E-commerce Growth Engagement & Marketing

In the U.S., social media is used by over half the population – 158 million people – a stunning new development in our culture and history. As such it poses a tremendous opportunity for ecommerce companies to connect with the market, create active dialogs around their brands, and develop rapport and familiarity before giving prospects a direct sales pitch. Wise use of social interaction is now a very effective way to condition the market, thus paving the way for sales.

Smart Ways Businesses use Social Networks – Here are just some of the ways today’s smart businesses are using social networks, social data, and interaction to deliver better products and services, and improve their bottom line

Selling products and services through online e-commerce affords many opportunities for effective promotions. In e-commerce any mechanism that aids in inducing a sale is a promotional tool. There are many different promotion types. 

For managers responsible for web-site updates, one part of business website renovation keeps them awake at night: the transfer of legacy content from an existing site (or sites) to a newly developed site. Migrating content to a Content Management System (CMS) is a very important part of managing a business’ web presence. It is a difficult, time consuming, meticulous process and requires organizations to allocate significant resources, and train management teams in transfer issues.

Content accumulated over many years creates a maze of structured and unstructured data that can make the migration process potentially disruptive to ongoing operations. The objective of the process is high-performance web migration, which requires first that the parties have a clear vision of what must be accomplished through the migration, and that they then plan the steps necessary to implement the vision.

For most online businesses, shipping can be one of the most difficult aspects of running an ecommerce site. Based on their experiences and observations of other sites, shipping costs and delivery time-frames are the biggest customer complaint that online retailers receive. A recent study confirms shipping to be one of the most important things to shoppers. Even if the shipping is free, customers often have obscene expectations on how fast their order will reach them. If it’s not free, there are always complaints about the cost even when the merchant directly passes down fees with no markup.

QuickBooks has become an internal accounting fixture for a very large number of businesses. It is a solid bit of accounting software that businesses rely on very heavily to manage their operations, taxes, and financial information.

Today, many of the companies that have grown so reliant on QuickBooks have also developed, or are planning to develop, ecommerce platforms through which they conduct an increasingly large number of B2B or B2C business transactions. Still others are contemplating expanding to multiple online sales channels. Tracking all sales, customers, accounting, inventory and shipping in these circumstances can be daunting. While some can manage the separate online and local systems independently for a while, eventually it becomes necessary to merge the ecommerce transactions and related data into the QuickBooks system in a reliable, automated way so that accurate information is always at managers’ fingertips. Attaining the highest level of integration is important. Maximizing interface automation and efficiency has a direct impact on cost control.

If your company conducts business online through an eCommerce application, and that eCommerce system runs independently of your other internal business-management software (for accounting, ERP, fulfillment, etc.), odds are very good that your organization is wasting a lot of time and money.  Today, smart businesses recognize that integrating their online eCommerce systems with their internal operating software dramatically improves administrative efficiency and reduces costs.

Many business owners and managers may, however, hesitate to link these distinct systems together for fear of complication, confusion, or data loss. But, today such fears are unwarranted. Enterprises using “third party” software systems to manage their operations (like QuickBooks, Intuit’s accounting and financial-management suite) can and should secure the integration of data between their internal and eCommerce operating systems, for doing so is now possible and highly reliable with the right integration tools.

It is not a mystery that social media sites are excellent marketing tools for all types of businesses, but e-commerce sites have an advantage when it comes to using the different networks. For one, consider the e-commerce target market: online shoppers. People who spend their time on the Internet searching for products to buy are more than likely spending time on social media sites as well. This is just one reason why social media cannot be overlooked as a vital online visibility and marketing tool within the e-commerce industry.

Promoting products and services on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs are a great way to drive consumers to your site and make sales. Social media outlets are good tools for link building and therefore by posting URLs that link back to your site, you are more likely to see an increase in traffic. Social media gives businesses the means to direct traffic to whichever site they want, whether it is a product giveaway on a blog site or a link to a coupon. E-commerce sites have an advantage over brick-and-mortar businesses because their consumers are just a click away from their products and do not have to travel into a store.

More than ever before, business enterprises offering products or services seek effective tools to improve their interaction with a fast-paced marketplace, and increase sales. Fortunately, businesses today can efficiently utilize their online presence to enhance business interaction, accelerate growth, and keep up with the competition. Online portals designed to attract, enlist, and support distributors, dealers, and resellers, interact with customers, and manage sales transactions are becoming quite sophisticated, increasingly user-friendly, and capable of dramatically expanding the reach of any business, while increasing efficiency and lowering costs.

Legacy applications are those that have grown over many years as an enterprise has developed, and they usually have unique features and capabilities essential to the business’ operation. As a result, they are difficult to replace or integrate with emerging modern systems and technologies. Organizations often run outdated web properties comprised of large collections of html pages built over long periods by many different people, or home-grown software, created by individuals no longer with the organization, with structures that no one knows enough about to feasibly add new elements. Some companies run large commercial systems that are very expensive to upgrade or that originated with vendors no longer serving the market. Still others use open-source systems like WordPress that, while simple to set up and use, don’t support the more advanced options required, or are very time consuming or expensive to modify or supplement.

For consumers, online shopping has benefits such as convenience and comparison. For companies, it gives the advantage of a national reach, builds loyalty and credibility and increases revenue. But how do companies maximize that revenue when it is easy to get lost on the web under the vast number of companies? Well, the easy answer is to become a client of any online store and use their technology to optimize your location on the web, streamline the navigation of your website, effectively promote your products and simplify the check out process. But if you don’t have time for such a large commitment, you should consider posting coupon codes.

Adrecom's Enterprise Blogging Suite is a powerful engine that provides essential tools for efficiently creating attractive, content-rich blogs that increase your impact and reach. Adrecom’s blogging tools allow you to accommodate multiple authors while synthesizing and organizing their posts, manage and pre-configure social media interaction, pre-schedule posts, categorize posts, efficiently link to related posts, and automatically moderate blog responses.

But, content is still king. What you say and how you say it have everything to do with whether your blog succeeds in its mission. Having the right blogging tools can take your content to another level.

Cross-selling is a marketing term for the practice of suggesting related products or services to a customer who is considering buying something. Also referred to as suggestive selling, it is a sales technique whereby complementary products are presented to a customer after the customer has demonstrated a desire and willingness to purchase a particular product. Often, cross-selling involves offering the customer items that complement the original purchase in some manner. The idea behind cross-selling is to capture a larger share of the consumer market by meeting more of the needs and wants of each individual customer. Online merchandising is one of the most important aspects of e-commerce. In order for e-tailers to generate profitable sales, they must use e-commerce sales tactics in order to navigate their customers to the products they want to purchase.

Up-selling is a sales technique commonly used by vendors to ingeniously encourage their customers to purchase more expensive items, upgrades, and add-ons in attempt to make a more profitable sale. Up-selling usually involves marketing more profitable services or products but can also be simply exposing the customer to other options that were perhaps not considered previously. For instance, if a customer was looking to purchase a certain product, a salesperson may try to convince you to buy the accessories for it whether you need it or not. When a customer is looking to make an online purchase, the webpage will feature accessories that the customer can purchase along with that item.

E-commerce storefront renovation is the process of redesigning your site in order to improve its design, functionality and technical elements. While affecting this renovation, remember that a complete overhaul is not always necessary - it might be sufficient to change either the look or the feel of the site, but not necessarily both.

Online event management is considerably an easier alternative to event management. Rather than relying on event planners to organize, supervise and plan your events for you, you can purchase an online management software that allows you to monitor your events in the most systematic and feasible way. Online event management provides a platform to artists, celebrities, fundraisers, organizations and businessmen to promote their talents, products, and businesses. It can be seen as an online marketing strategy tool by various companies.