Social networking is central to women’s Internet experience. Regardless of how much you believe that women are primarily communicators, networkers and facilitators, it’s clear they are embracing social networking in a way that men are not. Furthermore, the rise of social networking has prompted women of all ages to engage in a host of associated online activities, such as photo-sharing, gaming, video viewing and instant messaging. All of these activities have benefited from their linkage with Social Networking sites in terms of their ability to attract new female users.

In the U.S., currently the largest e-commerce market in the world, women are the key drivers of online buying. More women than men transact on the Internet and, collectively, they spend more. And it’s not surprising that women over-index most heavily in the following categories: Fragrances/Cosmetics, E-cards, Flowers, Gifts and Greetings, Pets.

Women are just as likely to manage their money online, and moms and grandmothers have emerged as online gamers along with high school- and college-aged boys. And, engaging in online vices is no longer the exclusive territory of men.

Get the full report here (requires registration).

1. WP-eCommerce (free) – the most popular eCommerce plugin, has been downloaded over 300,000 times so far. There’s a free version & a gold version, both also working with WP-MU. Main features:

* one page checkout
* product tagging
* themes
* downloadable products
* newsletters
* related products
* multiple payment gateways

You can check here the full list of WP-eCommerce features.  And here is a tutorial how to setup this plugin:

2. eShop (free) – is an accessible shopping cart plugin for WordPress, packed with various features. Including:

* Utilises WordPress pages, or posts, to create products
* Various methods available for listing products
* Products can have multiple options
* Upload downloadable products
* Basic Statistics
* Download sales data
* Various shipping options
* Admin has access to an Order handling section
* Automatic emails on successful purchase
* User configurable email templates.
* Configurable Out of Stock message.
* Basic Stock Control
* Google Base Data creation
* Uninstall available within the plugin
* Various discount options
* WPMU compatible.
* Merchant gateways:Authorize.net, Paypal, Payson, eProcessingNetwork, Webtopay, iDEAL and Cash/Cheque

3. YAK for WordPress (free) – It associates products with weblog entries, so the post ID also becomes the product code. It supports both pages and posts as products, handles different types of product through categories, and provides customisable purchase options (cheque or deposit, basic credit card form, basic Google Checkout integration, standard PayPal integration, PayPal Payments Pro, and Authorize.net). YAK includes the following features:

* Create products from either posts or pages
* Downloadable products
* Multiple product types – price per type (i.e. small, medium, large) and quantity per type
* Order administration – filtering by date, status and order number
* Products page with paging (simple alternative to viewing by category)
* Configurable shipping (either flat rate or by weight unit)
* Configurable shipping address
* Configurable countries list
* Promotions – percentage or fixed discounts, on shipping or order value
* Sales Reports (basic flash charts showing sales, best sellers, etc)
* Support for https (SSL)
* Tags for configurable emails
* Basic XML feed
* Support for multiple shops (function to retrieve product details from another shop)
* Customer interface has been translated into a number of languages: Japanese, Chinese, Taiwan Chinese, Thai, Slovakian, Czech, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, Swedish
* Support for WordPress MU

4. Quick Shop (free) – supports any Wordpress that has the Sidebar Widgets installed. It adds a SideBar widget that shows the user what they currently have in the cart and allows them to remove the items, not to mention a TinyMCE button to easily allow you to add products to your posts/pages.

5. Shopp ($55) – this is a commercial plugin for Wordpress with a rich featureset. The key features include:

* Single Page Product Data Entry
* Drag & Drop for multiple product images
* Support for Physical & Digital Products
* Order History
* Email Notifications
* RSS Feeds for Categories
* Fast Product Search
* Shipping Rate Calculations
* Shipping Discounts
* Promo Codes & Coupon Codes

What will bring this module for you? It will record the online transactions and will link revenues to visitors, content and traffic sources, helping you making decisions related to the marketing campaigns and the website in order to reduce the abandon rate and increase conversions.

Check this short clip to get familiar with the GA eCommerce tracking system:

It looks really nice, right? Now, how to get this? You can find here a complete installation & setup tutorial, or, if you are using osCommerce, you can find here an add-on that will do all the hard work for you.

Now, you can easily identify the most profitable campaigns, keywords, channels, you can improve ROI on your website and keyword bidding. Here is a video that will show you how to identify high spenders with GA:

1. Buy_Two_Module – allows you to bundle 2 products in order to sell more. In the product A page you’ll have a recommendation box to buy product A + product B together at a discounted price. This module shows also how much you save buying the 2 products together than separated, and when you click the “buy” button, it will add two items to the shopping cart.
2. Single Page Checkout – very useful add-on that reduces the existing 4-5 necessary steps for checkout to a single page with all the required information. Web sites that are using a multi page checkout system are more than likely losing a great deal of customers simply because the checkout process requires too much time, information, or both. By reducing the checkout time and using a simple one page checkout system you will increase your completed sales and customer satisfaction will be increased exponentially.
3. Orders at-a-glance – this is a time-saving contribution that adds a talk bubble icon to the admin orders listing wich products were ordered. When you rollover the talk bubble icon, it displays the products of that order.
4. How many orders has customer ordered before – the name says everything about this contribution, allowing you to see in the admin if a customer is a returning or a new one.
5. Random Specials – useful if you want to have different products on special daily and you don’t want to pick them every day.  A “set it and forget it” module where you specify the minimum price for product to be selected to go on special, maximum number of products per script run, discount in percentage and number of days for special to run.
6. Customer stats orders – a report module for all the orders or for orders with a  specific  status from a precise month that will show you the number of orders, the number of new customers registered over the period, the number of customer having bought (and % compared to the registered), the number of customers having made several purchases (1 to 20 and % compared to the purchasers), stats on the orders (Total sales, shipping, taxes…), the average sale included taxes, the average basket of products exclued taxes.
7. Dynamic price updater – This package will install in the product page a quantity box with plus and minus buttons. This will allow a user to increase and decrease the total product quantity while updating the total price on the product page according to the total before adding it to the cart.
8. Supplier Price Update – if your products acquisitions are impacted by changes in the exchange rate and you need an easy way to update all prices from a selected supplier by a given percentage.
9. Products Cycle Slideshow – this contribution will place a slideshow on the startup page of your website. The slideshow can show New Products, Specials and Bestsellers and you can specify in the admin panel how many products should be in the slideshow.
10. Search Tag Cloud – this module will add a box to your page, where the most popular searches get tagged. You can specify from the admin how many tags to be shown and the width of the box.

“By 2011, Enterprise Microblogging Will Be a Standard Feature on 80 Percent of Social Software Platforms” – STAMFORD, Conn., March 26, 2009

In a recent study, Gartner has identified four different ways in which companies are making use of the Twitter:

1. Direct – The company uses Twitter as a marketing or public relations channel
2. Indirect – The company’s employees use Twitter to enhance and extend their personal reputations, thereby enhancing the company’s reputation
3. Internal – Employees use the platform to communicate about what they are doing, projects they are working on and ideas that occur to them
4. Inbound signaling – Twitter streams provide a rich source of information about what customers, competitors and others are saying about a company

Now, you understand WHY you should use Twitter for your business  – BizTwitting, but you don’t know HOW and WHAT to tweet. Here are some ideas:

What to tweet:

• Sales/Marketing stuff:

- time-limited sales
- coupon codes
- specials
- contests
- event sign-up

• Company Info:

- product pictures (www.twitpic.com)
- staff
- customer support
- customer/client news
- product tips
- press mentions

• General Info:

- industry news
- re-tweets
- questions
- help requests/suggestions
- personal info

Who to follow – strategic following:

- customer/clients
- staff
- colleagues in the field
- vendors
- relevant journalists
- social influencers for your field
- competitors

How to get followers:

- include Twitter url everywhere
- write about your Twitter feed
- add linked Twitter badges to your site
- list yourself in Twitter directories (e.g. www.twellow.com)
- run contests

For a complete guide of what does Twitter do for business, check this link.

]]> http://ecommercetips.org/2009/10/biztwitting-twitter-for-business-why-how-what/feed/ 0 http://ecommercetips.org/2009/10/social-media-vs-search-behavior-performance/ http://ecommercetips.org/2009/10/social-media-vs-search-behavior-performance/#comments Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:25:16 +0000 admin http://ecommercetips.org/?p=59 An interesting research study was released recently, “The Influenced: Social Media, Search and the Interplay of Consideration and Consumption” from comScore, GroupM Search & M8, exploring the impact of social media on search behavior.

According to this report, social media can improve paid search performance for a brand by up to 300%, consumers exposed to both a brand’s influenced social media and paid search spending almost 3 times more time online than the average consumer:

Also, in organic search, consumers searching on brand product terms who have been exposed to a brand’s social marketing campaign are 2.4 times more likely to click on organic links leading to the advertiser’s site than the average user seeing a brand’s paid search ad alone!

You can check the entire report below:

The Influenced: Social Media, Search and the Interplay of Consideration and Consumption

If you want to know more about the traffic from Twitter, who your referrers are and how influential these referrers are, you can now load your own Google Analytics data into Twitalyzer in less than two minutes. Here’s what you have to do:

In Google Analytics, go to “Traffic Sources” then “Referring Sites

In Google Analytics, find the referrer “/twitter.com” and click on that link

In Google Analytics, change the “Show rows” value at the bottom of the page to “500″

In Google Analytics, click “Export” at the top of the page and select “CSV”

On this page, click “Browse …” and find the resulting .CSV file on your hard-drive

On this page, click “Combine Data!” to send the file to the Twitalyzer and we do the rest!

Cool! And a demo video:

1. Ultimate SEO URLs – This contribution builds on the cName & pName code to give an even more flexible, search engine friendly, and cross server compatible SEO URLs
2. Easy Populate & Products Attributes – Makes it simple to populate your OSC store with products without using the web interface at all. It also lets you download all your products into a csv file, edit them in the spreadsheet of your choice, and reupload them to update your products, changing prices, categories, quantities, etc.
3. Simple Template System – Lets you create simple HTML templates to customize the look and feel of OSC. You simply create an HTML page that looks the way you want it to and put in placeholders for the various elements wherever you want to position them.
4. Discount Coupon Codes – Create coupon codes for your customers to use for discounts on orders. Discounts are applied before tax and are displayed as one order total line for each applicable tax class. You can configure whether to display the order subtotal including the discount, or before the discount is applied.
5. Purchase Without Account – Allow your customers to choose one of the following options at checkout time: proceed directly to checkout (no account creation), create a new account or login to existing account.
6. Order Editor – easy to install, it allows you to add products to an existing order, reliably update order totals, insert coupons & discounts & extra fees, update tax on individual products, edit product information on individual orders, update product quantities, product prices, and more.
7. ‘On the Fly’ Auto Thumbnailer using GD Library - Dynamically generate your product image thumbnails on the fly. It works with GIFs, JPGs and PNGs, produces much smaller thumbnail file sizes (saving bandwidth), maintains the proper ratio of your pics, and does not create any extra files on your server.
8. Separate Pricing Per Customer – Allows you to assign customers to seperate groups and then give different pricing per product for each group.
9. X-Sell – Cross-sell allows you to link products to each other to upsell/suggest items customers might also wish to purchase.
10. Recover Cart Sales – This report will show you carts that are unsold so you can see what was at least added and then passed on for whatever reason. The report allows you to select how many past days you will view. Info also includes the customer name, phone number, email address, what items were in the cart, the cart total and you can contact all of them by the press of a button.

1. Figure out what you want in a webhost first. Do you just want one to play around with and have one for your friends and family or do you want one for your local business or to create a way of making money online? Free web hosts will be fine to play around on but you will need something more if you want it for a business or making money online.
2. Reliability is the main requisite: when choosing a web host many people base their decision on the offered disk space and bandwidth. Unless you already have a very popular website you will hardly use even 10% the bandwidth on most hosting plans. The main factor on your decision, therefore, should be the reliability of the host (i.e. the speed of the servers and the uptime).
3. Research online: in order to verify the reliability of the different web hosts you will need to research online. Use search engines to gather customer reviews and check the online forums dedicated to web hosting (the best one is Web Hosting Talk).
4. Stay away from oversellers: it is very tempting to sign up with a web host that offers many Gigabytes of disk space, Terabytes of monthly bandwidth and unlimited domains. Specially if they charge $5,95 monthly for those specifications The only problem is that those hosting providers are clearly overselling, and thus they are not able to guarantee service quality. When choosing a web host look for a company that offers reasonable specifications.
5. Resellers? Not all hosting companies own or lease their own web servers. Some of them are actually resellers for some other hosting company. The disadvantage of using a reseller is the possibility that you are dealing with people who don’t know much about the system they are selling and who take longer to help you (they have to transmit your technical support request to the actual hosting company for it to be acted upon). However, this also depends on both the reseller and the underlying hosting company. It is thus wise not to rule out all resellers; there are a number of reliable and fast ones who are actually quite good and cheap. In fact, a number of resellers sell the same packages cheaper than their original hosting company. If you find out that a particular company is a reseller, you will need to investigate both the reseller and the real hosting company.
6. Test the support service: before signing up make sure that you send some emails to the sales support. Check how fast they answer, how friendly they are and what degree of technical knowledge the operators have. If a company has a poor customer care department to begin with its very likely that other parts of the business will have the same performance.
7. Leave room for growth with enough space. The amount of space good web hosts provide would matter if your website grows bigger than allowed. Always look for a host with the option to buy more space if need be. Moving hosts can be a pain. Avoid this with a little foresight and planning.
8. Be wary of hosts that include a free domain name with their hosting package unless you are certain they will be putting your information in the WHOIS. Whoever has their information in the WHOIS is the owner, not the one who paid for it.
9. Don’t be cheap: if you are serious about your website or blog you should invest some money into a good web hosting solution. I am not saying that you will need a dedicated server right from the start, but consider that if you want a reliable and fast provider you will need to spend from $10 to $20 monthly.
10. Think twice about web hosts with a more competitive yearly rate, forcing you to pay for a year up front. If you have paid yearly and are dissatisfied with their service, you are less likely to swap. It’s always best to only pay monthly!