Branding and eCommerce Teleseminar

Hey hey my eCommerce friends, I want to invite you all to join branding expert Ben Mack and myself for a Branding and eCommerce teleseminar.

I will be talking about the top three ways to make your customers adore your store and increase your overall conversion. Whether you entice them to buy when they order or make them fall in love so they keep coming back these conversion tactics will increase your sales and customer retention.

You don’t need to be an expert, you don’t need to be a technical genius, you don’t even need to spend a lot of time. These conversion tweaks are not hard but they are important. So join Ben and I Wednesday night at 9pm EST at http://www.andsoitis.me, we’ll have a good time and you’ll come away with money-making ideas that are simple to implement.

If you’re sick of saying ” I don’t know where to start” or tired of “not making enough” for all the effort your put into your business, this is a call you won’t want to miss.

Cross Sells, Upsells, Upgrades!

Everyone wants to make more profit per sale. That’s the best way to increase your income without having to increase your traffic, advertising, or product offerings. There are many ways to do this – generally limited only by your imagination and your programmer’s skills. But there is one very common and easy way to get more out of each conversion…

Cross Selling

Actually I like to break it down further into cross selling, upselling, and upgrading. Most store platforms have at least some form of cross selling function available. Take advantage of it. Whether it is on your product pages or in your shopping cart you want to use it for everything you sell, it works. But I’m getting ahead of myself, let me first explain exactly what I’m talking about.

Products featured as “other items you might be interested in” or “other customers also bought” are commonly known as cross sells. They are on every product page in your store and/or your cart page. Cross sells are basically related items.

Products that are add-ons for another product are referred to as upsells. An example would be headphones for an MP3 player. A lot of people lump these in as cross sells, I’m not a big fan of that, I like to use both if applicable and keep them separated.

Upgrades may or may not apply to your products. It doesn’t have to be for electronics only, I sell swords that can be sharpened for an additional amount, I consider that an upgrade. Anything that is part of the product that can be customized or changed is an upgrade.

If you have the functionality in your store you should take the extra few seconds to set it up for each product. By making it simple for your customers to add other products they might want to their cart you’re increasing your chances of making a higher profit. These functions are helpful and shoppers like them – done right they can make shopping at your store more convenient which is something shoppers will remember and come back for.

Here are some examples of how I use cross selling, upselling, and upgrades in my stores.

Some platforms allow you to discount items that are offered as cross sells. For example, in the Armory I sell a cloth arming cap for medieval helmets. It sells for $17 if purchased alone but if a customer adds a helmet to the cart they have the opportunity to buy it for $15. This sort of incentive based cross selling is not only a great idea, it also works very well.

That cross sell takes place on the cart page but I like to have upsells on my product pages too. For instance on every one of my tapestry product pages I offer an option to add a rod to the order. I put it in a drop down box right next the order button, all the customer has to do is select from the box. It’s easy; the customer doesn’t have to even look around the page. You can go one step further and discount those add-on items to entice the customer into placing a bigger order.

I use this tactic with great success in the Armory. The pictures I use for my medieval clothing are mostly of a model in a full knight costume. So someone interested in the tunic being featured might also want the belt, crown, sword, or any of the other accessories that are pictured. So I offer these in a drop down just like I offer the rods on my tapestry site. When I started doing this my “average products per order” increased. Yours can too with very little effort.

Get cross selling going for your store, it is simple and incredibly important for your business. If your store platform doesn’t have a cross sell function see about getting a developer to create one for you. You can increase your profits without more traffic or more ads – just show your current customers what you have to offer and make it easy for them to buy it.

Working with Product Images

Depending on how you operate your eCommerce store, you may or may not have physical access to the products you sell. If you’re one of the many (like me) who use drop shippers the whole point of your business model to NOT to handle the products. So we’re left with the images provided to us by our drop shippers.

If you’ve spent any time shopping online you’ve probably seen several websites that have all or mostly the same product images. As a shopper what did that make you think? That all those websites are basically the same?

If nothing about your site stands out to the visitor they’re going to base their purchase on price. Now, it’s very true there are a lot of ways to make your site stand out from your competitors – Unique Selling Propositions, Discount Offers, Higher Search Positions, etc. Well product images are another that I think is very important but many eCommerce storeowners overlook it in the effort to build their store quickly.

It’s understandable from a store building perspective but what about from a customer perspective?

Let’s talk practically.

You have an image from your drop shipper of jewelry box. It’s sitting on top of a green blanket. Everyone using that drop shipper is also using that image. How do you think taking the green blanket out of the picture so the jewelry box is on a white background will effect the look of your product page? Do you think seeing yours will catch a visitors eye because it looks different than all the others she has seen during her search?

Yes it will!

Anything you can do to make your product stand out from the rest is a good thing. What’s nice about the images is it’s not that difficult. You need an image editor like PhotoShop and, as with all new techniques, it’ll take a bit of practice but spending a minute or two altering a product image is time well spent.

Even if all you do it flip the image horizontally, that’s enough to change your visitors perception of the image.

I take the backgrounds out of every product image I put on my stores. If I’m adding products quickly I sometimes add them as they are and then go back and alter them later… but I ALWAYS alter them.

Drop Shipper Image:

My Image:

This is something that can be outsourced as well. I have an employee who does most of our image work and since I like using PhotoShop I do some myself if I’m just sitting around watching TV.

This is one of the small steps not taken by the vast majority of online store owners. You should, every little change helps.

Take Control of Your Navigation

Many eCommerce store platforms use loops to create elements of your website. Two of the most common are product loops and navigation loops. They make it nice and easy to build your store as they populate your category pages when you add products and add links to your nav bar when you add categories. Great way to get started but ultimately you need precision control over your navigation and loops won’t give it to you.

Often the navigation link is whatever you name your category and unless you assign a specific file name your URL is that category name too. Sounds fine but what happens when your top keyword phrase for that category changes? You change the category name in the backend of your store so the anchor text in your nav bar is the phrase you’re going after. Still sounds fine, right? Well, if you aren’t using specific file names or your store platform doesn’t offer that functionality then your URL is going to change too. Uh oh. No external links, no page rank, no search positions. You have to start from scratch.

Let’s say you are using file names so you don’t have to worry about losing the URLs you’ve put so much effort into getting ranked. If you have more than a couple of categories in your store you’re going to want to create sections within the nav bar to help your customers find what they are looking for by grouping like categories under those headings. This is impossible using your store platform’s built in loop.

You need to go static. The only way to have complete dominance over your nav is to create it by hand. That may sound strange in this era of automation, but it’s the truth. You nav bar will still be automatically added to all the pages in your site (or at least the same ones the loop nav was on) and it will still be just one file. You’re going to replace the loop with HTML code.

This is easy to do whether you’ve coded before or not. You only need one thing, your published home page. Simply go to your site, view the page source, locate your nav bar, and copy the code. Paste this code over the code for the loop, publish, and… it should look exactly the same as it did before. Voila, static nav.

Now when you want to update anchor text, all you need to do to is change it in the code and publish, easy peasy. You now also have the ability to add section headings for related groups of categories – a big bonus in the conversion department. To do this, create a new table or copy an existing one from the nav. Change the anchor text to whatever you want your heading to be and remove the hyperlink.

You can get as fancy as you want now. Change the background color of the section heading to separate it from the nav links. Add image icons to grab customer attention. Add other static pages wherever you want them. The length of your page is the limit!