eBlogging 101: Getting Your Internet Business To Stand Out From The Crowd

Since the inception of eCommerce websites there have been a growing number of brick and mortar businesses expanding their sales online. With this growing trend it means more competition and less market share. I have mentioned that eBlogs are becoming more popular as well (an integration of an eCommerce shop with a blog) and I spoke more about it in the post I wrote: e-Commerce With Integrated Blog (e-Blogging). The question Internet businesses face is: how do you stand out from the crowd?

Design and User Friendliness

This is almost too obvious but I still see poorly designed websites lacking user friendliness and easy to use navigations. A well designed website is easy to use, looks professional and instils confidence in potential customers. This reassures them that they can safely buy on your website knowing their products or services will be delivered on time. Furthermore a professional website conveys high quality and strong branding, just how you would attend a business meeting in a proper suit and not a pair of Billabong shorts.

Ease of use of your website is equally important. If a potential customer can not navigate through your website easily and find the information they are looking for, they will go to the next website on the list. It is very easy to lose a sale because of poorly designed navigations. One way to test the ease of use of your website is to watch friends and family while they complete a few simple task of purchasing and finding specific information. A few things to observe are:

• Do they have to keep backtracking through the website?
• Can they find what they are looking for quickly?
• Can they easily click on images to enlarge the product?
• Does the search function work and return the appropriate results?
• Are the images of high quality without sacrificing time to load the website?
• Is it easy to add items to the shopping cart?
• Is the checkout easy to use?

Additionally, ask them for their feedback and thank them for their time. Be sure to take these findings and implement them to your website. Once you get this right, you will have a higher conversion rate.

Show Your Testimonials
Testimonials is a powerful tool for any Internet business. In the past I’ve utilised this tool to promote and market my products for Dragonboating and it increased my sales by two fold simply by having them displayed. Prospective customers will also feel confident to purchase from you because they see positive feedback from others. With the right mix of testimonials including website’s easy of use, quality of product, speed of delivery and fast resolution of issues, it will cover all aspects of the buying process for a prospective customer. So next time when a customer receives their product, follow up with them 7 days later and ask them to write a testimonial for your website.

Help Customers Find Your Delivery And Returns Information
It’s important to show a link to your delivery and returns page which should be displayed prominently on your website. Most customers want to know whether or not you can deliver to their location, how much it will cost them and how you will handle returns if there is a problem. I have had customers tell me how frustrating it is to find the cost of delivery at the end of the check out page, which is why I have it clear displayed on the website. It shows you are transparent and operate with integrity. This builds stronger trust with your customers as well. They will thank you later in repeat and referral business.

Extra eBlogging Tips
With these basic principals in place, your eBlog should start appealing to more customers. We want to give them that extra incentive for them to buy from you because you will be competing with other popular websites in the marketplace.

Offer Customers To Join Your Loyalty Program: A great way to attract more customers and to keep them coming back for more is to encourage them to be part of your loyalty program. In the past I have set up e-Commerce websites with an option to reward them with 1 point for every dollar they spend. The more points they accumulate, the more chances of earning a nice reward. Your customer will be able to exchange their points for a new gadget – an iPod for example or a product in your range.

Reward Purchases: You can reward customers who come back and order from you by giving them a discount on their next order. The more purchases they make, the more discounts they receive. It encourages them to purchase from you every time.

Bulk Discounts: If you sell products that people buy in large quantities consider offering a bulk discount rate. It’s a great way to encourage larger orders and higher turnover of product for your Internet business. We love to think that we have saved money, even though we have spent twice as much to get that discount. Aldi, the supermarket chain is a classic example of buy in bulk and save, which encourages shoppers to spend more.

The UPOD principle (Under Promise, Over Deliver): This is a principle I practise all the time in my businesses. Let’s say you offer normal delivery to deliver a product, which takes between 3 – 5 days to receive. What if you sent the product overnight via courier and it arrived the next day. Would your customer be ecstatic to receive their product earlier than expected? Of course they would! They would refer it to their friends and family because of fast delivery and good customer service. This is the under promise and over deliver (UPOD) principle that you can apply in your Internet business.

There are a lot of similarities between a brick and mortar business compared to an online business. Businesses that offer good products and excellent customer service are able to capture market share much faster with smarter techniques. They will be the businesses that succeed and do well online. Gone are the days where you just put an eBlog website and hope for the best. You need to implement strategies and be smart to attract good quality customers for your Internet business, then you will reap the rewards.

Tyrone Shum
eBlogging 101

e-Commerce With Integrated Blog (e-Blogging)

Lately I’ve been exploring different e-Commerece web applications and e-Commerce plugins for Wordpress. Since this blog mainly focuses on how to create profit from an Internet business, the first thing is to choose which web application is suitable for your Internet business. There’s not a one size fits all because each Internet business has different needs and requirements. Though, the foundation (system) can be the same across the board, whether you choose to use Wordpress as a customer management system (C.M.S) or an e-Commerce solution such as Magento, OsCommerce or Zencart. All of these systems work very well and they are constantly being updated and developed for users.

I Am Still Not Convinced With Using Wordpress e-Commerce Plugins

I wrote a post comparing Using A Blog Vs. Using A E-commerce Website?, which discusses the differences between a blog and an e-commerce system. Then over the last few weeks I’ve been writing reviews looking at the different e-Commerce plugins available for Wordpress. If you want to see the various reviews, read the articles section under eBlog Reviews. What I am exploring today are the different options available to integrate a blog into an existing e-Commerce system. If you have read all of my reviews about the different e-Commerce plugins for Wordpress, you will see that I am still not completely convinced. Wordpress for blogging is a fantastic system and is more than capable of handling large volumes of data. Though, once you add on an e-Commerce plugin it does not have the same functionality in comparison to an e-Commerce system, which are more robust to handle large consumer transactions. Now, the big challenge is, most e-Commerce systems do not have a blog interface built-in, which raises the question of how to integrate an e-commerce system with a blog?

Why Have An e-Commerce System Integrated With A Wordpress Blog?

Over the years, web users have found blogs to be more compelling to look at than just shopping sites. Most blogs have written reviews and information relating to a product or service, allowing any web user to do their research before making a purchase. Imagine that you were looking to buy the latest iPhone and you wanted to look at some reviews and read other people’s opinions before spending your money. If you typed “iPhone review” in Google, the first site that appears is usually a review site such as Cnet or Smart Company, which all run a blogging application such as Wordpress. These review sites usually only provide a review and opinions, but don’t have a link saying where to buy. This is where having an e-Commerce system integrated with a Wordpress blog can benefit your Internet business. Instead of the customer going to other websites to read reviews and opinions about the product (by that time they may have forgotten your website), you can have your own reviews and comments linked to your products. This encourages the customer to stay on your website and helps them save time looking for other places for reviews and opinions.

Additionally, the benefit of having a Wordpress blog integrated with your e-Commerce system, is that it helps to increase your search engine rankings. With higher search engines rankings, your Internet business will be found much quicker and also help with becoming an authoritative site.

How To Integrate An e-Commerce System With A Wordpress Blog?

Luckily for us, most e-Commerce systems have a special add-on package which has been developed by experienced programmers. At this point, I would recommend you hire a web developer to install or modify an e-Commerce system because it will can save time for you to focus on other important business tasks. Though I will explain to you how it generally works with some systems I have test:

Magento: This is a relatively new e-Commerce system that is taking the e-Commerce Open Source market by storm. It’s very user friendly and is very powerful, just like how Wordpress has been very successful for many Internet businesses. Magento has an add-on extension called Lazzymonks Wordpress Integration 2.61, which allows Wordpress to be integrated with their system. You can easily access Wordpress from Magento’s administration as well and would save you the hassle of logging out of Magento and logging into Wordpress.

OsCommerce: This system has been around since March 2000, which shows a long history of e-Commerce development for them. OsCommerce also has an add-on which is quite easy to install – the Wordpress Integration. Unfortunately this add-on does require you to log onto Wordpress separately. Once you have installed Wordpress with OsCommerce you will be able to still post your articles as normal and all the posts will be integrated into the OsCommerce theme you choose.

ZenCart: This is the system I have been using for many years for many of my clients and own e-Commerce shops. It is easy to set up the Wordpress On Zencart add-on with a few installation files to upload. Though, I found it wasn’t matching the style of the shopfront at first with this basic add-on. I did hired a programmer to modify some files which generated a good result in the end.

With many Internet businesses seeing the growth of web users searching on blogs and search engines today, it would be unfortunate to see you lose sales because you did not have a blog integrated with your e-Commerce shop. There are great benefits with having both these systems integrated into your Internet business and someday e-Commerce with integrated blogs will be the new community called e-Blogging.

Read how you can promote your eBlog: eBlogging 101: Getting Your Internet Business To Stand Out From The Crowd

Tyrone Shum
Starting the e-Blogging Revolution.

YAK Shopping Cart Wordpress Plugin Review

Amongst the other e-commerce plugins I have reviewed such eShop and WP e-Commerce, YAK Shopping Cart has come to my attention and the author Jason R Briggs describes the plugin as follows:

YAK is an open source, shopping cart plugin for WordPress. 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, standard PayPal integration, PayPal Payments Pro, and Authorize.net).

Therefore I was interested in testing to see how it would compare to the other plugins I’ve tried. So let’s get straight into the pros and cons of this plugin.

THE PROS

Includes Sales Reports And Graphs
YAK Shopping Cart comes with a Sales Report option under the Tools menu. In comparison to other plugins it is definitely a positive with more reporting available to see sales progress. The reports in this plugin are:

• Best sellers for the year
• Best sellers for the month
• A simple graph to see the sales for the month

A Good Range Of Payment Options Available
YAK Shopping Cart has many payment options readily available and it’s built into the plugin. Unlike other e-commerce plugins which are limited or require you to purchase additional payment gateways, YAK covers a majority of them. This plugin offers:

• Manual Credit Card Processing
• Credit on Accounts Receivable
• Authorize.net
• Paypal and Paypal Pro
• Google Checkout

As long as you have an account with the above payment merchants, it’s not too hard to link your shopping cart to them. Though, I’ve noticed they are still lacking payment options such as cash, cheque / money order and cash on delivery. Also YAK does offer a secure SSL connection for all of the above payments.

THE CONS

Documentation And Help Is Hard To Find
I found the plugin quite easy to install but found it very hard to navigate through YAK’s administration panel. It is partly due to a lack of documentation on how to use this plugin. Without documentation most people would struggle to use YAK and would not find it to be user friendly. Additionally I was very surprised to find I had to pay for a handbook to get the documentation, giving the impression the plugin was designed solely to make money not from usage but documentation. I would have rather paid for a plugin with documentation than be given a plugin that you have to waste time figuring how to use it yourself.

Lack Of Functionality For Products
After setting up a product in a post and linking it to YAK I’ve found it to be really basic and lacking a lot of functionality. There are no fields to insert product images. It was not easy to find the fields for obvious product attributes such as weight and quantity. I felt lost when trying to add products.

Not User Friendly And Lack Of Design On The Front End
As I have mentioned already without documentation a user has to spend time working out how this plugin works. What makes it worst is that each section in YAK’s administration is not self explanatory. At first after installing the plugin I went to find a menu called YAK, but after realising there was nothing there I found it had been added to the Tools menu. It added 3 new links: Orders, Products and Sales Reports. I think the developers at YAK thought I could work out how to use this, but they were wrong. It made more frustrated!

To mention, there is a YAK link under Settings which does allow you to change the options for Basic, Products, Download, Payment, Special, Advanced, Shipping, Promotions. It did alleviate some of my frustration when I found this, but I still couldn’t see much on the front end. As you can see, a very poorly designed plugin and lack of user friendliness on both the front end and administration.

Conclusion
I decided to let this plugin go as I had spent over 3 hours just understanding how the plugin could fit into a Wordpress blog. Overall there is a lack of user-friendliness and without the user manual it is very difficult to work out yourself. For users who want something simple and a shopping cart that works straight away, YAK is definitely not your solution. I would go back to using WP e-Commerce or eShop any day.

My rating for this plugin is 1 out of 5 stars.

Tyrone Shum
e-Commerce Plugin Reviewer

WP e-Commerce Review For Wordpress

WP e-Commerce plugin for Wordpress seems to be one of the most commonly used (currently 175,000+ downloads) shopping cart system across the board. I’ve been testing the latest version 3.6.10 and it has a lot of additional features compared to review on eShop I wrote recently.

The WP e-Commerce Wordpress Plugin was developed by a New Zealand company called Instinct. Since this company has dedicated funds and resources to this plugin, I presumed they would want to make money from selling this plugin. Lucky for us, they didn’t and have been giving away this plugin for free. Though, the first thing you will see on the front page of their website is the following:

Home of the famous WordPress e-Commerce Plugin

The WordPress e-Commerce plugin is a state-of-the-art e-Commerce platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards and usability. It is both free and priceless at the same time.

Now, being the state of the art e-commerce plugin is a bold statement and I have tested out numerous e-commerce software that I will be comparing this too. Let me review this plugin to test if their statement is true.

THE PROS

Easy Installation
It took me less than 5 minutes to upload and install without any errors or conflict with other plugins so far. I could easily find the newly created section in Wordpress administration called e-Commerce. It contained Sales, Products, Groups, Variation, Marketing and Settings links making it very easy to find what you need. I am glad they did this and made it simple.

Well Defined Categories / Groups Section
There is a self-explanatory tab that says Groups which allows you to add unlimited categories and subcategories to your shop. It’s very standard to see this available in e-commerce systems and it’s great to see this part of WP e-Commerce plugin. In comparison to other Wordpress shopping cart plugins they utilise pages to separate categories and it becomes a total nightmare without proper documentation.

Adding Products Is Easy
Adding products is easy when you click on the Products link. It offers a wide range of settings to customise your products including price and stock controls, shipping and weight settings, product variations, merchant notes, product downloads, coupon codes and promotions. These are very important when you have different products to sell and helps you distinguish between A and B product.

Widgets make customisation a breeze
What I’ve found quite handy are the customisable widgets that you can install on your sidebar as part of this plugin. A common widget people have on their website is the shopping cart. Having this displayed allows a customer to see what they have currently selected, then head to the checkout section to pay for all their items. The new widgets you’ll see in this plugin are: Shopping Cart, Groups, Categories, Price Range, Product Specials, Latest Products, Price Range and Donations. You can select anyone of those to display on Wordpress at any time.

Profit Using Marketing And Cross Promotion Tools Provided
Under the Marketing link it allows you to offer coupon codes for any product in your range. It’s a great way to encourage your customers to shop with the coupon code to follow through with a purchase. It’s a definite plus for me to have this tool built into the system. Some additional options you can switch on are:

• Cross Sales within your shop
• Show Share This (Social Bookmarks)
• How Customer Found Us Survey option

Many Payment Gateways Available and SSL Connection Included
WP e-Commerce comes with a few pre-installed payment gateways including Chronopay, PayPal, PayPal – Express, Google Checkout, and manual payment (for cash or money orders). If you want other payment gateways they offer such as Authorize.net or eWay, then you will have to purchase the Gold Cart Module. Also all transactions are processed securely through an SSL connection if you have SSL installed on your server.

An e-Commerce Plugin That Is Free
Lastly to top off the PROS, WP e-Commerce Plugin is FREE and it’s worthwhile to try it if you are considering using a shopping cart facility in Wordpress.

THE CONS

Lack Of Documentation
I am quite surprised from a company that has devoted resources and time to develop this plugin that they do not have a detailed documentation available. Especially when programmers develop a software there needs to be a way to track back and make changes, which is where documentation helps. So I was a bit disappointed. Their website has a very good “description” of each section but lacks in details on how to install, modify and add other functions. If you’re a beginner and do not have any programming experience then I would forget trying to tweak any of the files yourself because you will get frustrated reading through poorly organised code, with insufficient comments. I suspect they want to keep the details of the code within the company so they can offer add-on solutions they can sell.

Invoice Printing Is Not Available
This may sound simple to implement, but I am very surprised that this is not standard in their plugin. Most e-commerce software have options to allow you to print invoices, packaging slips (which is available) and labels. This is one area I believe they have totally overlooked. How do I print out an invoice to send to a customer or a label to put on my shipping box? I know you can just hit print on your Internet browser screen but what if I want to customise the invoice or label in different sizes? This is an area that Instinct needs to look at.

Inclusive of Tax Option Is Not Available
For business owners operating in Australia like myself, our customers expect that prices displayed have tax included. Unfortunately the plugin forces you to add tax separately at the checkout and only show prices excluding tax on each item. It’s another issue that needs to be address for future upgrades.

Lacking Reports
If you click on the Sales link, it will take you to a page showing sales for the month and columns of basic data, such as sales, pending transactions and closed transactions. There are no reports to say where your customers come from, no reports for sales of dollar amounts, quantities sold and customer item was sold to. These are usually standard within an e-commerce software and also very important to have if you’re running a business. One just has to look at ZenCart’s reporting system to get an idea of how comprehensive their system is.

Lack Of Template Options
A few other reviewers have mentioned about the lack of template options available. At the moment there are 4 or 5 of them, and most of them have proven to be not very useful. Additionally if you have a customised template for your blog, integration of this plugin can be a real nightmare because there are no detailed documentation on how to edit certain areas of this plugin.

Conclusion
I am still on the hunt to find a state of the art e-commerce plugin for Wordpress. I think Instinct have made a very bold statement about their plugin and personally I still see further development needed for this plugin to be a complete turn-key solution for an e-commerce site. For a beginner to use this plugin it maybe sufficient enough to do a few transactions per month. But for a business owner, I would still stick to other solutions available such as ZenCart, OsCommerce and Magento.

My rating for this plugin is a 3 out of 5 stars.

Tyrone Shum
e-Commerce Plugin Commentator

Converting Traffic Into Sales Part 2: Profiting From The Back-End

We are continuing our series on Converting Traffic Into Sales and if you have not read the introduction and part 1 of this series, be sure to catch up on Spreading The Word: Turbocharge Your Traffic and Converting Traffic Into Sales Part 1.

This is where the profits are really made and it’s important to understand how it links together with the front end of the sales funnel as discussed in the previous articles. Furthermore I will provide you with an example of how the back end process works and in a future article you will see practically how to apply the back end to your Internet business.

What Is The Back End?
It’s very easy to use these terms in your Internet business and assume that most people know what it means. I want to go back to basics and explain what the back end is. When a prospect purchases your products or services at the front end for the first time you are building a relationship with them and they become a customer of your business. Hopefully if your products or services have provided value for them, then they will be more inclined to come back and purchase more. This is where the back end starts to take place and offer your customers higher priced items. As mentioned before your back end is your most profitable avenue.

The back end consists of products and services of significant value to a customer which generates higher profit margins and referral sales. It’s basically meeting the same needs for a customer with different media. Examples of products provided in the back end are

• CDs, DVDs, MP3s or Podcasts (audi0)
• Video or Movies (visual)
• Conferences, Seminars, Workshops or Retreats (live)
• Phone Calls or Coaching (personal or private)

Essentially the biggest difference between the back end and front end of the sales funnel is how a customer perceives your product or service and the price they pay. These customers have already sampled your products and services at the front end and because they have enjoyed them so much, they are eager to purchase more from you. This is an ideal customer to have and it makes the sales process much easier.

Back End Profits
Most of the time front end products are sold for under $100, whilst back end products are priced in the range of a few hundred to a few thousand. The idea behind having these different prices is to create value and offer something extra to a customer. In turn the back end has significantly higher profit margins compared to the front end. As a result your relationship with them is stronger and they become a loyal customer who will make repeat purchases and referrals. Not only will you be more profitable but have the additional time to look after these customers who will become your AAA client base.

Let’s take a look at how a back end works successfully and helps profit an Internet business. A friend of mine recently wrote an eBook on the topic of “Saving For The Rainy Day” and created an exceptional full-page sales advertisement on his website. This eBook was actually given away for free even though it costed him a couple hundred to get the cover designed and to have it proof read. Since it was given away for free, readers logged onto his website and over 10,000 people downloaded the book and subscribed to his database. This is the front end of the sales funnel.

A few days later, he sent an email out to these people to offer a special promotion to attend a one-day “How To Build Wealth Saving” seminar that was valued at $199. The offer was to attend the seminar for only $49. It created such a buzz that over 100 people came along, profiting him almost $5,000 minus the costs of renting the venue. It was the first of many. But ultimately his goal was not to run the seminars, but to find potential students to coach which he could charge $10,000 a year to coach them to build their wealth. Essentially that’s what the back end process allowed my friend to do and helps build a long term sustainable Internet business.

The Future Of Back End Internet Businesses
Many successful Internet businesses with a significant back end today will outlast many other businesses without it for many decades to come. Personally when I ran my Dragonboat business I did not have a strong back end which means there was still huge potential. This raised questions such as:

1. What are all the additional purchases my customer should be making in using their existing paddle?
2. How can I offer additional services to help maintain their dragonboat equipment?

By simply asking those questions, it allowed me to see what additional back end products and services could be offered to generate more revenue. Take some time to ask yourself what additional products and services can I offer to my existing customers? Please add your comments below as I would love to hear what your thoughts are.

Tyrone Shum
Learning To Profit From Back End