Throughout history there have been many great pairings that bettered the world of man; Batman and Robin, salt and pepper, peanut butter and Jelly, Google and the ever-curious mind…and today we are excited to say is another day where two great things come together to make something amazing.

Imagine having the ability to combine nopCommerce, a leading ASP.NET based open-source eCommerce platform and Word Press, a world famous blogging platform backed by thousands of plugins, to create none other than what can be described as something that will help you rethink the way you build your online business.

WordPress & nopCommerce integration is a collaborative project by Striving Programmers & Techpro compsoft Pvt Ltd and it was officially announced/launched at nopCommerce Days 2017 (3rd annual conference event that was held in New York, the USA on 16-17th of November).

Incorporating nopCommerce with WordPress is a great way to make the best of both worlds while simultaneously simplifying and enhancing your online business site.

Integration Approach

This nopCommerce and Wordpress integration supports two different approaches:

• CMS Driven

  In this case, you can have a WordPress driven CMS site and a nopCommerce driven shop within your WordPress site.

  With this type of integration, you will have your CMS data of your WordPress site like pages, blog posts etc. You will be using a custom WordPress plugin for nopCommerce integration which offers some custom components that will bring nopCommerce data on your WordPress site like product catalog, orders information, cart and product search etc. In addition to that, the user data can be synced as well. Every user created / registered on your WordPress site will be created in nopCommerce as well.

• eCommerce Driven

  In this case, you can have a nopCommerce driven shop and WordPress driven content within your nopCommerce site.

  With this type of integration, you will have products / services on a nopCommerce store site with all the catalog menus, product pages, customer data, order information etc. You will be using a custom nopCommerce plugin which offers some custom components that will bring WordPress blog posts data on your nopCommerce site via widget zones. In addition to that, the customer data can be synced as well. Every customer created / registered on nopCommerce site will be created in WordPress as well.

Technical Aspects

This integration can be installed on any WordPress and nopCommerce store site individually like any other plugin. This integration consists of two custom plugins: one plugin for WordPress and other for nopCommerce.

• WordPress Plugin (Overview)

  This part of the integration comes with a long list of WordPress short codes (a complete list is mentioned in the documentation HERE) that can be placed anywhere on your WordPress site depending on your theme and it will display nopCommerce blocks (like product catalog, search, categories etc.) and users / customers of your site will be able to browse and add products to the shopping cart right from the WordPress site.

  User Sync Feature: The user data of your WordPress site can also be synced with nopCommerce customer data which means every time a user is registered on your WordPress site, same user will be created as a customer on your nopCommerce site with the same password.

  Examples:

  Displaying Categories (in WordPress)

  Displaying Product Detail (in WordPress)

  *A complete list of supported short codes is mentioned in the documentation HERE

• nopCommerce Plugin (Overview)

  This part of the integration allows you to bring WordPress content on your nopCommerce site like blog posts along with the author information. Within the plugin settings, you can define the location (i.e. nopCommerce widget zone) where you would like to display WordPress blog posts.

  Customer Sync Feature: The customer data of your nopCommerce site can also be synced with WordPress user’s data which means every time a customer is registered on your nopCommerce site, same customer will be created as a user on your WordPress site with the same password.

Download nopCommerce & WordPress Integration from GitHub

This integration is available for FREE on GitHub and Striving Programmers & Techpro compsoft Pvt Ltd will continue to support the project for the community.

GitHub Download: Click Here

Documentation / User Guide

Overview of WordPress and nopCommerce Integration: http://www.strivingprogrammers.com/overview-of-wordpress-and-nopcommerce-integration

Installing WordPress and nopCommerce Integration: http://www.strivingprogrammers.com/installing-wordpress-and-nopcommerce-integration

Setting up your websites for WordPress and nopCommerce Integration: http://www.strivingprogrammers.com/setting-up-your-websites-for-wordpress-and-nopcommerce-integration

Video from nopCommerce Days 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fPM_an-Yjg&feature=youtu.be

Demo

WordPress site (with nopCommerce products, cart, search, customer data, order info etc.): CLICK HERE

nopCommerce site (with WordPress blog posts, blog author info, blog title etc.): CLICK HERE

Please feel free to test it and post your feedback/comments here: http://www.strivingprogrammers.com/boards/topic/176/wordpress-and-nopcommerce-integration

*WordPress & nopCommerce integration is a collaborative project by Striving Programmers & Techpro compsoft Pvt Ltd

Author: Lavish Kumar

When it comes to eCommerce, it is all about providing exquisite experience through appropriate and relevant website features, functionalities, layout, design and theme to generate more revenue. An online merchant understands the privileges of providing excellent user experience to his customers since it has a direct impact on sale than any other tactics such as product features, quality, advertising, and marketing strategy.

Though nopCommerce has prepared relevant templates according to the needs in different kinds of industries, it is quite difficult to find one that contains all the features and functionalities as you have expected or needed. Hence, to implant your strategy customizing few features according to your needs and convenience and liking will do wonders for your business. Following are few customize features that help you prosper.

1. Leverage Online Bargaining Feature That Benefits the Business as well as Customers

Adopting a middle way approach by using ‘Bargaining’ tool will do wonders for your nopCommerce store since it is beneficial to the business as well as consumers. Customers often prefer having control over the pricing and some might even drop the idea of purchasing due to high price, at that time leveraging this to your advantage by providing them the bargaining feature will be a smart move on your part. It will give them the privilege of having control over prices at the same time ensuring you do not lose customers due to the price difference.

To maintain a good profit margin, you can set the minimum amount and quantity while giving the customer the power to choose for themselves. When it can be applied in almost all the industries, it can do wonders for businesses dealing with clothing, accessories, décor items and many more.

2. Customers Are More Likely to Pay More for Customized Products

According to a search conducted by Infosys, 86% said that personalization has at least some impact on what they purchase. (Source) They are willing to pay more for products they can customize. Implementing business relevant customization strategy, you can attract many customers. Ensure all the important functionalities are provided including multiple choices, proper visuals, price calculator etc.

3. Implement One-Page Checkout Instead of Needless Lengthy-Multistep Checkout Process

Research proves one of the major reasons of cart abandonment is lengthy checkout processes. The default check-out process is divided into six parts that take several minutes to get through. By implementing one-page checkout, customers will need to fill only the most essential or required details and a quick process will save time by letting them choose their billing address from the address book, edit the quantity of the product, enter a discount code or gift code on the checkout page only.

4. Scalable, Accurate and Quick results through Elastic Search

Slow response time on your nopCommerce website will drive the customers away. Since eCommerce, websites contain a lot of information and pictures it creates a large database, which becomes destruction while making it work slow.

The elastic search will help you make your website perform better by only taking less than a second to show search results, considering the number of products do not go beyond 100,000. Its additional facilities are enabling geo-localized searches, much faster than normal response times for large database.

5. Multi-step product Configuration

While offering customization, for certain categorical items, a customer requires to configure himself in detail. For example, a Shoe brand providing personalized shoes will have multiple parts to configure including design, material, colour, size width, style, features. At times like these, multi-step product configuration will be a great tool that seamlessly takes users through systematic procedure of creating a product completely on their own.

6. Using Advanced Tools - Advanced Google Analytics

After implementing all the strategies and tactics, measuring your performance with authentic analytical tool is necessary to know how well is your website performing. Using google analytics, will help you keep tracks of user behavior including how often website visitors are clicking on what, exploring which sections of the website, how many people search or click the help button, what are the key words users seem to be searching, which products are most viewed, sold, abandoned. This data will help bring appropriate changes and build future strategies to increase sale.

7. Custom mega drop-down menu with many filters

Providing smooth user experience through navigating the customers easily to their choice of product is necessary to make them stay on your website. Implementing custom mega drop-down menus will help them find their choice with a single click without much of a hassle. They do not need to go through all the section to find their choice of product.

8. Convert Each Product Page into A Landing Page

Purpose of creating a landing page is to drive the traffic to that section and promote the product range. Imagine the results you can get if you can create each of your product page into a landing page. The traffic would increase along with a conversion by directing the users to directly to their needs. Since a landing page is a sale centric page, which ensures users are directed to the right page providing them better user experience ultimately increasing conversion for the merchant.

9. Tailor Product Rates Based on Customer’s Location

When you are targeting global audiences, you can customize product prices. Checking the IP address of the customer, the site will show the relevant currency. If there are any country-specific prices for the product, it will show relevant prices along with fetching the country-pecific currency. Product prices in different countries are easily customizable- through country-specific currencies based on IP addresses.

10. EMI enabled

When the products are expensive, customers are more likely to look for EMI options with reasonable rates. They might not be ready to pay a huge price despite liking the product, but monthly installments will make them consider their decision or influence them to buy the product. Displaying EMI related information, bank interest rate, monthly installments and total money with specific banks on the product detail page using a pop-up window will prove to be very helpful. Displaying price range filters, category mapping and options to customize EMI table will help your customer to find the comfort area and make a purchase.

11. Responsive design

A rapid invention in technology has gifted mobiles, laptops, smartphones, tablets to the society because of which developers are needed to keep up. Responsive design comes to the rescue by providing good user experience to all the users without much effort to create different websites for different devices. It allows similar presentation and good UX irrespective of screen size.

This enables SEO visibility since responsive design can attract users who use a mobile phone, iPad, computers, laptops, all at once. This provides better user experience and improves ranking on search engines. Only one URL instead of two for mobile and desktop will not only ease your job of maintaining two URLs but also stand your website on Top of the Search results on various search engines.

12. Grab attention with attractive banner display

Displaying attractive banners on your nopCommerce store will grab attention of the users immediately. Using the technique while introducing new products, discounted products, trending items and season items to save the customers’ time as well as influence their minds. product which are sitting there since a long time without customers purchasing them, could be put out on banners to attract the buyers and grab attention.

13. Let the customer control the delivery details

Fastest delivery is always preferable but comfortable timing and days are necessary too. To make your online customer happy, you must deliver the products on their preferable dates and time intervals, yet, you can set minimum and maximum delivery days. However, letting he power shift to the customers will increase sales and make them come back.

14. Implement Machine Learning

Online businesses often have troubles with reaching out to the target audience without approaching the irrelevant ones. According to nopCommerce, personalized product recommendation can increase sale/revenue by 29% by generating the best possible recommendations. (Source)

When you are spending a reasonable amount of time and efforts to prepare a good marketing strategy to attract relevant users, machine learning will complete the task in minutes since it is learning user behavior with each passing minute. Improving with time allows providing more accurate results every time.

Apart from the above features, you can always make them feel comfortable by providing multiple currencies, languages and payment methods. Displaying the most viewed products separately on the home page will increase curiosity in the users’ mind to know what is trending. In addition to grabbing your users’ attention and displaying information, you must always focus putting together a list of features necessary for your website and helpful in your industries which will help you look for the most appropriate templates. It will help you to take a decision on which features to look for in templates, which ones to customize that will help you increase sale rapidly.

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.

One of the most important things customers are looking for these days is not just a quality product, but also a great customer experience. People are tired of being pitched to by faceless corporate entities and are looking for brands which can connect with them on a more personal level. But, even if you have managed to sell your product or service, that doesn’t mean that you should stop providing a great experience for customers, especially when it comes to providing timely and accurate customer support.

This is where most business owners and customer service managers stumble, because even if they don’t forget about their customers’ needs, they still underestimate just how important customer support is, and rush through it. As a result, they end up losing customers which might have made several purchases in the future. If you have the thankless job of being a customer support manager, take a look at some of the most typical mistakes made by your colleagues in order not to repeat them.

1. Not Investing in Your Staff

As a manager, it is your responsibility to make sure that your employees have everything they need in order to do their job properly. We are not just talking about giving them a decent salary, but also investing in them in terms of training, as well as providing them with all the necessary tools for the job. Whether you are managing hundreds of employees, or only a small team of professionals for one of the top resume writing services, for example, you need to make sure they are all properly trained to handle all of the potential scenarios that might happen in your line of work. This means training them how to address the customers and provide the right information at the right time, while showing enthusiasm for solving the issue.

2. Failing to Make Good on Your Promises

Just about every business owner and customer service manager is guilty of this, at least at some point in their career. In fact, most managers set out with a genuine intention to provide the best possible customer service, one that is available nearly 24/7, highly efficient, and capable of handling customer requests in multiple languages. However, those promises are often made at the very beginning, when there is no shortage of enthusiasm, but out in the field, the situation is a lot more challenging. Of course you are not going to advertise that your customer service is just passable, but overpromising and under-delivering is even worse, as it will permanently alienate your customers.

3. Relying on Automation Way Too Much

Automating some of the customer service processes can help you save a great deal of money, which is important when you are just starting out, as well as time, but automating most of your customer service is the single worst thing you can do. As we have mentioned before, customers are looking for a more personal experience with brands and companies, and if you are making them solve their issues using an elaborate phone tree, they are going to be furious for a reason. Sure, some requests should be handled by an automated system, but you should still allow your customers to contact you personally and discuss their problems with a trained human being.

4. Adopting a Reactive instead of the Proactive Approach

Providing an amazing customer service should be one of your goals, but as laudable as it is, an even better goal would be to create a product or service that is so brilliant that the calls to your customer service department are not all that frequent. Of course, this is impossible to pull off in real life, but if you are trying to market a so-so product, rest assured that will come back to haunt you on the back end, meaning that will get a lot of calls from disgruntled customers. Take your time when developing your product, rely on data and analytics, and provide constant improvements. Also, you can require your employees to make a few calls a month to the customer in order to keep that connection alive and well.

5. Not Considering Your Customer’s Feelings

While that may sound pretty vague and abstract, in the end, it all comes down to how your customers feel. If they were able to order your product quickly and are satisfied with the quality, they will feel positive about the whole thing. And if you have managed to solve their problem when they have called your customer service department, well that’s just the icing on the cake. But, if they have called customer service and they had to jump through several hoops, or someone had been rude to them, it can ruin the entire experience which you have worked so hard to establish.

6. Not Following Up after the Customer Service Issue

Another ace up your sleeve you can use if you’re a customer service manager is following up with your customer after an issue has been resolved. Even if the issue has been solved successfully, following up creates an even more positive experience for the user, and allows you to circumvent some issues that might appear down the line. Also, there is a bit of psychology in it, since we all tend to remember what happened to us last. This gives you a chance to bolster your customer’s experience even further.

Conclusion

Now that you know the most common mistakes made by customer service managers, you can avoid them altogether and provide the best possible experience for your customers, and ultimately, build a better company that will be able to delight its buyers and adopt a proactive approach to doing business.

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

What if you require advanced content management features as well as shopping cart functionality? Now you can use both of this using nopCommerce - Umbraco integration.

Umbraco is an ASP.NET based fully-featured, open source Content Management System well-known for its flexibility and great editing experience. nopCommerce is the leading ASP.NET based open-source eCommerce platform with comprehensive features, applicable for all types of users from new online businesses, who are going to grow fast, to the most demanding eCommerce experts.

These two products have a lot of things in common, first of all, their Microsoft roots and open source license. nopCommerce & Umbraco integration is a project done by nopCommerce partner Uteam and it was officially announced/launched at nopCommerce Days 2017 (3rd annual conference event that was held in New York, the USA on 16-17th of November).

Benefits

This integration allows using leading feature of Umbraco for content management and nopCommerce for eCommerce features and order processing.

1. It's Free

   Umbraco and nopCommerce are open source and free software

2. Flexibility

   Umbraco is a flexible, modern and friendly CMS with huge community over world, simple for developers and site owners, allow create custom stores in short time.

3. Security

   Umbraco and nopCommerce are very secured and regularly updated, both systems in use by enterprise companies and pass penetration tests, so you do not have to worry about any security issues.

4. Customization

   Both os systems have simple and fast customization options. This allow create custom designed store, SEO structure and customized customer journey.

5. Support

   Umbraco and nopCommerce have a big community over the world, when you need professional assistance Umbraco and nopCommerce provide enterprise support.

Main Features

• Extend existing Umbraco site with eCommerce features
• Create mini-sites for specific products with checkout process
• Create eCommerce site base on Umbraco framework
• Manage orders, customer and products centralized for multichannel stores
• Create full-featured eCommerce solution for Umbraco

Architecture

Project Structure

• Rest Api – raw api calls
• Nop.Api.Adapter – wrap api calls
• Nop.Integration.Core – entities and services for api calls
• Nop.Integration.Umbraco.Core – Umbraco common logic like shopping cart, registration callbacks
• NopStarterKit – complete sample for eCommerce store, connected to nopCommerce

Infrastructure

• Nop.Api.Adapter
• Nop.Integration.Core

Nop.Integration.Umbraco.Core

• Handling authorization
• Customer synchronization
• Manage customer state
• Strong type api wrapper
• Catalog synchronization processes

Nop Starter Kit for Umbraco

• Sample pages: login, registration, forgot password, categories, products, shopping cart, checkout
• Sample document types
• Sample pages structure in CMS
• Datatypes: products picker, category picker or customer picker
• Dashboards: products, orders

There are 2 separate sites for Umbraco and nopCommerce have been created.

• Can be used on new or existing site
• Use any site structure: flat or hierarchical structure for products and categories
• Use any data from nopCommerce catalog: you can choose any property from nopCommerce to show on your Umbraco site
• Full customized login and registration process
• Full customized checkout and payment page

nopCommerce site configuration

1. Install api plugin for nopcommerce https://www.nopcommerce.com/p/2464/api-plugin.aspx
2. Open api configuration - /Plugins/ManageClientsAdmin/Lis
3. Add new client

Umbraco site configuration - starter kit

1. Install Starter Kit
2. Change client details - from nopCommerce site

Links

• Umbraco Site: http://umbraco.nopintegra.com
• Nop Site: http://nop.nopintegra.com
• Api Plugin: https://www.nopcommerce.com/p/2464/api-plugin.aspx
• Git: https://github.com/yawkale/nop-umbraco-integration
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNei1s48uxI&list=PLnL_aDfmRHwujTxvvrMWnS0i22Ghg6lbd&index=11

Author: Yakov Lebski, Uteam

When it comes to having a powerful eCommerce business, one of the most important things you need is a good tool. There are tons of tools that you can utilize to help make your website run smoothly, and help you keep up with everything from the shopping that is being done to the services that your website provides. Remember that running an eCommerce website is a huge undertaking, and it takes in a lot of data from people all over the world. The right tools can make or break your business easily.

The Best Analytics and Data for Your Website

The first thing you should get is Google Analytics. Before you get anything also put on your website, this is a must-have tool. Google Analytics is not only free, but it also gives you a wide array of features. According to Jeff Waldroup, CTO of SolidEssay, you can analyze your traffic data with a remarkable amount of detail and it is practically essential for all major websites to have. This isn’t just for the start of your eCommerce business, but data makes your company, and most of the ways your changes, tests, and improvements will be determined are through the ways you collect data. There are few analytical services that are as good as this one.

Optimizing Your eCommerce Webpage

Outside of Analytics, there is also a great value in testing. Many testing tools will allow you to see how the market will respond to the way your website looks, the buttons that you use, etc. This gives you a chance to optimize the way your website looks and increases the conversion rate of the viewers of your website. Of course, Google Website Optimizer works wonders in this area as it tests everything on your market, while other testing services just try to match what your target market may be. The best thing about this optimizer is that you can actually set the percentage of the traffic you want to test so you can get strong results from a statistical standpoint. The service is widely used and highly recommended, just like their analytics tool.

The Best Tools in Search Engine Optimization

SEO Tools are probably some of the most numerous on the web, and there are several to choose from. Each tool has its strengths and advantages, but you will have to test them out to see. The point of these tools is to help you with your website and improve the rankings of your page in search engines. Some of the tools that you can choose from are Kissmetrics, Majestic, and MOZ, which have all been known as great tools for eCommerce businesses, and they can easily help you improve your page ranking. It is all a matter of checking them out and seeing which ones work for you.

Once you start your eCommerce website, there is a lot of competition out there, and the data you collect is important to make your website run better and convert more visitors. These tools are all designed to help make your website standout and increase your amount of traffic and conversion rate.

Author: Paul Bates is an eCommerce marketing consultant and a content writing manager at ConfidentWriters. He lives in Modesto, California and works with students and educators around the world.

Instagram is a unique marketing tool in your arsenal, and you want to make sure you're using it. This photo sharing platform has millions of users all over the world, and it provides you the perfect space to share your product with them. Here are 10 tips that will help you improve your sales on Instagram and get noticed.

1. Quality Over Quantity

As with any social media platform, updating regularly is something you must always do. You want to keep your product fresh in your followers' minds, all the time. This doesn't mean, though, that you should be putting every single photo you take online. "This can cause followers to actually become fed up of you, and sometimes even unfollow" says SMM manager Timothy Lane from Top Canadian Writers. "It's much better to focus on posting high quality photos that they'll enjoy."

2. Use Images That Fit Your Branding

You'll have spent a lot of time and effort creating branding for your business, so make sure you're using it in your Instagram images. Pick and choose carefully, only using images that fit in with your overall theme. For example, the Taco Bell Instagram uses bold colours and playful images to fit in with their look.

3. Don't Neglect The Description

The biggest reason why people are on Instagram is to check out the pictures. However, you still need to be paying attention to your descriptions. These will explain your images to followers, and even link them forward to your site or other areas of interest. Write short, concise descriptions, that are relevant to the image. Sites like Australian Reviewer can help you with the writing, and Best British Essays will help you write excellent headings for them.

4. Use Competitions To Draw Interest

Many brands have had a lot of success with competitions on Instagram, as they can bring lots of new followers to you. The most popular form of contest asks followers to 'like' a picture, and then tag friends or share it online. This helps you reach a lot more people online and build your following.

5. Edit Your Post

Both your images and your descriptions will need to be carefully edited before you post them online. You want to show your product off at its best, so ensure that your posts reflect this. Learn to use Photoshop or another image editing service, in order to touch up pictures and make them as good as they can be. You can use many different text editing services, such as UK Services Reviews, to help you edit your descriptions.

6. Invest In Ads

Like most social media platforms, you can buy adverts on Instagram. If you do your research first you can get a lot of interest by using them. Take a look at your target audience. Who are they, and what are they looking for online? For example, you may be a women's clothing retailer. If that's the case, you may want to target women aged 25-35 on Instagram with your ads. When you pick the right audience, you'll see a huge increase in sales.

7. Enhance Your Images

Taking a shot and then posting it on Instagram will get you some interest, but before you post it take the time to enhance it a little. You can add captions using free programs such as Canva, if you think that would help. Perhaps you could tag other creators in the image, if you used their work. Take the time to make the image perfect before it goes live.

8. Don't Forget Video

Many Instagram users forget they can take videos and post them on the platform, too. Videos are often a great way to show your product in action and show it from all angles. Take the time to take well thought out videos, and post them up too. Blogger Caitlyn Duggan from Revieweal says "I had a lot of success showing clothing in videos. It helped followers see how something would fit, or how it would sit on the body."

9. Use Influencers To Show Off Your Products

Influencers are high level social media users, with high follower counts. You can work with influencers to showcase your products and increase your sales. Do your research and find an influencer that's already posting to your target audience. Give them your product to showcase, and give them a unique discount code so you can track just how many people buy from their post.

10. Talk To Followers

Finally, followers will talk to you online. Talk with them, and get to know them. The more you engage with your audience, the better posts you can create for them. These tips will help you curate your Instagram feed so it's only showing the best posts. With a little work and tweaking, you'll see an increase in your sales in no time.

Author: Rachel Summers is an experienced social media manager, having worked with several different companies over the last seven years on their strategies. This included working with Student Writing Services, a leading custom writing services. She's helped them create social media strategies that work. Read more here.

Does any of your product descriptions tempt online shoppers to buy a product(s) from you? Or do you simply describe the product and let the customers decide if they want to buy that product from you or your competitor?

Writing a great product description for your eCommerce store site is one of the hardest things you will ever do. Yes, it can be a very time-consuming task. But, think of the product description as an opportunity to sell your product to the customers instead of simply describing it and explaining what it does that majority of the customer may already know. Have you ever come across a bland product description that does not give you any details that you are looking for? Especially when you are ready to click that buy button but you just need a confirmation from the product description that product does what it is supposed to do and a differentiating factor.

The secret of writing a great product description is to think from a buyer’s prospective and mention all those key items that customers are looking for and the differentiating factors that motivate them to buy the product from your online store.

Here are a few key points that every store owner should follow for writing great product descriptions that convert and sells.

Defining the tone

The tone of your voice in the product description can act as a great tool in engaging with your customers (or target audience). Do you want to sound boring and publish same old bland product descriptions that every other online store is posting? Or do you want to go with a lighthearted approach and a dash of humor that can be a differentiating factor from your competitor?

Let the tone of your voice demonstrate in the product description that you are friendly and interested in doing business with your customers. Online shoppers are very quick in judging by your tone, how you deal with your customers so show them that you are approachable and interested in understanding your client’s business.

For example, here is how ThinkGeek describes Harry Potter Hogwarts Moccasin Slippers:
Old castles in Scotland? They're really quite drafty. Sure, you've got the ability to make a stream of warm air come out of the end of your wand, but you don't want to sit around all day, pointing your wand at your feet, do you? Especially not when that wand could be better suited magically stirring your hot chocolate, instead. Or when you need it to fight in a wizard's duel.

• Warm sueded slippers magically keep your toes toasty
• Low-back slide-on slippers with rubber grippy soles
• Printed with the Hogwarts crest and motto

As soon as you read this kind of product description, you are compelled to buy such product. The tone in the description definitely matches the type of product that ThinkGeek is selling. Why would you buy a product like this? Because of the way ThinkGeek is describing it.

Creating a balance between features and benefits

There are countless ways how you can write that perfect product description. A good approach is to always create a perfect balance between features and benefits of the product. Describe how your product works and why a customer should invest in it. In other words, talk about your product benefits in relation to the features.

For example, here is how Moosejaw describes Moosejaw Carpet Diem Outdoor Blanket:
The Moosejaw Carpet Diem Outdoor Blanket is the perfect all-purpose outdoor blanket that is always ready for whatever you throw at it. Seize your spot on the lawn: Music at the park, Fourth of July fireworks, a day at the beach or plain old cuddling with your honey. Fleecy on one side and tough polyester on the other, feel free to choose which side is up, but obviously, the correct answer is fleece up. So soft and cozy for a nap. The tough side is water, dirt and sand resistant, so you don't get your tush all dirty while reading a book. Whether you're just arriving or taking off, the whole thing rolls up into itself and secures with a couple of straps with a carry handle on top. Ideal for getting back to the car when the rain rolls in.

• Versatile blanket is perfect for the beach, concerts, picnics and building forts
• Double Brushed Anti Pill Fleece face fabric is so soft it feels like you're lounging on a ground cloud
• 100% Polyester Oxford grid waterproof back side resists water, dirt, sand and sideways looks from jealous neighbors
• Durable nylon straps and carry handle for quick and easy getaways
• Zinc Alloy buckles double as a bottle opener. What more could you want from a blanket?

Moosejaw site is perfectly describing their product by telling customers about how the product is beneficial to their lives and why it is an essential product.

Appeal customer’s imagination

When customers walk into a physical store, they always like to look at the item before buying it. It is quite common for customers to look, touch, feel, smell and view the item from different angles before buying it. One limitation of selling products online is that customers cannot touch and feel your product so as a business owner (or store admin), it is your job to appeal customer’s imagination by words and let customer imagine how it is like to actually use the product just by simply reading the product description.

For example, here is how Godiva describes Masterpieces Milk Chocolate Caramel Lion of Belgium Bar:
Introducing Godiva Masterpieces – Godiva’s most exquisite chocolates now available in delightful individually wrapped mini chocolates, perfect to enjoy anytime. Each Masterpiece is crafted in the shape of a signature chocolate and filled with smooth and creamy fillings that melt in your mouth. Godiva's individually wrapped Lion of Belgium filled bar is inspired by Godiva's most cherished chocolate, a majestic chocolate 'shield' proudly embossed with the Belgium coat of arms.

This is a perfect example of writing a product description that let the audience picture themselves already having and using the product.

Writing great product description that converts and sells may sound like a tedious task but it is definitely worth it. Focus on power words, avoid using industry jargons and share stories to make a better connection with your audience.

Author: Lavish Kumar

How can you tell your prospects what you do, describe your product’s features, and talk about your services on your eCommerce site?
You do all these with web copy—those written words on your website. It can be a few lines explaining your value proposition, brief notes on your About Us page, or hundreds or thousands of words on your homepage detailing why you exist.
Beyond telling your brand story, great copy helps your eCommerce business rank higher on Google and out-rank your competitors, generates more leads and increases your ROI. So you need to know how to write the perfect copy. Here are some tips to guide you.

Create a Graphic Image of Your Buyer Persona

our copy is not just a collection of a thousand words on a pixilated screen. Your eCommerce copy is your product, and you want your readers, visitors, and buyers to consume it. The best way to get them to read, share, and act upon it is to create a buyer persona. Then make a graphic picture to have anytime you sit down to write your copy.
A buyer persona is a sample representation of your target customers. When you create a profile of your buyer persona, it will help you to imagine your ideal customer. This will, in turn, help you tailor your brand messaging and copy around their specific needs.
Luckily, creating a profile of your customer persona is easier than you might think. Here are a few questions to ask yourself as you build your customer persona profile:

• What problem(s) does my product solve?
• What categories of people have these problems?
• What are the key benefits of my product?
• How is it different from other products?
• Where are my customers located?
• How do my customers make purchases?

You can now paint a picture of your ideal customer based on the answers to these questions, and you can use the profile to craft compelling web copy that addresses their needs.

Write Specifically for Your Buyer Persona

Let’s start with the headline.
It’s the first thing that your prospective buyer will see in your copy, so it has to be magnetic. To achieve optimal magnetism, you have to make the title ultra-specific. In other words, write it for your reader, the buyer persona that you crafted down to the smallest detail.
If you have truly captured them in your mind, then you can write a catchy headline that speaks to them.
The next thing is to write in the language they speak. Before you write a single word, you should know the specific language that your buyer persona speaks. In today’s technological world, it is easier to stalk your ideal buyer’s Facebook profile, Instagram, or Twitter feed to find out the exact language they speak. Then use it in your copy to specifically persuade them.
Finally, keep your message crisp, simple, and easy to read. According to the Web usability guru, Jacob Nielsen, people don’t read eCommerce pages. They scan them in an F-shaped pattern.
In other words, Internet users typically scan through the content of your page. They only read the entire content when you format it correctly.
So, how do you format your copy correctly and glue users to your page?

• Use short sentences to make your text easy to read
• Use bullet points to help scanners find what they want
• Use short paragraphs to make your content more interesting to consume

Besides these, you also need to press your customers’ hot buttons — to convince them to take action.

Press Their Hot Buttons to Push Them to Buy

How do you press your buyer persona’s hot buttons? How do you appeal to their emotions and push them to take action when they finish reading your web copy? You do this in one of three ways:

1. Inspire them with emotional stories. There’s nothing as captivating as a good story. It’s like the engine that drives the buyer to open his wallet. To write an incredible story that stirs emotion, you need to base it on your customers’ pain points and/or desires.
2. Use power words to bolster your copy. A story with no powerful words falls flat. You need to weave powerful words into your copy, words that evoke emotions and excite readers, so they will want to revisit your eCommerce site. Here’s a collection of power words you can use in your day-to-day copywriting tasks.
3. Use action words to convert readers into customers. One of my favorite copywriting tricks is the use of action words. While power words touch readers’ emotions, actions words push them to take action. Words like add, act, buy, call, and click are all action words that command a prospect to take action.

The goal is to make your copy so useful and effective that your ideal buyer feels compelled to act.

The Bottom line

Writing great web copy is a skill that every eCommerce vendor should master - because it’s a tool that tells your company’s story and appeals to your target market. When writing your web copy, always start with your reader in mind.
Picture your buyer persona and write specifically for them, not you, not your company, not your product. Write for your buyer. Then optimize your copy with emotional stories that will hook your readers and persuade them to become customers.

Author: Vikrant Bhalodia is a Head of Operations with 10+ years of multi-functional expertise across Sales & Marketing, Consulting, Web Content Management, Operations and HRM at WeblineIndia. Having passion towards technology and with multi-functional expertise in a Software Development Company based in USA and India, Vikrant loves sharing insights on optimizing the success and internet visibility of the customers’ businesses. Reach out Vikrant on LinkedIn.

So you have invested time, effort and money in building a website and launching a new product, now what? Do you think, all you have to do is just sit and wait for all the cash to fly in?

Hate to break it to you but customers are not going to find your website and start buying your product if you are not doing anything about it after the launch. So, how to get from the first phase where no one knows you to the second phase of your first 100 customers who are willing to pay for your product (or service)? Here is a comprehensive list of a few tactics that can help you in getting your first 100 customers.

Reach out to your existing network

When you are looking for those initial customers, the first step is to reach out to the people you already know. It is totally fine to contact your friends, family and professional connections as they all come under the existing network. Think of the people in your existing network who may be interested in buying your new product (or service) or if they know anyone else who might be interested. One main benefit of starting with your existing network is that you will be most comfortable around these people as you already know them.

Reaching out to your existing network does not necessarily mean you have to sell something to them. Think of it as an opportunity for you to learn something about potential customers and how your product (or service) can resolve any existing issue that these potential customers might be facing.

You can start with some questions such as:

• Have you ever tried a product (or service) like X?
• What are your thoughts on an existing product (or service)?
• What you dislike about an existing product (or service)?
• Have you tried anything else? Did it work? If no, why?

If you have a list of previous/existing customers, don’t be afraid to contact them. Even if none of them have a direct interest in using your product (or service), they might share your product (or service) information with their network.

Blog away

What’s holding you back from writing blog posts for your eCommerce business? It certainly takes a lot of hard work to write content but writing blog posts about your product (or services) and your business in general is a great long-term strategy. You can use your blog to give a sneak peak of your new products before the official release. Not only does this create anticipation, but it will create more engagement. This strategy can easily excite your customers towards your new product(s).

See Example: You can see in this example that a company is giving a sneak of their new product and how everybody is getting excited about it in the comment section while looking forward to the launch.

Blogging is one of the best way by which you can educate your customers about your products/services that you offer. This helps you as a business owner to bring more value to your brand. When you provide useful information to the customers about your products, they are more likely to buy products from you. You can use your blog for providing tutorials in regard to the use of your products.

For example: If you have an online store that offers computer parts. You can write tutorials about how to build a computer or how to make your computer’s performance better. While talking about these things, you can mention products in the tutorials and provide link to your products within the blog post from your website. Your potential customers might get different ideas of using your product and will likely to buy products from your online store.

A few tips for blogging about your eCommerce business are as follows:

• Post regularly
• Create a plan
• Share case studies
• Ask your readers to comment back

Fun Fact: Did you know that 92% of companies who decided to blog acquired customers through their blog? (Survey by Hubspot)

Start building that email list

If you are able to get first 100 customers from your existing network, GREAT! But, sooner or later you will have to approach strangers as potential customers and pitch your product (or service) to them.

Email marketing is one of the best ways to launch your product (or service) that virtually guarantees a sale. Today, online businesses are making use of all possible channels to market their store sites and attract more customers. Email marketing continues to be one of the top marketing channels that every retailer likes to use. ROI (return on investment) is one of the most captivating reasons why email marketing is beneficial in promoting your eCommerce store.

Some retailers think that email marketing was killed by spam, facebook, twitter and blogs. Well, the surveys tell a complete different story. If emails are kept short, interesting, and relevant by providing the customers (recipients) an option to unsubscribe, it does bring the revenue. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing is responsible for bringing in $40 for every $1 spent (reference).

Start building an email list of potential customers and use email marketing to:

• Launch your product
• Descript your product
• Educate audience / potential customers about your product
• Promote your product

How you as a business owner (or startup) got those first 100 customers? Let us know in the comment section below.

Author: Lavish Kumar

If you are a manager, the chances are you write a lot. You receive and reply to numerous emails on a daily basis. They are mostly business related, so your writing needs to be on point, especially when communicating with your clients. Some managers think that their writing skills are not very important, but they tend to forget that they are a driving force behind an eCommerce company, and other people might get a wrong impression based on their poorly worded emails.

Improving writing communication is not complicated at all. It does take a little bit of effort, but everyone can refine their writing skills. So let’s start!

Practicing regularly

If you want to get better at writing, you need to practice that skill every single day. Some of us might get bored while going through our own texts, so try reading newspapers. You can pick up the forms they use. It could serve as an inspiration for your future writings, too. You may also ask some of your co-workers to share their own texts with you just so you can see a different style of business writing.

Take some time to think

The first step you need to take is to sit down for a couple of minutes and think about the content of your writing. Don’t rush this process and map everything out in your head. If you go straight to writing or typing, the chances are the structure will be all over the place, and difficult for a reader to understand.

Straight to the point

The most important part of a letter or email is the beginning. You have to get the main idea out there immediately. Therefore, it needs to go in the first paragraph. A reader will immediately know what your text is about, and gain more information as they read the rest of it. If you are writing a proposal that has a different structure than an email, try to summarize it on an additional page which you need to place before the proposal itself.

Good grammar and vocabulary

Managers are representatives of a company they work for. Showing your clients that you know how to use a language is a must. Your grammar needs to be correct. Plus, the sentences shouldn’t be too long. The opinions are somewhat divided when it comes to the vocabulary because many professions use buzzwords to describe certain things. If you simply cannot avoid them, or find synonyms for a particular word, use them freely in your text. But make sure you don’t do it often. A reader might get a wrong impression of you.

Proofreading

Go through your texts before you hit the send button. You might see the mistakes you missed while you were writing. Pay close attention to spelling, as well as structure. It would be great if you could get someone else to proofread your writing because a fresh set of eyes might notice something you couldn’t. Every honest feedback is good feedback because it allows you to grow and learn. And you will know how to avoid making those mistakes in the future.

Conclusion

As a manager, your writing communication needs to be at a higher level. Writing is not a difficult skill to learn. Everyone gets better at something if they practice regularly. And so will you. Always plan the structure ahead, and learn how to introduce every text, so a reader will know what it is about. Proofreading is great if you want to improve the writing style and identify your common mistakes. And make sure your vocabulary is clear, without overused slang.

Author: Nancy Spektor has sharpened her pencil at The Daily of the University of Washington. After graduation, she decided to combine her business degree with her passion for written communication at www.a-writer.com. Nancy writes about marketing strategies, content management and various other topics that she finds intriguing. If she is not composing on her laptop or notebook, you probably can find her playing with her dog, Bok Choy.

Website security is a key part of any eCommerce store. Since the stakes are higher, you need to do everything you can to protect your customers’ private data. Here are 5 ways you can keep your nopCommerce website secure and your customers’ private information safe.

Keep your nopCommerce version up-to-date

nopCommerce rolls out new versions quite frequently (at least twice a year) which includes feature enhancements, general maintenance, bug patches and optimization along with security fixes to address the issues found in the preceding versions. Every time security vulnerability is reported (or found); the core nopCommerce team works diligently to fix the issue(s) in the latest version. Hence, it is extremely important to keep your nopCommerce store site version up-to-date especially when you are dealing with customer’s personal information.

Note: nopCommerce platform is safe and secure, and had only one security patch since its launch in 2008

In addition to security fixes, nopCommerce team is always trying to make things faster and optimize the software. Each new release comes with several performance improvements that make your nopCommerce store site run more efficiently. Another reason why you should consider to update your nopCommerce site to the latest version.

Release notes are available for every new release on nopCommerce website: https://www.nopcommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx

Here you can download the latest version of nopCommerce: https://www.nopcommerce.com/downloads.aspx

Enable SSL

Show the customers that they can trust you (or your business) as shoppers need to feel safe when they are on your store site, especially when they are providing payment information. Make sure you have SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) configured / enabled on your nopCommerce site to prove to the customers that their personal information is protected. In addition to gaining customer’s trust SSL is important to keep the connections encrypted. Unencrypted connectors are vulnerable which can lead to data theft.

You can easily configure / enable SSL on your nopCommerce store site by going to this location:

Administration (Dashboard) > Configuration > Stores (Click EDIT besides a default store to configure SSL)

Set up a password policy

Creating a strong password policy is key to helping your customers safeguard their private information such as log-in credentials, address, and payment information. While additional password complexity can be seen as an inconvenience to many users, it should not prevent you from setting up a strong password policy for your online store.

nopCommerce is compatible with the latest industry standard for payment data protection, PCI DSS 3.2. The newest requirements help to prevent, detect, and respond to cyberattacks that can lead to payment data breaches. In order to fit PCI DSS 3.2, the following policies must be followed:

• password attempt failure lock-out must be supported;
• password must be changed at least once every 90 days;
• password must be unique i.e. it is not allowed to submit one of the previously used passwords.

All of these options are integrated into nopCommerce and are fully configurable.

You can easily configure / setup a password policy on your nopCommerce store site by going to this location:

Administration (Dashboard) > Configuration > Settings > Customer settings

Take regular backups

Your online store is an incredibly valuable asset. Regardless of how much traffic or orders you get on your store site, your website data is the backbone of your online business. If something happens to that data, it can negatively affect your business.

There are many factors that can affect your online store site data such as:

• Human error
• Accidental data deletion
• Malicious attack

It is always a good practice to take regular backups of your online store site so data can be easily recovered (if needed).

In nopCommerce, you can easily take regular backups of your store site right from the administration area by going to:

Administration (Dashboard) > System > Maintenance

Some additional security measures

Here is a list of some additional best practices that you need to be aware of in order to make your nopCommerce based store site secure.

• Choose a reputable and reliable host that makes site security one of their top priority
• Enable SSL for all site pages to enforce SSL for the entire site (available in nopCommerce)
• Restrict IP address to access the backend (available in nopCommerce)
• Enable XSRF protection (available in nopCommerce)
• Enable honeypot (available in nopCommerce)
• Private key encryption (available in nopCommerce)

Author: Lavish Kumar

Shopify is a well-know SaaS eCommerce platform. nopCommerce is growing its popularity open source shopping cart. In this article, we will consider strengths and weaknesses of both solutions and try to give you some idea of what can be more suitable for you.

Code

nopCommerce and Shopify have a huge difference in terms of development. While Shopify allows to modify only front-end and uses its own language - Liquid - for it, nopCommerce gives an opportunity modifying both front- and back-end. It uses ASP.NET. This means anyone with basic ASP.NET development skills can code on nopCommerce, Shopify in contrast, requires additional time to learn its language.

nopCommerce is an open source platform, Shopify is proprietary. This fact comes into play when you decide whether you need your store to be customized or not, and to what extent. An open source code is freely available and can be modified to meet individual needs, such as non-standard functionality or specific integrations. Customization of a proprietary code is not possible, so a store owner has to set a store within the given functionality. For this reason, Shopify appears to be a sufficient solution for simple shops, but not suitable for complex ones that need source code adjustment in order to realize unique functions. Customization might be required later in the future, and moving an active business to another platform is difficult, time-consuming and costly.

Expense

Owning an online store implies several types of expenditures: shopping cart ownership, hosting, paid themes and plugins, required integrations, additional development services.

Shopping cart ownership costs

nopCommerce is a free solution. It can be downloaded and used straight away at its full capacity.

Shopify is a SaaS product (software-as-a-service), thus, users have to pay a monthly subscription fee to access the software. To test it out, Shopify gives a free trial for two weeks, after that, you’ll have to sign up for one of the following plans: Basic Shopify - $29/month, Shopify - $79/month or Advanced Shopify - $299/month. More expensive plans give access to more features, such as, gift cards or third-party calculated shipping rates, which are available for free in out of the box nopCommerce configuration.

Some features included in Shopify plans, for example, abandoned cart recovery, are not included in the out of the box nopCommerce functionality. However, an additional plugin may help and still be cheaper. For example, Smart Campaigns plugin that deals with abandoned carts costs $40 once, whereas a difference between Shopify and Basic Shopify plans is $50 monthly.

Themes and plugins

Speaking further about additional plugins and themes, the variety of add-ons is approximately similar, both platforms have more than 2000 plugins in their marketplaces. Many themes are available for both carts. They can be found on various external resources or in the marketplaces, both free and paid ones.

Of course, it is impossible to say how much add-ons might cost in any particular case as different businesses have different needs. Prices for plugins may also vary greatly for both platforms.

One more important detail is that Shopify charges transaction fees for payments made through external payment gateways like PayPal, Braintree, and Authorize.net (in addition to their standard transaction fees). The fee percentage starts at 0.5% and goes up to 2%, where cheaper subscription plans imply higher transaction fees. Thus, whenever somebody buys from you, Shopify reduces your profit. And with a big amount of transaction, this can sum up to a decent number. For stores in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and Ireland this can be avoided with Shopify Payments.

Hosting

Shopify is a hosted solution, nopCommerce is self-hosted, which means a store owner would have to pay for hosting separately. The prices for nopCommerce hosting vary. Some basic plans may start from as little as $2.95 per month (for example, with SmarterASP.NET).

While looking for a hosting might seem a bit of a hassle for newbies, it has a significant advantage of the control over it. And a good hosting is essential for a store as it affects site speed, and the number of products that can be entered.

Development services

Shopify is a store builder, that means any person can easily configure it within the given functionality. nopCommerce can also be set up by a non-techie person, however, to properly customize it, a developer’s help would be needed. nopCommerce users may contact any of the more than 100 partners or find independent developers. So when planning a budget, these expenses should be considered.

Store look and functionality

Design

To make your store stand out in the net and be recognizable, you need to put an effort into its design. Afterall, it is one of the most important components of your brand. Both platforms have a big choice of themes, free and paid. When choosing a theme, make sure it is responsive, so it can adjust to different screen sizes. With more and more purchases done from mobile devices, this requirement becomes essential.

Multi-store and multi-vendor functionality

The multi-store feature enables store owners to run more than one store on different domains and manage all admin operations from a single administration panel. It gives a possibility to create unique online stores for multiple brands, products, B2B, B2C, affiliates, co-branded stores or quickly launch micro-stores for promotional campaigns. This feature allows every online store to share a single database: you can share catalog data between stores, and your customers can log-in to all of your stores using the same credentials.

The multi-vendor feature allows organizing a marketplace. Products from multiple independent vendors appear in the common product catalog and your website visitors can shop at one web store even if your products are supplied by hundreds of different vendors from all over the world. Each vendor can be provided with an administrator panel access to manage their products, review sales reports and order details regarding their products.

Now, coming back to our platforms, both of these features are available for nopCommerce users out of the box. Shopify users would need to install an additional app to set up a multi-vendor store, which would cost starting from $10 per month. And there is no way to run multiple stores from one admin panel. To do so, Shopify users have to create several accounts, which multiplies their payments.

Checkout

Carts are often abandoned at the checkout stage, so having a quick and simple checkout is really important.

Both of these carts have a one-page checkout option, as well as support guest checkout. Both support SSL certificates, so your customers may be confident that payments are secure.

However, again, Shopify doesn’t really let you customize your checkout. Say, you don’t provide discounts and don’t need the discount box at the checkout. You can only remove it if using Shopify Plus (which price starts from $2000). Similar to any other customization.

Marketing

No surprise on this, marketing is extremely important for your store. Keeping existing customers, bringing in potential ones - your shopping cart must support your marketing strategy.

Both of the platforms have inbuilt SEO functionality such as customizable H1, title, meta tags, localizable URLs. Both carts automatically generate sitemaps.xml files so new products and site changes show up on search engines quickly. These features help your store get a lot of organic traffic.

What other marketing functionality both of the carts have? Discounts and coupon codes, nopCommerce supports promotional codes generation out of the box, Shopify has this feature included in all of the plans.

Both platforms support blog, newsletter subscriptions, integration with Google Shopping. Gift cards available out of the box in nopCommerce are available in higher-priced Shopify plans as well.

In addition to this, nopCommerce also supports reward points system, related products, forums, polls, product reviews and ratings out of the box. All this is possible to set up in Shopify too, but would require additional apps, that would add costs.

Another important part of your marketing is reporting. Both of the platforms allow you to integrate with Google Analytics. Ecommerce transaction tracking automatically connects your Google Analytics web usage data with customer purchases and shopping cart transactions. In addition to this, Shopify offers to its top-tier subscribers some advanced analytics like statistics on how your customers found you and what country they are in, what URLs are referring to your online store, what search terms were used to find you.

User Experience

Many people say Shopify to be one of the easiest carts for non-techie users. It is quite true. It has a website-building tool which makes it simple for anyone to customize a store.

nopCommerce might require a bit more time to get familiar with, but this is also due to richer functionality available “out of the box”. The platform is designed to facilitate medium to large stores, though it can be used by smaller ones too. The admin panel is user-friendly, plus the documentation is provided.

As was mentioned earlier, nopCommerce provides more inbuilt features and doesn’t require plugins for many tasks that are not supported in the basic Shopify versions. Thus, nopCommerce store admins eventually might find it less demanding.

Support

When any question arises on the way, there are different opportunities to get it answered. Both platforms have forums where community or the company team members reply. NopCommerce community and ecosystem is larger due to the product is open source. Though it is not dedicated, the company also offers a paid support for $299 - 3 months or $799 - the whole year. Shopify includes support in its pricing.

In other words, both communities are active and there is always a helping hand to solve any query that a store owner might have.

Conclusion

Every store has its own unique requirements and goals, so a choice of the platform is not a straightforward decision. While both of these considered platforms are good they fit rather different needs.

If you’re starting your first individual business and don’t have much technical expertise, you might be more willing to consider Shopify. It really gives an opportunity to set up a beautiful store within couple of hours.

However, if you plan a store which needs lots of customizations and should be scalable, nopCommerce would be a better choice. Its extensive out of the box functionality paired with a large marketplace make is a great choice for online business even for non-developers. If you have a developer then your possibilities are unlimited due to open source code. nopCommerce also gives more control over a store. This is a critical factor for some business. And its freedom from monthly payments helps you lower your expenditures, thus increasing your profit.

Author: Alexandra Lykova, nopCommerce team

We are happy to announce the forth nopCommerce Conference and its new official website. No secrets anymore - this time we will meet in shining Las Vegas at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, 8-9 of November.

nopCommerce Days 2018 will be our biggest event ever, we expect 700+ attendees from 40+ countries. There will be 2 days full of brilliant presentations and workshops for technical people and online business representatives; networking and celebrating our mutual success at the night party!

Who is speaking

The conference will be opened with the keynote of nopCommerce CEO, Andrei Mazulnitsyn; he will share the past year results and uncover future plans. The technical keynote will be held by ASP.NET team representatives. As nopCommerce is based on ASP.NET Core, it's crucial for us to keep our users updated with strategic plans of the ASP.NET team.

Not to limit the conference with a technical side of eCommerce business we invited keynote speakers from marketing and consulting companies will be focusing on sales tips for eCommerce business owners. We are also looking forward to hearing the voice of established analytical companies who is going to share the industry trends and make 3-years ahead forecast.

Besides keynotes, there will be 20 parallel breakout sessions dedicated to specific nopCommerce development issues, practical eCommerce tips and success stories from our partners and their clients. By the way, we have already started accepting speeches, you can submit your topic using the contact form on the conference website.

Who is attending

nopCommerce Days is an event for the whole community, including our partners: development agencies, technology partners and hosting providers; individual developers, product and project managers, store owners and eCommerce experts. Whether you are advanced in nopCommerce, developing or managing online stores for years, started several days ago or just consider our platform for the next project, this event will help to get to know nopCommerce world and discover its ecosystem. What we are also planning for this year is an exhibition where all the sides of eCommerce process can meet each other. If you are interested in promoting your company and services at the exhibition please find more information about it here.

How to join

We have already started selling tickets to nopCommerce Days 2018. To get the lowest early bird price - $350 register now; this price will be available only for several weeks. For wise planners we also recommend to book a hotel room at fantastic Hard Rock Hotel, providing the best rate for our conference attendees. nopCommerce team will stay there as well! To book a room please use this link or call them by phone (800)4737625, don’t forget to mention nopCommerce Days 2018 name when booking.

For more information visit the conference website and follow our news in social media and newsletter.

Working as a creative agency, every day we have to face a huge number of stereotypes about eCommerce. Maybe they deserve a dedicated website for them.

But today we are going to speak about one stereotype which characterizes our working life: can an eCommerce be creative and, meanwhile, sell?

We must also point out that the coexistence between these two completely different concepts seems to be very hard: if an eCommerce sells, it is not creative. But if it is creative, is it able to generate revenue?

Yes. An eCommerce can be both! And you can reach this goal in 3 steps.

The first one: understanding the user.
Subtitle: “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing” or “You know nothing, Jon Snow”. But here the “ignorance” is your best ally because, when you don’t know, you have no preconceptions. Who is your target? Why does she/he buy online? What is she/he looking for in this experience? Because we’re not just talking about a product or a service: eCommerce is a matter of experience and we have to build the best experience we can imagine.

The second one: let the creativity rules AKA “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction”. Destruction of what? Destruction of useless and boring conceptions about UX and UI: after you have understood your user, it’s time to make “tabula rasa” and start to create.

Is your eCommerce project online? Are you checking day and night every single sell?
So far so good, here it comes the next step: improve and improve. And improve, because “Design, refine and repeat, and keep learning all the way along. It sounds bland and pedestrian, but in fact, it's the reverse”. Now you can understand if your creativity works or not and how you could improve it.

Because yes, you could and you have to do it.

An example from our very last project?

QC Terme: a worldwide Italian player among spa and wellness areas. Because of this, the main point of the project was the relationship among brand, creativity and performance. https://shop.qcterme.com/

To sum up, can an eCommerce be creative and, meanwhile, sell?

You can answer in this way: first shrug your shoulders then smile and say “Yes, of course”.

Author: AQuest is an Italian digital creative agency. The team includes more than 60 people and the structure is made up of vertical business units.

nopCommerce and Magento have a lot in common. Both platforms have extensive functionality and are made to fit businesses of any size, and are especially good for medium and large stores. Magento has two options: Community Edition and Enterprise Edition. The community edition is very similar to nopCommerce, it is also open source and free. Enterprise edition is a paid option and has its differentiators. Below is the more detailed comparison of the solutions.

Price

nopCommerce is open source and free. Magento, as mentioned above, offers two ways to go: free open source Community Edition and a paid version, Magento Enterprise. Speaking of Magento Enterprise pricing, it should be mentioned that the product has two main versions, Magento 1 and Magento 2. The pricing model differs greatly between them. Magento 1 is based on Per-Server model, Magento 2 has been changed to a Revenue Model. The license for Magento 1 would start at $18.000 per year, for Magento 2 at $22.000 and might go up to $75.000.

Free solutions, nopCommerce, and Magento Community Edition, don’t suppose any subscription fees, however, will still require some expenditures, such as hosting, and possibly some extensions which are not available out of the box. At the same time, purchasing additional plugins most likely will still cost less than the Enterprise Edition license.

Besides, each of the solutions would require customization. The price would depend on your requirements and your/your team’s skills.

Features

Both nopCommerce and Magento are full of features. Both platforms offer basic store functionality such as product and catalog management, SEO features, inbuilt analytics and even multi-store and multi-vendor features. They have various payment and shipping integrations available out of the box./p>

At the same time, the set of features in Magento Community and Enterprise differs greatly. Also, the difference is between Magento 1 and Magento 2. In the first version, there were just a few extra features in the Enterprise edition, Magento 2 has a significantly bigger gap in out of the box functionality. With Magento 2, it seems that the company decided to invest in adding features and supporting only the Enterprise Edition version of its product. Of course, it is possible to use a community version and develop required extra features, but this would affect performance.

So what exactly are those extra features? Magento Enterprise edition has greater customer loyalty tools, such as rewards points, gift cards, in-store credits. This helps to improve shopper engagement, stimulate repeat purchases, and reward customers. Magento 2 adds some other marketing tools, like flexible pricing rules, coupons, promotions targeted by customer segment, up-sells and cross-sells, among other.

nopCommerce offers similar to Magento Enterprise marketing options and most of the rest features out of the box, yet for free.

It is hard to compare these solutions in terms of features without applying it to a real project. The decision would take a deep dive into a merchant’s processes and selling operation (integrations, logistics, etc.) and can’t be made based merely on a side-by-side feature comparison. Many extra features of Magento Enterprise may stay untouched and useless (though being well paid for), while nopCommerce missing just a couple of functionalities can be easily customized with the required extensions, which would cost noticeably less and wouldn’t affect the performance.

Customization

As mentioned above, there are plenty of inbuilt features in both of the solutions. In case something specific to your business is missing, you can benefit from endless opportunities for customization, which both platforms offer. Because they are an open source they can be adjusted to meet any specific needs. Both of the platforms allow using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to interact with databases, other software, Google merchant and product feeds, and more. Additionally, an inbuilt functionality can be enhanced with plugins and integrations provided on the marketplaces. Both of the solutions have large marketplaces. Some of those extensions are free while some might cost you. Besides plugins, you can install new themes (designs) for your store.

However, nopCommerce as well as Magento are rather for advanced users with some technical knowledge and would require professional developers to do a complicated customization.

Code and Security

One of the main distinctions between the platforms is their language. nopCommerce is written on ASP.NET, Magento is on PHP. ASP.NET means being backed by Microsoft, PHP is community driven. Moreover, Windows + ASP.NET + MS SQL Server are considered the most productive environment, and ASP.NET Core is also much faster. This higher productivity means fewer resources required and cheaper hosting.

nopCommerce also has an extendable architecture that allows developers to override most of the functions from plugins without touching the core. It is easier and faster to customize, which results in a quicker ROI.

nopCommerce is considered to be more secure. Magento releases security patches in each version upgrade and sometimes even in between. This is valid only for the Enterprise version, Community Edition doesn’t even get regular security updates, the patches are introduced only when they become commercially viable. nopCommerce, on the other hand, had only one security patch since the launch, and that one relates to an external component. This means you don’t have to constantly upgrade to the newest nopCommerce version, it is reasonable and safe to stay with the versions released some years back. As for Magento, having no security updates would make your store vulnerable to security breaches, errors and malicious attacks.

Speaking further about the security, Magento Community is not fully PCI compliant. This means, credit cards can’t be processed securely, thus, you won’t be able to use payment gateways. To solve this issues you would have to use an additional extension. Magento Enterprise includes Magento Secure Payment Bridge, an application that helps merchants meet PCI compliance. nopCommerce is PCI compliant out of the box.

Support

nopCommerce and Magento Community Edition offer product documentation that gives basic knowledge. They also have forums where community members help each other. Both communities consist of more than 200,000 users, though nopCommerce one seems more active with 190k+ forum posts over 73k+ in Magento.

As forum support doesn’t always guarantee finding an answer to your question or doing it quickly, paid support is also available. nopCommerce premium support services cost $299 for 3 months or $799 for the whole year. As for Magento, its Community edition doesn’t have any support besides forums; Enterprise Edition includes 24/7 professional technical support, through a ticketing system or by phone. With this support from Magento also comes an Account Manager who guides your business to helpful resources and to getting the most out of Magento.

In case you need help of a developer, you can reach out to company’s solution partners or certified developers. Magento’s partners' network consists of over 230 companies, nopCommerce has 120+ at the moment.

Conclusion

All in all, these two platforms look quite similar. They offer rich functionality and waste opportunities for scaling your business. Magento is longer on the eCommerce market and is more popular at the moment. This explains larger number of extensions and a wider network of partners and certified developers. However, nopCommerce is a fast-growing solution and with its active community, you’ll be in good hands as well.

Thus, the choice between nopCommerce and Magento is very individual. You need to do a very careful analysis of your requirements, see which platform has more of the required functions inbuilt and how much would cost additional development and maintenance.

Author: Alexandra Lykova, nopCommerce team

A customer visits an eCommerce store site to find a bag pack. From the featured products on the homepage, he picks a bag pack that looks great and meets his requirements but there are no reviews from other customers for this product. He goes on a different eCommerce site and finds a similar but different brand’s bag pack. This product page has 10 customer reviews posted on it and the majority of the customers are talking about the great quality and how spacious it is. What store site do you think this customer is going to buy the product?

You probably know this already that you need product reviews on your eCommerce store site and how important these reviews are for the sales.

• According to marketingland, 90% Of Customers Say Buying Decisions Are Influenced By Online Reviews
• According to Inc, 84 Percent of People Trust Online Reviews As Much As Friends

If you think online reviews get lost in all the Internet noise, think again. Research shows that 91 percent of people regularly or occasionally read online reviews, and 84 percent trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. And they make that decision quickly: 68 percent form an opinion after reading between one and six online reviews.

Ask your customers to review your product

Remember – If you don’t ask anything, you won’t get it!

As a business owner, it is important to learn what your customers think about your products / services. Listening to your customers is the best way to succeed in any business. Right after a customer places an order on your store site, reach out to them with a follow-up email and ask them to review your product.

Looks at how Home Depot is asking customers to review their installation service:

A few things to keep in mind while sending the follow-up email / asking to review your product:

• Give your customers enough time before reaching out to them so they get the opportunity to receive your product and use it. If you are working with physical products that need to be shipped, please take shipping time frame into the consideration.
• Be polite while asking for reviews / feedback - Not everyone is going to reply back and that is totally fine.
• Keep your email short and to the point – Customers do not like reading long emails.

Offer incentive

It is human nature that more people will tend to post reviews on your store site who are not happy with your product. In order for you to motivate satisfied customers to post reviews / feedback on your site, you should consider offering some kind of incentive such as:

• Discount coupon
• Gift card
• Free products
• Free shipping in future orders
• Free samples etc.

Even a small incentive can easily inspire your customers to post a review. Not just reviews, incentives can also bring repeated customers and increase the customer lifetime value. How you offer these incentives to your customers depends on your business type. If you sell $10 socks, giving a free pair of socks to your customers is not a profitable idea. But, if you sell $300 custom skateboard then offering a free t-shirt or a hat with your branding information on it is not going to impact your business but it will certainly motivate customers to post reviews on your store site.

Start looking at negative reviews as an opportunity to improve

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 receive a positive review or feedback from your customer on the product page, you are always happy to reply back and say thank you. It is quite important to treat negative reviews in a similar manner to make your customers understand that you will take care of their complaints. Always respond back with a solution to negative reviews. This technique will help you in gaining customer’s trust and your product pages will show that customer satisfaction is your top priority.

Takeaways from this post

Reach out to your existing customers and ask for reviews/feedback

Make sure you have a working “Contact Us” form that is easily accessible (or visible) on your website so customers can contact you easily

Be creative and explore different areas to get reviews / feedback from your customer such as a poll, surveys etc.

Come up with an effective incentive plan that works for your business

Be prepared to offer an incentive to customers who are not happy with your product or service

Respond back to your customers on product review section so they are aware that you are listing

Author: Lavish Kumar

Once thought of as only a passing novelty, voice search and digital assistants are here to stay. These days, 20% of searches on an Android are voice searches. Word recognition errors have also decreased over the last few years: less than 8%.

And when you factor in digital assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Google Assistant, many users are skipping search engine results altogether.

So is the concept of SEO, specifically mobile SEO, dead?

Not so fast.

In this piece, we’ll go over how you can use voice and semantic search optimization techniques to improve your website’s performance in mobile, voice and “interactive agent” search. (Don’t worry, we’ll explain that last part in more detail in a minute.)

Voice Search Optimization

One of the most important aspects of optimizing web content for voice search is to create it using natural language. What do we mean by natural language?

Think of it this way: which of these queries is someone most likely to use when conducting a voice search:

• Leaky faucet
• Leaky faucet solution
• How do I fix a leaky faucet
• Faucet dripping water

The first and last queries could work for a desktop user, but most people don’t talk to their phones in that way. They’re most likely to use the third option — it’s just the polite thing to do.

Since voice search results often rely on Google’s featured snippet results, approach your content in the same way:

• Consider the user’s intent. What question are they answering or problem are they solving?
• Meet that intent as quickly as you can. For “what is” questions that means answering the question in 50-60 words.
• Use HTML headers to specify each step in a process.
• Put the question in your page’s <h1> tag and the put the answer in the <p> tag right after the header.

Advanced Voice Search: Interactive Agents

As computers have become better at hearing, interpreting and understanding spoken human language, people have started searching more and more through programs known as “interactive agents.” In fact, it’s estimated that 85% of people will manage their interactions with businesses via interactive agents.

Interactive agents are programs designed to perform tasks requested by a person using natural language.

Chatbots

What’s more, interactive agents are able to use previous interactions and context clues to inform tasks requested by the user.

For example, say you asked your Google Home “How old is Tom Brady?”

Google would come back and tell you he’s 40 years old.

Then, if you asked “How many kids does he have?” Google would come back with 3 kids.

The fact that computer programs can now answer questions that use pronouns was exciting new technology in 2013 when it debuted. These days, however, it’s just the way search works.

Preparing your website for interactive agents isn’t just for SEO anyway. Chat app usage growth has far outstripped that of social network app. To the point that the big 4 messaging apps — WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and Viber — now have more active users than Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and, Instagram.

And since Facebook is actively encouraging businesses to create chatbots for Messenger, you’ve got a huge opportunity to bring your content and products directly to your users on their phones, tablets and smart speakers.

You can give them purchasing guidance by answering their questions and then let them order a product, all without them ever needing to pick up a device.

Structured data

Structured data refers to information that is stored and organized in a standardized way so that a machine can read and understand it. For our purposes, that “data” refers to content found on a website.

You can’t see structured data on a website, but you’ll see it in Google’s search results:

The first two results on this search results page both show structured data: Schema.org’s recipe markup and review rating markup.

Chatbots also rely on structured data to find content relevant to a user’s spoken query. The birthDate and children properties of the Person schema are how Google Assistant was able to answer our questions about Tom Brady.

So how do you add structured data to your website?

Using structured data

First, create what are called “entities”. These are the people, places, organizations, concepts or events relevant to your website. Your entities, when combined, form a vocabulary for bots to read and interpret.

When creating entities, there a lot of vocabularies you can use to structure your data. But the best one is probably Schema.org. The schema was created by the major search engines as a way to standardize structured data.

Once you’ve created your vocabulary, you have to link your content back to your structured data. Marking up your pages with links to your structured data is how interactive agents find and deliver content relevant to a user’s query.

Like with structured data, there are multiple ways of adding linked data to your content. You can use JSON-LD, microdata or RDFa. We recommend using JSON-LD simply because you can manage it via Google Tag Manager. All 3 formats are equally valid.

You can manually add your JSON-LD to the <head> and <body> of your website, but that’s not feasible for people with small teams and/or big websites. Luckily, there are lots of great semantic web tools that can automate this process.

If you’re running a WordPress site, WordLift.io is a simple and easy way to handle any of your structured data needs.

The WordLift plugin lets you create and add linked data to your content. Completely automated.

Start Reaching A More Relevant Audience

Once you’ve managed to create content that’s optimized for voice search and marked up for chatbots, you’ll find that your website has opened up doors to users all over the web. Not just those using Google or Bing.

You’ll now be able to take advantage of all those people on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Kik who want to interact with your business. You’ve just opened up a whole new conversion channel.

At the same time, you’ve also prepared your website to deliver more relevant content to people who are searching via Google. So now you’re ready for the future of SEO too.

Author: Justin Borja, Key Account Manager at WooRank

eCommerce trends are always shifting. People are shopping online more than ever before. This makes it quite critical for online business owners to know what online shoppers are interested in buying and how they would like to buy. So, it is important for business owners to keep an eye on all the ongoing trends.

Here are 5 eCommerce trends to leverage for growth in 2018:

Social media

Social media continues to be one of the most powerful ways to grow your business. All business owners should look into leveraging it in marketing as well as customer service. Social media sites can be a great platform to make new connections with your prospects. Create an online community with like-minded people / customers to see what they want and what advice they have to improve your product or service.

Every business should follow customers to find out where they are hanging out. For example: In your industry, if most of the customers are active on Instagram then there is no need to spend time and effort on other social media platform. Follow your customers and be active on the same platform where your customers like to hang out. Provide valuable content on that same channel and engage in different conversations to build trust.

Unique customer experience

Creating a unique customer experience for online shoppers should be a priority for every store owner because it is something that acts as a differentiator in this competitive eCommerce industry. Even little details can make a big difference in terms of how customers feel about products and the company:

• Personalize online content and emails to greet your customers.
• Give a clear picture on your store site about how your product solves a problem.
• Provide your customers what they expect – If the majority of your site traffic is coming from mobile devices, make sure your store site is fully responsive and offer a consistent user experience.

Video

In the last couple of years, a lot of content marketing has been shifted to video streaming. Marketing experts predict that this year online consumers will be engaging with videos more than ever. Video marketing tends to bring your industry or business content to life. If you have not started video marketing for your online business you should start is NOW! Consumers are very much interested in learning about new businesses, products or services via video platforms like YouTube. Once potential customers are connected to your content, they will eventually become your loyal customers.

According to a recent study by HubSpot:

• 4X as many customers would rather watch a video about a product than reading about it. (Animoto, 2015)
• Almost 50% of internet users look for videos related to a product or service before visiting a store. (Google, 2016)
• 4 in 5 consumers believe that demo videos are helpful
• Marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users. (Aberdeen, 2015)
• Shoppers who view video are 1.81X more likely to purchase than non-viewers. (Animoto, 2015)

Source: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics

Voice search

Voice search originated from smartphones like Apple (Siri) and Android (Google Assistant) but now it has become a mainstream AI-enabled technology with the introduction of products like Google Home and Amazon Echo. As a business owner, ensure that the content on your store site is ready for voice search. The rise of voice search is simultaneously increasing because of its convenience, instant gratification, and ease of use.

According to Google, more than 20% of mobile queries are voice-based - https://searchengineland.com/google-reveals-20-percent-queries-voice-queries-249917

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/voice-assistant-report-2017-3

Chatbots

Did you know, almost 47% of consumers in eCommerce industry are already buying products and services using chatbots, according to a HubSpot research report? In the study, HubSpot explains how chatbots leverage natural language processing to communicate with a human. The chatbot processes a buyer’s request and taps into machine learning to determine the best products or options to serve a user based on purchasing trends. If a buyer asks for snow boots, a bot can suggest the top-rated boots sold by the company. The bot can also recommend wool socks to go with the boots because it knows people who buy boots also purchase wool socks in past purchases.

Chatbots can help online business owners in a number of ways such as:

• Automating a process / checkout experience
• Providing customer service (or chat) around the clock
• Providing a better customer experience
• Personalized shopping experience

Author: Lavish Kumar

In today’s complicated marketplace, every eСommerce business owner is looking for new ways to make his business thrive. It’s not easy, as there are many giant companies like Amazon and AliExpress who spend billions to consistently improve their branding and advertising.

If you’re an eСommerce entrepreneur who’s looking to get a piece of the pie, you shouldn’t be afraid to attempt to do it. In fact, the more confidence and faith you have in your work and the better you perform at your work – the more chances you’ll get to accomplish exactly what you want.

Never start your digital marketing journey without goals. Set the expectations clearly and lead your way to the top using a roadmap made of small, progressive tasks that lead to the big objective.

In today’s post, we’ll cover 5 effective advertising strategies and ideas that many successful online eCommerce businesses tend to leverage. Choose one or two, experience them fully, collect the feedback, optimize, and scale. If one doesn’t work, try the next.

Let’s begin.

1. Target and Retarget Your Audience with Facebook Ads

Facebook is surely the most popular social media network out there. Facebook’s also a great advertising option for eCommerce stores due to several reasons:

• Facebook offers the most advanced targeting features (limitless campaign options)
• Most people spend time on Facebook or Messenger because the majority of the population is accustomed to Facebook. If you chat internationally, you’re likely to add that person on Facebook.
• Unlike Google and YouTube, Facebook’s advertising options prioritize demographics and interests over clicks and numbers. Therefore, making eCommerce sales becomes extremely easy once you tailor the understanding of your target audience.

Use Facebook’s pixel to record all the visitors that come from Facebook. The pixel analyzes their actions and steps and allows you to automatically send personalized advertisements based on your visitors’ actions. Here’s an advanced Facebook remarketing guide for improving eCommerce sales.

2. Reach Your Fans Through YouTube Videos

YouTube, the 2nd largest search engine, owned by Google, the 1st and the most advanced engine, is one of the most effective marketing channels for eCommerce sites.

YouTube has a billion users. It has amazing targeting and retargeting features, and it is one of the best ways to reach various audiences according to their real interests and preferences.

When people watch videos, they are often looking to accomplish something:

• Solve a problem (learn, fix, or improve something)
• Satisfy a need (entertainment, health, social)
• Satisfy a desire (X object, Y thing)

Of course, there are more reasons why people watch videos in general, but these are some of the most common ones.

By simply acknowledging the purpose of videos, you can showcase your products and eCommerce site as a solution to your prospect’s needs, wants, craves, desires, problems, etc.

Develop a high-quality video that showcases a product and start featuring it on videos that are most likely to be frequented by your specific target audience. Observe the feedback, optimize the process, and repeat with other products. Here’s a YouTube advertising guide for eCommerce that should help you with the technical process.

3. Improve Your Brand’s Awareness Through Niche Influencers

Whether you own an eCommerce store, an affiliate marketing website, or a personal blog, niche influencers will definitely improve your business performance.

John Farwell, Marketing Specialist at Essay Geeks service, has made a great point here:

“Consider this for a moment: most individuals will follow someone with “authority”. If a doctor says that a drug is fine, the majority of the people will simply believe him. If a famous soccer player keeps promoting a shampoo, millions of football fans will start building preferences towards that specific shampoo. Whenever they’re in front of a decision, they’ll choose the shampoo that the famous football player has promoted.”

Therefore, you may easily approach blogs, magazines, or individuals that are closely related to your eCommerce niche but not in direct competition. Negotiate a price and allow them to expand your brand’s awareness and reputation. The sales will follow.

4. Advertise on Wearables and VR Technology

Every big technology company has started to focus on wearables. Other companies are now starting to implement VR and AR technology for business solutions.

All in all, the world’s quickly changing due to all these major technological breakthroughs that will allow for a more advanced lifestyle.

Before every marketer thinks about it, you should start advertising your eCommerce store on the “new tools” that keep popping up every now and then.

5. Forum Advertising

Forum advertising can be done in two ways.

1. You consistently provide valuable information and solutions by being an active member of a forum
2. You use the forum’s advertising features to place your brand’s logo and proposition in front of hundreds and thousands of people.

Either way, you win. Forums are a great place to interact with a very carefully selected audience. Customers who spend time on niche forums looking for solutions and guidance are already in an advanced stage of purchase – push them just a bit and they will “crack”.

Takeaways

Advertising your eCommerce store isn’t rocket science but it isn’t an easy task either. As a matter of fact, it is what you make it. Every strategy’s success is heavily dependent on the applicant’s skills, mindset, and knowledge. Oh, let us not forget about consistency!

If you want to prevail in your niche and become the #1 player, you must really start working. Work both hard and smart. I’d emphasize “smart” because the better strategies you choose to implement and the more focus you put on them the better results they will bring.

Author: Chris Richardson has been working as an editor at a publishing agency in London, UK for 5 years. He is also a professional content writing expert in such topics as career growth, self-improvement, blogging, and technology innovations. Feel free to connect with him on Google+.

Marketing automation is a process that uses tools or software programs to automate marketing processes. Albeit adequate, this definition doesn’t provide any insight as to what marketing automation actually does. It can be as simple as installing a select button on a web page or as complex as a Twitter bot that includes artificial intelligence with natural language processing. It can mean installing a CRM or analytics systems. It also covers a wide range of software tools and marketing channels.

Software that includes elements of artificial intelligence is changing the fundamentals of marketing. While it’s still the art of persuasion, the delivery and management of marketing is increasingly reliant on automation. We already have automation that makes highly precise target marketing possible, as well as software that includes predictive analytics, bots, and artificial intelligence.

Benefits of Marketing Automation

Tracking Advertising Campaigns

Whether you use Google or social media, each platform has automated target marketing tools that make precision marketing possible. In addition, they track virtually every conceivable statistic about your campaign. A/B testing and agile marketing techniques are expected and built into the automation process.

Productivity

Marketing automation is converting manual processes into automated processes, thus freeing the marketing staff to perform the more creative tasks of content creation and strategy.

Increase Revenue

While creating software that automates revenue generation isn’t cheap, it’s generally well worth the investment. Consider this: B2B marketers see an average of 20 percent increase in sales from automation. Over 78 percent of high-performance marketers identify marketing automation as a key contributor to increasing revenue. By 2020, it’s expected that 85 percent of customer relationships will be managed without human intervention.

Targeting

Whether it’s social media or data from your CRM, there is a glut of tools that automate target marketing. Platforms like Facebook segment their users by groups, behavior, interest, demographics, and a variety of other categories. Target marketing on Facebook is simply a matter of checking off those you want to receive your content. Wasting time and money advertising to people who are probably not interested in what you are selling is significantly reduced.

The benefits of automation are almost endless. Just automating email responses to customer inquiries is a big timesaver. As we move into the future, marketing departments will be dominated by programmers, mobile app developers, and social media experts. Successful marketing will depend on a company’s technical agility as well as their ability to create great content.

Using Autoresponders to Automate Marketing

One of the best ways to show your authority in your marketing efforts is with an email autoresponder series. Building an autoresponder is one of the best email marketing practices for building both your authority and relationship with the customer.

An autoresponder is a series of emails your prospect receives in the days that follow their initial sign-up. This technique builds your authority by delivering insanely useful content to your prospects. The content must be targeted to potential buyers to educate them about your product or service and why they need to buy it.

The beauty of an autoresponder for you and your business is that once it’s done, you don’t need to touch it again (except for testing and tweaking—something that is very much recommended). It will automatically continue to grow your list and build relationships with your customers.

How to Automate Emails in Mailchimp

There are many email automation tools for marketers but Mailchimp’s user-friendly interface and affordability makes it one of the best for beginners. Let’s have a look at how you can seamlessly automate emails in this tool.

Step one: Launch a workflow

Once you log in, hover your cursor over to “Automation” tab and click on “create automation workflow.”

Step two: Pick the list to send to

From your lists, pick the one you wish to send the mails to. Mailchimp’s drop-down menu can help you easily make a selection.

Step three: Pick the message category

Mailchimp offers several categories (workflow) of messages to compose and leaves room for you to customize your own. Some of the workflow categories available include welcome series, recover abandoned cart, reward your best customers, list added date and many more.

Step four: Fill out the workflow configuration

The “Workflow Configuration” section is where you key in your details (name and email) as well as the workflow name. You will also need to select your preferred tracking options and tick the “send activity digest email” in order to receive a daily mail bearing your workflow data. If you tick the “edit” button, you’ll be able to select which accounts the digest email will be sent to.

Step five: Configure trigger

In the “Trigger” section, you just need to customize or confirm your trigger and segmentation conditions. Some parts will require you to provide more info while others are merely defaulting selections that come as a result of the workflow type selected.

Step six: Add emails

In this step, you’ll be expected to create and organize emails and state when each should be sent.

Step seven: Edit template

Mailchimp offers several templates so you can give your emails any look you like. Make sure to confirm everything on your workflow before dispatching it. In case any step has an error, click on edit section to make changes.

Step eight: Launch the workflow

Once everything is up to your liking, it’s time to let those mails be readied for “shipping.” Just hit “start workflow” and you are all good.

Now that you’ve learned how to start a workflow with Mailchimp, go ahead and set up your first workflow to build a long-lasting relationship with your clients. You don’t have to stick to Mailchimp only; there are over 50 email automation tools; the closest competitor being Constant Contact. Just go with what appeals to you and can comfortably fit in your budget.

Author: Catalin is the founder of Ecommerce Platforms and Web App Meister. He's a design enthusiast and loves matcha, and is uber passionate about blockchain technology and travel.