10 tips to consider for your e-commerce cart

Ten tips for a customer-friendly shopping cart here (courtesy of UK web firm Polr), including: don’t have any nasty surprises, get straight to the product, let them know your product.

open source e-commerce tools – free and online

Looking for an e-commerce solution to help you sell your stuff online? Here’s a web page that highlights 16 open source e-commerce tools — including a popular New Zealand-developed e-commerce tool for WordPress blogs.

web page make-over!

Expert and real-world advice here on how to make a landing page really work on your website.

The experts at the Copyblogger site take a sales web page of a struggling small business and give specific advice on how to improve it and attract purchases from it.

Tips on everything from the text and images on the page to shopping cart placement and getting the right emotional hook. You’ll learn a lot from these guys.

fast web pages, happy customers

Some pages on retail shopping sites take almost 10 seconds to open, according to a new Nielsen Online study of major shopping sites. Woah, that’s way too slow … g0odbye customers!

Don’t be like Noel Leeming, which in the study came  in slowest at a time of 9.57 seconds. Make sure your site’s pages open fast before you scare off visitors.

One way to do this is to have keep data-heavy information on the page to a minimum. That means, for example, ensure all your photos are optimised to good web sizes and stay away from too much animated Flash content.

Also consider, if many of your clients are overseas, basing your website on a web server in the country where most of your clients are, or have specific sites for each country. It’s cheap and easy to have your site hosted with an overseas web host, And the closer the site is to its customers, the faster the site’s pages will open for those customers – keeping them happier and more active on the site.

Nielsen Online general manager Ivan Fuyala was reported saying that the accessibility and viability of a website is a key business success metric.

“If consumers can’t reach you quickly online, it won’t take long before they start looking to competitors instead.”

make it easy for the customer and make it cheap

Some good lessons here for small online businesses from one of the superstars of online trading: Amazon is making healthy profits in hard times. Its motto: Make it easy for the customer and make it cheap.

As well as value, Amazon also offers convenience and greatly improved delivery times.

online shopping to become more social network focused

Between 2008 and 2013, the number of social network users in the US will increase by an estimated 44.2%, to nearly 115 million, emarketer estimates.

Emarketer’s most interesting tidbit for small businesses, though, is that with that big increase in people social networking will be mainstreamed and consumers will be more likely to turn to their online contacts for shopping advice and recommendations.

Even today, word of mouth recommendations are some of the key drivers for people’s purchasing decisions.

Social networks are also a venue for discovering new products and services virally, through friends linking to things that interest them.

So … the shopping process will become socialised. So … e-businesses, you will need to understand the impact of social network communication on the purchase processes of your products.

shoppers turn to the web for discounts

It seems many shoppers are increasingly looking for their bargains online where they can easily compare prices and products.

The internet is also growing naturally and is becoming a mainstream medium: eMarketer estimates the US Internet population will grow to nearly 200 million users this year. By 2013, some 221 million people will be online.

Two goods reasons, then, to keep your e-business well-tuned and operating effectively, especially in an economic downturn.

nose-hair trimmer takes on the world!

We get excited when we hear of Kiwi businesses doing well online and using the interweb to take a product to the world.

After a bit of noseying around online recently, we came across a couple based in Taupo taking their Groom Mate Platinum XL nasal-hair trimmer global!

Selling millions of their product through Amazon, as well as from their website. Last year it was Amazon’s biggest selling personal care item.

And who would have thought – their customers seem to love talking online about the product.  Something as mundane as a nasal-hair trimmer is getting several hundred online comments from enthusiastic owners: Best nose job I’ve ever had, says a well-trimmed bloke from New Orleans.

Don’t turn your nose up at it: it’s a product any hairy bloke would want; and the power and reach of online marketing is making it a winner.

The National Business Review profiles the company behind the trimmer.

giving away stuff online can boost sales

Can free content boost your sales? Yes, it can, argues Mashable, pointing to Monty Python’s 23,000% (!) sales increase of its DVDs.

And here’s a piece about some bands creating innovative incentives for people to buy product from the bands’ websites.

kiwis keen online shoppers

The number of orders on shopping websites between October and December in New Zealand was significantly higher than Britain and Singapore, and just behind the US.

In Australia and New Zealand there were  2.9 and 2.5 orders per 100 online sessions respectively, compared to 0.9 in Singapore and 1.4 for Britain, according to research by internet-market analyst Coremetrics.

New Zealanders also spend as much or more than their Australian counterparts when shopping online. In New Zealand, the average session length was 5.39 minutes, with 7.4 page views per session, and average orders valued at $71.20.