Viralogy

80% of midsized merchants deem e-commerce growth a top priority

40% say they don’t think they’re maximizing their online revenue potential.

The Midsized Merchants Problem

According to a recent article from Katie Deatsch of internetRetailer, “A new poll by e-commerce platform provider Art Technology Group Inc.  finds 80% of midsized merchants deem e-commerce growth as very important or critical to their overall business in the next one to three years.” The article also digs deep into what these mid-sized merchants are hoping to improve on this coming year which include:

• 62% want to improve the ability to offer, control and manage cross-sells and up-sells to increase sales
• 60% want to improve site search functionalities
• 55% want to be better able to offer, control, and manage promotions
• 37% want to improve the help and customer service features on their sites (more…)

General vs. Social Recommendations – Getting More Personal

Ratings and reviews are consistently top-requested features by customers of ecommerce stores. In the last few years, huge companies such as Amazon have more than answered that call with sophisticated recommendation technology, and their answer has revolutionized the online shopping experience. Now consumers are able to not only see what others think of your products, but also see where else they can get the same product for lower prices. Being that online shoppers will believe customer recommendations over a company’s own brand and marketing message, this is a problem for many internet retailers. And this is where the new generation of social commerce – personalization tools – comes in to play. (more…)

A recent study by the Harvard Business Review shows that customers value self-service, whether online or at a kiosk, just as much as they value personal customer service.  The most important factor of the study is that “By and large, this indifference holds regardless of their age, demographic, issue type, or urgency.”

What this means for the brick-and-mortar

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When Customer A visitors your eCommerce store, they more or less see exactly the same things as when Customer B, C, and D visits your site. Along the same lines, unless Customer A, B, C, and D knows exactly what they are looking for, they are likely to (A) click on what interests them immediately from what they are shown or (B) will leave your site.

Following this, we encounter one of the first decisions a customer faces during their shopping experience: ‘What should I look at?’ If the customer doesn’t see what they are looking for on instant, the less likely they are to want to stay on the site. While this is a problem that many eCommerce sites face, the solution is becoming clearer as the social space merges more and more with online shopping.

The Solution to the Problem

To begin, we introduce the term social commerce. Social commerce has been widely accepted as “a subset of electronic commerce that involves using social media, online media that supports social interaction and user contributions, to assist in the online buying and selling of products and services.” Now that we have defined social commerce, we add on the concept of personalization to it which gives us social commerce personalization. (more…)

Whether you want to embrace it or not, Facebook and social media is becoming more and more a part of our daily lives. From how we communicate with others to how we market our products, social media is finding its way into many facets of our daily lives. Among them is the way the we shop. Although platforms like Facebook first started as a way for users to stay in touch with their friends and family, it now allows us to share our lives with our Facebook community. In regards to shopping, we let others know great deals we found, what pair of shoes were gonna buy, and even that outrageous shirt we didn’t think anyone would ever get. As more and more users use Facebook as a ‘distribution’ channel when it comes to shopping and interests, eCommerce sites need to evaluate whether or not they need to begin incorporating Facebook elements into their store.

Ways to incorporate Facebook into your eCommerce store

1. Facebook Like Button

Earlier, we wrote about how Facebook now allows sites to add the Facebook Like Button to their products, articles, and pages.  Revisiting some of those same points, implementing the Facebook Like Button on your eCommerce store products can significantly increase your sites visibility as well as help gauge which products have more interest in others. For example, if you see that a products has only a few sales, but has the most ‘likes,’ that may be a signal to lower the price of that product. (more…)

You’re an ecommerce director for a medium-sized ecommerce store that uses the Magento platform. You use Adwords, social media, and SEO to drive traffic to your store, and are now looking to increase your sales conversions and turn visitors into shoppers.

An effective recommendation engine is by far the best way to increase sales conversions. A recommendation engine understands who the shopper is and automatically displays a product that the shopper is most likely to purchase. If shoppers see products that they want, then they’re going to buy it from your store.

The Magento platform has several options for a recommendation engine; however,  only Viralogy’s recommendation engine, Dynamic Insights, will provide you with the highest return on your investment. These are the reasons why Viralogy is the best personalization engine on the market:

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When a shopper visits your eCommerce store, they are willing to do business with you based on two assumptions. The first is that your eCommerce store products are as described and that they are not falsely advertised, and the second is that your site is secure and safe.While secure and safe are commonly overlooked, sites that are commonly associated with words like “shady” and “sketchy” aren’t likely to get much business.

As mentioned, a sites security is important especially when it comes to eCommerce sites. With that said, one way that an eCommerce site can improve it’s security is to utilize an SSL Certificate or Secure Sockets Layer Certificate.

What is an SSL certificate?

By definition, an SSL Certificate is an encrypted protocol that provides secure communications on the Internet for such things as web browsing, email, Internet faxing, instant messaging and other data transfers. SSL is the technology that SSH uses. In layman terms, an SSL Certificate creates a secure connection during online communications. An easy way to think about this is to imagine an SSL Certificate as duct tape. When you send a package, you want to seal it so that it is secure. Thus, duct tape is needed. (more…)