Building eCommerce

By Jane Dawson

Every online retailer has his or her own approach to making merchandising decisions, based on their background and training, their products, their historical experience and the amount of time they have worked on strategies.

If you are like most business owners, you do some things pretty well, but wish you knew more about how to make decisions and worry that you are working too much on gut feeling and not enough on hard analytics.

Do you ever wonder if your approach is very different, pretty much average or substantially more sophisticated than other online retailers?

The 8th Annual Merchant Survey Report, based on a first quarter 2009 survey of 190 ecommerce executives and released in April by research and advisory firm The Etailing Group Inc., provides excellent insight into this question. As part of their survey, Etailing Group researchers asked marketing executives how they make their decisions about strategy. The answers are revealing.

As you might expect:

- Ninety two percent base their decisions on web analytics

- Seventy three percent based their decisions on sales history

- Sixty eight percent base their decisions on conversion data

One of the greatest advantages of the Web is the ability to quickly and easily track so much about customers. Pay per click analysis, landing page analysis, referral analysis, conversion rates all paint a picture of activity by your customers and potential customers. Every online retailer should be looking at their web analytics and know enough about what they mean to make decisions using their guidance.

However, there are some other techniques those marketing execs use that begin to show some of the art of marketing. For example, fifty six percent of marketers use ‘gut feeling’ to help them guide their decisions, a statistic that may make some of the less data driven entrepreneurs on the Internet feel a bit better.

Another technique that is substantially easier on the web is benchmarking against competitors and fifty percent of retailers look at benchmarking data such as search engine page ranking, Alexa website rank, page views and number and placement of pay per click ads to make merchandising decisions.

The increased interaction with customers through data collection during registration for newsletters, emails and RSS feeds allows thirty percent of marketers to use profiling as a way to make decisions. Customer reviews are used by thirty nine percent of marketers.

Many marketers also rely on more traditional bricks and mortar techniques as well. For example, fifty eight percent look at inventory data, forty nine percent use product margin and forty five percent use sales ranking as a guide.

How do you stack up against the survey participants? Do you have systems in place that allow you to access the kind of data resources that more and more marketers are using? Are you taking advantage of the uniquely open nature of the Internet to benchmark yourself against your competitors? Are you balancing that gut feeling decision making with solid data that allows you to make choices among products, weed out the non movers, establish loss leaders and create cross sell and up sell combinations? If not, it is a good time to start.

About The Author

Source wholesale, dropshippers and dropshipping wholesale suppliers. Browse wholesale UK dropshippers by country: Wholesale UK, USA wholesale and American wholesalers and more.

By Jack Landry

Attracting new customers and clients to your website can be difficult, even when you have an amazing site. It can be a frustrating, tedious process because you know that your website is well designed, well written, and well maintained, yet driving people to your website is seemingly impossible.

The internet is such an interesting platform for businesses because they cannot simply go put up a physical sign on the street that lets people know about their store. Instead they have to pay exorbitant amounts of money to advertise or wait for people to search for them.

Before getting too stressed with this whole process, it is important to understand what lead generation is and what it can do for your company. There are actually sites that exist solely to generate leads for you.

These sites offer no product for clients; they simply drive potential customers to their site and collect their information. When someone is interested in making a purchase they will most likely perform a search on the internet for information or a product.

When they do, they may come across a lead generation website. This site looks just like a normal commercial website, but the trick is they have no products to sell.

When the potential customer expresses interest in the information or product he or she will submit contact or personal information. This website exists solely to sell that information to the highest bidder.

This is called lead generation. So there are sites out there that are getting leads in your industry.

You are struggling to rake these customers in yet these other sites have built up such a strong online presence so they are frequented by your prospective clients. You want those leads but do not know how to go about obtaining them.

Because this website generates leads in a specific industry, there are many other websites interested in buying its information. The different websites all bid on the leads by letting the website know how much they will pay for each lead.

The website determines who the highest bidder is. When the website gets a new lead, it then offers the lead to the highest bidder.

Based on the compatibility of the bidder and the potential client, the bidder may or may not want to purchase the lead. If he does then he is given all of the contact information and can thus email or market to their new potential client.

If, though, he does not want to purchase the information, it is passed down through the bidders from highest to lowest until someone wants to purchase the contact information. This whole process can be very overwhelming and costly.

Because they are generating leads for you it is important to make sure the leads are who you are looking for. If they are not in your target market then buying their information would not do any good for your company.

You may consider creating a budget for your lead purchases. By doing this you prevent yourself from putting too many eggs, or spending too much money, on one internet basket.

Many online marketing companies offer lead generation services. They have professionally trained people that can analyze the lead data and make sure a client is right for you.

They can also spend the necessary time to budget your leads. So instead of going overboard making too many purchases, they can optimize your purchases and make sure you only get a few good ones that have a higher probability of return.

This can both save and make you money in the same act. Marketing teams are also very good at making sure the contact information you purchase will be compatible with your software.

When buying leads it is easy to purchase many and get caught up in the excitement of it. Despite that, it is important to remember that you will be contacting each of those leads and their information should be compatible with the software you will use to contact them.

Online marketing companies that specialize in lead generation should offer this service to guarantee an appropriate matching. Beyond all of this, there are many other reasons why it is beneficial for you to team up with an online marketing company.

They are able to spend the necessary time it takes to manage online lead generation purchases and they can even generate your own for you. Because they are well acquainted with the various websites that sell leads in your industry, they can sell you the highest quality leads for the lowest amount of money.

It is a good idea to team up with a lead generator for the best online lead management and generation.

About The Author

Jack R. Landry has worked in online marketing for the last 10 years and written hundreds of articles about internet advertising and online marketing services. He has consulted for SEO firms since 2001.

Contact Info:
Jack R. Landry
JackRLandry@gmail.com
http://www.Leadgenix.com