April meeting will be at 11:30 at CafeUSA on Wed April 16
Mark Stewart will talk about UPS OnLine Tools that they allow customers to integrate specific application programming interfaces (APIs) with an enterprise applications or web sites, and how it can improve our customer’s experience and reduce total cost.
Some of the tools available are:
- Tracking
- rate and service selections
- address validation
Attending
Harvey, Jim Queen, Randy Miller, Linda, Josh, TANYA, MARY LOUISA, MARK STEWART quest speaker UPS, JOHN FOX, Al Peterson, Kem Brown, Pat Burch, Glen Bundrick,
NOT ABLE TO ATTEND – Machael, Jim, and Audrey
We are open for suggestions for May’s meeting location, if you know of somewhere we can get a room for our meeting please let me know. Mary Louisa has volunteer to help with the locations. Mary Louisa’s life before UPS was as an event planner, so that means we will have to start booking the expo hall for our meetings. I also would like your input on topics as well, I need your help. Any input to help us grow and learn is most welcome. If you know of anyone in the ecommerce business that would like to attend please invite them and let me add them to our list.
The internet business is exciting and after our meetings each month I can’t wait to put to work what I have learned. I sure hope everyone else gets excite too. This is a great opportunity for us. AND IT FREE
Harvey Jelks
beautydepot1
synapsemultimedia
Harvey you are the bomb.
I am working on more search engine optimization myself. I talked to an IT tech at Verio who was trying to sell me their time to SEO my website. He offered to apply Google Analytics (I’ve already done that), to create keyword and description meta tags for all pages of my site (I’ve almost completed that myself) and tuning up the server. All for only $5000.00. I had to respectfully decline his offer at this time.
I will tell you this. If you optimize your meta Titles, Descriptions and Keywords on all your pages you will see a dramatic 15% – 30% increase in good free search engine traffic to your site. The benefits are long term. Well worth the time.
Another SEO component is link popularity. Check yours for free here: http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/ I am trying out http://linksmanager.com to manage the process. In just two weeks I have 27 new websites with links pointing to my website, my goal is to have 100 or more pointing to me. Again, this is what the Internet is all about, connecting to people. Link exchanging in itself is free and can connect your website to potential customers from other websites they already trust. In my experience, the visitors from these linked partners have high conversion rates. They may not represent a large volume of visitors but they are free and they convert to orders well above average.
If you have any experience in link exchanging leave comment here.
Online Power Selling
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Online Power Selling
Current mood: blessed
(Who are you selling to?)
Online retailing sites are prime destinations for women 18-34 years old who are Internet users. While women 18-34 are 15.7% of all Internet users, they are 24% of shoppers at fragrance/cosmetic sites, 22.3% of shoppers at jewelry/accessories/luxury goods sites and 20.8% of shoppers at apparel sites.
(2003)
U.S. online retail sales this year will close at $95.7 billion, climbing to $229.9 billion in 2008. Next year’s sales are projected at $122.6 billion, with $149.2 billion, $176.8 billion and $204.3 billion forecast for 2005, 2006 and 2007, respectively. (Appearance is EVERYTHING)
65 percent of Internet users won’t patronize a poorly designed site ? even that of a favorite brand ? and 30 percent reported that Web site design is more important than a great product. Even rock-bottom prices only persuaded 4 percent to shop on a poorly designed Web site. What’s worse is that nearly 30 percent stop buying from their favorite offline store if their online experience is poor.
( An 11% conversion rate is the best you can hope for.)
Nearly half (45 percent) of respondents indicated that they were researching product information, rather than making an immediate buy. Of the remaining 55 percent that had purchasing intentions, 11 percent immediately bought online, and 6 percent immediately bought offline. The locale was more difficult to determine for the 21 percent who indicated they would buy within 48 hours, and the 17 percent who intended to buy within the week.
14% of online merchants cannot identify their conversion rates and 43% don?t know how many customers abandon their shopping carts.
(Really)
The location of a search box can have a big impact on sales at an e-commerce site, too. Home furnishings retailer Black Forest Décor relocated its search box from the upper right corner to the center of the page just under the top navigation bar and increased the size of the search box by 72%. The result? A 34% increase in its conversion rate.
(Why did they not buy?)
Thirty-five percent of consumers surveyed said added costs, such as shipping and handling, or lengthy delivery times resulted in their abandoning an online purchase. Sites requesting too much information is another annoyance that drives away 35 percent of buyers surveyed.
Shipping charges for online orders continue to be a thorn in the side of consumers, 20% of whom cited shipping costs as their biggest frustration related to online shopping. 19% said spam is most annoying, followed by the inability to try on clothes, 15%, and the risk of entering a credit card number online, 13%.
(Do you have Customer Reviews?)
Customer reviews appeared to have the most impact on customer satisfaction and web site engagement, according to the study. 58% of merchants said customer reviews had “significant” impact on customer satisfaction and 37% said it had “somewhat of an impact.” 53% of merchants said it had a “significant” impact on web site engagement while 32% said it had “somewhat” of an impact.
11% of retailers reported a 20% or more overall increase in conversions as a result of adding reviews to their sites, 21% reported an 11% to 20% increase and 5% reported a 1% to 10% increase. 63% said they didn’t know.
Looking for more from its online customer reviews, multi-channel retailer Petco Animal Supplies Inc. recently conducted an experiment. Petco since 2005 has used technology from vendor Bazaarvoice Inc. to support online customer reviews. It discovered that shoppers who navigate to pages with top-rated products convert at a 50% higher rate than others. Petco also found the influence of online customer reviews wasn’t limited to shopping the site. When the retailer conducted its experiment to test the effects of including customer-generated star ratings in marketing e-mail, the test campaign had a click-through rate five times the usual rate.
Way to go Pat. Nick will be at our meeting which give us 14.
You might want to see that we have our room at Cafe USA set for the 16th.
Harvey the blog looks great! I will link it up to the Synapse blog.
Thank Nick, I am trying to keep up with Pat. But there is just no way. He stays up all night doing this and I just am too old to do that. haha
Yeah, I hear you… It’s hard to keep up too when I’m out running around all day. I think the blog looks great though. I will come through and contribute to it too.
Thanks!
Reservations have been set at Cafe USA for 11:30 April 16th for the meeting.
Thank you Mark, for visiting with us today. I got some new tool ideas to try to add to my site You are welcome to come back anytime you can. I will keep you on our email list so you can have our updates and we can get your suggestions ( You are now an offical member of our group)
If you missed today meeting you missed a very good meeting. We had a total of 20 attending.
We had several new ecommerce members today and I sure hope you enjoyed today and will plan on attending next month May 21st
Next month Lee Davis will talk with us about some of the things you should NOT do. Like Pat said some mistakes he has made and is still paying for. Should be very informative.
If you have anything you would like more information on or a question answered about ecommerce, bring it with you or email it to me and that will be added to next months meeting.
Again thank you for being there.