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Important: Product Description

Important: Product Description

Product description is the first thing that any user or search engine sees about your products. And for an e-commerce website it is the main description of what you sell. This text is what distinguishes your product page from any competitors. So if you are exactly the same as a competitor, the search engines really cannot differentiate. Distinguishing yourself with your unique content is pivotal for products. Imagine two different descriptions of a black stapler.

Description A
Blk Stapler Swingline
1/4” stapler
210 staple capacity
Description B
Black Stapler Swingline
1/4”stapler
210 staple capacity
Staples up to 20 sheets
Desktop stapler withstands heavy business use
Opens for tacking to poster paper and bulletin board

Now these are two of the same old boring stapler. But Google doesn’t assume that these are the same product. The B description seems like a much better product more versatile and suitable for more people.

The B description is purposely improved in several specific ways.

  • Uses real words – Black instead of Blk
  • Additional Features – Staples up to 20 Sheets
  • Appeals to specific buyer – Desktop stapler withstands heavy business use
  • Additional Uses – Opens for tacking to poster

It is important when you approach updating or enhancing descriptions, that you think about some of these improvements made above. Additional images or videos are helpful as well. But the simple description updates are effective.

You might be saying, “Wait, I just imported 10,000 products from a distributor. How can I update them all?” Well the short answer is you can’t instantly update them all. We always encourage clients to look at their highest margin or most popular products. You’ll see patterns of descriptions that are easy to fix. For example Black is Blk, Barrel is Bbl, etc. Quickly scan and update those for the popular products. Depending on the focus of your site you can also add an little extra to the description at the same time such as ‘Ideal for the Avid Outdoorsman.’ You’ll find your rhythm and update your most popular 500-1,000 products in no time.

Remember, these tips will help you create better user experiences and improved search engine ranking. Contact Us

Does your website work on Mobile?

Does your website work on Mobile?

If the above picture looks like your website, you need to read this! If your website does not work on mobile, it does not work!

  • 56% of all consumer internet traffic is now from mobile devices
  • Mobile traffic is growing at a rate of 53% each year
  • E-commerce sales will reach 500 Billion by year 2018
  • Mobile retail sales have increased 25% year over year
  • 81% of top search engine results are mobile friendly
  • 48% of consumers start their buying process at a search engine
  • 33% of consumers start their buying process at a branded website
  • 72% of consumers want mobile friendly websites
  • 62% of millennials feel that online content drives their loyalty to a brand

The statistics don’t lie. If you are a retail or manufacturing B2C business in 2017 and you do not have a mobile friendly website, you are losing. In order to win the the smart-phone era your retail website must be mobile friendly, if not mobile targeted. The fact is your customers are now finding and judging your business more than ever based on your internet presence. If you have an old and outdated or non mobile friendly website almost 3/4 of your potential business is being lost to a competitor who has a better web presence.

Now lets talk about your brand. It is proven that your brand strength now impacts your search results and your customers engagement and loyalty to your business. If you are using a shared ecommerce platform or a 3rd party selling platform, you are not building your brand, you are paying to build someone else’s, possibly your competitor in the future. If your website does not strongly represent your brand and engage users with it, you are once again, statistically losing money.

The cold hard fact is, you are losing $$$ and negatively impacting your brand by not being mobile friendly. You get what you pay for.

This day in age, up to 50% of your business can be driven by your internet presence. If you are not investing in ecommerce and branding at the same or greater level than you are in your retail brick and mortar, you are making a mistake. Would your brick and mortar store have a good retail presence if you spent only 100 bucks a month on rent? The answer is no, unless you are renting space in Siberia where no customers will ever find you anyway. Think long and hard about where you want your business to be in the next 3-5 years and how your brand and technology will impact your business, then ask yourself what area of your business you should invest in?

Need to find out if your website is mobile friendly or not? Google has a tool for it here: https://search.google.com/search-console/mobile-friendly

Here is an example of a website by another company that is not mobile friendly:

Look familiar? Contact XLEcommerce. We are here to help you!

For comparison here is an example of an XLEcommerce mobile friendly website in Google’s mobile friendly test:

Statistics from:

www.smartinsights.com

www.internetretailer.com

searchengineland.com

searchenginewatch.com

Buying a Website is Like Buying a Car and Going Racing

Buying a Website is Like Buying a Car and Going Racing

Buying a Website is Like Buying a Car and Going Racing, well, kind of….

Many customers we speak with are looking to work with a website provider of some sort, but they really don’t know what they need. This is where the car analogy comes in. Think of your website researching and planning process like shopping for a car.

Lets say, rather than running a business, you run an auto racing team. When you first form that team, you need to select a car to race with. Sounds easy right? There is more to it. There are multiple types and levels of car racing. First we need to choose something to compete in that fits our goals and budget.

The high-school kid just starting out may take his Ford Focus, slap a wing on the back himself and roll on down to the local drag strip on Friday nights.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is your Formula One (F1) race team. This team of hardened racing professionals will select a custom built one-off race car made of carbon fiber and unobtanium. It is incredibly expensive not only to buy the car, but the cost to maintain your car and team, hire top drivers, and compete at the top world level is astronomical.

In between these two levels is a whole range of car types and racing leagues which fit almost any level of competition and budget.

In the world of e-commerce, think of the guy with no business plan starting out of his garage as the Friday Night Ford Focus. Amazon.com is the Formula One Racing Team.

Friday Night Ford Focus went online and slapped a few products on his facebook page, bought a 1.99 godaddy page, and is throwing a few bucks against the wall hoping for fame and glory. We hope it works out, and you have to start somewhere. In the world of race cars, he doesn’t stand a chance though.

The Formula One Racing team is bleeding money out of its ears. They are spending millions of dollars. They are looking for every conceivable edge. They are hiring the best and the brightest in their industry to come work for them at top pay levels. They have purchased the best available technology and continually modify it for better performance. They will probably make it onto ESPN and go down in the record books.

If you are reading this, you likely fall somewhere in between these two extremes. You either have a solid business already which you are looking to expand, or you have a business/marketing plan you spent some time putting together and you are ready to implement it. Now you just need the right ecommerce “engine” that will allow you to compete at your level and budget, so you can someday move up on the ladder. You are researching and learning as much as you can, but you still don’t know exactly what to do, and that is OK.

Everyone wants a race car. Everyone wants to be the next Amazon.com, Ebay, Best Buy, or Cabelas. They want flashy features. They want custom lightweight parts and powerful engines. But most, when presented with the price to build a custom race car, along with the accompanying costs of a pit crew, professional driver, fresh sets of tires, racing fuel, and semi truck to haul it all around in, balk at the cost. Not to mention the marketing team required to get the fans to cheer for you and make your sponsors happy. If you are getting squeamish and gripping your wallet tighter after reading this, you may have to rethink your plan of attack.

You don’t have to race at the highest level to be a winner. There is plenty of lower level cherry picking to be had for an enterprising ecommerce entrepreneur or race car driver. You can have lots of fun and great competition driving a Spec Miata race car around the track, at a price a normal human being can afford. Maybe you will win some prize money and then can afford to jump into the Corvette class, or Baha offroad trucks, or whatever.

The key to success in your “racing” is to select the vehicle you can afford to purchase or build, something you can maintain yourself or afford to pay someone to maintain, and something you can drive yourself or afford to pay someone to drive for you. If you blow your wad on the car and forget about the oil changes and tires, you aren’t going to perform very well on Sunday. You will probably go home a loser. However, if you plan properly, select the right vehicle, budget for the whole year, and spend time tuning and practicing, its more than likely you will finish at the top of the pack and just might win a championship. As they say, winning on Sunday, means selling on Monday.

E-Commerce Conversion Rate – 10 Cheap & Easy Ways to Improve

E-Commerce Conversion Rate – 10 Cheap & Easy Ways to Improve

10 Cheap and Easy Ways to Improve Your Website’s E-Commerce Conversion Rate

Odds are, if you are reading this, you don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars to invest in e-commerce conversion rate optimization for your website. Heat maps, eye tracking, focus groups, A/B testing, and a dedicated team of marketing analysts and UI/UX designers may be a bit out of your league. That’s OK, there are some simple things you can do which can make a big difference in your bottom line.

  1. Make your landing pages look good: Trust is a big part of conversion. In order for your online customers to feel confident purchasing from you online, you need to have a trustworthy landing page. Get rid of anything out of date or unprofessional. You all know what we mean: that big red/bold/Arial text you typed on your home page, those flashing animated yellow gifs, the low quality photograph of your dog. Follow the example of the top e-commerce retailers, and make your landing pages look like a business your customer can have confidence in. Build your brand trust!
  2. Use calls to action: Make it easy for your buyers to know where to click to get to where they need to go. Think of the banners on your website as greeters in your store. Make your graphics say, “welcome to our store, let me help you, follow me” without actually saying it. “Shop Now”, “Learn More”, and “Click Here” buttons do actually work, use them but don’t overuse them. Once again, if your web page is full of flashing yellow “click here” animated gifs….refer to number 1.
  3. Streamline your navigation: Think of your website like your brick and mortar store. You wouldn’t let your customers walk through your back room, right? Make sure you have organized “aisles” and “departments” on your website that customers can easily surf through.
  4. Add unique expert content: Great unique content is not only good for SEO and getting people to your site, once they are there it helps build trust. Brand trust has a great effect on conversion. People will buy from your company because they like your company. A great way for people to get to know your business is to tell them stories about your passions, products, and experiences. When your prospective customer sees you as an expert, they will be more confident clicking the buy now button.
  5. Cut down your product list: Believe it or not, sometimes more products on your website can actually deter conversions. If you give the customer too many options, they may not be able to make up their minds. Think about turning off your low margin/low volume products.
  6. Remove barriers from checkout: Get the bare minimum amount of information you need to complete the sale from the customer, and nothing more. You can always seek additional information and follow after the sale is complete. Customers don’t want to jump through hoops to get the sales process moving, so if your fraud protection settings are too high or you have too many check boxes for newsletters or add on items in your checkout process, you could be losing out on sales.
  7. Use product reviews: Product reviews are a huge part of getting the customer to click the add to cart button. If your products have no reviews, your customer may not buy. It is OK to write your own product reviews, as long as you are up front about it. Encourage your customers to write reviews for you by giving them an incentive to do so. Have you thought about creating your own video reviews?
  8. Make returns easy: We all know returns are a hassle, and no one likes them. Not you, not the customer. New customers always have the question of “what if my order isn’t right?” Don’t give your customers a reason to not buy from you. Outline a clear return policy that makes things easy for your customer if things go wrong. They will feel more confident that if the worst case scenario happens with their order, you will back it up.
  9. Give simple shipping options: Most retailers are afraid to loose money on shipping costs. Often to combat this they show every shipping option under the sun. Customers want simple, so give them just a few options at checkout. Usually you will win some and lose some when using flat rate shipping. Remember, you can always adjust your shipping rates as you go after you gain a true knowledge of what your actual shipping costs are.
  10. Answer your phone: This is the #1 way to increase the e-commerce conversion rate of your website, and something most do not factor in calculating their online conversion rates. Many times first time visitors to your website will pick up the phone to call you. This is where you can beat out the big box stores. Make sure to provide a phone number on your website. Talk to your customers on the phone, maybe even take their order over the phone the first time, then you can turn them into an online buyer after they trust you!

Need more help optimizing your e-commerce website for conversion, contact us at https://www.xlecommerce.com

 

Ten Benefits of Search Engine Optimization in our Modern, Connected World

In this age of social media, you probably have heard that “pushing for content” is the greatest way to attract customers to your business. Everyone is focused on getting the most number of shares, the highest number of engagement, the “top post” that will spike to going viral.

Yet computers and patterns of techniques still drive the backbone of the internet. Facebook uses specific methods of identifying good content that might be relevant on someone’s news feed. Google uses someone’s personal search history to identify both geographic and tailored results, but even these depend on semantics. In fact, as more content, more stores, and more websites pop up, the greater need our world will have on sorting this vast information in a form that computers can understand.

The death of Search Engine Optimization is greatly exaggerated. While the old method of “just backlinks” and pure keyword-based optimization is long gone, search engine optimizers have survived a seismic shift in the complex way that the internet sorts itself. Here are ten ways in which optimizing your website can still benefit you today, which also illustrates just how complex and encompassing this field has become.

  1. Audience. In a social world, trends are increasingly defined by the masses, and often, knowing just who to target is extremely difficult. Through keyword research, social trends, shopping statistics, we can help you find the right products and content your business should be selling. Words go in and out of style, but research will always hold its value.
  2. Ideas. Brainstorming can be a chore, especially when you are jump-starting a new business or trying to add to an already existing portfolio. Yet with an SEO advisor, analysis reports and tools can give you insights into what has worked well so far in the world. This can even tap into your competition, allowing you to see how others have fared and provide you with a branch of generating new ideas.
  3. Organization. Spammy pages are scattered, cluttered, and not well organized. They use improper page layouts, untagged images, and promote chaos in an already chaotic online world. Optimizers ensure that your pages and products are organized, with the proper mark-up that both humans and computers can understand. How do your pages connect to other related pages? Do they convey a natural flow of information? We consider this and many other minor factors when ranking.
  4. Go local. With local targeting through keywords, directories, trends, it’s easy to know what your geographic target is looking for. The rise of smartphones means that more than ever, people are searching in their area for products.
  5. Strength. The internet has given rise to many forms of content and forms of sales. Contests, types of promotions, webinars, animated videos and guides, monthly product magazines, different forms of catalogs… It can be overwhelming to choose. Keywords alone don’t cut it for good SEO, we must have insights into more detailed specifics that engage your brand in a strong way. The stronger your engagement, the greater importance you’ll be on the internet.
  6. Authority. Generating backlinks is no longer as easy as asking someone to place a link to your business on their site. Authority is gained by the right shared content, well-written reviews from customers, and curated information.
  7. Universality. SEO ensures that your website is usable not just on tablets or desktop computers, but also on any other smart appliance. Like it or not, the internet of things trend has taken off, and over time there will be opportunities to showcase your business on other forms of technology. It’s also important that people with diverse backgrounds can access your website.
  8. Speed. Believe it or not, Google factors in page load times when it ranks your site. Where and how can we improve your page efficiency?
  9. Submissions. While Google is still the #1 search engine, people are also using other websites for searching. Each engine has their own unique way they crawl the web, and knowing how to work with the big guys will place you in good territory with the internet.
  10. Efficiency. As a business owner, your job is to focus on the business and sales. Through search engine optimization, your efficiency can grow without much overhead from your company. Optimizers work with and for you, not against you to create the best e-commerce experience you can have in today’s age.
A Seal’s Seven Rules

A Seal’s Seven Rules

A few weeks ago I was on a plane and struck up a conversation with the gentleman sitting next to me. He was a retired US Navy veteran who had traveled the world. After thanking him for his service we spoke about many different topics, but the one I remember the most was about an article he was reading in The American Legion Magazine. The article was originally written by a former Navy Seal, Brent Gleeson and published in Inc. Magazine. Here is the text from the article, titled which is mean to help anyone “live to be your most effective.” I am sure the following are hugely important on the battlefield, but I personally enjoyed how they are applicable to business and life in general. I wanted to share them with our team members and clients. Here they are:

Be Loyal. “Loyalty is about leading by example, providing your team unconditional support and never throwing a team member under the bus.”

Put others before yourself. “Ask yourself waht you will do to add value to your team, such as simply offering your assistance with a project. The challenge is overcoming the fear that your team member might say, ‘Yes, I really need your help with this project … tonight.'”

Be reflective. “Reflective people often spend too much time analyzing their actions. But imagine if you could harness this talent into something highly valuable.”

Be obsessively organized. “Some of us innately have this ability, often to a fault, and some have to work at it a bit more.”

Assume you don’t know enough. “Any effective team member understands that training is never complete. It’s true in the SEAL teams, and it’s true in any elite team. Those who assume they know everything should be eliminated. Those who spend time inside and outside the workplace developing their knowledge and skills will provide the momentum for their team’s forward progress.”

Be detail-oriented. “Don’t ask yourself what you are going to do today to be successful; ask how you are going to do it.”

Never get comfortable. “Always push yourself outside your comfort zone. If you do this with every task you take on, that boundary will continue to widen. This process will ensure that you are continually maximizing your potential, which will positively impact your team.”

How to Not Get a Computer Virus

How not to get a computer virus:

1. Look before you click. Always hover over a link before you click it so you can see where it is going. It the URL does not match where you think you should be going, or looks weird, suspicious, or kinda funky, don’t click on it. Only click links you know are safe and go to reputable websites.

2. Don’t open email attachments until you have verified they are safe. Never open any email attachment that is *.exe, *.zip, *.pdf, *.doc or any other *.* that you were not expecting. If you are unsure if someone is sending you a file, email or call them to confirm that you need to take a look at that file.   You don’t have a relative in Nigeria that left you money!

3. Watch for spoof emails. Do not be fooled by look-a-like emails. Always make sure you know where the email came from and who sent it before you do anything more than preview it.  Be especially wary of emails that say they are from the IRS, banks, or other large agencies.  Most times these agencies will send you snail mail if there are any pressing issues.

4. Look out for phishermen! Phishing scams are one of the most popular portals to viruses and hacking. Always look at the URL bar to make sure you are on the actual companies website. If you aren’t sure, google the company and navigate to their corporate website through google. Remember, watch the URLs carefully.

5. Your password is yours. Keep your password to yourself. Memorize it. Don’t give it to others, make it a series of random letters and numbers, no dictionary words. Make it hard so a hacker cant guess it. DON’T USE 12345!  DON’T TAPE IT TO YOUR COMPUTER!

6. Don’t surf and go to non-work related websites.

If you follow the above, you will likely not get a virus. Viruses halt your work and waste a huge amount of company time and money to clean up. Pass this on to your friends and employees as well.

Keeping Your Inbox Tidy

Email can be a great business tool but it can also be a real headache sometimes. Staying on top of email is definitely high on the e-commerce housekeeping list, but it is not without its fair share frustration.  Not only is it tough to keep organized, but also keeping out the junk or “spam” can be maddening. Here are some tips to keep your mailbox organized, keep spam to a minimum, and manage storage space.

Spam:

Just to be clear, spam is any kind of email that you don’t want and did not sign up to receive. Most spam is harmless but sometimes it can be part of an identity theft scam or other types of fraud. Although spam is most commonly found in email, it can also come to text messages and even on social networking sites.

You can receive hundreds of spam messages for every legitimate message that arrives. With tools like box trapper as well as email filtering you can help reduce the amounts of spam in your inbox.  Even with good filters, some of the spam makes it through. Also filters can sometimes hide messages that you really do want to receive, so watch out and be mindful when you are creating your rules. We offer a tool called “Spam Assassin” that we can setup for retailers with high spam, just give us a call and ask for it.

To set up filters, log in to your email account from the front end of your website. Here is a tutorial on how to login and set rules in your email:

1.Type your domain name into your URL (ex. “www.yourdomain.com”)

2.Add “/webmail” or “:2096” and hit “enter” on your keyboard (ex.”www.yourdomain.com/webmail”)

3.You may see a yellow warning screen, just choose the “Proceed Anyway” button

4.Type in your complete email address and correct password (case sensitive) and choose the orange “log in” button.

5. You will see the three different free viewing programs: Horde, Roundcube, and Squirrel-Mail.

6.Under the email server icons, go to “Email Filtering” in the bottom right corner.

7.Under “Create Filter” click the button “Create a New Filter”.

8.Set your rules by creating a unique name for this set of rules, then set the rules using the drop down menus, selecting types of messages you do not want to receive. You can add as many as you like using the “+”

NOTE: Use specific email addresses, keywords, and phrases that are specific to the spam you have been receiving.

9. Once you have made your selections, set your action for your rule with the drop down menu

10. Hit the “create” button to save your rule.

11. You can go back any time to edit your rules or set new ones.

Storage:

Make sure you either save or delete old emails. Many people are email hoarders and keep old emails so long that eventually they use up their storage space and are unable to send or receive mail. Staying within your quota is a lot easier said than done, but here are some pointers.

One thing you may not know is that it may not be the number of emails in your inbox but what is actually in your emails. Emails with big documents, pictures, and other data monsters will take up space in your email. We suggest that you either archive old emails or save pictures and documents onto your computer or even something like Dropbox instead of letting them sit in your email inbox.

Organizing your Inbox:

Some people like to create folders to keep their inbox organized, and you can find many ways on how to do it. We suggest finding categories that make sense for you and sticking to it.

Your Password:

As we have said before, having a strong and secure password is also essential to keep your inbox safe and secure. Keep hackers from getting into your account by making sure your password is “bulletproof”. Here are some suggestions that will help you create a strong password from microsoft.com.

If you have trouble remembering your passwords, you can use a secure password keeper like passpack.com.

Creating An Effective Logo

Creating An Effective Logo

Every company needs an effective logo to represent their branding and provide consumers an easily recognizable graphic representation of the company and it’s core values. Logo’s can become the public face of a business and in examples of extremely effective logo design, can even replace the brand name as the most ubiquitous aspect of a company (see the Nike “Swoosh” or McDonald’s “Golden Arches”). Creating and implementing an effective logo is an essential step in the evolution of any successful retailer.

What is the purpose of a logo?

Logos are an aspect of a company’s branding, they’re used as the graphical representation of a company’s values and goals. Logos are used to identify a particular entity in a sea of competitors, and help to inspire loyalty, trust and admiration among consumers. An effective logo design will help to convey not only what a company does, but what it stands for. Although logos are not generally created to be a salable commodity, it’s not unheard for a great logo to become just that (again, see the Nike “Swoosh”).

What elements make up a good logo?

Generally it’s accepted that there are 5 basic principles that every logo should encompass:

  1. Simple
  2. Memorable
  3. Timeless
  4. Versatile
  5. Appropriate

Simple: Often logos need to communicate both effectively and quickly. Logos need to be as easily recognized by someone speeding by a billboard at 70mph, as they would be by someone watching a 30 second commercial on tv. The key to speedy recognition is simplicity of design; the fewer elements, the easier it is for the viewer to distinguish what he or she is looking at.

Memorable: Of equal importance to the logo being recognized, is the logo’s ability to leave a lasting impression on the viewer. The goal of an effective logo is to create a relationship between a symbol and what it symbolizes, to accomplish this task it must be easily remembered. An effective logo will be easily remembered so that the consumer can easily recognize the symbol of a company and what that company stands for.

Timelessness: In order for a logo to remain memorable it also must remain unchanged. Logos need to be created in such away that allows them to remain relevant even with changes in design aesthetics and popular preferences. Updates are appropriate from time to time, but the general feel of a logo should be created in such a way as to allow for changes in taste without compromising the logos integrity.

Versatile: Logos need to be able to function across a variety of different media and applications. For instance an ideal logo would look good on a website header, plastered on a billboard, or stitched into a company t-shirt. An effective logo should look as good in black and white as it does in color. Ideally logos should be created in vector graphics format. Vector graphics scale to any size and can be enlarged or shrunk to fit any application without a loss of quality.

Appropriate: The effective logo needs to take into account the audience it is hoping to capture and be appropriately designed with the intended viewers in mind. This isn’t to say that every logo for a gun store needs to have a firearm in the design, however if you’re intended audience is the recreational hunter you may want to include camouflage or a deer, where as a company going after tactical sales may want to include carbon fiber or soldier silhouette in the design.

What does good logo design cost?

The cost of logo design can vary greatly depending on the needs of client. How many logo concepts need to be presented? How many rounds of revisions are included in the design quote? What type of finished files are required, .pdf, .eps, .png, .jpg? Large companies have spent millions of dollars on logo design and implementation. OBN offers logo design packages starting at $499 that include multiple design concepts, one round of revisions, and final image outputs in several formats including scalable vector graphics.

Return on Investment

Investing is one of the most important aspects companies have to deal with on a regular basis. Companies have to figure out when to spend while also looking at what to spend it on that. Now an investment doesn’t necessarily mean money, but can also be the time, or effort put towards a particular thing. However companies are main objective is to make money while turning a consistent profit. But have you ever wonder if the investment your company has made actually turns a profit? There’s a way to do it, it’s called Return on Investment (ROI); which is a performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or to compare the efficiency of a number of different investments.

It is crucial for companies to check their Return on Investment wherever they designate any kind of investment. You want to make sure you are turning a profit on your investments ROI can be used to help narrow down where a company is or is not making a return on their investment.