eCommerce Trends to Watch This Holiday Season

blogger

Black Friday and the holiday shopping season are fast approaching, and customers know this just as well as retailers. Based on last year, between Labor Day and mid-November we can expect online customers to change their behavior by deferring purchases. As an industry, we have conditioned our customers to expect exceptional offers in the run up to Black Friday.

At SeeWhy, we track both conversions and shopping cart abandonment rates, and you can see this change in behavior in the data. Shopping cart abandonment rates normally average 70 percent, i.e. 7 out of every 10 people that place items in the shopping cart do not complete the transaction. But last year from Labor Day through November 15, the number of online sales fell by almost 56 percent compared with the volume for the previous month, and the shopping cart abandonment rate shot up, peaking at 83 percent.

But once holiday promotional offers were rolled out, the transaction volumes rose sharply, and the abandonment rate fell dramatically. You can see this in the graphs below.

Note also how the day of the week is very significant: During the weekends, customers were researching, not buying. The pattern of high shopping cart abandonment rates during the weekend is normal throughout the year as customers research online before potentially making a purchase during the week. However, this pattern was much more pronounced from mid-September through mid-November, reflected in a peak abandonment rate for the year.

What happened in mid-November, of course, was that Black Friday-specific promotions were being rolled out across the board, triggering seasonal buyingnot browsingbehavior and the ramp up to the peak on Cyber Monday.

Based on last years pattern, we should expect that, until the big Thanksgiving promotions get rolled out in mid-November, many customers will defer purchases, having become conditioned not to purchase online but to wait.

This reinforces what we have known for decades; promotions shift the timing of revenues and may not provide significant lift overall.

Well be monitoring both the discounting trends and the shopping cart abandonment rates through the rest of the holiday season, and it will be interesting to see whether the Holiday 2010 will be a rerun of 2009.

Importance of Chat Support to Small Businesses

blogger

Thinking that you can achieve online business success with a plain website that simply displays your product is a big mistake you should remedy as early as now. With technology continuously evolving, consumers are expecting more and more from online shops.

They want the convenience of shopping from home yet an experience close to that when shopping at a local store. One of the things they look for is the assistance they get from staff.

They usually have questions and they want answers. One way to meet this need is to get a live chat for website.

THE CONVENIENCE OF LIVE CHAT

Live chat is convenient for consumers. Even when shopping online, many consumers want to get help (when they need it) from a real person. What is surprising is that most of them would choose live chat support over assistance via phone or email.

Live chat is just more convenient than dialing a toll free number or composing a long email that contains all their concerns. Moreover, live chat for website usually involves a shorter wait time than call centers.

Emails are usually answered within 24 to 48 hours. Consumers want prompt answers.

TAKING ADVANTAGE OF CONSUMERS LOVE FOR LIVE CHAT

Take advantage of live chat support. With a live chat box on your website and a high number of consumers using it, you can double your sales and build or improve your customer base. It is best to have a team that can answer live chat queries 24/7.

While you can be offline, wont it be great for you and your potential customers if there is a communication channel available round the clock?

SAVE ON LIVE CHAT SOFTWARE

Live chat for website has become cheaper than ever with several companies that offer similar programs. You can find an affordable live chat software and get all the necessary features. Just do your part conduct research before making a purchase.

Compared with phone support, live chat offers big savings to business owners. For instance, when the line is breaking up, callers tend to hang up and businesses would have to make a callback, which costs a few bucks, to salvage the sale.

With live chat for website, costs are reduced because the average interaction cost is also reduced.Save on Payroll with livechat

Moreover, you can reduce payroll expenses. Skilled live chat support representatives can handle several chat sessions simultaneously. Some live chat programs offer canned responses, making answering frequently asked questions fast.

Whether you have just started your online business or have been online for quite a while and want to boost your conversion rate, getting live chat for website is definitely a wise thing to do.

Provide consumers a convenient way to reach you. While phone and email work, adding a live chat box to your website can help a lot, especially in establishing your involvement.

Take advantage of consumers love for live chat support by meeting their expectations in terms of the quality and speed of customer service. Save on customer service expenses and see your conversion rates and sales soar.

Migrate Your Online Store to OpenCart with Cart2Cart – Don’t Feel Worried About Details!

blogger

You might be sure that the process of migration to OpenCart really needs a lot of efforts and even those people who will be responsible for it should be very reputable, because you do not wish to lose any existing data or check every single thing for mistakes. And so it may be unless you make use of Cart2Cart migration service. It is able to transfer all of the required items from your current source shopping cart software to your new account on OpenCart instantly. Let us give some thought how Cart2Cart can help you.

You can easily forget about rewriting every detail of every item from one shopping cart to the other by your hand. You do not need to make this tedious work with Cart2Cart. Consumers, their shipping and billing addresses, orders, order products and statuses, products, their pictures, attributes and extra fields, categorizations and their photos, taxes, currencies, suppliers and their pictures -these are the data you can transfer to OpenCart through the help of Cart2Cart. Moreover, you can find some extra options you may use for extra pay. They include the following: to keep order IDs on the target web store (in order that it is definitely not obligatory to change them) and to strip HTML from product category and product labels.

Speaking about safety, it is really one of the vital important things to be applied. For this reason Cart2Cart team performs the steps involved in migration to your OpenCart account by using secured SSL connection. Moreover, there surely is a dedicated Amazon server for each migration. In such a way you do not have to control this procedure and you can also ensure to protect all the vital data. The amount of items transferred is not limited, so you will not have to worry too much if you have a lot of consumers, products, sales orders, categories, etc.

Concerning the price of this service, it varies with the number of consumers, products and orders you would like to move. As an illustration, when you have a small business and you would like to move up to 500 products, 500 customers and 1000 orders, you have to pay $49. In case you have another number of items to be moved you can try Migration Estimator to find out the specific cost of migration to OpenCart. You can do this on the official website of Cart2Cart.

To sum up, the process of migration to OpenCart with Cart2Cart is extremely easy due to the automation of the overall process. Cart2Cart is helpful and safe to apply. There is no need to spend days filling in all the details you need. Cart2Cart makes everything very quickly rather than you.

Turbo is Only as Fast as You Make it

blogger

Selling a bulk of inventory on eBay takes a lot of time. Having to upload items one by one would take ages, and writing descriptions would take even longer. Thats why eBay offers turbo lister: a listing manager that allows you to list large quantities of inventory on eBay quickly and efficiently. You can organize your items, create templates, and save tons of time. Turbo lister is a great feature on eBay, but you (as the ecommerce businessperson) still have to do all the work.

Sure, you can read the 243 page user guide for turbo lister and start listing items in bulk. But with Infigra Ecommerce, well do all the listing for you. If you arent computer savvy, turbo lister can be difficult to master. Some features are simple, others are more complicated. If youre more of a business person and less of a computer whiz, Infigra can take care of all your listings without you having to lift a finger. Infigra Ecommerce is dedicated to serving your ecommerce needs. We target online marketing channels, like eBay, and make sure your products are the ones that customers are attracted to.

With the Infigra Ecommerce server, we create multiple titles for your products to increase the “searchability” of your items. We also create temples to market your products with professional looking graphics and high quality colors. Making templates on eBay costs money; finding high quality graphics and fonts for your products can be costly, and it also takes some knowledge about computers. With Infigra, you dont have to worry about graphics or titles for your products. We create unique templates for your products as part of our ecommerce site services. Have confidence that well market your products in the best way possible.

Infigra not only helps ecommerce business owners list large numbers of items on eBay, but we also post listings on other sites to increase your sales opportunities. We post on Amazon, Newegg, Google, Buy.com, and many others. We also create our own ecommerce sites to specifically promote your ecommerce products. Listings for your inventory will appear on a variety of online marketing channels with professionally designed templates and high quality photos. While turbo lister requires work from the ecommerce business owner, Infigra will take care of listings while you can focus on running your business.

Getting an ecommerce business started can be a daunting task. Dont hesitate to contact Infigra for help with online marketing channel listings and other ecommerce needs.

Choosing OS Commerce vs. Zen Cart Shopping Solution for Web Development

blogger

Today, diverse shopping carts are being used by e-retail outlets to enhance their e-commerce and Web Development activities and offer a unique experience to its customers. There is an exhaustive list of Shopping Carts that include Magento, PrestaShop, CubeCart, OpenCart and StoreSprite. Two of the major open-source Shopping Carts that have attained high popularity in the recent years are OS Commerce and Zen Cart. Many Web Development service providers offer these two Shopping Cart Solutions at a very large scale. However, it is proven that Web Developers do not embrace a single Shopping Cart solution completely, because of the fear of obsolescence or lock-in.

The comparison among OS Commerce and Zen Cart Shopping Cart has taken place by Webmasters at many levels, and this article, by no means, intends to be an extension of the same. This article instead discusses the benefits of both OS Commerce and Zen Cart in a little detail and helps you choose a sound Shopping Cart for your Web Development projects.

Zen Cart Shopping Cart for Efficient Web Development

For efficient Web Development, developers bank on Zen Cart Shopping Cart. Zen is free, extremely user-friendly, an easy-to-install and open-source shopping cart. More than the developers, Zen Cart is a Shopping Cart solution for shoppers. Zen Cart also offers various exclusive features like multiple payment support, varied shipping options, quantity discounts and coupons.

Zen Cart also features multiple customer modes and sales and discounts, unlimited category depth and display modes. It also efficiently supports XHTML template system and offers the liberty to use unlimited extra pages and several ad banners. Many Web Development Companies in India, believe that no Shopping Cart solutions comes as close as Zen when it comes to features and benefits.

OS Commerce for a Strong and Dedicated Shopping Cart

OS Commerce is an open source online shopping cart that offers a wide range of features to online e-commerce stores. Like Zen Cart, OS Commerce also supports multiple currencies and allows the customers to print invoices directly from the order screen. Many Web Development companies vouch for its easy database backup system, and effective Web Development processes.

OS Commerce Shopping Cart features a rich set of functionality that allows e-commerce owners to setup and maintain online stores with minimum efforts and absolutely no costs. Many Web Development, India, firms have Java proficient web developers and are solely dedicated to designing projects in Java language.

Hope this article has been able to provide some help to all those who are yet to decide between Zen and OS Commerce Shopping for their Web Development projects.