How To Find Questions for a Great Online FAQ

Posted on May 6, 2012 by martinnormark

When running an e-commerce store, customers will ask questions all the time. Customers can’t see and feel what they’re buying, some products has a more complicated buying process than others and before putting their credit card details on the line, every customer wants to make sure they’re making the right choice.

This means, at worst, if they can’t find answer to their questions on your site, they’ll leave and find one of your competitors. If you’re lucky they’ll e-mail or phone you up and ask the question.

So either way, it’s a good idea to sort out your online FAQ, get it right and make it an integral part of the checkout process so that customers can find the most frequently asked questions before they leave, or make contact.

But how do you know which questions they want answered?

Well, that’s the hard part. But luckily there’s a lot of things you can do to find out what information your customers need.

1. Check the manufacturer’s website

You probably sell several products, and from different manufacturers. But you can seek out inspiration on their websites to find out what they think is the most frequently asked questions in regard to their products.

Remember not to copy and paste directly. Not only is it illegal, but it can also cause duplicate content which can harm your search rankings.

2. Spy on your competitors

Of course you should not copy! But spying on your competitors is fine. Browse their website, add products to cart, start the checkout process. If you really want to explore the inner workings, complete the checkout process and order something. Place it in your friend’s name if you don’t want them to know.

3. Do order fulfillment for a week

If you don’t pick, pack and ship orders yourself, try it for a week. At the same time, make sure your pick up the phone and answer customer service e-mails.

This will not only let you optimize the process, but also give you inspiration for questions.

4. Handle customer service requests for a week

Speaking to customers is the best way to get to know them. You’ll quickly find inspiration for questions, since your customers are asking you the exact questions they need answered.

5. Browse previous customer service e-mails

If you don’t have the time to do customer service full time for a week, then go through previous inquiries. You should look for repeating questions to make sure you don’t publish one-off inquiries.

6. Use popular forums, blogs and other community driven content

Find established forum, blogs and other sites within your industry. Stay in the loop, see what people are talking about. Not only is this a way for your to find questions, you can also provide service to the community by answering them.

When you have created a good online FAQ, answer questions in forums and blogs by linking directly to the answer on your site.

7. Publish the FAQs from your shipping company

Shipping is one of the more frequent worries of online shopping. Make sure to provide adequate information as to who will bring the package, what time of day, what happens you’re not at home when they arrive at your doorstep, how can I return a package. Lots of questions come to mind.

Conclusion

Test and refine. If you get a lot of questions by e-mail or phone, make sure to provide the answers at a prominent position on your website.

All order specific questions should be answered around the shopping cart and checkout pages. Order confirmation e-mails is also a great place to include order- and shipping specific questions.

What Instagram Can Teach You About Running an E-commerce Store

Posted on April 13, 2012 by martinnormark

Unless you’ve spent the last week on the moon, or somewhere far, far away — you know that Instagram was acquired by Facebook this Monday.

But what has this to do with E-commerce, you may ask?

Not a lot, but still a whole lot of things. Did you know that Instagram have 30 million users, but only 13 employees, by the time of the acquisition?

It’s a great example of how you can achieve success (lots of users, I’m not focusing that much on the acquisition) even as a small business.

And that’s exactly what you need to know if you’re opening an E-commerce store. You don’t need a big warehouse, hundreds of employees or a million dollar website. Less can do, and less is often better!

Remove clutter

Instagram started out trying to make a mobile check-in app that did a lot of things, but saw it wasn’t easy to solve all needs to perfection, so they stripped away all the clutter and focused on images.

If you’re opening an E-commerce store, or maybe it has already launched, don’t focus on selling each and every product you can get. Instead, focus on great products. Be the expert in your field, and remove clutter for your customers.

People don’t want 20 different bike helmets – they want to see those that are approved by authorities, that looks OK and within a certain price range.

Try out different things

When you get going with your online store, don’t sit and wait. Things probably don’t work out exactly as you thought, but don’t ever take that personally. You can’t dream up a market, a product or a business and expect it to just work. You need feedback from real customers.

If your newly designed home page doesn’t get visitors in front of products, and shopping carts – try something new.

If the latest product doesn’t sell in the first week – remove it.

If ads on Facebook doesn’t work for you, for whatever reason it may be, move on.

You get the idea – move fast, and move often. You don’t know what works until you’ve actually tried it.

Stay calm, and keep it simple

Even when you get your initial taste of success, don’t think you’ve found the answer or the holy grail of E-commerce. Don’t try to get enormous, because you can.

Keep on experimenting, and stay focused on serving your customers well. Stay small, lean and agile enough to always be able to change an entire e-mail marketing campaign the day before it was meant to be sent.

Too many businesses fail, because they try to act bigger than they are, spending way too much money on useless stuff.

Stay calm, stay small and focus!

5 E-commerce Sites Doing Customer Service on Twitter Right

Posted on April 11, 2012 by martinnormark

Many e-commerce sites use Twitter to drive traffic to their sites, spread content on their blog or content from other sources. And that’s totally fine, it works great and you can connect with your customers very fast.

But what lots of e-commerce sites, and other companies tend to ignore, is the huge potential in helping their customers on Twitter so that anyone else can see how great customer service they deliver.

Most companies ignore customer complaints on Twitter, but it’s widely used to complain. Using the #fail hashtag on your complaints will quickly get your complaint some eyeballs around the world, and established, international companies will be hurt sonner or later.

Companies doing Customer Service on Twitter right

There are lots of ways you can improve your customer service efforts on Twitter, but this blog post gives an example of five companies doing customer service on Twitter right.

Dell

Dell has both good and bad customer service stories from “real life”. But on Twitter, they’ve turned their Dell Cares account into a responsive way for customers to get help online.

Zappos

Zappos is specifically know for great customer service. So what would be more natural than expanding their support to include Twitter? With Zappos Service they also help customers find what they need, so it’s a sales channel as well.

Best Buy

Best Buy has taken things a bit further. They help all sorts of people with their technical problems, with their Twelpforce staff. With the endless amounts of electronic shops both online and offline, this could be a way to get some free, positive airtime and get in touch with customers before they buy.

Argos UK

Argos assists their customer service efforts on a daily basis via their ArgosHelpers Twitter account.

Sonos

With technical products, support might be harder. Sonos have a dedicated Twitter account for helping their customers connect their wireless audio products. Who wants to sit 30 mins on a phone, when a simple tweet could save the day?

Conclusion

There’s no one-shot solution to customer service. In my opinion, you have to reach out and show the world you want to help. This is where Twitter is awesome. Anyone can see how you’re actively helping people solve their problems. And when you do, customers would probably tell their friends about you.

How to use QR Codes in E-commerce

Posted on March 10, 2012 by martinnormark

QR codes are gaining momentum. As mobile devices is becoming the center of the universe, we need to embrace technologies that make it easier to be a mobile user.

You can make a QR code do just about anything. Open up your E-commerce Store’s home page, go to a specific product, like you on Facebook, Tweet a branded message on Twitter. Only your imagination is the limit.

However. You have to think about the obvious fact: People who scan them, are on a mobile device. So don’t send direct them into any complicated, large pages and expect them to buy stuff from you right away.

Use QR codes to support offline marketing

If you’re doing any sort of offline marketing, it would be a great idea for you to add a QR code to your campaign.

Here’s a few things to remember:

Set up a landing page in your E-commerce Store specifically designed for this campaign.
On the page, you must match the message and branding from your offline campaign
Make sure to add tracking information to the link your QR code reflects

Add a QR code to your business cards

You might say that business cards are useless. But they’re still relevant, even in E-commerce.

What I’m suggesting is, that you throw a couple of business cards into every package you ship. The business cards should include logo, your internet address, and a short description of what you sell – just as you have online.

Preferably, your business cards contains a QR code that goes straight to your E-commerce Store. That way, people who got a business card from you or one of your customers can easily scan and see what your E-commerce Store has to offer.

Add a QR code to packages, when shipping

When shipping items to your customers, add a QR Code to the package. If your E-commerce platform supports it, link to a page where they can review their order and handle returns management stuff right away. Preferably, this site should be mobile optimized since they’re obviously scanning your QR code from a mobile device.

E-commerce Website Templates for Pages – Template Frameworks is a must!

Posted on July 5, 2011 by martinnormark

Creating content for your E-commerce Store is one of the more important tasks in your everyday management of an E-commerce Store.

Content is the juice the all-important search engines drinks, and you need to constantly feed them with delicious new juice.

But more importantly, you have a business that sells stuff. And your business needs customers to buy from you. In order to buy from you, customers want to check out your stuff, gain knowledge of “how this thing works”, how do I use it and so on.

What I’m trying to say is, don’t write content for search engines – write for humans – your customers! And the search engines will pick up.

E-commerce Website Templates

Before you start to create the content it self, whether it being content on product pages, category pages or information pages, you need a set of Website Templates in place for you to use.

When you want to create a new page, you should have a set of templates that varies in details e.g. the number of columns, content of the sidebar, different navigation menus, no navigation menus at all. You need a template to each use case. If your page is marketing related, a Facebook Page box, a Twitter stream or something could make sense, but if the page is your terms and conditions you might be better off with a plain and simple one column layout, without the social streams, newsletters and such.

The following is an overview of common layouts your templates could have.

From the Web Style Guide, chapter 6: Page Templates

Different use cases requires different templates. A landing page for an E-mail campaign might perform better if you go for a simple one-column template without all the navigation menus to remove clutter and focus on the message you’re trying to get across with the campaign.

Your product pages is different, here it makes sense to list the categories in a sidebar to help the user navigate other categories and find what they need.

In your checkout flow, the context of the user is no longer to find more products, but to actually buy those that they’ve already found. Then the categories list in the sidebar should be removed, you might get rid of the sidebar entirely – but you need to focus on getting the sale done.

Template Frameworks to the rescue

Your E-commerce platform must have a template framework in place, to make it easy for you to switch back and forth between layouts. You should be able to set the layout (One, Two, Three columns) on any template, and your should be able to set a template for any given page – whether that being product pages, category pages or information (content) pages.

A set of templates also makes it easier for you to cooperate with a designer. Your designer can create the templates you need, using the different layouts – and it is just a matter for you to use them. If you want changes to some of the templates, you simply get the designer to work and make them as you want. All pages using the updated templates, automatically gets the updated design.

Why Business Cards Still Makes Sense for E-commerce Stores

Posted on June 4, 2011 by martinnormark

Most E-commerce stores have learned, that offline marketing doesn’t provide value for online businesses. Putting an ad in a magazine, newspaper, radio etc. is first of all not measurable, and it’s too much blind shooting given the fact that you’re not targeting people down to a narrow audience – like you’ve also learned you should do.

But there are other offline marketing tactics that are almost free of charge, and secondly involves a referral between people, putting your brand in the middle of a recommendation.

Business cards is an easy way to exchange contact information, but unlike the classic person-specific business card, E-commerce stores should get creative and use the space that wins a new customer in the context of a recommendation from an existing customer.

What I’m suggesting is, that you throw a couple of business cards into every package you ship. The business cards should include logo, your internet address, and a short description of what you sell – just as you have online.

Also, do mention on the delivery notice that you’ve included a few business cards that you can give to friends and family.

Use short URLs

If you want to get some sort of statistics on how many go to your e-commerce store from those business cards, put a short URL from e.g. Bit.ly on there, instead of the real address. Bit.ly gives you the ability to get information on each URL from their website by appending the + sign to the address. You’ll get a nice page with the number of clicks etc.

If you use Google Analytics, also make sure to “campaign tag” the URL you put into Bit.ly. This will give you a campaign in Google Analytics, that you can use to filter statistics and see how many click and buy from the business cards.

QR Codes

QR Codes is being used more and more for offline marketing campaings. Posters at bus stops etc. often include a QR code you can scan from you smartphone.

A tactic you can use on your business cards is to put the QR code on the backside. Bit.ly already provide QR code images with their short URLs, so you can just grab that – and you’ll keep the ability to track clicks etc.

Discount codes

To give enticement to purchase, you can get creative by including discount codes, free shipping, buy one get one etc. with your business cards.

This would also make the customer who should give the business cards away, treat the cards like a more valuable item since they actually are worth something then.

Get creative, try out new tactics with your business cards. It is definitely not a scalable marketing tactic for online stores, but they do take advantage of existing customers and spreads the word a little.

7 Design Elements Every E-commerce Site Must Have

Posted on May 31, 2011 by martinnormark

You want to establish an online business, and sell some products. You know what you’ll sell; you have most things in place. You just need to find a nice design for your website – so that it looks delicious, is easy to navigate and easy to buy from.

You may have surfed the internet for a while to see if you could find any great themes for your E-commerce Platform, but they never seem to satisfy your needs. There’s always something wrong, either the overall color scheme doesn’t suit you, or the little details ruins the rest of the design.

What is wrong?

I’ll tell you. You’re trying to satisfy your needs with a “one-size fits-all” solution. It rarely works, and there’s a very good reason for that. Everyone is different. So is businesses, especially online businesses. This, of course, applies to websites as well.

Instead of trying to find a theme, which almost always lets you down, try to define the elements that will eventually make up the site.

This is what I’ll do now, this is a list of 7 Design Elements any E-commerce site must have. No excuses!

Home page

Obviously any site has a home page. But the home page in your store should not be a coincidence.

Your homepage must show the door to specific categories when a new visitor arrives. Your top categories should be present on the home page – a way in.

You need to guide visitors of your home page, through to the department of your store you’re most proud of, or the products you’d rather sell. Home page visitors are often browsers, killing time, maybe looking for a new bike, nothing in particular. This is your chance to tell them what they need!

Remember that loads of visitors will never see your homepage. Visitors often go directly to product pages from search engines, and such – but that’s a good thing, since they’re probably closer to making a decision.

Category page

Since the home page is showing the door, you need the room the door leads to. This can be your category pages, and a category page is a tricky thing.

Most E-commerce platforms deliver the category page as a list of product, and nothing else. This should not be the case for your E-commerce site, since visitors who browse your site should get more value from a page they see often, than just a list of products.

Summarize your category at the top with images
Bullet points (Unique Selling Points)
Video
A featured product
Products on discount
Make it easy to scan the page, to immediately see what this category contains.

Don’t forget to socialize – this is a great place to have a Facebook Like button, a Twitter button and any other social buttons.

Product page

The product page is where all the magic happens. Ultimately, to buy something, any user must go through this page (in most situations).

This is extremely important that your product page present your products in the most desirable way. Images are a must, video is sometimes better. Relevant information must be provided – such as price, SKU, whether or not the product is in stock, delivery information, product specifications – the list goes on.

Don’t make the mistake of just copying the description the manufacturer provides on their website, since this could give search engines an indication of duplicate content. Write your own!

Last, but not least. The “add to cart” button must be placed prominently, be sized prominently and grab attention with its color and call to action.

Shopping cart

Being an E-commerce site, users must be able to add products to their cart – just like they do in any regular store.

What you should decide is how you want your shopping cart delivered to the user?
Should it even be named “Shopping cart” in the first place?
Are you better off with “Shopping bag”?

How should it look? Knowing your customers is important, so do think of them as you decide.

Checkout flow

Being an e-commerce site, you need a checkout flow just like any other store.

This is another very important step to get right. Think about how you can guide your visitors through the process easily.

Is it too complicated to do in one step?
Is this a place for you to up-sell?
Which payment methods do you want (or need) to accept?
Should the visitor be able to edit the cart, while checking out?

It all depends on what you’re selling, and who you’re targeting. How internet savvy is your customers? Take a look at the demographics, and design something that caters to their feelings and emotions. Take their side – make them take yours!

Order thank you page

Many forget this page. This is the page your customers will see right after they’ve placed an order with you. And when they’ve just done that, they’re in a state of mind where they trust you, they look forward to receiving whatever they just bought, and you have a much better chance to make them sign up for your newsletter, follow you on Twitter, or like you on Facebook.

Think about yourself, and think back to the latest purchase you made online. Wouldn’t it be very likely that you’d take another action after completing a purchase, if you were asked for it?

E-mail design

When you’ve got all the design elements on your website nailed down, don’t forget the look and feel of your e-mails.

You should be sending e-mails that instantly displays similarities with your site, so the recipients will know an e-mail is from you.

It should be a simple one-column layout with your logo at the top and using the same colour scheme as your site does.

5 Ideas on How a Blog Can Benefit Any E-commerce Store

Posted on May 26, 2011 by martinnormark

A lot of E-commerce store owners have tried to establish a blog, only to give up on it a few months later. This is usually because of unrealistic expectations, and the idea of success before commitment (See the 2nd quote from the bottom).

Other E-commerce store owners might have the commitment and drive to succeed, but lack the ideas on what to blog about, and how the blog and the E-commerce store plays together.

This is my 5 ideas on how a blog can benefit any E-commerce store.

Find strong communities in your products

Part of blogging is to establish a following, a tribe, a community. Most products already have a huge community already. Let’s take an online bike store as an example. They sell both mountain bikes and road bikes. Each “category” has its own community already, so the bike shop could blog about lots of interesting stuff related to mountain biking:

How do you ride up a steep hill
How do you safely decent
How do you clean your bike

And for road bikes:

How to climb Alp d’Huez
How to achieve optimal gear shifts
How to decrease your bike’s weight

Also, if you can find a niche in your products, target that niche. It is much easier for your blog to succeed if you target a smaller niche, rather that a wide segment.

Teach, but don’t self promote

Most of all, your blog should be educational for your readers. So getting back to our bike store, you should not blog about the brand new Trek mountain bike and why anyone should buy that, and never write they should buy from you! Don’t self promote.

Instead, write your blog post for the general term of mountain biking, so anyone with a mountain bike can follow your blog. The interesting part happens when people who would like to have a mountain bike start reading about your wonderful tips, and decides to buy one. Which online bike store would they go to first? Yours, of course.

You should skip the salesy approach, and out-teach your competition, instead of trying to out-spend them.

Write “How To” posts, that include several products

When writing a blog post about how to clean your mountain bike after returning from a trail, make sure to include a couple of products the reader can use to better clean the bike. Find products that compliments the bike. There might be some great tools to use when cleaning the chain, brakes and gear-parts.

After cleaning the bike, should you add some rustproofing material? What about the brakes? The chain?

Anything that makes the reader feel they’re taking better care of their bike, because of your tips will benefit you. It builds trust, and establishes you as an expert in this niche.

Blog about events in your niche

This is a hugely underestimated tactic for blogging. Whenever something big happens in your industry, you need to get some content out there to target people following the big event/news. Your chances of getting lots of traffic are quite good. Try to search for iPhone 5 in Google. You’ll find dedicated blogs that even have iPhone5 in their domain name, like www.iphone5rumours.com.

This is a good example of arriving early to the party. They know that an iPhone 5 will be released sooner or later, so why not join the rumor wagon?

Getting back to our bike store, you want to blog about events going on in your niche. So the Tour de France, Giro’d Italia and Vuelta a España are obvious events to blog about. People follow those races all over the world. Yoou could write about lots of related things, such as:

How they work to prepare for the Tour (Pro tip: Don’t write about doping!)
What they eat before and during the Tour
The equipment they use, what it costs – just as a fun comparison

Connect your blog with Facebook, Twitter and E-mail marketing

Don’t make your blog an island. Build bridges from your blog to the rest of your marketing efforts such as Facebook, Twitter and E-mail marketing.

Specifically, this means you should:

have a sign-up form to your E-mail list on your blog
tell your e-mail subscribers about your best blog posts
have a Facebook Page box on your blog
post new blog posts on your Facebook Page’s wall
have a Twitter Stream widget on your blog
post new blog posts to Twitter

Remember, if you want to start a blog to drive traffic to your e-commerce store – be patient, consistent and don’t give in a month later because you’re disappointed. Commit to making your blog a success, it takes a lot of time and energy so stick with it!

SEO Tips for New Websites

Posted on March 11, 2011 by guestblogger

This is a guest post by Charles Mburugu. Charles is a professional content developer and an entrepreneur. Enjoy his tips on SEO for New Websites!

Creating a website is one thing, and surviving in the global online market is another. How many internet users will find your website from the millions of websites on the internet? This is a vital question which website owners need to think about after creating a new website.

The best ways of attracting visitors to your website is to get listed on various search engines. Being listed in the search engines’ Top 10 results will boost your business, since visitors don’t have the time to go through the thousands of sites listed in the different search engines. It is therefore important to get a top position ranking for your website.

The following are SEO tactics which can help boost your rankings in the search engines.

Quality Content

Your website content plays a crucial role in attaining top ranking on the search engines. On the other hand, it can also cause the falling of site ranking if it poor quality or copy content from already existing websites. Your website content should be interesting as well as unique so that users are attracted to visit your pages.

Proper Keyword Selection

While selecting keywords for your website, examine keywords as if you are a web user. Which keywords are most likely to be used by someone searching for your web content? This is an important question to think through. Initially, it is wiser to use general keywords rather than specific keywords. You could use your product details, company name or location as a keyword.

Link Popularity

It is not easy to get good ranking for your site without quality back links. Therefore, link popularity plays a vital role in a website’s ranking. You should always focus on getting one way links or quality natural links from relevant sites which have a higher page rank.

Competitor Analysis

All websites listed in the search engines would want their web pages to be highly ranked. Therefore, you should always keep track of your competitors’ activities. If you want a top ranking, analyze what you need to do and who you should compete with. When it comes to promoting your site, you should always strive to outdo your competition. If you lack the time to promote your website, you could hire a qualified SEO service provider.

Easy to Use Website

Your website should be easy to navigate and visitors should not have any problem reaching any part of the site. If you have a large website with many pages, you need to create a site map for your visitors. The site map will tell users about vital sections of the website and the pages under every section. This will enhance your website’s chance of a high ranking, and will also attract good reviews from your visitors.

Author Bio

Charles Mburugu is a professional content developer and an entrepreneur. He often writes about real estate, finance, business start-ups and internet marketing. In the past few weeks he has been writing for blogs where you can get the latest norton renewal coupon and promotional codes go daddy.

How to Raise your PayPal Receiving and Withdrawal Limits

Posted on March 3, 2011 by martinnormark

PayPal claims they’re the easier and safer way to send and receive money. But there’s a lot of stories out there on the internet, saying they’re not. If you search for paypal scary story many of the top result is dedicated anti-PayPal sites that tell their own story of failure. But is PayPal really that dangerous?

PayPal account limits

Of course they’re not dangerous. They’re the fastest and easiest way to setup a payment solution that accepts Visa and Mastercard. You pay a fee per transaction, and you can transfer money to your bank account with ease.

The stories you read about people hitting a brick wall with PayPal, is probably people not reading or paying attention to the limits of PayPal. When you open an account, there a page where you can see your sending, receiving and withdrawal limits. These are very important if you want to do business with PayPal.

To see your limits, click the ‘View limits’ link at the My Account –> Overview page.

The page you’ll see then, shows you your sending, receiving and withdrawal limits.

Notice the ‘Lift Limits’ button? Tick the limit you want to lift, and click the button. A new page is displayed, telling you exactly how to lift your limits.

If you have the ‘Identify yourself or your business type’ link, click it and fill out the form on the page. When you return, you’ll have more options.

The above screens shows you that I’m subject to certain EU (European Union) regulations, but they’re easy to comply with.

You basically have to do the following steps:

Link and verify a creditcard to your account
Confirm yourself as a business
Supply additional information
Authorize account holder
Identify account holder.

The reason PayPal wants all this information, is to minimize fraud. As long as you keep your account in good standing, and keep an eye on your limits you’ll be fine.

Only have a single account

Because PayPal does so much to prevent fraud, they keep an eye on not only your account, but also how many different accounts you log into from the same computer. If you have created several business accounts, they might suspend all of them. This is because, they don’t want you to be able to use another account if the first one gets suspended. So use only one account, and one account only.

You can still have a personal account without any of them being suspended.

Use PayPal to get feedback and move on

If you want to start an online business, you want to get going as fast as possible to verify your idea. PayPal is great for this, because they can set you up almost immediately. Use PayPal for this purpose, and if/when you start selling stuff on a regular basis, you can extend your payment setup.