Ecommerce Blog of Blueport Commerce, Big Ticket Ecommerce Solutions Provider

5 Tips for Handling Inventory Stock Information on E-Commerce Sites

Friday, September 30, 2011 by Carl Prindle

“I always remember that it costs a lot to get people in a store…and takes very little to convince them not to come back.”

This quote was from a recent Practical Ecommerce article about inventory stock status on e-commerce websites. The consumer who is quoted had a very bad experience shopping online. He tried to purchase the discontinued HP TouchPad once it went on sale for $99 (originally $399).

Like him, many other shoppers went online to make the same purchase, and, like him, many were successful – at least in placing an order and having their credit cards charged. Unfortunately, the stores oversold, and instead of getting their new tablets, these consumers received emails apologizing for unexpected demand and saying that their orders would be cancelled.

It’s remarkable that the massive players mentioned in the article still have this issue, especially selling a fairly simple item that, if in stock, is easy to fulfill. The resulting outrage points to how high consumers’ expectations have become in the area of fulfillment.

Blueport’s focus is meeting these high expectations, even in the toughest logistical categories. When you’re browsing our sites, you’re seeing real-time local inventory. If you order a sofa, you know it’s in stock and when you’ll get it – often as soon as tomorrow and for a very low delivery price. What Amazon has done for UPSable items, we’re doing for sofas, appliances, large electrics and more.

Regardless of what you’re selling online, the article concludes with a few excellent suggestions:

Be up-front about product availability.
Communicate when inventory is low – it might even help you sell the item.
Be clear about any stock disclosure policies you have in place to protect yourself.
Explain who is fulfilling the orders for your product.
And should you a sell a customer an item that is no longer stock, take care of the problem: Let the customer know you are sorry, explain what happened, and then offer a discount toward a future purchase. Do not automatically add the customer to your email list for marketing promotions.

The overarching theme here is to be straightforward with your customers about the merchandise you have on your website. You could potentially miss a sale or two today, but the long-lasting result of creating a trusting relationship between customers and your e-commerce site can be priceless, especially in categories that are difficult to fulfill.

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SEO Won’t Go Away for E-Commerce, But It Will Evolve

Friday, September 23, 2011 by Betsy Miller

The title of a recent E-Commerce Times article, “The Coming Irrelevance of SEO,” did its job and got me to click through. (Of course, I found it by searching Google.) The piece says that online retailers should begin preparing for the future and focus less on search engine optimization for driving sales and instead should harness the power of marketplaces. “Thanks to improvements in trust and safety, as well as predictability enhancements that brands like Amazon and eBay have brought to the space, consumers simply aren't turning to Google to purchase products,” writes the author Brian Horakh, who is also the founder of Zoovy, which is an integrated marketplace e-commerce solution, not that he’s biased. It’s unclear how this is an either/or scenario -- you can have a marketplace presence and promote your goods through SEO.

Not to hold onto the past, or even the present, I believe that SEO will continue to be a valuable tool for e-commerce websites. Purchasing is just the last step in the process. When customers research items, search engines are a premier starting point. We also don’t know what leads to that final visit where the purchase was made. Was the click from a friend’s review the first visit or the ninth? Perhaps the review helped close the sale, but the initial visit to the company’s e-commerce site may have come from a pay-per-click ad or from a link in organic search.

Good SEO Is Good Content

What even Internet experts tend to forget is that good SEO does not have to be a daunting task. Think about your business and your audience. What does your target audience want that you can provide? If you provide quality content that consumers want, then the SEO part falls into place. Sure, you can mix things up a bit and use different phrases to say the same thing, but that is also considered to be good writing. For example, if you are writing about a sofa, you might also refer to it as a couch or seating -- that reads better than using “couch” over and over again, and it’s good SEO.

Creating good content will also help you as social networks grow. Consumers want to share good content -- they’ll link to it from Facebook posts or reference it in their own blogs. And appropriately tagging user-generated content on your e-commerce sites, like reviews, for example, will help users and search engines find them.

Link farms and black hat tricks gave SEO a bad name earlier this year. But as the Google algorithm continues to evolve, so will SEO practices. And as long as you are focused on your audience, your e-commerce site will benefit.

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Keep Your E-Commerce Site on Target and Avoid Outages

Friday, September 16, 2011 by Betsy Miller

When a retailer launches a new line, media coverage is usually more than welcome. But in the case of Target’s new Missoni line, the more than 200 headlines found literally around the world could have had a better message. These reports all focused on how the large retailer’s e-commerce site, which recently switched from an Amazon back-end to one that’s proprietary, crashed under the heavy traffic.

Target was not prepared for the customer demand for this limited-edition designer line, and the e-commerce site was down for approximately 12 hours. The line’s launch – and the site’s crash – was preceded by amped up publicity for the line, leading to starlets discussing their interest in specific items on Twitter before the line was available. Of course, unhappy Target.com shoppers went to Twitter as well when they couldn’t access the website once these items were for sale.

While Target says this specific demand was unprecedented, dwarfing the traffic they get even on Black Friday, it is important for e-commerce websites to be prepared. Knowing the marketing push behind the Missoni line and the interest it was generating in social networks, Target should have taken steps to ensure the website would work as if it were any other day.

At Blueport, when we know one of our clients’ e-commerce sites will be getting extra traffic due to an incredible sale or promotion, we take steps in advance to be sure the websites can handle the onslaught of traffic. For example, when one of our clients ran a Living Social daily deal, our IT Operations department took action so the user experience was not affected in any way.

When your company plans a spectacular event, make sure that the event is as spectacular online as it is offline. And this becomes even more important as the holiday shopping season approaches. Online retailers should take the steps now to be sure their websites will be able to do what they need them to do this holiday season – and that’s selling merchandise.

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Online Expectations, Offline Experience

Friday, August 26, 2011 by Betsy Miller

PSFK, the self-proclaimed “go-to resource for new ideas and inspiration for creative professionals,” recently released its 2011 Future of Retail report, which explores the new trends driving the industry. This year, the focus is on the use of technology and how it will revitalize retail stores, both on and offline.

The study outlines three emerging megatrends:

Online Expectations, Offline Experience
Shopper Know-How
Refined Retail Cartography

Let’s take a look at the first one here:

Online Expectations, Offline Experience

For this megatrend, PSFK identified three smaller trends:

Digitally empowered staff: We’ve posted on this blog about the power of the iPad for retail. This trend is all about giving staff access to additional product information and real-time inventory – information we think are important components of an item’s product page on any e-commerce website. Having this information right at salespeople’s fingertips will allow them to spend more time selling and assisting customers by locating or ordering items.
In-stories: In-stories give customers access to additional product information in an entertaining manner. Including QR codes in your bricks-and-mortar store could allow customers to conduct the additional research on products that you want them to. Why not allow them to access your e-commerce site’s user reviews?
Scanned shoppers: This trend is all about interactive technology entering the store to help customers make purchasing decisions, such as what they should make for dinner or what size to get a specific shirt in. We’ve seen some of these types of tools exist on stores’ websites. Customers crave this interactivity everywhere.
Gesture-based browsing: Gesture-based browsing allows customers to interact with a display via non-contact movement (think Kinect). Such displays will pull customers into the store and the shopping experience. In addition to providing an entertaining experience, it also gives the store information on how the consumer navigates through the display and what the consumer ultimately chooses.

We find all of these trends very exciting. We already know that multichannel retailing allows customers to shop when and how they want to. This new melding of technology and retail will help retailers create a tighter branding experience between their bricks-and-mortar stores and their online e-commerce presence. Both online and offline will be able to more easily benefit from each other, and that gives the biggest benefits to the customer.

In a future blog post, we’ll take a closer look at more of the underlying trends from this report.

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The Economy May Be Looking Down, But E-Commerce Sales Keep Looking Up

Friday, August 19, 2011 by Betsy Miller

According to comScore’s State of the US Online Retail Economy in Q2 2011, despite an increased consumer perception that the economy is getting worse, Q2 e-commerce spending was up 14% YOY. Here are some interesting findings from the recent report:

Online Shopping

E-commerce sales growth is growing at double the rate of total retail sales growth, indicating that consumers are shifting from shopping in-store to buying online. The number of online shoppers increased 16% YOY for Q2 – there are now 170 million people shopping online.

Big-ticket items like furniture, appliances and equipment have shown moderate growth of 5% to 9% YOY for Q2.

Cutting Back on Spending

Because of their economic concerns, consumers are looking to save. They are now switching brands, shopping only when items are on sale, looking for deals online and going to different retailers in order to spend less.

Get Smart About Smartphones

The number of consumers using their smartphones to browse retail content in some form is now at 78 million. 22% of smartphone owners say they have made purchases via their smartphones, 50% have used their phones to find nearby stores and 40% have used their smartphones while in a store. The top reasons for using the smartphone in-store? To compare prices or to compare an item to other items not available in the store. 36% of consumers who abandon in-store purchases after using their smartphones end up buying online instead.

Social Media Matters

Overall, retailers not taking full advantage of the opportunity social media presents. For example, retail ads only make up 15.4% of the display ads on social networking sites.

If you are looking to expand your social media presence, comScore offers insight on Facebook: Once consumers like a page, they are very unlikely to return to that page. Facebook users spend the majority of their time on the newsfeed, so what and how you post will account for much of their interactions with your brand. Fans and their Facebook friends who are exposed to your brand on Facebook via advertising and status posts have a much higher brand engagement, which includes visiting your e-commerce website.

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5 Ways for Online Retailers to Be a Little Fab

Friday, August 5, 2011 by Betsy Miller

Fab.com is one of the latest fabulous e-commerce stories: Originally launched by entrepreneur Jason Goldberg as Fabulis, a social networking site for gay men, the company was then revamped and renamed to be the design flash sales site it is today. And by the time it reached its sixth week, the company was already turning a profit, had 400,000 users, and received $8M in Series A funding. Investors in Fab.com include Menlo Ventures, The Washington Post Company, SoftTech VC and Ashton Kutcher.

But with so many flash sales sites out there in the e-commerce game, why is Fab.com such a success? Here are five reasons why we’ve become fans of Fab.com.

Do What You Know and Are Passionate About

According to this piece from VentureBeat, Goldberg and cofounder/chief creative officer Bradford Shane Shellhammer settled on the formula that is now Fab.com because of their backgrounds in building websites and design, respectively. The result is a beautiful, well-built website that brings its customers a wide array of items all brought together because of their unique design sensibilities.

Products = Content

While we’ve been seeing many e-commerce sites bring an editorial spin to their product pages -- Gilt Groupe has been poaching a number of folks from the magazine world to work on its sites -- for example, you get a sense that Fab.com treats the items it sells like content to be consumed that way. And as members, we tend to look forward to their emails much like we’d look to a magazine to tell us about the newest trends and neatest gadgets. The difference is now, I can easily buy what they show me.

A Fostered Sense of Community

Since Fab.com’s origin was as a social networking site, you would expect some innovation here. But the way the initial phase of Fab.com has integrated social community has been in a very clean, modern way. Goldberg has the Betashop blog, where he gives an insider’s look at the company. There is also a Fab blog, which features products, and an Inspiration wall where members can post pictures. To close the loop, Fab.com includes quotes about the collection from members of the Fab.com or the designers, giving a little more context as to what the collection is and why it is for sale on the website. For customers, this gives real personality to the products.

Constantly New Inventory

Of course the inventory and products on a daily deals site will change more frequently than on a conventional e-commerce site. But the items on Fab.com aren’t just new to Fab – they are new to the consumers. The products are curated in such a way that there is a real sense of novel and innovation with each new sale on the site. This is also what keeps customers coming back – Goldberg has cited repeat buyers as a contributor to the success.

Consumer Love Is the Best Marketing

To date, Fab.com has not had a major marketing push. It appears that much of their resources have been spent on getting the right products presented in the right way. This stellar combination has made way for a strong word-of-mouth campaign as subscribers spread the Fab.com love. Are there ways you could improve your own products, customer experience and customer service to foster positive word-of-mouth from your existing customers?

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Can Groupon Work for Big-Ticket Items?

Friday, July 29, 2011 by Betsy Miller

Earlier this month, when Groupon’s first big-ticket deal for $199 for $500 toward a new car at a Detroit area dealership failed, it didn’t only make for amusing headlines (“Groupon Hits the Skids,” for example). It also got people asking whether the daily deal model can work for big-ticket items.

As a company that provides the technology and services to help its clients localize big-ticket retail online, Blueport Commerce takes the stance that daily deals can work for big-ticket items if executed correctly. The Groupon car deal was not.

Why Conventional Daily Deals Work

Daily deals are so popular, because they are great deals. Groupon’s subscribers expect a significant discount on the goods or service being sold. Half off a dinner? Wonderful, and I’ve been meaning to try new places!

So far, successful daily deals have been somewhat simple and often for items subscribers were likely to spend money on anyway. Salon services at 70% off? Well, I do need a haircut anyway.

Lastly, the offer is usually concrete. I will pay X and get Y. Any variables in what I spend beyond what I paid for the Groupon are easily in my control.

So What Was Wrong with the Automotive Offer?

The offer was to buy $500 that could then be used toward a new car. A quick look at the dealer’s website has cars starting around $16,000. So someone who bought the deal is only getting at most a few percent off his final purchase.

Among the things that makes daily deals so successful is the easy spontaneity of it all. You only have a short amount of time to choose this deal, and then it’s gone. But it takes people some time to research a purchase like a car.

A recent article from The Atlantic, points out that one issue with this deal is that car price is negotiable. The piece quotes Ben Edelman, an associate professor at Harvard Business School as telling Reuters: “This voucher is for a very small portion of the cost of a car or lease, so it’s basically an agreement to buy or lease a car from LaFontaine. That’s poor negotiating because the dealer could take advantage f that by offering the same car for more money. They (Groupon) need to fix that before this part of the model can take off.”

The Big-Ticket Daily Deal Challenge

Many folks are saying that daily deals won’t work for big-ticket items. Perhaps these are the same people who years ago told us that consumers would not buy furniture online. But people do buy furniture and other big-ticket items online, so eventually daily deals in this arena could take off.

Our client The RoomPlace actually did a successful daily deal with LivingSocial not too long ago. The offer was $150 worth of furniture for $75. This worked because even though the offer was for big-ticket items like furniture, consumers could choose from a large price range and could choose whether they purchase something solely for the face value of the deal or use it toward a larger purchase.

Big-ticket retailers can look to daily deal sites, or create their own, in order to drum up business. For great results, they need to turn their big-ticket deal into something that is concrete for users. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

Be sure that a consumer could leave your store or website with an item or service for the value of the deal.
Consider offering a specific item at a steep discount rather than following the voucher model.
Once the consumer cashes in on the deal, be sure you do what you can to keep in touch, such as offering an at-register email sign-up or customer survey.

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What Retailers Can Learn from Netflix’s Big Multichannel Mistake

Friday, July 22, 2011 by Betsy Miller

Last week, Netflix announced a change in its subscription plans and their cost structure. The news was met by anger from many of its customers. In an Econsultancy blog post, Patricio Robles summed up the misstep: “At the end of the day, Netflix is making the same mistake many publishers are: It's hoping to charge consumers by the channel. Want to watch movies on DVD? You have to pay for that. Want to stream movies over the Internet? You have to pay for that separately.”

This forces customers to choose between the two methods, which, from the pricing, Netflix proposes are equal. But with the discrepancy in the number of titles available in the DVD library versus the streaming library, consumers disagree and are enraged.

This is another case, where the retailer is seeing the business differently than the consumers who ultimately foot the bill. And in this economy, consumers will not pay for something unless they see the value – no matter how loyal they have been to the company until now.

Your customers expect a consistent experience with your brand, no matter how they are accessing it, whether in person, on your e-commerce site, or even elsewhere on the Web, like your Facebook page or Twitter account. And your customers expect you to be available in these different venues so they can interact with your brand on their own terms. At Blueport, we work with our clients to be sure the messages customers see online are what they would see in-store, from consistent local pricing to real-time availability.

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When It Comes to the Newest Technology, Set Objectives First

Friday, July 15, 2011 by Betsy Miller

Everyone wants to be involved with the newest technology, right? Retailers and consumers alike want to play on the newest playground with the newest equipment, along with the coolest, most influential kids, whether that means Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr today, Google+ tomorrow and who knows what next week. But before an e-commerce company jumps on the latest technology bandwagon, people need to stop and think about the website’s strategy and what is right for the overall business. That’s just what David Rogers, author of The Network Is Your Customer: 5 Strategies to Thrive in a Digital Age, wrote in a BNET blog post.

It’s almost as if the technology itself becomes bigger than its function. Brands tend to jump in so quickly that Google was compelled to post a YouTube video asking businesses to hold off on creating Google+ profiles until the business version is released.

While we at Blueport understand that brands do need to get out there and dip their feet in new technologies, strategy should come into play first. We work with our clients to help them determine their objectives before taking action. We don’t just help them administer Facebook contests, but we ask them why they want to have a Facebook contest – what is the real goal for the company? Then, based on our clients’ objectives, we offer suggestions that make the most sense for their brands and that will deliver the best return on investment.

New technology presents a new frontier, even for companies that already have an e-commerce presence. It helps to create a digital strategy to guide you in this unmarked territory.

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Online Advertising: Now Delivering Local
Shoppers -- Is Your Website Ready for Them?

Friday, July 8, 2011 by Carl Prindle

According to a recent eMarketer article, 90% of national ad agencies have clients asking for geographically targeted online ad campaigns. Daily deal sites, like Groupon, and mobile check-in sites, like foursquare, are hot because they can deliver local shoppers.

Seventy-five percent of survey respondents said location was key in helping national brands reach their target audiences, and more than 50% said the ROI on geographically targeted ads is higher. It makes sense -- if you’re looking to buy a new sofa in Chicago, would you be drawn to an ad about stylish sofas or one about stylish sofas in Chicago?

Local advertising brings what the consumer is looking for that much closer. Local means you can see it in a store; maybe get a local deal; and get it quickly and cheaply (and even get service if you have to).

But is your ecommerce platform ready for local shopping? Very few are.

Local Commerce Makes Good on Local Advertising

Remember the early days of ecommerce, which promised to “Amazon” everything? Stores were to become obsolete, and as a result, most ecommerce platforms were built as national channels, designed to bypass local stores entirely.

That’s a real problem for most bricks-and-mortar retailers. The promise of a local ad falls flat when a customer clicks to a homogenized, national website.

To monetize local ads, you need to provide your customers a complete location-based experience that delivers on the ad’s local promise. A landing page isn’t enough -- you need to deliver local online shopping.

At Blueport Commerce, we enable local online shopping experiences for our clients. Blueport’s clients present localized content to their shoppers based on location, including merchandise trends, selection and availability, in-store inventory and pick up, local pricing and deals, fast, cheap local delivery, and even “About Us” pages, managed by stores, and that can speak to a local store’s place in a community.

It’s seamless cross-channel shopping between online and a local store, and it dramatically improves the already impressive ROI of local online advertising.

Your customers are ready for a complete local commerce experience -- are you?

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Consistency Is Key in This Multichannel Retail World

Friday, July 1, 2011 by Betsy Miller

We’ve all read the news – most likely on a tablet or e-reader of choice – that brick-and-mortar bookstores are closing left and right as their electronic counterparts comparably flourish. But recently, I needed a book.

As do many shoppers, I began with online research. I went straight to a major book retailers’ website and located the title. I was disappointed that I could no longer order the book online for in-store pickup or even find out if my local store had the book in stock. But I could locate the closest store, which took some doing in light of the above-mentioned closings.

In-store, the item was priced 30% more than on the retailer’s website. The manager explained it was for the convenience of coming into the store, and no, it’s not confusing, because the company gets the money either way. I left unlikely to buy from the store or the e-commerce site again.

A Seamless Experience Between Online and In-Store

Of all the retail categories to know the right way to sell in a multichannel retail environment, you would expect books to have it mastered. After all, e-commerce began with bookselling.

Seeing where the book retailer got it wrong, while we here at Blueport are able to get it right as we help our retailers sell big-ticket items online, reminded me of just how new e-commerce and getting different retail channels to work together is.

But consumers are ready, and delivering a consistent experience between all of your retail channels is a must, particularly for considered purchases like furniture and appliances. This is why we tie into our retailers’ existing systems to show their customers consistent local pricing, real-time availability and a way to see the items in a store or to order online. We allow our retailers to give their customers control, so they can get the information they need, whenever and however they want it.

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New Insights on How Consumers Research Products and Shop Online

Friday, June 24, 2011 by Betsy Miller

We’ve already written about today’s smarter consumers, but a new study from PowerReviews, a Blueport Commerce partner, and the e-tailing group takes a closer look at how today’s sophisticated online shoppers use a variety of tools to research items before buying.

Of the 1,000 consumers surveyed, 70% research their purchases for at least a day before taking action. A ZippyCart piece also covering this survey offers this insight: “one reason for this longer-term research…could be the fact that most online purchases are for bigger-ticket items (TVs, other consumer electronics, etc.).”

Unsurprisingly, most of those surveyed said they begin their online shopping either at a search engine or a major retailer’s website. And 90% said product reviews had the biggest impact on their decision to buy.

At this point, only a third of respondents use social media sites, like Facebook, for researching products and instead look to them to find deals. But consumers are using their mobile phones to search for product ratings and reviews from within physical stores.

How Does This Change Your E-Commerce Business?

While these insights may not change how you run your e-commerce store, it does give you a few things to continue to focus on or try out. Including:

Retargeting advertising: If consumers are spending more time online researching, retargeting allows you to keep your brand in front of them during their time online.
Search engine optimization: SEO comes down to content creation. Be sure you have unique, helpful content on your product pages and consider branching out and creating content to help users buy your products. These tactics will aid consumers in their research and you in your search engine rankings.
Product ratings and reviews: This is just another form of content, which will help with SEO and informing your customers. And even better, since ratings and reviews come from their peers, consumers trust them.

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Get Your E-Commerce Website Ready for Daily Deals

Friday, June 17, 2011 by Betsy Miller

Groupon has more than 83 million subscribers; LivingSocial more than 28 million. According to Bloomberg, 480 companies are competing in the daily deals space – including everyone from Google and Facebook, which have recently tossed their hats in the ring, to niche sites like the socially conscious Roozt.com or the kosher-inclined Jewpon.com.

With the potential traffic that could come from offering a daily deal, retailers that are considering teaming up with one of these sites need to be sure their own e-commerce websites can handle the load.

A Daily Deal Case Study

Our client The RoomPlace offered a daily deal through LivingSocial: $150 worth of furniture at 50% off. The site activity the day the deal ran was considerable:

67% increase in website traffic
65% increase in bandwidth used
75% increase in calls for content.

Foreseeing the increase in site usage, we made sure all product and site changes that we usually update daily were completed before the daily deal email was sent. We worked with Akamai to increase the regular cache time to 48 hours. This ensured our regular customers would have a seamless site experience and that the influx of new traffic from the daily deal would be able to get to and see the site pages quickly. As a backup, our operations team set up additional hot standby servers.

Our operations team closely monitored live site usage throughout the day the deal went out – just in case. Thanks to the precautions taken, the additional traffic had no effect on site speed, nor was there any downtime.

“Planning ahead, both from a technical and a business perspective was essential,” says Kathryn Kerrigan, e-commerce manager for The RoomPlace. “Thanks to forethought and site stability, we were able to accommodate and convert numerous new customers.”

No matter what kind of business you run, a daily deal offer will drive a lot of new customers to your website. These new customers want to know what their getting whether or not they plan to use the deal online. Beyond the window dressing, be sure your website is technically ready so new customers will get a great first impression and come back for more.

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Will You Make Back Your Online Advertising Spend in Store Sales? Yes!

Friday, June 3, 2011 by Carl Prindle

All retailers want to know that the money they spend online is coming back to them some way, somehow. It's become a mantra that the majority of consumers who buy in stores research online first, but in truth, it can be hard to follow customers from their keyboards to retailers’ registers.

We at Blueport see the value that local e-commerce and online marketing bring to our brick-and-mortar clients every day. But, it certainly helps when a company like Google offers Online to Store research that quantifies cross-channel results.

Google set out to prove that online advertising leads to in-store sales. For one national retailer, testing keyword advertising specific to one product category not only lifted in-store sales for that category by 3.6%, but the online advertising had a halo effect, lifting sales in all other categories by 1%. And, the bigger the ticket, the better the results were.

HP Case Study Shows ROI Is Higher with Bigger-Ticket Items

The Google Retail Advertising Blog post about Hewlett-Packard and the study discusses the following findings:

Overall, HP’s online to store campaign had a 530% overall return on ad spend
The top 25% of markets in the test had a 1,090% return on ad spend
Higher-end models correlated with a higher increase in store sales.

How Can You See Your Own In-Store Return on Your Online Presence?

In an interview, analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik offers some ideas for getting quantitative information on how your online efforts contribute to in-store sales.

Some ideas you might be able to implement for your retail business:

Offer an online survey as consumers exit your website, asking where they plan to buy and how likely they are to buy based on the experience they’ve had online.
In-stores, include a call-to-action to take an online survey for a chance to be entered into a sweepstakes and ask questions about where their interactions with your brand began.
Use a store card program, where you have a number attached to customers when they interact with and buy from you online and in-store.
Allow customers to order online and pickup in-store, and then track additional in-store purchases as a result of the pickup.

We're just at the beginning of this trend. As localized e-commerce gains traction and enables synchronized web to local store marketing, we'll start to see new sectors of retail get even more involved (and see even better results). In the meantime, even this simple test shows how stores can -- and in today's world, must -- harness the power of online marketing.

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Should Your E-Commerce Site Offer Live Chat?

Wednesday, May 25, 2011 by Betsy Miller

There’s been a lot of chatter about live chat lately. This month, LiveChat announced new features for triggering prospects and measuring conversions from its software, and Bold Software and The E-Tailing Group released the results of a study on the effectiveness of live chat for e-commerce websites. Does your e-commerce platform need to incorporate live chat functionality?

Live Chat Allows Customers to Contact You in the Way They Want To

E-commerce is about convenience. It’s about consumers being able to purchase from your retail business the way they want, when they want. And this convenience should extend to how customers can communicate with your company. Today’s consumers want to be able to choose the options that work for them, and well-thought-out live chat is an option the consumers you want to reach are interested in.

The Bold Software/E-Tailing Group research finds that 20% of shoppers prefer live chat. And this 20% of consumers tends to include those age 31 to 50 with above average income and who are more likely to be college educated and spend more online on an annual basis than other shoppers. Can you afford not to appease this audience?

The Right Way to Execute Live Chat

If you’ve decided live chat is the right option for your e-commerce business, you need to be sure to implement it correctly. Customers who engage in live chat say its success completely lies with the chatting customer representative. They found the chat software’s features to be far less important.

The E-Commerce Edge Is Customer Service

At Blueport, when we work with clients that are implementing live chat, we instruct them to really think about who they are assigning this task. We find the ideal chatters to be web-savvy and have a good mix of customer service and sales skills. Deep knowledge of the product catalog is essential.

Your retail chatters need to be clear on their goals, which should most likely be customer satisfaction and closing the sale. Chatters should also keep in mind that the customer decided to reach out to them via chat, so they should tread carefully about sending users to alternate medium, like the phone or in-store, for resolution. Your chatters need to be empowered to quickly answer questions and resolve issues all within online chat or in the follow-up method each customer prefers.

Are You Going to, or Have You Already Implemented, Online Chat for E-Commerce?

If you’re thinking of incorporating live chat, remember that the software is just a piece of the puzzle. Go to sites that offer online chat and see what does and does not work for you as a consumer. How long of a wait for the retailer rep to begin the chat is too long? Could the chatter answer your catalog questions, or could you learn more from the product page? If an item was out of stock or not what you wanted, were you offered alternatives? When you said you’d come back later or go to the store, were you given an incentive to buy today. Note what your frustrations and what you liked so you can incorporate best practices into your own implementation.

If your website already has live chat, how do you know if you’re maximizing this opportunity? Regularly review the transcripts to see what opportunities may have been lost and to see if you have given your chatters the information and tools they need to make the customer interactions successful. And be sure to engage in live chat on your website as a customer every now and then to see that the experience is what it should be.

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4 Tips to Boost E-Commerce Site Traffic from Rapper Lil B

Thursday, May 19, 2011 by Betsy Miller

What does an underwear-showing, tattooed, 21-year-old rapper from Berkeley have that every e-commerce site needs? SEO and social media game.

Lil B is known for his extensive use of Twitter, MySpace and other social media sites to build his brand. Wired recently broke down four things the rapper does and how it helps him in the online world. We’ll show you how you can follow the same principles to help your e-commerce website.

#1 “Keep It Real with Social Media”

Lil B reaches out to his audience via frequent Tweets and more than a hundred MySpace pages offering free songs. He says he communicates with his fans because he loves them.

What You Can Do: Don’t you love your e-commerce customers? Show them by reaching out to them with regular Tweets and special offers. You don’t have to Tweet as much as Lil B, but add some regularity to what you’re doing so that your customers can expect – and anticipate – hearing from you. And use a branded Facebook page or blog to encourage two-way communication about your brand and products.

#2 “Do It Big When It Comes to Links”

Lil B spreads the buzz by creating buzz so blogs will talk about and link to him. He also encourages fans to respond to his songs via YouTube.

What You Can Do: You need to create something that customers and bloggers will want to link to. Offer a contest that has a viral component, like asking users to create your next commercial or to help design a new product. Create content – like a buying guide, perhaps – that the market would consume and link to. Outside links to your site and content gives you authority.

#3 “Slang Content on the Regular”

Lil B is also producing and cultivating new content from his fans. People – and search engines – expect frequent content updates.

What You Can Do: Creating a corporate blog is a great way to facilitate frequent content updates about your new products, new ways to use your products and more. Harness the power of search engines to drive traffic to your e-commerce site by generating new content and aggregating content of interest to your target audience. Depending on your goals and capabilities, you don’t have to update your content multiple times per day, but you do need to update it regularly. Start with an easy plan of once a week, and then dial up or down as necessary.

#4 “Swag Up with Keywords”

Lil B incorporates prominent keywords into his song titles and lyrics – “Charlie Sheen” and “I’m Paris Hilton,” for example. People find Lil B and his music without even looking for it.

What You Can Do: While someone searching for Justin Bieber may have no interest in purchasing from your e-commerce site, you can be sure that your web pages and content are targeting the most relevant keywords to drive the appropriate traffic to your site. Be aware of keyword trends. Yahoo! always displays its top 10 trending searches on its homepage. And Google's free AdWords Keyword Tool lets you enter phrases so you can see the related terms web users are searching and how much competition there is for each term.

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3 Reasons Why Quality Content Could Be Your Key to E-Commerce Success

Wednesday, May 11, 2011 by Betsy Miller

Back in the early days of the web, when many of us pioneered this business, there was the notion of sticky content. Sticky content was all about putting content on your website to encourage visitors to linger and come back to your site. This was back when business plans were thin, eyeballs were all the rage and no one talked about conversions. But then the dotcom bubble burst, and content creation was deemed an unnecessary task as website teams trimmed down and struggled to keep their Internet businesses afloat.

Fast-forward to now: Content has made a comeback. Google, blogs and social sharing have made offering unique, quality content in some form to your customers a must for any website and a competitive advantage for e-commerce sites. Here are 3 of the top reasons why.

#1 Your Customers

Remember: E-commerce site content takes the place of welcoming sales associates at a brick-and-mortar store. From calls to action to your About Us page, what is the impression you want to make? Also, e-commerce retailers ask their customers to buy items with limited senses. Well-crafted product descriptions can fill the void for customers who wonder what an item really feels like in person. Buying guides and other advice can lead customers through the process of purchasing online and specifically via your website.

Tip: As an e-commerce website, you are a content publisher. Define your target audience and who you are as a retailer. Be sure your content’s voice and tone live up to and reinforce the promises you want to make. Style guides are not just for logos and fonts.

#2 Your Brand

The content you publish on your e-commerce site is an extension of your business. It allows you to give your company a voice and to set yourself up as an advocate, trendsetter, thought leader, or whatever best sets your specific e-commerce business apart. And thanks to social sites, if the web content you create is engaging, sharing it is easier than ever. Good, interesting content can spread like wildfire – are you creating any? If you deliver content that is truly helpful and unique, your customers will blog about it, share it on Facebook, Tweet it and more. Quality content allows others to be your brand ambassadors.

Tip: You can start getting the word out yourself! Share your site’s content via a corporate blog, Twitter account, StumbleUpon, etc.

#3 Search Engine Optimization

Anyone who knows their SEO stuff will tell you: When it comes to search engine optimization, nothing beats fresh, original content. While link baiting and creating directory pages on your own site will help with your organic search rankings, it should supplement your real content offering. Just look at how well blog posts rank on Google. By nature, well-written content is full of keywords, whether on a product page or in an article related to the types of product you sell online. A fresh content offering gives spiders something new to crawl, and nothing beats a quality offering to encourage people to read and link to what you’ve written. And with Google Panda, being sure your product descriptions are truly unique will only benefit your e-commerce store.

Tip: A corporate blog is a great way for an e-commerce site to get into the content arena. You don’t have to worry about integrating a content management system into your platform, and you can use a blog to introduce new products, offer tips and share relevant news about your online retail business.

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E-Commerce Is About More Than Online Shopping: Think Digital Marketing

Tuesday, May 3, 2011 by Betsy Miller

This week’s article from Multichannel Merchant “How to Drop the ‘E’ from E-Commerce,” talks about the evolution of folks who are now in charge of retailers’ e-commerce sites and how they likely worked their ways up through the retailers’ IT ranks and are now measured by online sales. But the article points out that e-commerce shouldn’t be about website sales as much as it should be about digital marketing for the entire retail organization.

Your e-commerce website is an influencer and should be designed to be a cross-channel powerhouse that drives sales and interactions with your business. You need to create a retail business that lets the consumer interact with you on the consumer's terms. And with the way people begin shopping using online search, your website could very well be the first touchpoint for new customers.

6 Ways to Turn Your E-Commerce Website into a Retail Digital Marketing Machine

Offer real local inventory information with local pricing -- right down to the store.
Provide a feature-rich store locator, allowing customers to search stores by location, hours and other customer-centric criteria.
Allow customers to buy online and pick up at a store location.
Be sure there is consistency between your e-commerce website and store when it comes to messaging, naming conventions and pricing.
Boost your local store online, using Google Places and the like, and integrate with location-based services like FourSquare.
Allow local stores to customize their information, and include store specific events, contacts and more.
Work with your marketing and merchandising counterparts to ensure a consistent message that works both in-store and online.

Remember: E-commerce is simply an extension of your existing stores. Don’t overlook your website’s full ability to market your products by focusing solely on online sales.

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There’s a Lot to Like About Facebook and Ecommerce Marketing

Friday, April 22, 2011 by Betsy Miller

Last week we posted about Forrester’s report on Facebook as an ecommerce driver. And while we agree that Facebook will likely not become a major ecommerce platform any time soon, we do see the social network’s value for marketing your ecommerce brand.

There’s more to marketing on Facebook than adding a Like button to your web pages. You need to become a content publisher with a marketing slant. You need to provide value in the form of resources, product information and special deals. The frequency and scope depends on your audience, and cultivating that audience is the number-one step for successful marketing on Facebook.

Building a Facebook Audience for Your Ecommerce Website

We recently worked with one of our clients to run a Facebook fan promotion. The more likes the store’s Facebook page received within a specific time period, the larger the discount all of the Facebook fans would get.

We promoted this “The More You Like, the More You Save” campaign on Facebook, the store’s website and through email marketing. The nature of the campaign was for fans to spread the word -- if their friends liked the page too, everyone would save more. In two weeks, we nearly doubled the store’s Facebook fans, but it didn’t end there. Once we posted the special coupon code on Facebook, we promoted the discount to the site’s audience, encouraging an additional 1,300 of the store’s customers to go onto Facebook and like the page to get access to the code.

We’ve been able to attribute tens of thousands of online sales to this promotion, not to mention additional in-store traffic and sales. And we can continue to use the store’s Facebook page to market to these customers.

Create Social Noise Around Your Ecommerce Brand

A side effect of this promotion beyond the dollars, is that this store’s customers are talking to each other on Facebook about the store and its products. They’ve discussed the furniture they planned to buy with their discount, great experiences they had and what they like most about the store and brand. By administering this Facebook promotion, we’ve helped our client to create an army of brand ambassadors -- specifically brand ambassadors who like to post to social networking sites.

Engage Your Facebook Fans

Now the big challenge is engaging these fans and keeping them interested in a brand that sells big-ticket items the average consumer does not buy every day. To successfully do this, you need to think community more than transactional. Help your customers keep the conversation going about their purchases. Solicit pictures of what they bought, provide tips for caring for their items, and offer tangential information from other sources that complements your brand. This will help your fans remember you, recommend you and come back to you the next time they’re looking to make a purchase.

Copyright 2010, Official Blog of Blueport Commerce

Facebook's Role in Social Shopping

Thursday, April 14, 2011 by Betsy Miller

Will Facebook become a major ecommerce player? According to the latest from Forrester Research, probably not.

In her newly released report, “Will Facebook Ever Drive eCommerce?,” Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru claims a social-network presence is less effective at online retail customer acquisition and retention than e-mail and paid search. She notes that Facebook's major challenge is that the majority of the 650 million users visit the social network to socialize, not to shop. While I agree Facebook is not on track to be the next Amazon or eBay, the social networking site does have a part to play in ecommerce.

Facebook and Online Considered Purchases

Facebook will likely never be a destination for major ecommerce transactions, but I do believe consumers will leverage the community's tools for the social aspect of shopping online and in-person. Whether sending a picture from their mobile phone or posting a link from an ecommerce site, Facebook is one of the quickest ways for consumers to ask their friends if they should get the new sofa in brown or gray.

Retailers can also use the Facebook platform to engage with customers and offer special deals and information specifically for their Facebook fans. Consumers want to be a part of the conversation, and Facebook lets you connect in new ways retailers only wished they could before. And a potential audience of 650 million makes Facebook a very difficult website for retailers to ignore.

What benefits you have seen from your retail store’s or brand’s Facebook presence? Has the site played a role in increasing conversions or helping to drive engagement?

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