Employing ecommerce strategy

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Employing a online strategy to sell directly to consumers and to compete directly with traditional wholesalers and retailers.

Software developers have used the internet as a highly effective distribution channel to complement sales through wholesalers and retailers. Selling online directly to end users has the advantage of cutting out the costs and margins of software wholesalers and retailers as much as 30-50% of the retail price. In addition, allowing customers to download their software purchases immediately via the internet eliminates the costs of producing and packaging CDs. However, software developers are still strongly motivated to continue to distribute their products through wholesalers and retailers to maintain broad access to existing and potential users who, for whatever reason, may be reluctant to buy online. Despite the channel conflict, there are two major reasons why manufactures might want to aggressively pursue online sales and establish the internet as an important distribution channel alongside traditional channels:

1.they make a far bigger profit margin from online sales

2.it helps educate buyers to the ease and convenience of purchasing online, thus encouraging more and more buyers to migrate to buying online where company profit marking are greater

This sell direct positioning strategy is well suited for companies in industries where there are good long-term prospects for the internet to evolve into a company’s primary distribution channel. In such instances, incurring the channel conflict in the short term and competing against traditional distribution allies makes good strategic sense.

WordPress Ecommerce Tip #2

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Change wording in your shopping cart.
Most all of the “text” on the site that involves the shopping cart can be found in the language file here:
“wp-content/plugins/wp-shopping-cart/languages/EN_en.php”. In that file you will find everything from “Visit the Shop” to “PnP” (which most like to change to “Shipping”) to the sentence that reads on the checkout page about “having your credit card handy”. You can change these phrases to whatever you’d like, but just remember that when editing this text that you leave the quotes in place, otherwise your site will break!
So here’s an example…I want to remove the words “Visit the Shop” from my sidebar shopping cart. So I locate the line in the language file (it’s on line 174):

define('TXT_WPSC_VISITTHESHOP', 'Visit the Shop');

I would then change it to this: 

define('TXT_WPSC_VISITTHESHOP', '');

And you notice that I left in the quotes, but removed the text. That’s it for changing or removing text.

WordPress Ecommerce Tip #1

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Change the “add to cart” button that appears on your shopping cart.
Well, first you’ll want to make sure that you choose “ecommerce” for your theme in “Shop Settings”. That will place an actual button on your cart.
Then to change that image, you will navigate to “wp-content/plugins/wp-shopping-cart/themes/ecommerce/images”. In that directory you will see a “add_to_cart.gif” and you will replace that with whatever “add to cart” button you’d like. Step 2 of this process is to adjust the stylesheet so that it will reflect the correct image size of the new image you’ve uploaded (unless of course, the new image is the same size as the old; then you can stop here).

Locate “ecommerce.css” and find the following code:

input.wpsc_buy_button{
background-image: url(images/add_to_card.gif);
border: none;
width: 80px;
height: 30px;
}

You will then change the width and height to reflect the size of your new image. Save and upload and you’re all done

Grow your small business with ecommerce

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Grow your small business with ecommerce

Growing your small business is vital. And one way to do it is selling your goods and services online with ecommerce. Many small businesses are turning to ecommerce as it has become too big to ignore. Now more than ever people are shopping online whether its at their desk or with their smarphones everyone is online.

So how do you get started with ecommerce ?

  • First if you already have a business and are looking to extend it online, then the best thing to do is hire someone to develop your shop from scratch. 
  • Or if you already have an existing website all you have to do is add an ecommerce section.

Having an ecommerce website is like having an additional business on top of your current one.

Key benefits of ecommerce business: 

  • Additional revenue
  • Open 24-hours a day
  • No overhead cost
  • People can see what you are all about
  • Free marketing
  • Ability to engage with customers
  • New customers via the web
  • Product catalog
  • Keep customers informed about new services
  • National reach – sell anywhere you wish, even international
  • Brand awareness

Do you need SSL “SSL Certificate” for your online store?

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Do you need SSL "SSL Certificate" for your online store?

Ecommerce is a very complex business and every business owner needs to know at least the very basics of ecommerce website design in order to fully understand the complexity. So lets say you have your ecommerce website ready to launch and your web developer tells you to get a SSL Certificate.

Do you really need it? The answer depends whether you will be processing credit card payments on your website or a third party website. Lets look at both scenarios.

Accept payments on your site: This requires you to encrypt all the transactions so that all the data that gets transferred is being securely transmitted. In this case you must get a SSL certificate since you are liable for processing these payments.

Process payments on a third party website: This option will send your customers on another website e.g PayPal.com and after the payment is fully processed they will be re-directed back to your website. In this case you do not need to buy an SSL certificate since you are not liable for encrypting this transactions. All you are doing is sending the user to the merchant who processes credit cards securely.

So where you need an SSL certificate or not it depends on what kind of ecommerce system you end up using.

B2B Mobile Audience is Growing Quick

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According to emarketer , oracle and endeca business to business customers are largely relying on mobile for their initial research especially for ecommerce transactions.

B2B Mobile Audience is Growing Quick

On the other hand business to business executives also rely on their smartphones to research prior to making a final decision. This goes to show that mobile industry is growing rapidly and the need to have a mobile presence is greater than ever.

B2B Mobile Audience is Growing Quick

eCommerce Strategy – Why aren’t Customers Buying Online?

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Quite bit of work goes into developing an eCommerce website and even more into designing the user interface that actually sells products. Many online shops have beautiful designs and graphics but when it comes to converting visitors into sales it always a roadblock.

We often hear people say:

“I have so many customers that visit my website but how do I get them to buy my products online”
“I look at my analytics and see that they abandon my shopping cart within seconds” 
“Why aren’t my my products selling online, how can I increase my online sales ?”

You have done everything right and even get some decent traffic to your website through SEO or pay per click advertising but still people are not buying from you – so what’s the problem?

Well, all that is great but you have to put yourself in customers shoes and think how do they make the ultimate purchase decision.

Quick Tips
First, look at your product page and see if there are any barriers such as add to cart button. Is it properly placed where customers can see it ? Is it the right color ? Is it the right width/height?

How many steps are in your checkout process ?

There are some many aspects to look and every merchant as different needs so it on a case by case basis.

Getting people to buy online is more than just having an online shop – a well crafted strategy is needed. Its not just cool graphics and beautiful photos because everyone has all of those, it more about the psychological aspects of ecommerce. Selling online is very competitive and for a business to succeed it needs to have a well calculated business model and strategy.

Let us know if we can help you