Ecommerce and Music: Usually a Bad Idea

Music that Works

The internet and music sometimes get along really well. Apple has made a fortune using their patented web design e-business solutions to get people to buy mp3s, and have long been a staple of making money using the internet and technology in novel ways. Likewise, YouTube and other similar video and audio aggregating sites have made a fortune on advertising using a powerful yet elegantly simple ecommerce marketing strategy, in which they simply build up a huge volume of traffic. But that’s really only a special niche—people go to those sites to buy or select music that they want to hear. 

Terrible Music

Then there’s the other end of the spectrum, those rinky-dink sites that still play those hokey MIDI files from the 1990s. Let’s be honest, no one wants to hear that.

Music Leads to 1 Very Unhappy Customer

So not too many people do the MIDI thing anymore, but companies will still try to spice up their web page with some music that they force the customer to listen to. Erik Islington describes his horror story about music on web sites:

“It seems like the stop buttons don’t work very well anymore in the web browsers, or you have to hunt endlessly for a little Quick Time button hidden somewhere near the bottom of the screen. Meanwhile, you’ve woken your baby up, your wife yells at you, you get angry and yell something back, then go away to cool off, but you fall down the stairs and break your ankle. You curse out your wife, who then refuses to take you to the hospital, so you end up limping to the hospital. When you finally get out of the hospital the next day and crutch home, you find your wife has left, selling your $300,000 home for $5000 cash to 20 Australian backpackers.”

Lessons Learned

Poor Eric lost everything because of a company’s poorly constructed marketing strategy. Okay, so maybe his example is a bit extreme, but you’re still risking incurring the wrath of the customer by making him or her listen to music that he or she did not choose. Because let’s face it, most people have their audio all set the way they like it and don’t care for your input. In fact, most people are already listening to music that feels good, or they’re multitasking by listening to the news or watching a movie. Let customers define their environments and find your own strategic place within them.

The one exception: should you choose to incorporate music into your ecommerce solution, make sure to give the consumer the option of playing the music or not. They’ll appreciate you asking first!

Crazy Business Stunts: The Tale of a Misplaced Marketing Scheme

When you’re dreaming up e-commerce solutions for your website, it’s easy to get carried away. That’s what happened to Harold McAdam of NetDesign Associates. He is the webmaster for a company that develops unusual marketing campaigns. “We do all sorts of crazy things,” McAdam said. “The craziest thing we did one time was to drop thousands of pork rinds on the city of Austin, Texas. It was pretty successful I think, because sales went up by 50% that year.” McAdam says his company specializes in over-the-top marketing, so he had to come up with a way to market their website in an equally crazy way. 

Viruses: Not a Good Marketing Tool

What he came up with was a marketing blunder fit for the Guinness Book of World Records: worst web design e-business solutions ever! He decided to create a marketing website that would simulate putting a virus on the person’s computer. When a person surfed to the site, he would immediately be confronted with a large flashing warning icon: “Warning! Your Computer is About to be Flooded with Awesome. Loading software now!”. McAdam thought that his target audience would be amused by this prank, and he thought they’d be intrigued by such an edgy company. The bottom line? They weren’t.  He had made the classic mistake of assuming that people outside the company had already bought into the ethos of the company. It is a classic mistake. As a marketer, you know the company inside and out.  It is easy to lose perspective and start to think that all your customers do too, and just as important to avoid going down that road.

What happened? Panicked, most people shut down their computers to avoid the virus, and they never visited the site again. People wrote on message boards about the potential virus. Sales seemed to be lagging.  So, one day the company’s CEO finally logged into the website to see what was amiss. He was horrified to find McAdam’s senseless marketing ploy. He immediately fired McAdam (his brother-in-law) and hired a new webmaster with a little more sense for prudence. He produced a more straightforward campaign highlighting the company’s history. The real punch line to the story: their website is now back and running as a serious enterprise, using a strategy that is centered on making fun of how stupid the old one was.

When you’re designing your ecommerce marketing plan, it’s okay to be creative. But please, don’t end up like McAdam; make sure you get someone else to check your work before you go public.

Does Your Content Have the Right Attitude?

Your content may be interesting, engaging, and captivating, but are you packaging it the right way? Are you selling an attitude and a lifestyle with your content? If you’re not, you are missing one of the most powerfully effective e-commerce solutions available to you. And it gets worse when you try to sell an attitude that contradicts the attitude your product communicates. When you do that, you end up with customers that are confused about what they’re buying, and 9 times out of 10 they will buy from your competitors who have their ecommerce marketing strategy together.

Content Plus Attitude: The Wrong Way

If you don’t take a hard look at your site, looking at it as if you had never seen it before and you didn’t know much about the content, you might end up like Zack’s CD Shack in Port Myers, Georgia. He was a young white kid trying to sell specialized underground rap CDs out of his home. Since he was young, he thought he needed to maintain a more adult presence on the web, so he had his teachers at school help him design a site. What they created was a very carefully laid out design, with big labels for all the CDs, descriptions of all the records in terms that the teachers could understand, impeccable standard grammar, clear fonts, pastel colors, and a smiling picture of a mid-twenties teacher. Not surprisingly, Zack made only a few sales off his website. His personality, and the personality of his wares didn’t show through on the website, and he had no credibility for selling.

The Right Way

After 8 months of trying to make this model work, Zack decided to overhaul the site when one of his friends told him, in the appropriate lingo, that it was “wack.” He made extensive changes, writing personal statements about why he loved each one of the CDs he was selling, getting rid of the pastels for a more stark black and white theme, putting pictures in of the various artists, and even putting his own picture up with a biography. He wrote in a much more informal style. And, with little surprise, his sails began to grow. Soon, Zack was writing a blog and interacting with his customers and starting to turn a tidy profit.

So, be like the older, wiser Zack. Make sure your site reflects your personality or at least the personality you’re trying to project, and don’t try to fit some ideal. Authenticity is the best custom web design strategy.

Choosing a Killer Font for Your Webstore

Fonts are important. That’s why choosing an effective font can make or break your ecommerce marketing strategy. God help you if you’re trying to create a cool look for your website and you go with Times New Roman or Courier New, or worse, something like Comic Sans or Curlz MT—the horror, the horror.

If visual design isn’t your forte, paying someone with the proper experience can be wise.  But you’ll want to know a few things before you shell out any cash to some custom web design guru in Helsinki who’s going to tell you what’s best for your business.

Fonts: The Least You Need to Know: Serif and Sans-Serif

There are two main classes of fonts: serif and sans-serif. Times New Roman (font of the New York Times) and Courier New (which looks like a typewriter) are both serif fonts. The serifs are those little feet and other protrusions you can see sticking off the letters. Sans serif, naturally enough, translates literally from French to “without serifs”, so they don’t have feet and other protrusions. They look a bit sleeker, but some people find them difficult to read. So, in general, the more normal serifs will portray your site as more old-fashioned and classical--and possibly more legible.  Serifs also tend to give your site some real pop.

You should also know the difference between proportional and non-proportional fonts. Non-proportionals are like Courier New, where each character takes up the same amount of space, like a typewriter. That’s why students use Courier New when they want to make a paper look longer.  But you’re not a desperate student, you’re a professional, so stick to the more professional looking, proportional fonts, which space the letters in a more aesthetically pleasing way.

Fitting Font to Site

So, obviously you should know the difference between serif and sans serif before you start hunting a font, but that can only get you so far. A few basic things to always keep in mind: the match between the font and your company’s products, and the match between your products and the lifestyle they promote, will enable you to make smart choices about which font to ultimately settle on.

When in doubt, get a second opinion.  The way your site looks can be an important solution for bringing your business success. And you can never be too precise in setting up any kind of ecommerce solution.

Figuring Out Your Process is the Key to Creative Web Design

Website design is all about finding creative ways to reach your target audience. Say you’re designing a website around the keyword e-commerce marketing New York, and you’re completely stuck. What should you do? Throw in the towel? Give up? No way! There are plenty of ways to get those creative juices flowing. Just follow these tips, and you’ll be pumping out one ecommerce solution after another.

Freewriting

Sometimes you just need to let it flow. Turn all your censors off, and just write the first things that pop into your head. It doesn’t matter if it is terrible writing, your task when you freewrite is simply to get words on the page. Just keep typing. If you have to type “the, the, the” for 10 minutes until something else comes out, do it. Don’t worry about punctuation and grammar either. That’s what editing is for. If you just start to relax, the ideas will begin to flow. Once you’ve done this for a while, you may want to leave what you’ve written and come back to it later to organize. Often a little time away will allow you to really get at your meaning when you return to your project. Or, you may feel so energized that you just want to keep plowing through the project until you’re finished.

Brainstorming: 3 Different Approaches

Everybody knows what brainstorming is, and a lot of people underestimate its ability to really work when done properly.  The best ideas often come near the middle of a long session. So, you can just write a long list if you like, or you can be a little more organized and write yourself different categories as you go; maybe you want to use different keywords to section off your ideas from each other. The important thing is to not be afraid of your ideas: Go for it! The creative process is all about doing what’s most productive for you. A final take on the simple brainstorming process is called clustering, or webbing. This one is great for visual learners. You can harness the power of the doodle for this one, because you take your brainstormed ideas and connect them to sub-ideas by circling the idea and drawing lines to subordinate ideas. This way, you can really start to see the hidden structure behind your thought.

And that’s what creativity is for, revealing to yourself what you thought all along. That’s what Socrates said all of education is: an act of remembering. So try to remember some great ideas today, using brainstorming and freewriting techniques to unlock the inner advertising guru that’s trapped inside you. If you do, your ecommerce marketing will make a huge leap forward.

6 Tips to Improve Your Online Store

If you're running an online store, and sales just aren't improving here are some tips that will help you make your online store better.

#1: Polish your web design

Your web design is important in making your visitors feel good about your business and your products, so that they can easily convince themselves to buy from you. You need to convey a sense of professionalism and credibility with your web design. So no flashy animations, funny pictures or ALL CAPITALIZATION. If you use these gimmicks, people will not take you seriously, and will not buy from your store.

#2: Use online marketing

If you only have your online store, you probably won't get many visitors. You have to do online marketing to attract potential customers. One option is to put ads on Google for the keywords under which you want people to find you when they search. A second option is to place ads on websites that have many visitors in your target group of customers, for instance, discussion forums or product review sites.

#3: Learn from the best

Look at some professional ecommerce companies in your field, or professional ecommerce companies in general. What can you learn from them? Try to apply some of their methods to your business and to your online store. One thing that almost all top ecommerce companies excel in is their customer service:

#4: Provide great customer service

This can be an area in which you can separate your business from other ecommerce businesses. The reason is that many online stores have bad customer service. So your online store can stand out if you make it your goal to provide quick and helpful customer service that is generally considerate and respectful to your customers.

#5: Offer more payment options

This is another area in which many online stores fail. They only offer one or two payment options and then wonder why no one buys from their store. Learn from that and offer several payment options for your customers, so that everyone who wants to buy from you will actually be able to buy.

#6: Get consulting

If none of the above helps, or if you really want to invest in your online store, consider hiring an  ecommerce consulting company. These usually have a lot of experience in ecommerce and can help you identify issues with your business very quickly. You can then apply their feedback and often see improved results in just a few weeks that easily make up for the initial investment for consulting services. With or without consulting, you should see considerable improvements in your sales if you follow all these tips. Good luck!

Common Mistakes Businesses Make in e-commerce

A lot of money can be made by selling goods on the Internet so many companies set up an online store thinking they can get a share of the pie. But many find out that they cannot; their online presence simply does not work. There are many reasons for this, but some of them are relatively easy to fix. They involve better storage provisions, more effective ecommerce marketing, and a more user-friendly web design.

The first mistake businesses make in e-commerce is that they do not coordinate their storage and their online store. This is deadly. If you have more items sold than you actually have available in your storage room, you will not be able to deliver on time; in the worst case, you will have to buy the necessary items from another supplier and due to the urgency you will have to pay a premium. If, on the other hand, you have fewer items sold in your online store than you have in your storage room, you waste money by paying too much unnecessary storage costs. So your goal has to be to keep enough items physically stored, but not too many.

The second mistake businesses make in e-commerce is that they ignore ecommerce marketing. Many companies, especially smaller ones, think setting up their website and their online store is enough, and customers will come rolling in. This could not be further from the truth. There is so much competition for the attention of buyers online that it is very unlikely that your online store will be noticed just by being there. So you need to promote it, for instance, by buying ads for specific Google searches, or by placing direct ads on other websites.

The third mistake businesses make in e-commerce is with their web design, in particular the design of their online store. Businesses that do not succeed online often do not have a professional ecommerce design; instead, they plaster something together quickly and hope for the best. But in order to look professional to potential customers, you absolutely need to have a professional ecommerce design. This usually involves offering several payment options, providing secure transactions, presenting your items in a visually appealing way, and many other aspects.

If you have covered these design aspects, and if you take your storage and ecommerce marketing into account, chances are that your online store will be much more successful.

How to Make Your Online Store More Professional

Today, creating an online store for your business is not as hard as it used to be. So a lot of businesses include an online store on their website. The problem is that most of these are of poor quality and don't attract many customers. In fact, often it is the online store which makes the whole business look cheap and unprofessional. To change that, you need to really know your competitors and focus on being better than they are in key areas.

First of all, you have to do research on your competitors. What are they doing, how does their website look, how are their products presented in their online store, which payment options do they offer, and what are their online marketing strategies? If you don't know the answer to these questions, you might not appeal to your market in the way your competitors do. When you research your competitors, it is essential to look for the right competitors. If you have a small niche shop that sells a very specific type of high-quality goods, then you are probably not competing with the top ecommerce companies, such as eBay. You rather need to focus on other businesses in your particular niche.

You then need to apply what you have learned from your competitors. Try to offer similar or even more payment options for your customers. The reason is that it is a big problem for your business if a customer wants to buy something, but can't do so because you only accept a specific type of credit card, for example. Furthermore, if your online marketing doesn't reach your potential customers, they won't even get so far as seeing your products. In this area, you might learn a lesson or two from the top ecommerce companies and how they attract customers.

Another aspect that makes a professional ecommerce firm is its customer service. Far too many web businesses have a terrible customer service that has long response times, is impolite and generally not very helpful to customers. This is your chance to turn your small web business into a professional ecommerce company. Aim to provide quick and useful feedback to your customers' inquiries, and do it in a nice and polite way.

If you put your attention to these areas – knowing your competition, and being better than them especially in your online marketing and in your customer service – you will make a great leap towards being a professional ecommerce company.

Why You Should Hire a Consulting Company for Your Online Shop

If your business has an online shop, but you do not sell many items, perhaps hiring an ecommerce consulting company may be advisable to you. The market of ecommerce solutions has become very competitive, so your business needs expert advice on how to improve sales and leverage online marketing activities. A truly professional consulting company will provide that.

A good ecommerce consulting company will first of all take a look at your current online presence. This will include a detailed analysis of your landing page, your website in general, and your online shop in particular. The firm will research your keywords, take a look at how your products are described and presented, and will refocus your online marketing so that it actually drives visitors and customers to your online shop.

The major advantage of an ecommerce consulting company is that you get real advice which you can immediately act on. It is not necessary for you to learn all the information yourself and to invest in costly and lengthy trial and error. Ideally, a consultant will give you the specific advice that you need in order to improve your sales in a short period of time. Consulting companies are especially helpful if you are dealing with highly technical matter of ecommerce solutions, including security measures and legal aspects.

It is recommended to hire an ecommerce consulting company in the beginning of a project, so that mistakes can be identified early on, and not much later when the online shop has already been running for a while. Even a single session with a consultant can often prevent the most common mistakes from happening to your ecommerce project. Afterwards, your business is ready to implement all the advice and get its online shop running. If the sales numbers then drop at some point in the future, or are not as good as you had planned, another session with a consultant can be helpful to find problem areas and to eliminate them.

To sum up, hiring an ecommerce consulting company can speed up the implementation of your project and help you prevent common mistakes businesses make in their ecommerce activities. Due to their expertise and experience, consultants will know exactly what to look for in your existing online shop, and provide you with strategies to fix these issues. The one aim of all this is to increase the sales of your business, so that you can make a higher profit.

What You Need to Know when You Start Your First Web Business

The Internet offers almost unlimited opportunities to make money. It is so easy nowadays to create your own website that you don't even need to know web design to pull it off. You can just use a custom template or even sign up on a blogging platform. It is also easy to use online marketing to promote your business, much easier than going the old-fashioned way of print advertising. Today, you can advertise on Google with just a few clicks. So if you want to get serious about starting you own online business, here are three tips for starters:

First of all, start low and set yourself small goals. Don't go for perfect in the beginning. Set up a basic website (no need for fancy web design), and create a simple email address for your business and show it on your site. If you sell any services, you might need a way to receive online payments. But don't go looking around for some advanced ecommerce solutions just yet. There's more important things than ecommerce solutions for the moment. Just focus on getting your basic setup ready.

Then put your attention to your product. If you sell goods, write up interesting product descriptions that speak to your readers (and potential buyers). If you can't write well, perhaps hire a freelancer. Those can be quite cheap on the Internet. If you sell content or creative work, on the other hand, you might want to put up some samples of your work. Write some blog posts if you want to sell e-books or how-to programs. Upload some sample tracks if you are a musician and want to sell your music. Remember: Focus on the quality of your product first; the marketing, or in this case online marketing, comes later.

Lastly, if you've done all that, you need the two most important ingredients for being successful online, or successful at anything basically: patience and hard work. It sounds boring and trite, but it's true. If you don't persist in tough times (and those will come), you're not going to get far with your online business. And if you think you can make a quick buck online, you're wrong, too. It takes work, work, work. And work. But if you are willing to put that work in and be patient, then you can succeed and make decent money online, by being your own man or woman!