Community means a lot for an open source project. All these 9 years nopCommerce users from all over the world contribute to the platform different ways: answering forum questions, translating documentation, contributing the source code etc. Several years ago we started to choose MVPs - the most valuable persons, community leaders who share a passion, technical expertise, and knowledge with others, and who represent the spirit of the community. But it’s not enough to praise their contribution.

That’s why we decided to award the most active nopCommerce users at our annual eCommerce conference, nopCommerce Days 2017 to show how much we appreciate their efforts and to give thanks in front of all the conference attendees.

Moreover, at nopCommerce Days 2017 we want to praise efforts of our partners. Every day we review well designed and highly customized sites based on nopCommerce, new plugins, integrations and themes submitted on our marketplace. It’s thrilling to see the wide range of projects built on our platform.

This year on our annual conference, nopCommerce Days 2017 we are going to award developers and developing agencies made the most complicated and powerful projects on nopCommerce in several categories:

• The best B2C site
• The best B2B site
• The most valuable plugin/integration

To make the awards more exciting and competitive we want applicants to nominate projects on the conference site firstly, and the best of the best will be chosen then.

Find more details on the procedure, submit your project and become our winner at nopCommerce Days 2017 site. Please notice, that we accept submitted projects before the 1st of October.

We don’t want to hurry you but the celebration is going to be so great, we have already planned the party so If still you don’t have your conference ticket go get it and join our event in New York!

Imagine a form of eCommerce which could earn you a living remotely, means you don’t have to keep any physical stock, easy to get started with, and has endless possibilities.

Welcome to the world of drop-shipping. As a concept, drop-shipping has existed for decades as a popular supply chain management method. It means that a retailer will sell goods to a customer, but their goods are shipped directly to them from the manufacturer or wholesaler.

Applied to the world of eCommerce, drop-shipping opens up opportunities for entrepreneurs looking to make an income online with minimal hassle.

Here are six reasons why drop-shipping is so appealing that it is disrupting ecommerce:

1. You don’t have to hold any stock

One of the most practical reasons that drop-shipping is disrupting ecommerce is because it negates the need for retailers to keep any stock.

Traditional businesses buy, sell and ship their own stock. This makes life difficult, mainly because you have to:

1. Buy the stock
2. Store the stock
3. Insure the stock until it sells
4. Ship products to customers
5. Deal with returns, inventory tracking and re-stocking

Depending on the size of the business, this may be a huge process (think of Amazon’s logistics), or take up a spare room at home. Drop-shipping takes all of these worries away, totally transforming the logistical chain of events.

Drop-shipping also means that you don’t have to worry about minimum order quantities. Traditionally when purchasing stock for a business, you would have had to make big decisions about how many of which products to buy. Drop-shipping allows you to test the waters — offering products for sale but not taking on the risk of actually holding them in stock.

(Some wholesalers will still require minimum purchase orders – but you can set up a credit system with them to circumvent this problem).

2. You don’t have to deal with fulfilment

Traditional businesses often have to deal with the headache of fulfilling customer orders. This includes picking, packing, and dispatching orders on a daily basis.

However, drop-shipping means that an online business can sell products and take customer orders without having to get involved in the fulfilment side of the process.

Retailers simply take a customer’s order and forward it to the drop-shipper, who fulfils it on their behalf. The customer receives their order, branded with the retailer’s information, and knows nothing of the middle process.

Not only does this make life easier when it comes to posting goods, but it also means the returns process can also be handled externally. This gives the business owner more time to spend on marketing and selling products, as postage and returns are largely automated.

3. You don’t need a fortune to set up

Drop-shipping is further attractive in that it’s a relatively cheap way to start a business. Because you don’t need to hold any stock, a large capital sum isn’t needed to purchase stock and float the business.

Ongoing business costs will also be lower, as it’s not necessary to pay for space to keep the stock. All expenses relating to warehousing and distribution facilities are also removed.

Cash flow will be less problematic, as the business won’t need to have large sums tied up in unsold stock.

Word of warning: Even if you don’t need to buy any stock, it can still be expensive to start a business, depending on which web technology and marketing tactics you go for. An influencer marketing campaign can quickly become expensive, as can a custom-built site. From this perspective, nopCommerce can be a great support to you as the solution is absolutely free. Low cost of ownership (mainly for hosting or extra customization) gives a starting business more opportunities to invest in marketing or any other operational expenditures.

4. You don’t need technical skills

For an ecommerce drop-shipping business, a website is undoubtedly the main asset. Thankfully, you don’t need thousands of pounds or technical skills to get it up and running.

The ecommerce sector is growing and many out-of-box solutions appear on the market. nopCommerce is one of those. The installation process takes few minutes, and you get a platform full of various features, able to support a business of any size. Creating the perfect product page is the case of clicking a few buttons and writing a good copy.

5. You can work from anywhere

By taking away the issue of stock, running a drop-shipping business only really requires a laptop and internet connection. This opens up the world of working from home — enabling people to disrupt the industry and change their circumstances from the comfort of their own homes.

If a drop-shipping business can be run from home, there is also the potential to run it remotely from further afield.

Tribes of ‘digital nomads’ have sprung up all over the world in recent years – individuals who earn their living remotely, running online businesses including drop-shipping retailing.

Just remember to keep the right balance between work and play, and a drop-shipping business could be your key to funding endless worldwide travel.

6. The possibilities are endless

Yes, the thought of running a drop-shipping business is exciting. From working at home to traveling around the world, this could be your ticket to entrepreneurial success whatever your goal.

Don’t just think about selling standard products such as toys, make-up and garden furniture. Drop-shipping can also be used as a business model to sell more creative items. You could even write a book, and have it published & fulfilled by a specialist publisher.

It’s easy to see why drop-shipping is disrupting ecommerce. Many of the biggest barriers to starting a business – including financial and practical reasons – are removed when entrepreneurs use a drop-shipping business model.
The benefits of drop-shipping are as compelling and varied as the different products you could sell through it. What kind of drop-shipping business would you run?

Victoria Greene: Content Marketer & Ecommerce Entrepreneur
I love to work with brands and business owners, sharing my ecommerce top tips, and helping them solve their content challenges. Big advocate of storytelling (who isn’t these days) and I love to kick back with my dogs when I’m not working on my drop-shipping stores.

In a few weeks, our team is going to release a completely renewed version of nopCommerce - nopCommerce 4.00.
We have been working a lot over the last months and now we are proud to announce that nopCommerce is finally moved to ASP.NET Core.
ASP.NET Core is not a continuation of ASP.NET 4.6. It is a redesigned ASP.NET, brand new, cross-platform, high-performance and open-source framework.

So why we decided to move nopCommerce to ASP.NET Core?

We always try to keep nopCommerce running on the latest technologies to offer the best experience possible to our users.
ASP.NET Core is a new framework but it is already matured enough to be used as a basis for building modern, well-structured and extendable web applications such as nopCommerce. ASP.NET Core is the fully featured framework of course but let me highlight several ones making ASP.NET Core a preferable for nopCommerce particularly:

New concept

The concept of ASP.NET Core is very close to us. ASP.NET Core is open source and community-focused. The whole source code of the framework is available on GitHub.

Cross-platform

ASP.NET Core is cross-platform which means an application can be run on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Though nopCommerce still uses .NET Framework as a core, and this feature is not available for us yet. But in next versions when we finally move nopCommerce to .NET Core, developers will be able to use all the opportunities of cross-platform development.

Modular framework

ASP.NET Core ships entirely as NuGet packages. This allows us to optimize nopCommerce including selected, needed packages, which improves security and performance of the solution and reduces servicing. This also means that the framework upgrading process goes easier in general: when the new version of a package is released there is no need the whole framework to be upgraded. It gives sort of independency for a developer who can get the latest changes just by updating the packages. This is a very important feature allowing us to keep nopCommerce up-to-date constantly.

Performance

Performance is crucial for nopCommerce and ASP.NET Core suits our needs. One of the main points in performance optimization is caching. The framework supports several built-in caches.

• The first one which is used in nopCommerce is based on the IMemoryCache which represents a cache stored in the memory of the web server.
• The second one is distributed cache. nopCommerce uses Redis cache but doesn't use the ASP.NET Core approach yet. This will be implemented in the next nopCommerce versions.

ASP.NET Core uses Middleware

Middleware is a new lightweight high-performance and modular pipeline for requests in an application. Each part of middleware processes an HTTP request, and then either choose to return the result or pass to the next part of middleware. This approach gives a developer total control over the HTTP pipeline and encourages the development of simple modules for an application which is important for growing open source project.

ASP.NET Core MVC

ASP.NET Core MVC provides features simplifying web development. nopCommerce already uses such features as Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern, Razor syntax, model binding and validation but the following tools are new for us:

• Tag helpers. It's server-side code to participate in creating and rendering HTML elements in Razor files. What are tag helpers needed for? What features will be available?
  1. They give us HTML-friendly development experience. Which means Razor markup using Tag Helpers looks like standard HTML. It's important for front-end designers which are not familiar with C# Razor syntax.
  2. Now developers can use rich IntelliSense environment for creating HTML and Razor markup for the more productive development process.
  3. ASP.NET Core provides lots of built-in tag helpers for common tasks, such as creating forms, links, loading assets etc. But besides using them, it is possible to create our own tag helpers.
• View components. This is a new tool similar to partial views, but much more powerful. nopCommerce uses view components when reusable rendering logic is required and when the task is too complex for a partial view.
• Dependency injection into views. Although the most of the data which views display is passed in from the controller nopCommerce has views where dependency injection is more usable.

Conclusion

Moving to ASP.NET Core is a big step forward for nopCommerce community. We have changed a lot in the nopCommerce source code, there are new approaches which are worth learning about but in the same time, it should be noted that the core concepts and business logic stay the same. As well as the controller and routing logic.
This means that despite the big changes we made, nopCommerce users familiar with previous versions of the platform can easily manage dealing with new one, based on ASP.NET Core, it shouldn’t take long. To ease an upgrading process from 3.90 to 4.00 we are going to prepare a tutorial describing it step-by-step.
We are also going to talk about the moving nopCommerce to ASP.NET Core on the nopCommerce Days conference which will be held in New York in November 2017.

New technologies are crucial for us as for the eCommerce platform. We are certain that ASP.NET Core is the future of web development in .NET and moving to ASP.NET Core will bring our community lot more opportunities for growing their business.

Author: Marianna Koroleva, nopCommerce team

Online businesses are flourishing with each passing day and the reason is quite simple, anyone with minimal investment can set up a business that is globally accessible. Even the experts have predicted that eCommerce will surpass the milestone of $2 Trillion by the end of 2017.

But just knowing that online businesses works is not enough. For a successful eCommerce venture, you need to know what is the demand of the market and where do people go to get the supply of the same. Well, the need of the customers can be ever changing, but according to a survey, nearly half (48%) of online buyers first turn to a mass commerce marketplace to seek the product they need.

So, once you figure out what people need, setup a marketplace that can become a preferred shopping destination for your target audience. But, becoming a people’s choice is not that easy. You need to incorporate such features that are user centric and that generates a goodwill amongst the people due to its captivating user experience. Now, the question is how can you decide which features fit the best for your marketplace? The answer to that question is using the following features of nopCommerce Multi-Store and Multi-vendor marketplaces along with their business implications:

Features of Multi-Store Marketplace

The multi-store marketplace is like the brick and mortar product exclusive stores. Instead of stuffing the website with numerous products from irrelevant categories, an entrepreneur can create multiple stores with exclusive domains and then manage all of them from one administration panel. Below are the features of nopCommerce that works the best for the majority of marketplace administrators:

One for All and All for One:

Multi-store functionality allows the administrator to create niche and micro-niche stores to target specific segment of potential customers. It empowers the administrator to focus on a specific market with an exclusive target audience and capitalize on the market gap with a high conversion rate.

Prioritize and Monetize:

The administrator can create multiple stores for different categories or for different geographic locations to incorporate second and third level price discrimination strategy. The additional benefit of creating stores based on geographical locations is that it allows the administration to use the store personalization by introducing regional languages and can also allow customers to pay in their local currency. This also allows the administrator to implement customized marketing plans for each store.

Administrator’s Sidekick:

nopCommerce authorize the administrator to provide a restricted or controlled access to the vendor. The admin can apply common rules or can execute individual store level access rights. They can also publish store wise content like Blogs, Templates, News etc.

Features of Multi-Vendor Marketplace

Multi-vendor is like a wholesale market where vendors upload their products to an eCommerce portal along with other similar products and they try to make money based on competitive pricing policies. Below are the most preferred Multi-Vendor features:

Administrator’s Trump Card:

Multi-vendor not only enables the vendors to sell the products on the eCommerce platform but also prompts them to market their products along with your portal. Thus, an administrator can kill two birds with one stone.

Product Ownership:

A nopCommerce administrator can add ‘n’ number of vendors to the portal, he can also associate the vendor to the product.

Vendors Can Sell and Sail Their Products:

The administrator can enable the Drop Shipping feature for the multi-vendor marketplace and should worry only about the payment and after sales services. Drop shipping directly assigns each product with their vendors and every time an order is placed, the vendor directly gets the mail regarding the order placed with details like quantity, shipping address etc.

This delegation is a win-win situation for both vendors as well as administrators. The administrator does not have to act as a mediator for the orders placed by the customers. And the vendors also don’t have to fall prey to the human errors as they have direct access to the orders placed by the customers.

Above are the most preferred features of the nopCommerce Platform and many marketplaces who chose these features are running successfully. But, it is obvious not all the businesses may settle for the same. Thus, nopCommerce also provides its users with the freedom of customization. Designers can build a marketplace as they see fit using the cross features of both Multi-store and Multi-vendor.

In this world, all you need is a vision and a will of steel to succeed. Building a marketplace in today’s digital world is not a challenge. But, to make it strong and unique enough to break the thick wall of competition takes a lot of effort. Make wise use of these features to make them work as a pedal to the metal for your dream of getting a piece of the $2 Trillion worth Cake.

Author Bio

Bhoomi Mehta is a techno-commercial leader with 20+ years of cross functional expertise across Consulting, Operations, Marketing & Sales, Application Portfolio, Web Content Management, Product Engineering & Lifecycle Services at Cygnet Infotech.

Having worn several hats over the years including Consulting, Mentoring, Training, Project Management, Quality Assurance, Marketing & Sales, Bhoomi actively shares insights on latest and important issues related to nopCommerce and leading technology platforms.

Payment processing is a complicated industry, and most businesses don’t know much about how it works when they start out. When there’s so much to learn, it’s hard to blame them. Most don’t gain what limited understand they have until they’ve set up shop and partnered with an ISO to use a particular gateway for their business.

The problem with it is, in their limited understanding, callow businesses might partner with a provider that neither meets their needs nor gives them a fair price for services. Anyone who runs an eCommerce business needs to be aware of the options when it comes to payment gateways, and some may be a better fit for your business than others.

Traditional Payment Gateways

In the traditional model, a payment gateway partners with a merchant acquirer, like an Independent Sales Organization (ISO), that then collects clients for the gateway. The gateway doesn’t interact much with the merchant clients; they just provide the software for conducting transactions. The ISO does most of the interacting, but has no control over the platform being used, and they can’t really help if something goes wrong or the client wants to make changes.

This disconnected format is made worse by the signup process and the fees. Because the risk of each merchant is underwritten individually, getting approved is an involved, lengthy process. Cost structures are also typically not very transparent, leaving merchants confused about how much they will owe, and about which fees are “junk” fees.

This is the most common option chosen, usually due to lack of awareness of alternatives. There are alternatives, though, and times are changing.

White Label Payment Gateways

Some intrepid Independent Sales Organizations sign up with payment gateways that provide their services under a white label, meaning that the ISO gets to market the platform as their own solution, with increased control over the quality of service provided to the clients. This means that merchants have more direct access to help when they need it and that ISOs are better able to directly address the needs of their clients.

White label platforms also usually benefit from a multi-tier hierarchy, allowing merchants to set up multiple merchant IDs (or multi MIDs), and separate accounts for separate locations of the business, without having to increase the number of parent accounts and login profiles.

Payment Facilitators

Payment facilitators similarly shorten the supply chain, but in a different way. Facilitators also use a multi-tiered system, starting with their own “master merchant” account. Merchants that sign up under them are given “sub-merchant” accounts but are each given a separate account and merchant ID.

Because they’re sub-accounts, they don’t require each merchant to have their risk underwritten, which means the application process is easier, and the approval comes faster. And because they’re part of a hierarchy, a merchant can set up multiple accounts if they need to. What’s more, facilitators usually use a flat rate fee for their cost structure, making the pricing unbelievably transparent.

So if you’re a business that uses a traditional gateway, don’t settle for a basic understanding of the industry. Do some digging, shop around, and find a solution that best fits the needs of your company. Odds are, the only thing holding you back from better service and better prices is the knowledge of where to look.

About the Author: Danielle Adams is a freelance writer who specializes in eCommerce topics and writes for a variety of publications such as NMI. In her free time, Danielle enjoys learning more about payment gateways, technology, and hanging out with friends.

Your eCommerce site is an integral part of the business initiative that is required to provide a superior customer experience. Enhancing your business site features continuously and providing a great customer experience is one of your best differentiator in this competitive eCommerce industry. Making an online store site enticing for the online audience is the key way to stand out from the competition. Hence, identifying the ideal methods that focus on making your eCommerce site user-centric has become necessary.

Below are 5 effective ways that focus on how to extend the functionality of your eCommerce site well enough to make it easier for customers to use:

1) Use a reputable platform (like nopCommerce)

The eCommerce platform market isn’t very small, there are literally hundreds of options out there. While researching you will see that there is no one platform that fits all solutions nor you should be looking for one (or else you are wasting your time). Each platform has its own strengths and weaknesses when it comes to aligning a platform with your business needs.

With over 1,800,000 downloads, nopCommerce is no doubt a reputable and leading eCommerce platform when it comes to building an online store site. Just last year in January 2016, nopCommerce won the CMS Critic's Best eCommerce for SMB award. nopCommerce is a great example of an open-source product: it is transparent and open for input from developers from all over the world.

If I was to start an online store for selling products / services, I’d straight away pick nopCommerce. The reason is quite simple - nopCommerce is a unique solution offering an incredible cost/value ratio. Being free, yet capable of handling serious projects, it offers the lowest ownership cost in the eCommerce industry.

2) Design

The web design industry is moving forward at a very fast pace and the trends are changing all the time. As technology evolves, it is easy to fall into the trap of bad designing or following some old trends that might make your website look unprofessional. An ugly layout and cluttered website can easily drive away the potential customers from your online store.

If you are not a developer or a designer, look no further - nopCommerce offers a marketplace where you can find thousands of free and paid options for themes. You can easily pick a theme that compliments your brand/business.

3) Optimize Speed

How many times have you left a website in frustration when a webpage fails to deliver message in a suitable time-frame or website is taking way too much time to load? Don’t be that website.

Speed optimization plays a big role in making your eCommerce site user-centric. Regardless of what your business goals are, a fast website is an inevitable factor in providing a superior customer experience and keeping online users / customers on your site. Some useful facts (source – Kissmetrics):

• 1% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that crashed, froze, or received an error
• 38% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that wasn’t available
• 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less
• 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load
• A 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions
• If an eCommerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year

Some useful website speed test tools:

• Google PageSpeed Insights
• Pingdom Speed Test
• KeyCDN Website Speed Test
• GTmetrix

4) Mobile-friendly

When your customers visit your online store, what do you think they are using as a primary device these days? Majority of people are either using a smartphone, tablet or some kind of mobile device in order to go on the web. With the increasing number of mobile devices, it has become very important to have a website with responsive design that works in a same matter across multiple platforms/devices. A responsive design delivers a better user experience and this can certainly help your business to grow.

Tip: nopCommerce supports a responsive design with a compelling, feature-rich and graphically pleasing storefront & admin panel and means for retailers to immediately deliver relevant offers, promotions and products. nopCommerce responsive design works on any connected device, without requiring extra development or add-ons. It is free and available out of the box.

5) Offer multiple payment options

When it comes to online shopping, customers continue to want multiple payment options. In fact, analysis of shopping cart abandonment rates for online stores shows that not offering multiple payment options during the checkout process can lead to shopping cart abandonment.

Different customers do prefer different kinds of payment methods. If you offer your customers limited payment options and they don’t find what they prefer, they will definitely leave the shopping cart and go to other online store that provides what they are looking for. It is always a good idea to offer a variety of commonly used payment methods in order to satisfy your customers.

Tip: nopCommerce is integrated with more than 50 payment methods and gateways that includes some widely used payment methods such as:

• PayPal
• Authorize.NET
• BluePay
• Cybersourse
• SagePay
• Purchase Order
• And much more…

Find more information here: nopCommerce Marketplace

Author: Lavish Kumar

eCommerce is largely about getting your math right. The future of eCommerce is uncertain, so it is important to look into the past, present, and future to understand the customers’ demands and create an exquisite experience for them. Looking from the customers’ perspective becomes important.

So, let us unveil the mystery of the eCommerce industry so that the marketers and retailers can understand the predictions and adjust to these strategies.

Chatbots- The Definite Future

In the coming decade, we are likely to see an increase in the use and popularity of Chatbots in eCommerce. Brands like H&M and Sephora are leading their way with the chat application to understand the preferences and the prices, the potential customers are intending to pay. The idea of bringing personalization into eCommerce has proved to be a difficult concept for many retailers but bringing Chatbots could give a personal touch to eCommerce realm.

Creating Sustainable Future with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning

Improving the search of the product goes together with AI-assisted personalization to display the most relevant product. By combining the power of machine learning and data mining, marketers and retailers will improve predictive personalization and gain a deeper understanding of customers’ preference and needs.

Road to Virtual Reality (VR)

Isn’t VR just for Gaming? How is it relevant to e-commerce? These questions might be arising. But! Google has its hands-on on new VR project which lets the customers see the products that they are probable to purchase without leaving the four walls of their house. Also, China’s Shopping Giant Alibaba.com with Buy+ shopping platform allows the customers to browse through departmental stores and select the products. VR is the next big thing with eCommerce.

Connecting Your Home Through Embedded Buying

Voice assistants like Siri, Alexa and Cortana are becoming popular with each passing day, but embedded buying will replace our needs to interact with the digital store fronts. Augmented Reality will play an important role in your day-today life and will provide in-store shopping experience, regardless of the location. Over the time it will tell you about what clothes fit you well and what makeup shade should be used on your skin tone! With embedded buying, the customers will experience a level of personalization which will directly lead to an increase in sales.

Pop Up Shops- Finding the Perfect Space

“Showrooming” and “Webrooming” have been the buzzwords when it comes to eCommerce where the customers can visit a local store and shop online or vice versa for cheaper rates. Selling the product online, e-commerce miss on the webrooming aspect for which Pop Up Shops could provide us the answer. Pop Up shop is a temporary retail event that might be here today and gone tomorrow through which the retailer has the benefit of reaching the corners of the market.

The future of eCommerce is still unclear. But any prudent e-commerce business owner should be ready with his armor on to take in any new eCommerce revolution that will be there in the next decade.

Author Bio

Bhoomi Mehta is a techno-commercial leader with 20+ years of cross-functional expertise across Consulting, Operations, Marketing & Sales, Application Portfolio, Web Content Management, Product Engineering & Lifecycle Services at Cygnet Infotech.

Having worn several hats over the years including Consulting, Mentoring, Training, Project Management, Quality Assurance, Marketing & Sales, Bhoomi actively shares insights on latest and important issues related to nopCommerce and leading technology platforms.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re starting off your eCommerce business or you’ve been operating for a while, and you’re looking for new ways to boost your existing sales, the main thing you want to think about is SEO.

With a better SEO ranking, you’ll move your business up the search engine results page, helping you to generate more leads and therefore, more sales. Today, we’ll explore seven of the best practices to improve this ranking so you can double, even triple your eCommerce sales.

See Where You Stand

It’s impossible to start optimising your content and trying to improve your SEO ranking if you don’t know where your store stands at the moment. For this information, you’ll need to analysis your content and your website.

Fortunately, this is made relatively easy using website tools such as SEO Analyzer or SEO Site Checkup.

Ensure Perfection in Every Piece of Text

It doesn’t matter what kind of text you’re referring to; you need to be sure that it’s perfect for the world wide web. For example, if you were about to buy some Nike boots and the product description was full of errors and spelling mistakes, the chances are that you probably wouldn’t buy the boots.

You’d probably leave the website and never return. This means you’ll need to go through all of your content to ensure that it’s perfect.

One of the main things you’ll need to check is your grammar as poor grammar can seriously harm your SEO ranking. You can use online resources such as State of Writing to brush up on your knowledge.

Optimizing Your Content

One of the main things you’ll need to think about changing to boost your SEO ranking is your content. Whether it’s your product descriptions, your blog posts or your landing page content, there’s plenty of work to be done.

You’ll need to consider your keyword density, your readability and the accuracy of your content. Understandable, this is a time-consuming job, but it can’t be rushed. Instead, you can outsource the tasks to SEO copywriting services, such as Boomessays or Essayroo.

Optimizing Your Website

Now that your content is optimised, you’ll then need to draw your attention to optimising your eCommerce store.

There are a few things you can consider. For example, is your website optimised for mobile devices? Is your website fluid and easy to use and navigate? If the answer is no, this is what is harming your SEO ranking.

Using online tools such as Small SEO Tools and Moz’s SEO Toolkit, you can easily identify and rectify any problems you’re having.

Utilising Title Pages on Product Pages

One of the most common mistakes you can make when running an eCommerce store is not using unique title tags on each of your product pages. This can seriously harm your SEO ranking.

To look for what your existing title tags are, hit CTRL-U on the website you want to check. You may be thinking ‘hold on, how can I not repeat title tags if I’m using keywords?’ Instead, you need to adapt these keywords into ‘key phrases’.

This is the term that users will search to find your products and your product pages. Try to keep these phrases under 70 characters and place your key phrase at the beginning of your title tag, and you’ll see a dramatic boost in your SEO ranking.

Ensuring Your Content is Valuable

Surprisingly, Google will rank your website depending on how valuable your content is to your readers. This can be quite a tricky guideline to master as you need to define what makes your content valuable and informative to your readers.

One of the best ways to approach this is by writing out your first draft and then re-reading it through to make sure that you’re communicating the exact message that you want to communicate.

For example, if your headline is ‘Top ten backpackers for hikers’ does your article answer which are the top ten backpackers for hikers or is it merely an article filled with links to your store? Provide value to boost your ranking.

When editing your content, you can use professional writing services, such as Ukwritings and Academized to ensure you’re communicating everything that you want to say.

Consider the Length of Your Content

Hand in hand with the consideration above, it’s important that you consider how long your content is as it directly affects your SEO ranking. For example, a valuable piece of content accordingly to Google should be around 2,000 words.

Of course, this solely depends on the nature of your article as a valuable article could still be around 500 words in length. To track your word count in real time using tools like Easy Word Count.

As you can see, there are plenty of things you can do to boost your eCommerce store’s SEO ranking, all it takes is a bit of hard work and motivation to be the best! Once completed, you’ll soon see a massive increase in your lead count leading to a more successful business!

BIO: Gloria Kopp is an ecommerce marketing consultant and a content writer at Paper Fellows. She write professional advice columns at Microsoft and Australian Help blogs. Gloria is an author of Studydemic blog where she writes her guides and reviews with students and educators.

Just as brick and mortar stores need to worry about floor plans and visual merchandising, online retailers need to consider the importance of a well-designed nopCommerce themes or as many call them nopCommerce Template. As a small / medium business who’s outgrown your current system, you’ve indeed made the right choice by choosing nopCommerce for your online store. So how can you take it forward to the next level of growth by choosing the best template?

How to Choose the Best NopCommerce Template?

Do you want your NopCommerce template to deliver enhance your store’s credibility, visual style, navigation, mobile compatibility while successfully echoing your brand personality? Here are 3 major things you need to know about nopCommerce templates to ensure that it’s the perfect nopCommerce template for your online store.

Does it Focus on Design Layout and User Experience?

There Are Three Responses to A Piece of Design – Yes, No, And Wow
Not all NopCommerce templates are created equal. You must never sacrifice usability for aesthetics because the design of your template must attract and engage customers therefore, always put the ease of use and user-experience first. A well-chosen nopCommerce template allows you to use your homepage to tell your customers who you are, what you do and what you offer. It’s the first place where customers will interact with your online business and If your homepage fails to hook and impress online shoppers, they’ll simply go elsewhere.

The 5 key designs and usability points you may consider when choosing the evaluating the design aspect of nopCommerce template are

• Content Width Design
• Header Layout
• Navigation Design
• Logo Placement
• Overall Usability and User Experience

Complexity hurts conversions, therefore stick to simple intuitive layout for easy navigation and design aesthetics that use a lot of white space and reinforce your brand as a fun shopping experience. Ensure that navigation is simple and functional to make it as easy as possible for your customer to navigate and interact with.

Does it Offer Features and Customization for Great Shopping Experience?

nopCommerce templates offer a wealth of features and capabilities. However not every functionality can be achieved via nopCommerce template. Thus, it isn’t surprising to see nopCommerce template to be accompanied with nopCommerce plugins created specifically to achieve certain more advanced functionality. Backed by an extensible plugin architecture and theming mechanism which makes it easier to curate a personalized shopping experience to set your ecommerce store apart. The customization ranges from color pallets and fonts to integration with advanced features to help your product display match your brand and vision. Moreover, nopCommerce templates offer various customization feature like cross-selling, up-selling and related products during a checkout process in order to increase your sales and average order value without any additional marketing costs.

Make it Responsive

With the staggering growth of mobile devices and customers using mobile as their primary device to access your online stores, it is essential that your nopCommerce template is mobile friendly. Although the free default theme supports a responsive design optimized for all screen sizes, there are vast choices in NopCommerce templates online for a modern look, powerful ecommerce functionality, responsive design for a great mobile shopping experience. Responsive templates also trigger better SEO for your online store, a better user experience to help your business grow. Together with its pluggable modular/layered architecture which allows added functionality and elements, nopCommerce delivers a compelling feature-rich storefront together with relevant offers, promotions to drive business and increase sales.

Choosing nopCommerce Templates has never been easier, however, there’s no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to picking a theme. Every business is different and you can make an informed decision on the perfect nopCommerce template by ensuring the above three guidelines. Have you come across any nopCommerce store that has a great theme? Let us know in the comments below!

Author Bio

Bhoomi Mehta is a techno-commercial leader with 20+ years of cross-functional expertise across Consulting, Operations, Marketing & Sales, Application Portfolio, Web Content Management, Product Engineering & Lifecycle Services at Cygnet Infotech.

Having worn several hats over the years including Consulting, Mentoring, Training, Project Management, Quality Assurance, Marketing & Sales, Bhoomi actively shares insights on latest and important issues related to nopCommerce and leading technology platforms.

We are proud to announce the brand new official version of nopCommerce - 4.00!

In this version, our development efforts were focused mainly on moving nopCommerce to ASP.NET Core 2.0, performance and architecture improvements, but also we have made some further enhancements and bug fixing. You can find the full release notes here.

Please find out more about the highlights of this version:

Migration to ASP.NET Core 2.0

It was the biggest challenge for us because we always try to follow the newest technology trends and give our users the better experience. We made a decision firstly target .NET Framework 4.6.1 and not .NET Core. The reason was that we plan to use .NET Core only when EF Core team starts supporting all ORM functionality from the classic Entity Framework 6. Such as lazy loading, etc (they plan to do it in Q1-Q2 2018).

Please note that the release notes don’t include all changes caused by migration to ASP.NET Core. Here is a separate upgrade guide for developers on how to migrate your existing projects and plugins to this version. The number of changes is really huge!

Significant performance enhancements

We bet you already know that ASP.NET Core speeds up performance a lot. The new version of nopCommerce is much faster, and it’s going to be even better in 4.10 when we will fully move nopCommerce to .NET Core.

The changes we made in this version affect not only migration to ASP.NET Core. We’ve made many other changes to increase performance. The most important improvements are here:

• Moved javascript files and inline scripts to the footer
• Schedule tasks are rewritten to be run using HTTP requests (not in background)
• Response compression
• Now generated bundles and minified files are stored on the file system
• More SQL Server indexes
• Cache stores, currencies, languages between requests (do not load them for each HTTP request)
• Faster Azure BLOB support (caching added)
• A lot of other performance changes

Other improvements

Upload plugins

In this version we allow store owners to upload plugins and themes instead of putting them manually into "\Plugins" or "\Themes" directory using FTP. Now you can easily upload ZIP file from your PC.

Better UI/UX in admin area. Nested settings

We have added nested settings to all settings pages for your convenience.

There were a lot of other enhancements. But of course the most important one was moving to ASP.NET Core. It was our biggest focus!

You can download the new version of nopCommerce here.

It would be great if you could share the news about the 4.00 version on your Twitter and Facebook accounts (please use hashtag #nopCommerce).

nopCommerce Days 2017, our third annual conference, was held in New York on 16-17th of November. Hosting the conference in the USA for the very first time was a very challenging task for our team. So it feels great that we have handled it and with more success than before.

Speeches & Presentations

We were happy to get so many responses from potential speakers when just announced the nopCommerce Days 2017. It’s a sign of our common success. When compiling the conference schedule, we tried to take into account different job profiles of our attendees and make a mix of tech speeches for experienced nop developers and more general talks for eCommerce managers and business owners. It was exciting to learn about the complexity and diversity of tasks that are being solved with the help of our platform and how fast our users react on new market challenges.

We have published presentations and pictures from nopCommerce Days 2017.

Marketing & Community

One of the most important purposes of this conferences was to tell our partners and users in more details what we do to promote the platform, to widen the community and how we can cooperate with them for mutual success. Last two years, we were focused on the platform marketing. For us becoming more well-known means getting more users and growing the business of the existing ones. We were glad to get the feedback and in next few months we plan to share more content from our users: case studies, articles, meet more often on local/regional meetups and just stay in touch.

Networking

When it comes to informal discussions, networking is the most valuable part of the conference. It’s always about the people you meet! This time we had more networking slots during the event, and we hope nopCommerce Days attendees also enjoyed the time at Tonic Bar after the first conference day and cocktails at AMA’s. Cheers :)

Feedback

We analyzed the post-conference survey results and noticed that the core of our community - developers would like to have more complex technical sessions while managers were looking for more information on nopCommerce infrastructure. We will definitely try to incorporate your wishes next time.

During the Q/A session and after, we have heard many suggestions for the product improvements. We are going to examine them and implement most needed features in the nearest version. We also want to stress that the best way to suggest your features is by adding them directly to our Github project here.

Figures

As it was our third conference we wanted to share some figures on how we grew since nopDev Days 2015. Figures will speak for themselves.

Your nopCommerce website is one among thousands. According to Builtwith.com, the nopCommerce installation package was downloaded for more than 1.7 million times and apart from these, there are many more eCommerce businesses flourishing day and night.

The remarkable growth of eCommerce businesses has resulted in a power shift from Marketers to Consumers i.e. online buyers. The same old strategies that did wonders are of no use now. Consumers have learned to deliberately ignore marketing/ advertising content and choose what to buy, where to buy from, what to read, what to download and what to avoid.

When conventional strategies do not apply, you need to scratch your heads and figure out how to attract them smartly. We figured out few techniques that will be helpful for you in the long run.

1. Invest more time and efforts in Design and Development Phase

The first and most important stage will seal your fate. Appropriate appearance, functions, and features are the things that attract users and make them stay on your nopCommerce store.

Choose relevant Features, Themes, and Layouts.

nopCommerce themes and layouts come handy when, you are creating a nopCommerce store but if available ones do not meet your needs, you can always customize or create a new one.

Choosing theme and layout is a thoughtful process since many aspects are taken into consideration such as which Layout and Theme will attract your target audience, which ones are easy to navigate the website, what are the primary features your website must have etc.

For instance, while creating a store that sells medicines, you may not focus on one of the prime functions that are good quality photos which are very important for majority products. But, add features that could gain the audience’s trust such as Live Chat features, Detailed Contact Details, Reviews, and Rates. On the other hand, for an automobile store, you will need strong, good quality photos with a 360-degree view, videos, different dimensions, and colors as well.

Implementing responsive design will help you give a unique layout that will make the website function well irrespective of the devices and sizes of the screens.

2. Play with Human Psyche

Understanding human psyche and leveraging subconscious patterns that affect decision making will help you get a higher sale.

• Changing font type and size - MAKE THEM EASILY READABLE
• Using language that is easy to understand - AVOID JARGONS
• Changing the color of ‘Buy Button’ into GREEN - AVOID RED
• More filter options - CATEGORICAL DIVISIONS
• Detailed yet precise product description
• Good quality photos, include videos if possible
• User-qenerated content/videos - GAIN TRUST- Advertising indirectly

3. Expanding your reach through social media

People are more likely to believe on ‘Word of Mouth’ than product description and photos provided by the sellers. They do not take risks especially if the product is expensive, childcare- healthcare or safety related items.

In times like these, creating social media presence and encouraging users to share views will be a plus to attract new customers. This will build a brand image and brand awareness on Global Platform.

When in dilemma, the first thing a customer goes to is reviews, comments and feedback section. At these times, positive feedback, reviews, case studies, testimonials, featured articles in trustworthy publications will gain the trust of your consumers and lead them towards making purchases.

4. Using nopCommerce Features and Templates

After considering all the requirements your business demands, you can use required features for your business that are offered by nopCommerce.

When the appearance of your website attracts your users, appropriate features make them stay on your website. Attractive layouts will lead them to explore your store, but relevant and unique features will influence them in making purchases.

Other than above mentioned, few additional features that affect your conversion rate directly and immediately are:

• Enabling multiple language options
• Giving choices in payment Gateways
• Newsletters
• Easier checkout options
• Shipping details
• Multi-currency support

Many plugins are made available by nopCommerce from which you can choose one with suitable layouts and functions according to the needs of your business.

5. Use of Analytics to understand user behavior and implement strategic plans

For eCommerce businesses, everything depends on metrics. Thus, after implementing all the marketing strategies, it is necessary to know how good is your website performing find out strengths and figure out grey areas.

Using Web Analytics Tools such as Google Analytics, HubSpot, Mix Panel will answer many of your questions and help you come up with more effective strategies and provide you with important details as following.

• Where do customers come from? (Platform)
• Where are they from? (Geographical area)
• How long did they stay on your site? on which pages?
• How often they visit?
• Who is visiting?
• How many abandon their carts before purchasing?
• How long they go in the process of buying before purchasing their carts?

Even after remarkable growth, eCommerce is still growing that also at a much faster pace. There are many ways to improve your conversion at any stage, but no shortcut nor master plan exists. Only effort persistence, experiments in the right direction will boost conversion of your website.

Author Bio:

Bhoomi Mehta is a techno-commercial leader with 20+ years of cross-functional expertise across Consulting, Operations, Marketing & Sales, Application Portfolio, Web Content Management, Product Engineering & Lifecycle Services at Cygnet Infotech.

Having worn several hats over the years including Consulting, Mentoring, Training, Project Management, Quality Assurance, Marketing & Sales, Bhoomi actively shares insights on latest and important issues related to nopCommerce and leading technology platforms.

The holiday season is here and by now, hopefully, all eCommerce store owners have prepared their stores for the upsurge of traffic and sales. Over the years, customer shopping behavior has made it pretty clear that this is the best and most lucrative time of the year for all online retailers. However, all of this comes at a price of the wild competition.

With a plethora of eCommerce stores fighting each other to get the attention of shoppers, it might be a little difficult to set yourself apart and organically draw customers to your store. However, it definitely isn’t impossible and with just a little creativity and effort, you’ll be able to make the most out of this crucial time.

Given below are 5 marketing tips to help you jump on the opportunity of this season and boost your online sales in the holidays.

1. Offer Bundle Discounts

Simple discounts are offered all the year round but during the holiday celebrations, make sure to offer some great bundle discounts. This is because, during this time, most shoppers are purchasing gifts for multiple people which means that the probability of a customer buying multiple products is extremely high.

So give them a great reason to see this probability through. Offer heavy discounts if people buy three products or more from you. Keep increasing the discount on the number of products. Apply the same strategy to related products too. Compel them to buy the camera and the memory card together, instead of just one, with a better deal.

2. Pique Consumer Interest with Price Preview

At this point, you’ve probably redesigned your store and promotional banners to match the holiday themes (if you haven’t, you should immediately). The primary goal of the design is to serve as a reminder to the consumers about the holiday shopping and the exciting deals they’ll get. However, since yours is not the only store they’ll browse through; there is a possibility they might not return.

Give the users something to remember you by. Use capturing banners to inform users about the day or time period of the sale. Pique their interest by holding a special price preview session well beforehand. Let them know the incredible prices at which the products, they’ve been looking for, will be offered on the day of the sale. Use this to make sure they return to your store after a visit.

3. Offer a Custom Gift Wrap Option

Being the festive season, you can expect a lot of the products being bought are going to be gifts. As you may know, gifts are given to others and wrapping it well before presenting it is highly preferred. Offering users to gift wrap the product is a great way to ease their work and add value to the product.

However, just a random gift wrap is not quite enough to draw the attention. A custom gift wrap, however, can go a long way. Offer multiple options for decorative wrapping paper for the users to choose from. Let them choose the style of wrapping the present and the choice to add little extra accessories like a bow or a decorative tree. Help your customers personalize the gift wrapping according to their likeness.

4. Collaborate with a Social Cause

At this time of the year, everyone is in a spirit of sharing and giving. Since everyone cannot get directly involved in it, people actively look for mediums to help out in any way possible. This is where you can come in to help them make a little difference in the world.

Publicly collaborate with a Non-Profit organization and inform your users how their purchases on your store will have a positive impact on those in need. Tell them that with every purchase they make, some of the proceeds are donated for a noble cause or they are used to do something good. You can even ask for small donations during the checkout process. Customers always prefer such people-friendly stores that try to do some good. Also, make sure you put up images and other forms of media showing you doing the deed.

5. Categorize your Products as Gifts

Giving gifts is not that easy a task and often times the most difficult part is deciding what would be a suitable gift. Ease this decision and help your customers visualize your products as the perfect gifts for the different people in their lives.

You can categorize your products based on the people for whom the gift might be the most appropriate like Gifts for mom, dad, brother, sister, friends, coworkers etc. Categories and their names can be anything innovative and based on the products you sell. Easing the task of making this decision will improve the overall shopping experience which will, in turn, draw them to your store even more.

So these were 5 marketing tips you can make use of to get the most out of this holiday season. Also, make sure to thank the customers for shopping at your store and make them feel valued. Sure this season might be the one for spending big bucks but it is also the one for giving back. Don’t forget to be appreciative and wish everyone around a great holiday season.

Bio:

Nandhaan Verma is an online marketer and developer at Matrid Technologies, a 16 year old software development company.

Lately, he has been drawn to nopCommerce platform and has taken up the task of providing people looking for help with this platform with professional nopCommerce developers.

Emotions play a larger role in our decision making than we sometimes realize. They will – either consciously or subconsciously - impact who a customer acts and reacts to your brand and offer. This is true of all businesses, no matter what product or service is being sold. Dependent on the emotional connection, the customer will react accordingly.

Find your raison d'être

In order to begin telling your brand story, you've got to start being reflexive about your company and why it came to be. Answer a few questions, and be honest about them, so you can start getting your story written:

• What purpose are you serving?
• What are your priorities?
• How are you different than your competitors?

Keep your story on message and to the point, using Easy Word Count to stay on top of your word count. When you discover the essence of your own existence, you can begin to tell your authentic brand story. Every company has a different story to tell, and it's in those differences where emotional connections can be built. And, stay connected to your customer base with the help of Buffer, to manage all of your social media outlets, schedule posts and track the performance of your content.

Write your history

Once you know why your company came into existence, you can put together the how. What events came together to push you forward, or even possibly set you back. Each component of your history is an important factor in how you exist presently, shaping you along the way. Build trust with your customers by being honest about that history and the obstacles you've had to overcome. An honest story can do a lot to connect with customers on an emotional level and build a trusting relationship with them. Big Assignments or Oxessays are there to help you compose that story in the most authentic and engaging way possible.

Who are the characters in your story?

The characters of any story are what push the narrative forward and direct things in a certain way. Determine who the main characters of your brand story are, and detail how their influence – whether positive or negative – impacted the overall story. Build a more connected relationship with your customer base by using Rapportive to add LinkedIn profiles of the characters in your story to the emails you're sending them.

What mission are you on?

Almost hand-in-hand with your reason for being is your brand mission. That is, what your company sets out to achieve and the values it lives by. A family-oriented travel business, for example, shouldn't be planning adult-only booze cruises or anything of the sort that would be counter to their mission. Help with writing your brand mission can be found from the professional team at Resumention.

What are your failures?

If there's a business that says they've never experienced any sort of failures, chances are they're lying about it. It's almost inevitable to come up against some type of failure somewhere in your brand story. Failure, after all, is what causes us to change, make improvements and come out on the other side with more knowledge and experience than before. Your authentic brand story needs to include the failures, not just the successes you've had, in order to truly gain the trust of your customers. But, don't let your failures be the grammatical and spelling mistakes within your text. Eliteassignmenthelp or Cite it in can give you a hand with editing, to keep your story free from those errors.

Although you're being honest about the failures you've had, you don't want incorrect or undue negative information circulating about your brand. Let Mention scour the web for instances where your brand, industry and competitors are talked about, to see what's being said. When Google needs a little cleaning up, Brand Yourself will help you improve your online image and eliminate unwanted Google results.

Don't avoid the gaps

Sometimes there will be gaps in your history that should be highlighted. Whether it was a slow year for business, or you took a year off to travel the world, make those 'gaps' known. “Oftentimes, we try to brush over anything that appears to be negative, but it's usually within those gaps that we do the most growth and the most interesting things happen” – explains Marion Combs, a Brand Manager and Huffingtonpost business writer.

Customers want to know that they can trust the brands and companies they are using. This is especially true for companies where trust is a must – such as car manufacturers, travel businesses, and healthcare providers. Build up that trust with an authentic and honest brand story that evokes emotion and creates a connection between your brand and your customers.

Bio:

Gloria Kopp is an eCommerce marketing consultant and a content writer at Paper Fellows. She write professional advice columns at Microsoft and Australian Help blogs. Gloria is an author of Studydemic blog where she writes her guides and reviews with students and educators.

The internet can be a dangerous place to conduct an online business, especially when no (or minimum) security measures are in place to protect the business. According to kount, global holiday fraud attempts increased 31% in 2016. CNP fraud losses are projected to increase by $3.2 billion over the next 4 years. And mobile commerce – 2X more likely to involve fraud – is growing at least 30% a year.

Cyber-attack is rising every year and hackers are continuously stealing sensitive data / information from eCommerce store sites. In order to protect your customers, it is important to implement fraud protection protocols. Let’s take a closer look at 3 simple steps to secure your eCommerce site.

1) Use a trusted platform

One of the best things you can do to protect your data and customers from getting hacked is to make sure that you are using a trusted platform (like nopCommerce). Security is a massive issue in eCommerce sites and it is important for you as a business owner to store customer data with all possible security protocols. As far as security goes, a few platforms take it very seriously such as nopCommerce because it meets all PCI Compliance requirements and it offers all the features you need to run a secured and successful online store.

Using an unsecured platform could easily lead to catastrophic scenarios such as theft of your customers’ data and payment information. So, make sure to keep a close eye on the security features of your eCommerce platform and always do your due diligence.

2) Do not store sensitive information

Many eCommerce websites store a lot of information about their customers in the database in order to market their products in different ways. It is always a good practice not to store any sensitive like passwords or financial information about your customers in the database if you are accepting online orders. There should never be an instance where you need to store the sensitive data as-is like credit card information directly in your eCommerce platform database.

eCommerce platforms like nopCommerce are compatible with the latest industry standard for payment data protection, PCI DSS 3.2 and it offers many great features such as:

• Credit cards are not stored into database according to PA-DSS
• Using private key encryption to store sensitive data
• Password encryption / hashing option and policies like:
  1. password attempt failure lock-out
  2. password must be changed at least once every X days
  3. password must be unique i.e. it is not allowed to submit one of the previously used passwords

3) If you are collecting private information, you need SSL

Show the customers that they can trust you as shoppers need to feel safe when they are on any website, especially when they are providing payment information. Make sure you have SSL certificate and badges to prove to the customers that all the personal information is protected. If you add trust signals on every step of the checkout process, the customers will certainly be convinced that their payment information is completely secure and they can trust your online business/brand. Many eCommerce websites add security icons on payment pages as it helps the customers to overcome the hesitation and gives them the confidence to complete the transaction.

nopCommerce allows you to easily configure SSL settings on your store site by simply going into store details page and enabling the option. In addition to that, you can:

• Force SSL on all site pages
• Enable XSRF protection for admin area
• Enable XSRF protection for public store

For businesses wishing to get that competitive advantage, having a multilingual website is a big step in expanding the customer base. Though it’s often overlooked, making your online store site multilingual is an effective way of acquiring greater sales.

Here are 3 main reasons why a business / store owner should consider adding more languages on the eCommerce site:

1) You get a larger audience base

Having your eCommerce website readable by thousands (or even millions) of online shoppers from different countries, you are actually advertising your online business around the world. Technology has helped businesses expand to have worldwide reach.

Incorporating languages other than English helps you in bringing new potential customers on your store site. For non-English speaking audience looking for products and services, you can automatically capture their attention by offering a multilingual website.

2) Separating yourself from the competition

Your competitions are probably offering same products or services as you. Offering a multilingual eCommerce site can be an important step that you have been looking for in order to get ahead of the competition and get an early-mover advantage.

Having the ability to communicate with an entirely new international audience in their native language can be an undoubtedly financial boost for your business but that’s not all. A multilingual online store is a cost effective way to market your products, brand awareness and create better relationship with existing customers & potential online shoppers by giving your business an international exposure.

3) Improved Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

In many countries, Google is not a default search engine. Native language search engines are more popular because people feel more comfortable in searching in their native language. Unless you are offering multi-language support, your website is less likely to show up in those search engines.

Translating your site content in more than one language and offering multi-language support on your online store is a smart step in terms of search engine optimization (also known as SEO). When you search for anything whether it’s direction to a place or a product that you have been looking to buy, you prefer to use a search engine. Imagine the content that you are having been searching is available in your native language and the second or third language that you speak. Your options will be doubled or even tripled. Basically, you get the same affect with your business when you offer more than one language on your online store. The population that is searching for products or services that you also offer on your store site is increased drastically when your locale based URLs shows up in the search results.

Tip: Did you know nopCommerce offers multi-language support and allows you to setup a multilingual online store site within minutes? Using nopCommerce language packs, one can easily offer multi-language support on the public store along with the accessibility of admin panel in different languages as well which makes is quite easy for the non-English speak admin to manage a store site. You do not have to be a developer / programmer to do this, you can easily install language packs on your nopCommerce site with a user-friendly interface without having to write a single line of code.

Here are the steps to add languages to your nopCommerce site

Here you can download various language packs for your nopCommerce site

Author: Lavish Kumar

It’s just a fact of being in a business: one day your customer will complain about something whether it is about your service, product or website. Somewhere down the line, there will be a hiccup and it is the nature of the business that involves dealing with people / customers. But often, some complaints can be avoided if you allow your customers to easily communicate with you, get back to them in a timely fashion and allow them to provide feedback via different channels.

For any business, customer feedback is paramount for knowing your customer’s needs and expectations. In order to be successful in your business, you must listen to your customers. The feedback from your customer is very valuable information that can help you improve your product and services.

When you openly ask for feedback from your customers, while it’s sometimes uncomfortable to face customer complaints, it is important that you do it on regular basis. Research shows that customers who are able to get their complaints resolved in a timely manner are more likely to stick with you and recommend your products or services to others. Here you some measures that you can take in order to stop customer complaints before they happen:

Ask for feedback

Asking for a feedback from your customer helps you build strong relationships and increase customer satisfaction. At the end of the day, the only reason your business is able to survive in the market is that of your customers. So, you better listen to your customer who pays you for your product and services. There are many ways by which you can gather feedback from your customer such as:

• Contact us form: Make sure, you have a working “Contact Us” form that is easily accessible (or visible) on your website. This simple form allows your customer to get in touch with you to get more information about your product / services, complain about your product or simply tell you how great your product is. By adding a “Contact us” page on your website, you can prove to your potential customer that you are real and running a trusted business.
• Conduct survey: One of the most effective ways to get your customer’s feedback is to conduct a survey. You can simply ask your customers to take a survey on your website (if you have that functionality) or use 3rd party tools like survey monkey.
• Product reviews: Product reviews can be a very important factor for your customers in making a decision to buy a product from your online store. It is important to decide the placement of customer reviews on the product page so that people can easily see them. Tip: nopCommerce supports news, blog, forums, polls and product reviews and ratings which allows asking for feedback on products that give customers a voice and lets others know what people think about your products.

Make sure your customers can reach you easily

When you are dealing with products that are sold by many other competitors, it is your job as a store owner to provide quality content that will distinguish you from other sellers. The quality content will make it easier to attract online shoppers to your site. Another important thing is to try to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and see if your store site is easy to navigate. Is it easy to find information for products or services that you are offering to your customers? Just having an online store is not enough these days so make sure you are also on the entire social media sites so that customers can reach out to you via different channels.

Test Thoroughly

Whether you are launching a new product on your store site, updating design / layout of your website, trying new features and doing some kind of technology upgrades, testing is crucial to success. UAT (user acceptance testing) whenever possible is always going to help uncover hidden issues.

Always consider talking to your hosting provider (or server administration) in regard to how to minimize the risk of overload and what steps are necessary to overcome the issues. It is a good practice to test your website in advance for performance issues as well as security threats.

Customer Service

A bad service experience can easily motivate your customers to go to your competitors. Customer satisfaction is the key to a successful business. Never assume that you know what your customers want. In order to be successful, try to follow a customer-oriented philosophy in which you ask your customer’s feedback and then act on it. Train your employees who are communicating with customers on the regular basis that a good customer service is one of your company’s most valuable asset and it is important to help a customer on every step. This can significantly lower down the complaints.

Author: Lavish Kumar

Today online trading is one of the most popular and promising ways to earn money. This type of trading allows you to choose the direction in which you want to work and also gives an opportunity to launch a business without large investments.

However, there is also a significant disadvantage - high competition. Today, the Internet is literally abundant with services and offers. A huge number of stores, small and big, are being created. Therefore, it’s very important to choose the right product that you will sell. The main criteria are uniqueness and quality. If you skip this step, it’s unlikely that your business will be successful.

How to determine the level of demand

It’s difficult to say straightforward which products will bring you the largest turnover. This is a hard question, the turnover depends on many factors. To correctly choose a strategy, you need to carefully study the situation on the market. Your business plan is the key to big earnings, a due attention should be paid to it. For the proper construction of a business plan, consider the following points:

1. Product demand. The product must have a high demand in the market at any time. In order to determine the level of demand for products that you are going to sell, look at how your competitors work. Alternatively, you can use a special online service that lists the statistics of queries for a particular word or phrase. However, low demand does not always mean that the product will have poor sales; this may be due to the novelty of the direction you have chosen that has not yet gained popularity in the market.

2. The product size. It would be better to focus on a small product. It's much easier to work with it. For example, if you compare the sales of mobile phones and furniture it’s obvious that the first option brings better income. Why? It's very simple: the delivery of furniture is much more expensive. Therefore, it’s more profitable for a buyer to go to the local store and buy there. Another disadvantage is that goods of large dimensions require much storage space, and the larger the area is, the higher the rent. Consequently, your expenses will increase.

3. Range. Good range makes the goods more attractive to buyers. The wider the range of the products you sell, the higher the chance of a large flow of customers. An excellent solution is the sale of related products. If you sell mobile phones, you can add various cases, films and glasses for screens, fobs etc.

If you set up your business independently, it’s preferable to choose the direction that is not too common, since it’s always difficult for beginners to earn a client base. For example, in your city there are several thousand sanitary ware shops. In which of them would you go? It’s logical to assume that it’s the one where you have been before and which, so to speak, is time-tested and reliable. That's why it’s senseless to open one more such store, it will be extremely difficult to create a client base.

The most popular products on the Internet

There is a huge number of online stores. This means that many entrepreneurs have made the right choice and sell the product, which brings them a decent income. In order to choose the product that you will be selling, you need to make the list of products with high sales figures and choose among them the most sold, not forgetting about the analysis of the situation on the market.

Popular products among consumers:

• electronics and household appliances;
• clothes and shoes;
• notebooks and computers.

Books, products for children, building materials, food, sports goods people prefer to buy in real stores. Low purchasing power and obligatory certificates for this group of goods make them disadvantageous for selling on the Internet.

A well-chosen product will provide you with a good income and will quickly be in demand. But setting an online store doesn’t end there. You should make an effort to promote your nopCommerce store. No online activity is possible without advertising. Thanks to advertising, it becomes possible to make your product stand out in the market among the variety of similar products. If you don’t have sufficient funds at the start, you will have to deal with advertising by yourself and you should be prepared it would take time.

Author Bio: N-Theme.com provides nopCommerce Themes & Plugins in various business lines with free lifetime upgrades. Our goal is to ensure that your nopCommerce store will continue to look as good several years from now as it does today. NopConnect.com provides nopCommerce Performance Optimization.

Search engine ranking depends on two main elements – optimization and content quality. Unfortunately, most marketers neglect the latter and pay attention only to the keyword density. This makes their posts too boring and technical, which eventually deteriorates webpage ranking.

If you want to win over new customers and grow business in the long run, you need to focus on high-quality content creation. In this article, we will show you 9 reasons why it is important to write for your customers and not for SEO.

9 SEO Mistakes to Avoid in Content Writing

There are many positive effects of SEO writing but there are also a lot of negative sides of the optimization-only approach. That’s why we are going to explain to you 9 techniques to stop thinking exclusively about optimization and start writing for your consumers.

• Know your audience
  

  Appealing content always focuses on real people and their problems or needs. This is exactly where SEO writers usually fall behind – they put too much emphasis on keywords and headline tags, thus forgetting to create text that fits the interest of target audiences. Therefore, you need to analyze and understand an average customer before you even begin with content creation.

• Take your time
  

  SEO writers are always under pressure as they need to deliver a lot of articles in a limited amount of time. Of course, it reduces content quality and chases away followers after a while. Try to avoid this mistake by writing fewer high-quality blog posts. Excellent writing will only boost your digital reputation and improve search engine ranking, consequently.

• Write longer posts
  

  When you concentrate on SEO instead of creativity, you start writing mechanically and do it only to reach the certain word count. On average, contemporary blog posts can go anywhere between 500 and 1,500 words. But if you really want to influence customers, you should sometimes go beyond that and write longer and more thorough articles. A study proved that more than 60% of followers completed their purchases after reading recommendations on a blog. It clearly suggests that you should focus more on quality and make outstanding content to convince buyers that your products or services are relevant.

• Mind the style
  

  With SEO on your mind, you can hardly ever build your own style of writing. You must disperse keywords and targeted phrases throughout the post which makes the sentences look artificial. For instance, let’s say that you want to write a 1,500-word post and the main keyword is ‘psychological trigger’. Keeping the keyword density below 2% would still give you some 20 to 25 mentions of ‘psychological trigger’ in your article, which is extremely awkward. The point is that SEO usually stops authors from writing freely and concisely, so you might start thinking about your style more than keywords.

• Stay unique
  

  According to content specialists at the best paper writing services, SEO has been ruining digital creativity in the last few years. Today, almost all blog posts look the same and it’s hard to find a single author who really stands out from his/her competitors. In such circumstances, your only chance to make an impact is to stay unique and find a new angle while writing about old themes.

  For instance, a lot of bloggers write about their reasons to start writing. What you could do in this case is to change the perspective and say: “10 reasons why I did NOT start writing a blog”. Users will know that your topic is pretty much the same as others but they will also understand that your writing is more interesting.

• Reveal your personality
  

  Content consumers don’t want to read boring data-driven posts, which is often the case with SEO writing. Instead, they want you to expose your human side and reveal your personality. It’s alright to present a few statistical information to support your main idea but doesn’t burden customers with it too much. Just show them who you really are.

• Solve their problems
  

  You can be the best writer ever but you can’t deserve high search ranking in case nobody cares about your topics. Optimization is nice but it won’t help you if you don’t answer users’ questions and don’t solve their problems in your posts. Therefore, you should not write about email marketing in general – you should write about 5 ways to increase email open rate by 24%.

• Write consistently
  

  We already mentioned that you should focus on quality, not quantity. But you still need to establish your own routine and get customers used to reading your posts periodically. Almost 40% of marketers publish content at least once a week, which is something that you should do as well. One week is more than enough to prepare and create content that satisfies both the demands of optimization and quality.

• Use synonyms
  

  Our last advice is to avoid using your main keyword too many times. If you really have to focus more on SEO, then you should also consider all other keywords and synonyms which could be relevant to your post. This way, you will respect the rules of SEO but you will also create a more versatile article.

Conclusion

Content marketing doesn’t target some sort of generic mass. The goal of content creation is to address real people, meaning that you should focus both on SEO and the quality of posts. In this article, we explained to you what’s wrong with optimization-only writing and showed you techniques to avoid these problems. Make sure to follow our tips when writing and let us know in comments if you need additional explanations about this topic.

Author: Julie Petersen is a content writer and an editor. She writes her own blog AskPetersen where she shares her ideas about content writing.

It's not about you, it's about your customers!

As freaking, enchanting or intrusive that it may sound, “Effective Personalization” is the key to ecommerce success. Over 74% of marketers say targeted personalization increases customer engagement leading to increased sales. E-sellers are facing a stark new reality in a modern online marketplace - aggressive selling via all multichannel approaches, the competition is heating up real fast! From defining your segment, creating personas to analyzing anonymous personalization, true success lies in collaborating effective personalization, leveraging what you know based on past and current interactions, profile management to store key customer attributes and strategically utilizing emerging technology.

From product recommendations to targeted email outreach or push alerts promoting sales campaigns, ecommerce companies today strive to deliver a relevant and delightful shopping experience at all touch points. Let us discover the challenges, considerations and best practices that define these milestones and give you the edge over rival online stores.

Milestone 1 - Personalized Recommendations Across Buyer Journey

“The holy grail is having a customer for life, and having that customer buy from you repeatedly.”

~ Alex Zhardanovsky

Not all customers are equal and major ecommerce players are nailing it! GAP, Amazon, Shoeline, Lowe or The North Face have tactically integrated recommendations into nearly every part of the purchasing process, religiously follow them both on-site and off, via email.

Personalized product recommendations including cross-sell and upsell however must be offered on across the buying cycle, from the homepage, product pages, category pages to shopping cart page. You too can achieve this by capturing opportunities in customer data using advanced analytics like Optimizely, HotJar, MixPanel, FullStory, Metrillo and then tailoring customer engagements to drive greater sales.

Milestone 2 - Boost the Experience with Personalized Promotional / Lifecycle Emails

Adequate data collection, effective processing, extracting useful information and tactical use of shopping funnels and more… Amazon, Alton Lane, Spotify, ModCloth, Target, Crate and Barrel work wonders with personalized email and how?

From welcome emails, transactional mails like price drop emails, subscriber mails and promotional emails with personalized subject lines, to ‘abandon cart reminder mailers. The collaborative approach helps you sustain the individual experience that customers crave.

A study ‘Millennials—Where They Shop, Why It Matters’ by SmarterHQ, points out that there are 5 emailers that can increase campaign revenue by 291%

• Checkout abandonment
• Product browse abandonment
• Back-to-stock notifications
• Welcome messages
• Reengagement emails

Use CTA’s, dynamic landing pages, kinetic email designs and A/B testing on your email campaigns to increase email engagement and capture insights. You may consider using tools like ExactTarget, Marketo, Vertical Response to automate most of the processes and tying the email campaigns to the outcomes – open, clicks, purchases to make them accountable.

Milestone 3 - Leverage Predictive Analytics & Machine Learning

Your shoppers know it when they SEE IT, so start optimizing experiences with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Gilt, Amazon Go Grocery online stores, The North Face, Etsy are among those ecommerce players, actively leveraging the power of AI (Artificial Intelligence), including machine learning and predictive analytics to personalize shopping.

Ecommerce like yours may use AI to optimize every part of the marketing mix to deliver seamless, always-on, relevant shopping experience that consumers crave. By rapidly monitoring a huge amount of data to identify clusters and patterns, AI allows you to not only understand but also predict consumer behavior, pinpoint their place in the shopping journey and help engage the right prospects with the right message at the right time.

AI tools like Choice.ai, Twiggle, Mintigo, Boomtrain, Wayblazer help ecommerce like yours to create intelligent customer engagement at every point of the shopping funnel.

The Future is Personal

Create the ‘gentle nudge’ to create powerful personalized online shopping experiences for your users. Are you looking out for innovative methods to reach out to your customers? Has something caught your eye?

The Future is NOW!

Author: Bhoomi Mehta is a techno-commercial leader with 20+ years of cross-functional expertise across Consulting, Operations, Marketing & Sales, Application Portfolio, Web Content Management, Product Engineering & Lifecycle Services at Cygnet Infotech. Having worn several hats over the years including Consulting, Mentoring, Training, Project Management, Quality Assurance, Marketing & Sales, Bhoomi actively shares insights on latest and important issues related to nopCommerce and leading technology platforms.