that's left at the end of the day, or even suggest selling some more expensive items on consignment.
A seller may also want to post ads, offering to buy certain kinds of items.

Make Something

eBay sellers may also find some success manufacturing items specifically to sell on the marketplace. These manufactured products may be simple crafts or some decidedly more complex items that have been designed and built via contract manufacturers. Contract manufacturers make items to a designer's specifications.

Summing Up

eBay represents a great opportunity for selling products new or used, and between suppliers, auctions, manufacturing items, shopping on Craigslist, or going to garage sales there is nearly an endless supplier of products to sell.

by http://www.practicalecommerce.com

Thursday, November 8, 2012

7 Steps to Better Ecommerce Marketing

Effective marketing rarely happens accidentally. Successful campaigns are most often the result of good planning and execution.
Planning a marketing campaign can provide an excellent opportunity to focus on a business's unique marketing problems or challenges and the proper actions required to address those very problems or challenges.

Regarding Marketing Planning

Unfortunately, some entrepreneurs simply don't know what a marketing plan is or how it should look. Is there a form one can download and fill out to ensure complete success? Not really. Are there marketing recipes to follow that include search engine marketing combined with pay-per-click ads and a blog post or two? Not exactly.
Instead marketing planning varies greatly from organization to organization or even campaign to campaign. What follows are seven steps that may help ecommerce merchants make better marketing plans. Apply these steps as they make sense in the context of a particular campaign.

1. Know Where the Business Is

Marketing is frequently thought of as "those activities involved in the process of selling products or services to customers." But another possible definition — or perhaps restatement of the definition — might be "those actions required to move a business from its current state to a desired state."
For example, imagine an online store that sells $10,000 worth of digital widgets each month. That store would, however like to sell $20,000 worth of widgets. The store's current state is "sales of $10,000," and its desired state is "sales of $20,000."
Marketing represents those actions required to move a business from its current state to a desired state.

Marketing represents those actions required to move a business from its current state to a desired state.
In the example, it is marketing that moves the retailer from its current state to its desired state — i.e., to double sales.
In application, a good marketing plan should begin with a thorough understanding of the business's current state. What are current sales and inventory levels? Are new products available? What is the business's cash flow or available marketing budget?

2. Know What the Opportunity Is

In marketing textbooks, one will often find the term "total available market" or "TAM." The TAM references the revenue opportunity for a particular product or service. It describes the value of the entire market.
It is unlikely that a single business will have the ability to sell to the entire market. That business will, instead, have some share of the available market. An increase in revenue or sales frequently represents an increase in that market share.
When developing a marketing plan, consider what kind of opportunity may exist. Is the TAM for a particular product or segment growing? Are there opportunities to gain market share.
Knowing how large or small an opportunity is will help with goal setting later.

3. Know Who the Customer Is

Recently, a major clothing manufacturer specializing in work wear and outerwear profiled its typical customers. This manufacturer aggregated information about the customers' ages, occupations, locations, hobbies, and favorite places to shop. Similar customers were grouped together and represented by personas with names like Mike, Matt, and Mary.
The manufacturer then shared this data with many of its retailers, including brick-and-mortar stores, pure-play ecommerce merchants, and multi-channel retailers. This kind of customer information can be very useful.
The Mike persona, which was a 40-year-old, blue collar worker earning around $65,000, was the only customer type shopping at relatively small specialty stores. This fact helped the marketers at those specialty stores do two very different things with their marketing plans. First, they aimed at strengthening relationships with Mike persona customers. Second, they looked at other similar personas, which were not currently shopping at specialty retailers and sought ways to win them over.

4. Have S.M.A.R.T. Goals

Once a marketer has taken stock of a business's current state, studied the market to understand the available opportunity, and researched customers, it is time to define the desired state or the goals that marketing is supposed to achieve.
There is an acronym, S.M.A.R.T., that can help a marketer set good marketing goals. I've addressed S.M.A.R.T. previously, in "Setting SMART Goals and Measuring Success."
Put simply, marketing goals should be:

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Time-bound

5. Choose Reasonable Tactics

Once a S.M.A.R.T. goal has been created, it is time to select the specific tactics or actions that will move a business from its current state to its goal or desired state. These tactics will be things like creating a special landing page, sending emails, posting on Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, publishing content, or purchasing pay-per-click ads on Google, Bing, or similar networks.
Each tactic selected should be responsible for achieving some part of the goal. As an example, if the goal is to get $10,000 in new monthly revenue, pay-per-click ads might be made responsible for producing $2,000 in new sales while a multi-part email tactic might be responsible for another $2,000. Other tactics would need to make up the remaining $6,000 in new sales to meet the goal.
Reasonable tactics are those actions or advertisements that help achieve the goal while remaining within budget or time constraints.

6. Create a Schedule or Calendar

Every tactic in the marketing plan and every goal milestone should be laid out on a schedule or calendar. This schedule will first help to coordinate tactics avoiding overlap or other potential issues.
Second, the schedule will help with execution and measurement, since the marketer will know ahead of time which tactics are coming up and, presumably, what must be done to execute those tactics.

7. Build in Room for Change

A good marketing plan also should assume that some tactics will change during the course of execution and accommodate those likely changes.
This does not mean that the planner should seek to figure out possible changes in advance or be unwilling to commit to some tactics. It suggests, instead, having some margin or room in the plan for change.
The plan should spread marketing investments out so that there will still be room in the budget — in terms of money and time — if new opportunities arise or if some tactics underperform.

9 Blogging Lessons for Ecommerce Merchants

Blogging is a combination of science and art. The science part requires that bloggers use the latest search-engine-optimization tactics. The art is to hone writing and editing skills.
But it doesn't have to be as difficult as that may sound. As a longtime blogger and journalist, I've learned what works for me, and what does not. Based on my experience, here are nine suggestions to help you become a better business blogger.

1. Make It Personal

What makes a blog unique has less to do with technology and more to do with personality.
What sets blogging apart is that it gives the author a platform from which to inform, instruct, inspire or incite. Not only that, the reader forms a relationship with that person, albeit a virtual one.
Even if you are writing on a company blog, identify yourself as the blogger by name, not as the "admin." If possible, include your photo to make it even more personal.

2. Make It Practical

The best blogs are those that are written with the reader in mind.
There is a fine line between blogging on topics about which you are passionate and writing for your audience. Arguments could be made for both. After all, if you write feverishly about a topic of great interest to you, chances are you will build an audience of those who share that same interest.
Still, I believe bloggers have a responsibility to use their voices responsibly, emphasizing the needs of readers.

Write to educate and serve. Make sure to inform readers more than just the products. Include industry news and trends as it relates to your customers, which will build trust.
Focus on your audience. The purpose of your blog is to provide potential customers with information they need about a product. It's one of the few places on your website that is actually for web visitors and not for the company.

The types of posts that make great educational content include "how-tos," or list-style posts such as "10 things you need to know..." or "Five secrets to..." These types of posts are popular with readers because they are educational.

3. Make It Topical

If you are using a blog for marketing purposes, especially for search engine optimization, it's best to focus on an individual topic.
My favorite example of this principle is a blog about single-serve coffee. If you use Google, search the term “single serve coffee.” Chances are that the top result is SingleServeCoffee.com, which is a blog that talks exclusively about single serve coffee, coffee makers, and other items related to that topic.

The Single Serve Coffee blog focuses on that narrow topic. It's highly ranked in search engines.
In addition, do not try to do much with a single post, such as optimize for multiple keywords or cover several different topics at once. Keep each post to one topic, and one keyword. Search engines are more likely to highly rank blog posts that go in-depth on one topic, and provide authoritative content to web visitors.

4. Make It Fit the Platform

Choosing the right blogging platform is important. Let me explain.
Twitter is commonly referred to as a "micro-blog" in that its posts are limited to 140 characters. Conversely, WordPress, Typepad, and other blog platforms are well suited to long-form blogging.
But, what if you want to write posts that retain the anecdotal character of Twitter, but not be constrained by character limits? You might consider Tumblr, in that case. It is a blogging platform that has carved a niche for itself in micro-blogging — but not in the Twitter sense.

5. Make It Noteworthy

Don’t write a blog post just to keep up a quota. Make the content noteworthy and worth the reader’s time and attention.

6. Make It Promotable

If you use email for marketing, put a sign-up form for your email newsletter on the blog. Conversely, link to and promote your blog in the newsletter. Maximize the synergy that exists between the two, to foster the prospect of gaining even more attention from the reader than you could through one channel alone. In addition, spread blog post content to your target audience on social networks.

7. Make It Original

Do not duplicate content from another blog or website as that may be considered to be plagiarism. Also, don’t post the same blog post in several places.

8. Make It Routine

Something that many bloggers struggle with is publishing on a schedule. No matter your role in your company, blogging is likely not your full-time job.
Consistent publishing takes discipline and time. The first can be learned, but the second has to be found. One way to address time is to remain at least one post ahead. If you publish weekly, make sure next week’s post is written before you publish this week’s. This is more difficult if your posts draw on current news, but this is a good reason to have a variety of post types.
If you are using a blog for marketing purposes, you should be blogging no less than two times per week. If you can blog more frequently, and still maintain a high quality in every single piece you write, do it. The reason business blogging needs to be frequent is because it keeps readers — and search engines — coming back. No one is going to come back to a blog that only publishes once a month or every other week.

9. Make It Engaging

If you write compelling content that brings your audience back for more, they are likely to leave comments and link to your post from their own blog or social networking sites.
Continue these conversations in the comments. Every real comment should get a real response. It makes a difference to readers to see the post authors responding in the comments. And when you find your content shared by your readers elsewhere, thank them and continue the discussion over there. Being appreciative of comments goes a long way.

SEO: 3 Ways to Grow Links to Your Ecommerce Site

Search engine optimization relies in large part on relevant content and authoritative links from other sites. As the search engines develop ever-more stringent algorithms around relevance and authority, it becomes harder to acquire links that will actually matter to your site’s SEO efforts. Fortunately, your business is likely already doing some things that can be tweaked to encourage sites to link to your site for SEO benefit.
These days, links need to be earned organically from relevant and authoritative sites rather than built or submitted as they could be even five years ago. The best links will come from sites that manufacture, write about, or sell the same types of products that your ecommerce site sells. In addition, sites that have themselves achieved a level of authority and links from other relevant sites will have the most link authority to pass on to your site.

Public Relations

Working with the press is one of the best ways to attract links from relevant sites. Even the name of the activity is perfectly suited to what we’re looking for to earn links: public “relations.” The focus is on forming relationships with influential and relevant media outlets to extol the company’s achievements and messages. SEO needs that same relevance and influence to successfully earn links.
Forget about the old tactic of seeding press releases with over-optimized anchor text links. In the past, these optimized press releases would generate links when they were reposted by sites that survive on scraping PR content. The more scrapers, the more links. Unfortunately, the types of sites that specialized in reposting press releases didn’t have any of their own authority to pass on, and were usually only minimally topically relevant.
Modern SEO integration with PR involves cooperation on outreach and an expansion of the traditional definition of media. Sure, we’d all like to get a link in The New York Times, but a link in an article from an influential blogger in your industry could actually provide more value in terms of topical relevance and authority.
Work with PR to identify a list of the most influential bloggers and social media mavens in your area of expertise. The line between social media, SEO, and PR is very blurry here, but if all of the players come to the table and divide up the research, messaging, and outreach responsibilities then all three of the channels can benefit from the cooperative effort.
In addition, give the writers you’re pitching something compelling to link to. They’re extremely unlikely to just link to your highest-profit category page, but they may get excited about a video, a comparison of specifications, and customer research.

Executive Leadership

An executive in your business is likely passionate about the industry you’re in. In the best case, that person will also be eloquent and willing to share that passion with others. Trainings and speakerships can be great ways to earn high-value links.
Look for opportunities with groups or schools that overlap with your industry. Don’t wait for them to fall into your lap. Research relevant groups and schools in your area and pitch your executive to them. Consider local business organizations, industry conferences, vendor shindigs, and business schools.
Speaking doesn’t have to require mountains of preparation and collateral. For example, a college professor in fashion design may be thrilled to have an executive from a local ecommerce site that sells shoes come in to discuss shoe trends, where the industry is going, and what sells in the real world. To promote the seminar, the professor would naturally want to send out email blasts to students, post the information on the school’s fashion design department website, and tweet about it.
If your executive isn’t willing to speak, perhaps she’d write. Guest blogging can be even more effective then speaking at generating links. The blog that hosts the guest post typically links to the author’s company as part of the attribution. And assuming the blog has been chosen because it’s one of the topically relevant and authoritative sites on your new PR list, that link could be very valuable.
In addition to the attribution link, that blog will have its own audience of readers and usually social media followers as well. Some of them are bound to find the guest post compelling enough to share or blog about themselves. Others will be intrigued about the author’s company and will click through to your ecommerce site and become customers. There are a lot of ways to win in the guest blogging scenario.
As with press relations links, though, the guest blog post will only be as successful to your SEO efforts as the content is compelling. A poorly written or obviously self-serving post probably won’t even be published if the blog is reputable. And even if it is published, it won’t inspire readers to share, link to or visit the site.

Marketing Promotions

When your marketing team is planning promotions to generate traffic and sales, remember that some of those plans could benefit SEO as well — if you can intercept them in the creative stage before development begins.
Let’s say plans include video content showing the products in use from all angles. Where the content is hosted, how it’s coded, and what textual content accompanies the videos can all have an impact on organic search. Optimizing these aspects in the planning stage means less rework later, and consequently less cost, as well as increased traffic to the feature.
Depending on how innovative the site feature or marketing campaign is, different types of media may be interested in stories about the feature itself. When the campaign or feature is successful, consider doing a case study with the agency or vendor, or on your own and pitching it to ecommerce publications. Or the campaign may involve people, characters or products that niche communities love to write about, creating even more opportunity to approach media and bloggers in that niche.

Summary

Hopefully these three common areas of business will give you some ideas for earning links naturally through the programs you already run and with the people you already have. Focus on topical relevance and seek out sites to work with who have the authority you’d like your own site to have. Look for sites whose audiences could also be your customers. Links from those quality sites will help your SEO program naturally while they increase your brand recognition and leadership in the space.

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