Guidance, Techniques and Companions on
Your Journey to Ecommerce Success

In EA’s Ecommerce system I constantly emphasize how ecommerce must be marketing driven. Any other preoccupation leads to the most classic, avoidable and ruinous mistakes ecommerce businesses experience. But what type of marketing?

We do a lot of training on SEO and other channels but I want to discuss another type of Ecommerce that is re-emerging because of the online social networking explosion namely brand-driven ecommerce.

Creating a brand online on a budget used to be nearly impossible. How are you really going to compete with huge sites to get customers to remember your site name and become loyal? It was a good way to keep customers but not to great at aquiring them. Online social marketing is beginning to change this equation.

One case in point is an Ecommerce site called DB Clay. I met a couple of the guys behind this site at an ecommerce luncheon put on by EA in Portland, OR and they’ve really done a great job of building their brand. Here are a few pointers they shared with our group -

• Develop rapport with bloggers in your industry (using technorati)
• Use Social Bookmarking Sites to attract brand interest
• Manufacture a unique product
• Find a brick and mortar outlet (they sell in art gallery shops across the country)
• Blog about your product

Everyone getting into Ecommerce should seriously consider the advantages of creating a brand from their sites and selling products under your own brand name. It will diversify your income stream, give you control over quality, keep margins low, and give you access to the explosion occuring in social marketing online.

More on this techniques to come…

The story is the most familiar one in the history of Ecommerce. You decide you want to sell products online so you go shopping for a web development firm that can give you a professional design and the features you want. Once that’s completed you begin to think about how to market the site. You ask your developers if they do SEO. At this point you often get one of several three responses -

• Yes, we do SEO.
• No, you’ll have to find that somewhere else.
• SEO is a scam, don’t worry about it.

If they say yes most likely they know very little about what they are doing. People that are great at SEO usually can make far more money doing SEO than web development. If you can get ranked at the top of the engines why wouldn’t you be selling something yourself? Also, if they SEO experts surely they would have sold you on that when you came to them for web development.So why not just get a different firm involved? Because doing the best SEO for Ecommerce deeply effects both the way the site is designed and the way the site is coded. Another firm can get involved but the progress they can achieve is usually somewhat limited by how much they can get both you and your development firm to cooperate with their efforts.Solution - Find a firm that does both. And check more into their SEO track record than their design expertise (unless you’re trying to win a design award instead of sell products online) :)One case study we observed for the success of this approach was the recent platform switch by one of the Ecommerce SEO clients at Marketplace Earth. MPE did aggressive SEO for 2 years when the client decided to switch to the MPE Ecommerce platform (AdaptCommerce) and within 2 weeks SEO went from being 30% of their sales to 60% of their sales. It all came down to the SEO related intellectual property that was embedded in our platform and the way we layout the various pages.Remember, when you want to launch an Ecommerce site, always think marketing first and that SEO is the most important type of marketing for niche online retail.

A number of new sites have emerged to try and capture the online shopper who is frustrated with sorting through search results to find the best product.An aggressive idea being attempted by new player 3luxe.com is to provide only 3 results in each category from household items to luxury yachts. Other players in the so called shoposphere include Wize, Stylehive and Crowdstorm.These sites are difficult to use for online marketing because their purpose is to put power back into the hands of the consumer but if you find you’re competing in verticles being reviewed by shoposphere sites and you’re one of many retailers offering the product then investigate carefully where they send customers to buy. 3luxe seems to have a deal with Shopzilla and with educated customers ready to buy moving from 3luxe to Shopzilla you will get amazing value for your PPC spend for these items.EA will keep a close eye on the increasing shoposphere sites so we can discover together ways these services may alter the way customers shop online.