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…

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.