Running an online store is no small thing. First you have to construct a site. Then you have to invest in and manage your inventory, which is an expensive endeavor (see Amazon). By the time your site is finally up and running, you’re flat broke! And who has the extra money to hire a marketing firm to get their products out to the entire Internet? I know I don’t. I have, however, managed to find a few simple ways to showcase my store and close sales. Here are a few simple principles that will help you market your store to prospective clients without breaking the bank. Make the checkout process seamless There’s nothing more annoying than getting held up at the checkout. We’re not in 1996 anymore, when people limped around the Internet using dial-up service. If a YouTube video fails to load in 10 seconds, people are taking their eyeballs elsewhere. At a brick and mortar store, people will complain about slow service, but they’ll put up with it. In your eCommerce store, you’ve lost the sale. Unlike the local big box store that can invest money in extra cashiers to expedite checkout, you must make your checkout process seamless and simple with a few clicks. The easier it is to check out, the less likely customers are to abort their purchase. Quick checkouts = more cash in the bank. Here are a few tips to make your checkout simple in order to boost those online sales. Don’t require users to register for your site in order to check out. While contact information is helpful, research shows that customers leave their carts and move on when they have to register. Give them a guest checkout option. When shoppers do register, let them save their information. When they return to shop again, their checkout is much faster, which will bring them back in the future. Make the process visual by adding checkout phases. Break up the checkout into phases so that customers feel they are making progress. When the checkout is visual, customers understand that they are getting closer to being finished. Now, I realize you probably don’t have a developer on call to make this happen for you. Luckily, there are companies like Shopify (www.shopify.com) that offer one click plugin products to handle this for you.Source: 5 Easy Ways to Build Ecommerce Sales | Independent RetailerMake product recommendations at the checkout. Upsell, upsell, upsell! Amazon’s product recommendation engine is absolutely brilliant. Just prior to me paying, Amazon splashes a host of closely related products up on the screen. The result? I end up shelling out more money than I initially planned. Right before your customers pay, upsell them on related products. Give them deals they won’t get anywhere else. Convince them that they have to have the warranty or the cleaning solution or whatever it is that you want them to buy. They are already in a buying mindset, which gives you a psychological advantage. Give products away for free If you’ve got a limited marketing budget you should seriously consider influencer marketing. Influencers are incredibly powerful because they serve as online referrals. If you can connect with the right ones, you can drives tons of motivated traffic to your website. Personally, I love using Instagram for influencer outreach because most people are willing to promote your brand simply for giving them the product for free. I use a simple process to find influencers: 1) Head over to http://websta.me/search and type in some keywords related to your product. 2) The platform will return the latest content with that hashtag. 3) Sift through the posts (this takes time) to find ones with high engagement. 4) Those highly engaged posts generally belong to someone who has a large, engaged following. 5) Most influencers have a contact email in their bio. If they don’t, you can send them a direct message.
Simply let them know you love their content and ask them if they’re interested in checking out your product, free of charge. This can be a lot of work on your end but I promise you, it’s well worth it. Take advantage of online advertisements Social media is a gateway to closing sales and promoting your business at an extremely affordable price. The beautiful thing is that it targets consumers suited for your store on its own. You don’t have to do anything. Just purchase the ads and let social media work for you. Many social media sites offer ad budgeting options, meaning you can set a daily budget (some start as low as $1), and then when your budget for the day is spent, your ad quits running. It’s a great way to stay within your means while still reaching out to potential customers online. Facebook ads are a tremendously effective way to find customers at an extremely low cost. I don’t want to hear the argument “my customers aren’t on Facebook.” Mark Zuckerberg posted a status a few weeks ago that announced Facebook had reached a new milestone. For the first time in the history of the network, 1 billion users were logged in at the same time. 1 billion users. Your audience is on Facebook, trust me. Build a community of loyal fans Invest your time in building a community of fans. If you own a business, you need to have a social media page, and you MUST work to build a following. People who like your page and share your page are doing your legwork for you, so it’s literally a free marketing tool where others work for you. Keep your social media up to date. Post upcoming sales, offer coupons, and promote new products on your page. Encourage your fans to share your information with others, and it will spread the word quickly about what you have to offer. Build email lists and run email marketing campaigns. There are tons of free email newsletter creators online that can help you design and email you fans. Create quality content Quality content on your page is one of the most important marketing techniques you can have. As in a brick and mortar store, your customers want to feel like they matter. Quality content that speaks directly to them, not down to them, creates that connection. Talk about what you believe in with regard to your products, and then tell customers why they need those products. If your content is just trying to hard sell customers, they’ll be just as turned off as they would with a pushy salesman in a store. Be creative, be genuine, and be yourself! Conclusion If ECommerce were easy, every joker and his mom would do it. It requires strategic thinking and careful execution. Small mistakes, like a cumbersome checkout process, can cost you serious cash. But with thoughtful implementation, you can create an ECommerce store that creates significant revenue for you.
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User-defined fields (UDF) in Retail Pro allow you to track a virtually unlimited number of data elements. UDF and auxiliary fields can be completely customized to ensure you capture the specific type of data you need to inform, for example, your merchandising or marketing strategies. Capture customer preferences like favorite colors, styles, and activities to personalize your marketing campaigns, or arm your sales associates with access to those details on a mobile device so they can make meaningful recommendations.
For example, a cosmetics retailer might track a customer’s favorite brand, shade of eye shadow or lip tint, or their skin type based on their transaction history, and can send special offers for those products when they shop online or come into your stores during their birthday month.
Data analysis with calculated field 
Retailers know there is a major shift currently underway in the payment industry. More and more consumers are beginning to leave their credit cards at home, in favor of keeping digital versions saved in their smartphones. Through the use of technologies such as Apple Pay, Android Pay, and Samsung Pay, individuals can carry out everyday transactions without ever reaching for their wallets. Outside of being popular and trendy, these “mobile wallets” come with their own set of positives and negatives. There are a few major considerations business owners should take into account before deciding whether or not to support this new payment platform.
Improved security over conventional card payments. Mobile wallets take advantage of technologies that provide more secure transactions. Individuals today are more security conscious than ever – the massive campaigns behind the EMV shift are evidence of this trend. Businesses that support technologies such as Apple Pay and Android Pay are on the forefront of card-payment security, or namely, tokenization.
When your customers pay for a product or service using their phones, their financial information travels in an encrypted packet – a “token” – that is later decrypted by your software when you receive it. If a thief or fraudster were to somehow get their hands on your customer’s payment data, they will only have access to these tokens, which are useless without a decryption mechanism. Secure encryption features are just one reason consumers are switching to this new technology, and retailers who offer a mobile payment platform find that it frequently serves as an incentive for some customers to keep coming back their store.
Shorter Customer Wait Times. Mobile payments are fast, especially when compared to a more conventional payment method. The scene in any rush hour New York Starbucks shop should be enough to convince anyone of the importance of cutting wait time. While those customers who pay for their morning cup of Joe with a card must hand their card to the attendant who then swipes the card through a reader, the customers utilizing mobile wallets just hold them up to the NFC reader and they’re done – fast and quick.
Decreasing the time it takes to process each customer should be an attractive feature to any business with heavy foot traffic. Not only will businesses be available to service a larger volume of customers, but those customers will be generally happier due to lower wait times. In this way, mobile wallets can serve to increase customer satisfaction and retention.
Mobile payment fraud. On the flip side of things, accepting mobile wallet payments may pose a risk for some merchants. With the surge in mobile wallet popularity, fraudsters are focusing their sights on exploiting this technology to attempt to trick business owners into accepting fraudulent transactions. Staying vigilant and monitoring the transactions that come through your store’s account will help deter fraud.
Employee Training and Systems Management. As with the implementation of any new technology to your business, it is impossible to ignore the time devoted to employee training. Because mobile wallets are an emerging technology, few employees will be ready and trained in how to service customers who pay with this method. As a business owner, you will need to set aside time to fully train your staff and to ensure that you know the ins and outs of the system yourself. By adding to the complexity of your system and adding new card readers you are also increasing the number of possible points in your business that may need troubleshooting. Be certain you understand the hardware and software system components and make sure your tech support person is available for the system rollout.
Costs of Upgrading. In order to accept mobile wallet payments, your business must have a contactless payment-capable point of sale terminal. Retailers who have recently upgraded their POS may recognize that EMV comes in two major varieties for in-store payments: “contact” transactions, in which a chip card is inserted, or “dipped,” into a POS terminal, and contactless payments, where an EMV card or smart phone is waved near to an EMV terminal. Many of the new POS terminals offer both features, and range in price from between $100 and $1,000 per terminal – actual costs will vary widely based on your store’s needs. Generally, the more functionality a new contactless point of sale terminal has, the more expensive it will be.
If your business already accepts credit cards, contacting your merchant services provider is the first step you should take. Your provider should be able to offer you cost-efficient ways to upgrade your reader to support contactless payment-capable readers, as well as provide you with any additional cost estimates and educational resources.
Mobile Wallets Are the Future for Consumers and Businesses. A 2015 report from Forrester Research estimates that by 2018, up to 20% of US smartphone owners will be using mobile wallets. With such a large segment of the population utilizing this new technology, many customers will come to expect retail stores to support this payment method. As consumers begin to leave their wallets and cards at home, the only way for some merchants to accommodate sales will be by accepting mobile payments.
Forrester Research’s report also points to an added advantage inherent in mobile wallets: marketing campaigns. Working together with app developers, business owners can help drive more traffic to their locations by pushing notifications to smartphone users through coupons, or other forms of advertising.
