Archive for the 'Internet Sales' Category

Tablets and Smartphones Become Holiday Shopping Assistants

Published on January 11, 2012 in Internet and Internet Sales. 0 Comments

The majority of online purchases still made via desktop

This holiday season, consumers are consulting mobile devices for help checking off items on their shopping lists more than ever before. Thanks in part to the growth of tablet device ownership among US households, consumers are using mobile devices for product research, online shopping and to help make decisions while in brick-and-mortar stores. According to a Google holiday shopping study conducted by Ipsos OTX, 77% of tablet owners plan to use them this holiday season for shopping.

The Google study indicates that tablet owners have a higher likelihood of using the devices for online shopping than smartphone owners. When it comes to using mobile devices for in-store shopping though, roughly half of both smartphone and tablet users said they are very or extremely likely to use their devices—perhaps surprising given the typical tablet’s inability to fit into most people’s pockets.

Another holiday shopping study, from Prosper Mobile Insights, indicates that about 60% of smartphone and tablet users plan to use their devices for holiday shopping this season. Prosper Mobile Insights divides shopping activities differently than Google. However, the research indicates that most of the respondents who do plan to use their device for holiday shopping will use it during the planning and research phase. About 40% of those respondents will use mobile devices while out shopping, including while in a physical store.

Prosper Mobile Insights also shows that certain product categories drive more tablet and smartphone usage than others. Respondents told the research firm they would purchase books, CDs and DVDs, video games, clothing and electronics via their smartphone or tablet devices this year at rates of 50% or higher.

Todd Pollak, retail industry director for Google, told eMarketer in an interview that Google has seen a direct correlation between mobile shopping activity and ads that consumers might have viewed on TV.

For example, a consumer might see a TV commercial for a discounted item and subsequently search for that deal via tablet, which are becoming consumers’ go-to device when it comes to product research and shopping online, Pollak said. Smartphones are increasingly becoming on-the-go personal shopping assistants, he noted.

In terms of mobile commerce, Pollack said there’s still room for growth, especially when it comes to mobile-optimized websites.

“The big barrier to people using smartphones for commerce is that the browser experience on the phone is still difficult,” Pollak said. “With mobile-optimized sites, conversion values, engagement and page views go way up. Yet only a small percentage of Fortune 100 retailers have implemented them.”

eMarketer estimates that 26.8 million US mobile users will have made a purchase via their feature or smartphone by the end of this year, rising to 37.5 million in 2012.

Moms Prefer Digital Shopping Over In-Store

Published on December 22, 2011 in Internet, Internet Sales, News and Social Media. 0 Comments

Digital usage and ecommerce increase when women become moms

Describe almost any mother of small children and one word comes to mind: busy.

Two recent studies verify this truism by showing that women spend less time with media outlets such as TV and magazines—but more time online—after becoming a mom. An Eric Mower and Associates survey, for example, found that more than half of new mothers spend less time watching TV (59%) and reading magazines (55%), and that 59% also spent less time shopping in stores. The percentages are similar for moms as they have more children or their kids get older.

When asked about time on the internet, however, the balance was more even: 25% of moms spent more time online while 29% spent less. For online shopping specifically, digital won out, with more than a third of mom internet users spending more time on ecommerce than before.

BabyCenter reflected these findings in an August 2011 survey, “Shopping Rituals of the American Mom,” which also demonstrated that online activities related to shopping are important to moms. New-mom status made women more aware of value and quality, both research studies indicated.

BabyCenter’s survey found that 71% of moms use websites such as shopping engines and review sites to compare prices, and 56% search for coupons or deals. Higher percentages of moms also turn to websites to compare product features and for product recommendations than to other information channels, such as retail stores or traditional media.

The bottom line for retailers? To reach moms, look online.

Source: www.emarketers.com

Three Steps Approach for Retail Loyalty Program Success

Published on October 14, 2011 in Internet Sales. 1 Comment

Deep discounting with online services like Groupon and LivingSocial allows retailers a way to quickly attract new customers, and many retailers have jumped on the daily deals bandwagon.

Here Michael Koploy, ERP Analyst at Software Advice writes Three Steps Approach for Retail Loyalty Program Success.

If you are interested to create a great Loyalty Program for your business, you should check out his great article in this matter.

 

Getting Started With Twitter for Business

Published on June 26, 2011 in Internet Sales, Social Media, Website Online Marketing and Website Search Engine Optimization. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Twitter is a social network on which users share short, 140-character messages with each other. Users “follow” or subscribe to each other and can receive messages from each other via multiple technology devices including desktop computers, smart phones, and text messages.

As mentioned previously, for business, it is best to use Twitter‟s free search engine, Twitter Search to search for your business, competitors, and industry mentions on Twitter.

Understanding how and if people are talking about your business and industry will give you enough information to determine if you should invest the time to start and manage a Twitter account for your business.

If you decide that Twitter is right for your business, you can visit Twitter.com to sign up for a free account.

Here are a few tips for setting up a business Twitter account:

  • Use the name of you business as your Twitter username.
  • Use your business logo or a picture of the person managing the account as the profile image for the account.
  • Create a custom Twitter background that provides additional information about your business.
  • Use Advanced Twitter Search to help determine industry influencers and potential customers that your business should follow.

Domain Names and SEO

Published on April 8, 2011 in Internet Sales and Website Search Engine Optimization. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

A topic that comes up frequently when discussing URLs is the importance of the domain name. The domain name is that part of the URL that is shared by all other pages on the website.

Since the domain name is part of all URLs on a given web site, it is often useful to have a keyword contained within your domain name. The reason is simple, since all of your URLs contain your domain name, any keywords that are in your domain name automatically become part of all of your URLs. This is why keyword-rich domain names have become so popular recently.

The question is, should you change your domain name so that it contains one or more of your most important keywords? It depends. For a business web site, the domain name should likely match the name of the business. If the business happens to contain a descriptive keyword, then you’re fine.

If not, it’s unlikely that you want to change the name of the web site and the business, simply to get a keyword-rich domain. Further, if you do decide to change your domain name, it will take some time and effort to reclaim any SEO authority you have built on the old domain name. Tread lightly here. We’ve gone through this process several times and it always has its challenges.

If you do want to use a domain name that has one or more keywords in it (which may be the case if you’re a startup and have not decided on a business name yet), keep these points in mind: The best domain names are those that are relatively short and memorable.

If you’re running a business, you want to focus only on .com domain names. Though there are other top-level domains, such as .net, .biz, .info, and others, the .com extension is the de-facto standard for businesses.

Utilizing Facebook Connect for Your Marketing

Published on April 6, 2011 in facebook, Internet Sales, Social Media and Website Online Marketing. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

Facebook Connect is a new feature that extends Facebook Platform to other Web sites and offers members the ability to connect their Facebook identity, friends, and privacy settings to a Facebook Connect-enabled Web site. There is no charge for Web site owners to integrate Facebook Connect, although there is rumor of a Facebook ad network in the works serving ads across these sites.

One good example on our client’s website is www.negpri.com (will be launched sometimes in April of 2011).

Facebook Connect allows Facebook to extend its influence on the Web at large. By turning its social network outside in, it’s empowering tens-of-thousands of Web sites and blogs, both big and small, to make use of many of the same features that have made Facebook the fastest growing social network on the planet. And it’s proving to be a successful strategy.

The main point to adding Facebook Connect is to encourage members to interact with your Web site in ways that generate stories in Facebook. It’s this seamless integration between Facebook Connect partner sites and Facebook News Feed stories that can help make your site viral that is, spread very quickly within a specific group of friends or to a larger demographic.

Here are four more reasons your organization should add Facebook Connect to its website:

  • Allows your visitors to effortlessly connect their Facebook account and profile information with your Web site.
  • Offers site owners access to fans Facebook profiling data, such as name, location, age, and so on, to provide deeper insights into your site visitors.
  • Provides your visitors with an easy way to find and interact with other Facebook friends who also visit your Web site.
  • Leverages Facebook News Feeds as a way to share and promote your other members’ actions on your site with their Facebook friends, increasing word-of-mouth buzz and the likelihood of more Facebook visitors.

Like all platform extensions, Facebook Connect does require some sophistication on the part of the Web site owner. Although a number of tutorials are available, via Facebook and third-party Web sites, we recommend that an experienced Web developer integrate the code that’s necessary to connect Facebook Connect to your website.

Google’s New Search Algorithm (it’s no joke)

Published on April 1, 2011 in Internet Sales, Website Design and Website Online Marketing. 0 Comments Tags: .

2 months ago, Google, announced the release of their new spam algorithm on 24th of Feb 2011. Allegedly, the algorithm, was armed and aimed to deal with content farms as their prime objective.

According to Google, their goal was quite simple. The algorithm was re-tuned to provide their users the fastest and most accurate relevant answers to their search queries.

It appears that this algorithm, was tweaked to devalue rankings for low-quality sites and sites containing copy content of little value to their users.

It’s purpose is to give quality sites better rankings that provide original content of value, for their search engine users. However, with a major improvement like this, it is going to effect a lot of websites and their ranking will fluctuate. Furthermore, this new algorithm, will reward sites that focus on high quality page copy. Therefore, this is what the algorithm, does! Here is the link for the original post, “Finding more high-quality sites in search“.

Who Uses Facebook Pages?

Published on March 29, 2011 in Customer Relationship, facebook, Internet Sales and Website Online Marketing. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

Facebook Pages are for public figures, businesses, and brands who want to establish a presence on Facebook and start interacting with fans. Pages can be enhanced with apps and provide an open forum for discussions and shared content. Only the official representative of the artist or business controls their Facebook Page.

Facebook Pages provide a great opportunity for both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) marketers to get the word out about their product or organization. Here are some examples of companies who use Facebook now.

Continue reading ‘Who Uses Facebook Pages?’

A (Brief) Introduction to How Google Works

Published on March 19, 2011 in Internet Sales and Website Online Marketing. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

To succeed with search engine optimization (SEO), and rank for keywords you care about, it’s necessary to understand a little about how Google works.

Google does two basic things. First, it crawls the Internet looking for web pages, storing these pages in its index. Think of the Google index as a massive catalog (much like a library would have a catalog of every book).

Second, it has software that processes user searches and finds the best matching web pages from its catalog. In order for your web page to rank well in Google for a given keyword, two things need to happen.

First, Google needs to crawl and index your web page. If your web page isn’t being crawled, you’re not even in the race! Then, of all the possible web pages that Google thinks is a match for the keyword being searched, your page or pages have to be considered better than the other possible candidates.

Getting Google to visit a Web page and index it is not as hard to do as it once was. In the early days of SEO, it was often necessary to manually submit new web pages to the search engines so they would know these pages existed.

Many SEO consultants and software tools offered this as a service called search engine submission. Today, manual submission of pages is rarely necessary. Instead, simply getting a link to a new web page from a page that is already being crawled by Google is sufficient to get the new page crawled as well. That’s how most new pages get into the Google index today.

If you do decide you want to manually submit your pages to Google, it’s free and easy (and should not involve hiring a consultant). Just use the Google Add URL tool (http://www.Google.com/addurl).

Getting web pages indexed by Google is not the problem. Getting them to rank well is where the challenge is. To understand how to rank well, it’s helpful to understand the basics of how the Google ranking algorithm works.

Facebook Marketing: Using contests to promote your brand

Published on March 15, 2011 in Branding, facebook, Internet Sales and Website Online Marketing. 0 Comments Tags: , .

When you offer a good incentive, word travels. On Facebook, when you offer a good incentive, word reverberates off friends. When members interact with the contest by uploading videos or images, answering questions, or becoming a fan of your Page, it generates News Feed stories, amplifying the word-of mouth effect. A contest or giveaway promotion can be a very viral vehicle to ignite fan engagement with your Facebook Page.

When Neutrogena launched their Facebook Page in April 2009, they created a contest to build brand awareness and drive the key female, teen audience to their Page. The Fresh Faces contest, which was held in conjunction with Teen Vogue magazine, helped the brand attract more than 700 fans to its Facebook Page. The winner earned a chance to be a contributing beauty editor for a Neutrogena advertorial on TeenVogue.com.

Take Adobe, who wanted to reach the elusive college student market with its Adobe Student Editions, so they provided steep discounts of up to 80 percent on popular Adobe software for students. With the help of the interactive agency, Traction, the company developed a game app called Real or Fake in which users had to determine whether a photo was fake or real, underscoring the quality of its Adobe Photoshop imaging software.

The application was featured on the Adobe Facebook Page. Adobe engaged in a targeted ad campaign to reach interested college students. The game caught on because it was a fun and easy-to-play casual gaming experience. Of those that played, 6 percent clicked the Buy Now link at the end of the game. It also incorporated a simple Share button, in which 6 percent of players sent an invite to their friends, adding an additional point of interaction to encourage viral sharing. By the end of the competition, the Adobe Facebook Page welcomed more than 6,000 new fans.