Worth Reading Posts About Ecommerce

There are quite a lot of blogs teaching ecommerce business and providing practical tips and strategies. I spend quite a lot of time browsing the blogs each day and I will list down here the ecommerce-related posts that are well worth reading, for you, as well as for myself. The list will grow longer, as the time goes on. 

1.  Ten Mistakes I Made Running Two Online Stores (And How You Can Avoid Them) 

Author: Shabbir Nooruddin

Blog: Bootstrapping Ecommerce

In this post, Shabbir shares with us what he had learnt from his ecommerce mistakes, which are most likely the mistakes you and I are making now. He did a really detailed analysis and provided profound tips & strategies about running a successful ecommerce business, which worth taking time to read through. And his personal blog is widely recognised as one of the 11 Top blogs that ecommerce entrepreneurs shall follow. 

2. Beginner's Guide to Content Marketing.

Author: Ezra Firestone

Blog: Smart Marketer 

A series of 15 videos, teaching beginners and more advanced merchants how to develop a content strategy to increase traffic, sales and repeat business. A quite detailed and thorough teaching about Content Marketing, which will benefit online store owners a lot. 

(More To Come...)

5 Proven Ways To Increase Online Sales + Things You Need To Do Now

So you are operating an ecommerce store and you want to make more sales? The good news is people want to buy more online. Nowadays, people spend more and more time browsing the internet. Is your store optimised for this great opportunity? If not, there are 7 simple things that you can implement in your store and experience the efforts getting paid off. 

1. Choose one ecommerce goal. 

Identify which stage is your online store now. Is it at planning stage? Or no visitors, no sales? Or you get tons of visitors, but no sales? Know your current position clearly, then choose one main goal to focus on, such as making more sales or attracting more traffic. Step by step, you will achieve your goals. 

2. Plan for mobile shoppers. 

It's a great trend around the world that people spend more time with their phones, quite sad though. However, it brings the opportunity for the online store owners to optimise this trend and sale their products. To achieve this, efforts are needed in making it more user-friendly and attractive for the mobile visitors. Add more visual contents and re-size the website to fit the mobile devices are essential for keeping the mobile visitors. 

3. Choose the right landing page. 

Choose the right landing page to keep your visitors and convert them into customers. It's recommended to set the parts of the site where they can purchase your products as the landing page. And it's important to make sure that the landing page is clear and visitors won't get distracted or loose their interest in your store and quit. The main purpose of the landing page is to get customers to pay your products.

4. Free shipping. 

Studies have shown that free shipping is the best and most effective way of convincing customers to willingly purchase online. It works for Amazon, ebay, etc. Adjust your product prices and apply this model to convert traffic into sales.

5. Focus on SEO.

Invest more time and efforts on SEO and focus on the right keywords that can bring your store ranking to a higher position in Google search. For a new store, Google search is an effective way of bringing new customers. 

Videos have more influences than text and they have longer effects on search engine. Besides, you can also upload videos to Youtu, which is another powerful platform for attracting traffics. 

Above are the 5 proven ways that have been used by many successful ecommerce store owners. You can implement these methods to your store, by start taking actions to do the following things now: 

a). Browse your competitors' online store, who have been successful in operating ecommerce business. Check their websites out, learn from them and improve your own store. 

b). Look at your Google Analytics data, to get a sense of which part of your current site is attracting people, how long they stay, and how many of the visitors become customers ( the conversion rate). 

c). If possible, talk to people who work in the companies that are selling the products related to your niche. Ask them which product has worked well and which hasn't. 

Don't let your visitors or customers leave your website without purchasing products. Create your site to make it user-friendly and really easy for them to buy quickly. Give your best to your goal, though it might take you 6 months to achieve so. 

Top 5 Ways of Attracting Traffic & Making Sales Online

The biggest challenge for the online store owners is getting traffic to their stores and converting visitors to customers. Besides, ecommerce store owners shall know their position among thousands of other ecommerce sites. It's crucial for them to figure out the effective ways of standing out and making their stores well-known.

The explosion of growth in the ecommerce world has only made it tougher for ecommerce sites to attract the critical mass of visitors needed to stay in business.

In this post I will share with you 12 different strategies that you could use to increase your online community and get more sales. Pick the strategies and tactics you find most interesting and suitable for your business and start seeing your business grow.

1. Update content / blogs regularly.

It's important to keep your customers / followers being interested in your store. You could use the following methods to update the store content: 

• Add the latest and trending products; 
• Post interesting blogs that are related to your products;
• Create discount or sales activities; 

2. Using images while posting Ads.

Images tend to get people's attention fast. The best way to increase Ads engagement is by including images within the Ads campaign. Images help to make the ads connect with people's emotions & feelings, which are the vital factors for making purchase-related decisions. Studies show that posts with photos on Facebook generate 50% more likes than the normal text posts. Same effects happen for the Google Adwords. Image ads are generally more attractive and more easily to stir up people's curiosity, compared with text Ads.

With the help of Google Shopping free apps, it becomes convenient and simple to link the shopify store with the Google Merchant Centre, which simplify the process of advertising with product images to a great extent.

3. Make it easy to link your ecommerce site with other social media.

The more impressions that people have about your ecommerce site, the more likely it is for your site to gain traffic and customers. Make sure that you have embedded the social media icons (facebook, instagram, pinterest, twitter, google+, linkedin, etc) into your webpage. And make sure that they are displayed properly to the visitors, not hidden or blocked. And you could always be the first to like, share, or link your webpage with your other social media account. Do your part to bring your site to the friends, families and communities. 

And you may want to consider to place social media icons in the following places of your website: 

• Footer of the website & blog
• Header of the website & blog
• On the left/right hand side of the website & blog
• In your newsletter
• In you email signature
• Within specific blog posts

Check out this example of an outdoor product website. They list the social media icons on the side of the home page and make them stick there. Neat and tidy. A great idea!

4. Enable UGC (User Generate Content).

It is a great way to create trust and provide insights on your products by using UGC (User Generate Content), which will result in sales increase.

Yotpo is a popular free social review app that's available in Shopify's app store. Yotop helps you to increase sales by generating more site & product reviews with Yotpo’s signature in-mail review form. Besides, with it you can boost your customers' trust and increase conversion rate with tons of verified reviews & customer photos.  The app helps convert over 8% of customers to reviewers through their mail after purchase email which results in a large number of reviews being created. The best part is that this process is automated so you don’t have to spend time reaching out to customers to try and get new product reviews. Here's how it works:

5. Create micro content.

Nowadays, a great amount of people admit that they often feel overwhelmed by the overloaded information out there. World is changing too fast and too many things happen each day, leaving people helplessly, unable to digest such huge information. It means people have less patient and less time to consume content. An increasing trend among marketers which should be considered seriously by the ecommerce store owners is the creation of bite sized chunks of content, for quick and easy consumption. 

Vine is a great, free app for creating an up to 6s short video. Facebook also provide such video creating tool by using up to 10 images. 

Conclusion

Above listed methods have been widely discussed and introduced on other Ecommerce blogs or courses. And a great many of online store owners have won traffic and made great sales over their competitors, by applying one or more of the these strategies. 

Many people have heard some ideas, but only a few are willing to work hard and try them out. Take actions today and fight your way up in the ecommerce business!

How To Find Hot Selling Products On Shopify App Store & Facebook

Shopify App Store

Visit shopify app store, not to check out what apps we could use to promote our products or websites, but to find out who have purchased these apps, especially those expensive ones. 

a). Sort by "Popular", then search for the those expensive apps, not the free ones. 

b). Then click the selected app and scroll down to the "review" section. Click on any one of these reviewers, who have purchased the app. And it will lead you to that person's shopify store. 

c). Generally, the stores that use those expensive apps have higher chance of operating a successful business. You can browse their website and looking at their best selling products, by adding this code "/collections/all?sort_by=best-selling" right after their main home page URL. 

d). Check those hot selling products in AliExpress and import the products to your store. 

Facebook

Another way of getting the hot selling products and knowing what your competitors are selling, is using Facebook. 

Go to Facebook and like all the pages that are related to your niche, so that you will be your competitors' target audience. Within a few days, you will start getting your competitors' ads. You can visit their site, checking out what they are selling that you don't have, what they are doing which is better than your site and what their hot selling products are, by adding "/collections/all?sort_by=best-selling" right after their main home page URL. 

These are the fastest ways to find the actual best selling products that are related to your niche. As the saying from "The Art of War" says "Know yourself and know your enemy, and you will never be defeated ."

How To Find The Right Product Niche?

Finding the right product niche is one of the crucial steps of being successful in the E-commerce business. Here are some tips and suggestions about how to find the right product niche. We will go through the process of generating product list & evaluating the list to get the potential winning products. Hope they will help you!

Generate The Product List

1. Start from yourself. 

Your minds are already filled with many good ideas: products you like, your hobbies, your passions, trends that you think will become popular, etc. List them down, as much as possible, at least 10 products. We will discuss about how to evaluate them and choosing the potential bestselling products later. 

2. Browse other websites.

Spend a great amount of time browsing those existing, well-established E-commerce platforms, observing their best selling products, promoted products and offers. Learn and find out what are the hot selling products that people are already purchasing. They are the winning products. Add them to your list. Below are the links to some of these well-known platforms. Visit them often and make the best out of them! 

• AliExpress Weekly Best Selling Products 
• Amazon Best Sellers 
• Ebay 
• Lazada Top Sellers  

Besides above sites, you could also check out what other shopify stores are selling by Google "site: myshopify.com" + "The niche" (eg. site: myshopify.com, iphone cases). It's an effective way of knowing better about your competitors, feeling like a spy? 😉

Once you get the product list ready, it's time to start evaluating them and choosing the potential products that you want to sale. 

Evaluate The Product List

1. AliExpress Criteria

a). Store Numbers

Type your product name in AliExpress. Based on the numbers of the stores that are selling such product, we evaluate the store number score as below: 

• More than 2,000 stores: 5 Score
• 500-1,999 stores: 4 Score
• 100-500 stores: 3 Score
• 0-100 stores: 2 Score

b). Product Popularity

Get the average order amount from the top 10 stores that are selling such product. Based on the order amount, we evaluate the product popularity score as below: 

• More than 2,000 orders: 5 Score
• 500-1,999 orders: 4 Score
• 100-500 orders: 3 Score
• 0-100 orders: 2 Score

c). Supplier Positive Feedback

Get the average positive feedback from the top 10 stores that are selling such product. The product shall have min. 96% positive feedback. 

d). Product Price

For the beginners, who never have E-commerce / dropshipping experience before, in my opinion, it would be safer to look for products that are less than $5. Generally, cheaper products are more popular and tend to be hot selling products. Besides, such products are capable of "FREE + Just Pay Shipping" campaign method.  

2. Google Trend

Go to Google Trends and type each of your product idea into the search box and look what the trend is. Is the trend increasing or decreasing? Are there any patterns? Do you see any spikes? 

Take "iPhone cases" as example, we will get the following trend: 

Besides looking at the trend, you should also pay attention to the "Interest by region" area. It shows you from which country these key words have been greatly searched, and such information is very useful in the ads targeting stage. 

And you want to avoid seasonal products, such as Christmas decoration, Easter basket, etc. For the seasonal products have shorter life cycle, and it won't help you in making sales. 

3. Target Audience

While you are selecting products, please bear in mind that it shall be easy to find the target audience with such products, whether on Facebook Ads, Google Adwords or others. If the products are too general, cannot fit in any group of people, no matter how great the products seem to be, very unlikely they are going to make effective sales, and on the other hand, your advertising fees might be sky-high. We will discuss about targeting audience in details in other part. 

Above are some tips and suggestions in finding the right niche. Hope they will give you some basic ideas about getting the right products. Though this stage is important, don't spend too much time on it. It only works when other stages are also well-planned and developed. They work together to lead to a successful E-commerce business. 

Things You Should Know Before Starting A Shopify / E-Commerce Business

Nowadays dropshipping with Shopfiy & Facebook has been widely discussed on Youtube and many other websites. However, before investing more of your time and money, and actually carrying out the Shopify & Facebook dropshipping buisness, you should know the following things, to avoid being unsuccessful: 

1. It takes time and needs money.

Watching those "guru" making thousand dollars per day, gives people the illusion that with shopify dropshipping, Facebook advertisement & Aliexpress, it is so easy to gain decent money really fast & effortlessly, and it will rescue them from exchanging their time with the day-job, which just enough to pay the meals, and most people are so sick of living like this.

However, they fall into this illusion way too fast. Or they're simply not willing to be aware of the reality, but want to be blind and keep on day-dreaming about their fantasy outcomes. They fail to realise that with their current skills and knowledge, making decent income with dropshipping method is like approaching the castle over the ocean, which they aren't unable to enter it at all, for it's just their imagination.  

But the truth is it does take quite a lot of efforts, both time and money. In terms of time, please be prepared to wait at least 1-3 months before getting your first sale, especially for those who doesn't have any E-commerce marketing knowledge or experience. You need to spend certain amount of time browsing around the websites, blogs & googling, to be familiar with the terms and methods. 

As for the investment money, very common, it will take at least $1,000 before you make your first sale. There are many things that costs money, such as choosing the domain name, paying shopify service fees, purchasing the shopify apps, Facebook advertising, etc. Be prepared mentally and financially and be ready to invest even more. 

Be willing to invest enough time & money to get to know the system and then you will start making money!

2. Be persistent & creative. 

It will be difficult to brand your store and even make sales, considering there are already thousands of stores out there selling the same products that your are advertising now. Why will they buy from you, which is just a general store, when they can easily find cheaper products from other well-established platforms, such as Amazon, Ebay, etc? 

Though it might be hard and difficult to compete with other stores, don't ever give up. You should avoid from hopping from one project to another. Learn from the failure, analysing why your fail to make sales, is it because of the niche, or because of the Facebook target audiences not right, or because of the store website not attractive? Improve from the mistakes and restart again. Keep trying and practising, after certain amount of time, you will find the right path, which will take you fly. 

3. Find the right advertising method. 

Even though most of the Youtube guru or courses are talking about using Facebook as the advertising method, it doesn't mean it's the only way. If you have used Facebook ads, and it didn't work for you, don't lose your heart, thinking you are done with the E-commerce. Searching about other advertising methods, such as Google Shopping, Instagram, Pinterest, Google Adwords, Email Marketing, etc, and try them out. Many people make their first sales with Google Adwords, not Facebook Ads. And there are many apps at the shopify store, that can help you create more efficient & attractive advertisements.

Every product has the potential of being the winning product. Keep looking for the right audiences and search deeper, you will find them. 

4. Make your products go viral. 

Before investing in the advertising, you should plan and develop a strategy to make your product go viral, without depending on the advertisement. The more you spend on the advertisement, the less profit you will receive, or even worse, loose money. Be creative, make some videos / photos which are highly engaged with audiences and will make people want to share with their friends. There are quite a lot of good examples about viral ads. Spend some time watching them and learning from them.

Above are the things I think you should know before setting up your shopify store, just my opinion. When you think you are in pain and you've had enough, don't ever give up! 😄