You are here: Home / Archives for Articles / Selling

Can your website visitors trust you? 4 things that you can do

21st February 2012 | Please add your comment

Before people purchase something on your website, they have to trust you. If your website does not look trustworthy, then you won’t get many sales no matter how many visitors your website has.

There are four things that you should do to show your website visitors that your company can be trusted:

real company1. Show that your website represents a real company

It’s amazing how many Internet businesses don’t list their postal addresses. Do these businesses have something to hide? If your customers don’t know who you are and where you live they might refrain from doing business with you.

Real life example:

You can find our full contact information here. We link to that page at the bottom of every web page. In addition, our full postal address is listed in the footer of every web page. We do this to make sure that our visitors know who we are.

You can see our tax number, our trade register number, publications in which our company was mentioned, etc.

What you should do on your own website:

If you’re serious about your business show your visitors that you have nothing to hide. List your full contact information on your website.

white hat2. Show your website visitors why your company is better

Why should someone buy from you and not from your competitors? Is there anything that distinguishes you from the rest?

Real life example:

We distinguish ourselves from other SEO software companies by using only ethical search engine optimization methods. Our products do not use any shady tactics that will get your website banned from search engines.

We want our visitors to know that they can trust our products and that they are safe to use. That’s why we link to our code of ethics in the footer of every web page.

What you should do on your own website:

Show your website visitors how you’re different and why they should use your products or services instead of the ones of your competitors.

testimonials3. Show your visitors that other people tested it before

If other people have tested your products and services then it’s less risky for new customers to buy from you. Your website visitors want to be reassured that you’re a serious business.

If your company or your product has received awards then show them to your visitors. If your current customers have something positive to say about your products or services, list these testimonials on your website.

What you should do on your own website:

Show your visitors how other people benefited from your products and services and what other people say about you.

guarantees4. Offer your website visitors guarantees

Web surfers don’t like risks. That’s why guarantees will help you to sell more.

Real life example:

It is 100% risk-free to test our products. We offer two guarantees to make it as safe as possible to buy our products:

  1. You can return our website promotion tool IBP within 30 days for any reason. Even if you tell us that the dog ate it, that’s no problem. You will get your money back.
  2. IBP is a tool that helps you to get your website on Google’s first result page for the keywords of your choice. If you use IBP as described in the manual and do not get a top 10 ranking, you will get your money back. This additional guarantee is valid for a full year!

What you should do on your own website:

Show your website visitors that you’re 100% sure that your product or service really delivers. Give strong guarantees so that your website visitors can only win if they try your products.

It’s important to have a trustworthy website if you want to sell something on the Internet. Show your visitors that your business is real and that they can trust you by using the tips above.

Article by Axandra SEO software

Useful items
Comments: Please add your comment
Categories: Ecommerce, Internet Marketing Articles, Selling
Tags: , , , , , , ,

There is no such thing as B2B – or B2C either…!

19th May 2011 |

Go to any business meeting these days and talk about Twitter or Facebook and you’ll be met with a familiar cry: “Aha,”, says the hapless accountant, lawyer or consultant to you, “that’s all very well for consumer businesses, but how can it help those of us in the B2B sector?” It is special pleading, suggesting that there is something very different about being in “business to business” that sets you apart from “business to consumer“. These people ask you for “B2B” examples of the success of social media, taunting you that the only real success has been found in the “B2C sector”. “Aha, got you,” they seem to be saying under their breath.

The fact of the matter is – and, be warned, this is really difficult for people who reckon they are in the B2B sector – there is no such thing as either B2B or B2C. It is a false distinction.

B2B is the same as B2C

When I get told that B2B is special I simply ask: “Who buys your stuff? Is it a machine? Is it a business? Or is it a person?”. Often people stumble out a reply saying, “well obviously it is a person,” then there’s a pause and they add “but they are in a business”. This last bit is simply justification for their thought that B2B exists.

So, I pursue my line of enquiry, rather detective-like. “Which businesses then, give you most of your business? Which companies do you sell most to?” People are usually able to say who their best clients are. Then I ask, “And do you have good relationships with the people in that business?” Naturally, the answer is yes.

Then I ask them to think about the businesses they do little business with. I ask them to consider the personal relationships they have in those firms. “Well, I don’t really know anyone there,” is the usual reply. Then it slowly dawns: the “businesses” with which a company has the best personal relationships are the ones which generate the most cash. In other words, you are not selling to a business, but to a person – often a friend.

Asking people in a B2B environment about who they do business with always reveals this fact: most business is done with individuals in a company with whom a good, solid personal relationship exists. Ask any B2B owner if relationships are not important to their sales and they will look at you like you’ve just arrived from the planet Zog.

B2C is the same as B2B

In the “B2C” sector companies, such as retailers know this. They know that each purchase is a one-on-one experience. They are selling to you the individual, whether you are buying a bottle of fizzy pop or a new dining room suite. They focus on selling to individuals, to people – they just call them “consumers” in order to make it sound much more fancy than it is.

The truth is – whether you are selling to businesses or to consumers – it all comes down to relationships. It is all, ultimately person to person business – P2P.

What this means is that “B2C” companies are merely those which concentrate on personal selling. “B2B” firms are often not focusing on the person-to-person nature of their business enough. Once they do, the difference between them and a “B2C” company gets eroded.

Whatever business you are in  your buyers make the same purchasing decisions. Whether it is a bottle of fizzy pop or a multimillion pound mega deal, the brain processes are the same (and ultimately emotionally driven). The buyers do not divide themselves into “B2B” or “B2C” – to them they are just a person buying something. When B2B companies realise they are just a person selling something they will then be able to connect – P2P – using all the wonders of the online world.

Social media may be dominated by “B2C” examples, but that’s only because they are one-step ahead of most “B2B” firms in realising that they are selling to individuals. Social media is P2P – when you focus on being a P2P business instead of a B2B one, that’s when it will work for you.

Related articles

Categories: Selling
Tags: , , , ,

Four Free Or Open Source Shopping Carts Compared And The Powerful New Winner

29th March 2011 |

Author: Greg Nicholl

Your choice of an e-Commerce Shopping Cart is very important. The software will either be suited or ill-suited to your type of business and your skills. A Wrong choice can make things more of a burden. This article talks about my journey to find a free Open Source Shopping Cart that I could use on my Shared Hosting accounts. Some carts had plenty of functions but lacked important ones like SEO modules. Some were well known but looked old like Web 1.2. One had plenty going for it but took up a ton of PHP memory. After this discovery adventure I present my top 2 choices.

The Journey Begins

When I began my search for a shopping cart I first looked at Zen Cart since I had had a little experience with it before. I find that Zen Cart looks a little bit stale by modern standards. It is noted as a very respectable and stable PHP shopping cart. However, there are few free templates available in the Zen Cart community. Most of what I\’ve seen didn\’t seem to meet the style demands that I was looking for. Granted, I could adjust templates and CSS in order to make it look better. I was not in the mood for that sort of work at the time. Zen Cart has a lot of nice features but the back end and catalog system seems overly complicated. In my opinion, it could take the newbie quite a bit of time to get used to the features of the Zen Cart back end. I decided not to go any further with Zen Cart.

Heavy Duty Stuff – Too Much To Cope With

I began to do some research and I came across a newer offering called Magento. Magento is starting to get a lot of acclaim. It is a very full featured Shopping Cart, in fact some insisted that it is a full business system rather than just a cart. At first look I thought that I had found what I was looking for. I downloaded Magento (you have to register to download it) and began to set it up. Magento has a free Community Edition that can be used. The fuller Professional Edition is available which comes with a paid support package. The Professional Edition comes with a price tag of $2,995 per year. That might hinder the participation of many small business persons. Magento Community has a lot of themes and extensions (otherwise known as modules). The Magento script has an onboard upload feature which connects to Magento Connect, the site where extensions and themes are made available. Some free things are available at Magento Connect but many of them are offered with a price and some with a hefty price tag. I had quite some trouble with installing a free module from Magento Connect. I\’m not sure just what the trouble was but the installation of that extension caused the total destruction of my site. I entertained the thought that I might have uploaded the wrong version of the extension but I had come to the belief that Magento Connect was going to safeguard me from that. At any rate, the site would need restored through a database backup or a total re-installation. I opted to do neither.

Another problem sprung up earlier which helped me to give up on the notion of using Magento. Shortly after I installed the software and started to configure it I received a blank white screen and a PHP memory error. I set up a php.ini file and increased the php memory. The problem did not go away. I did a little research and found out that Magento typically takes a whopping 128 MB of php memory. The more the weight of the php script the higher the amount of memory that is required. Magento is a little hefty. This would create a real problem. I used to run some Drupal sites on GoDaddy. Drupal with a significant number of modules can require from 60 to 90 MB of memory. When I ran into that situation Godaddy said no, I could not have an increase like that. I found that some other hosting companies will allow this on shared hosting accounts. I think it is doubtful that many hosting companies are going to want people to run php scripts at 128 MB. This could necessitate people obtaining Virtual Private Hosting or a Dedicated Server. This does not mean that Magento is bad, but it means that it is not what I am looking for. Magento is rich and feature full but it is for the online merchant who has need of a larger and more powerful site. I deleted the Magento installation and emptied the tables of the database to make ready for my next trial.

Does Not Have Features I Want

Somewhere along the road of discovery I tried Zeuscart, whose website is at http://zeuscart.com/. Zeuscart is a commercial Open Source shopping cart. with a free version. It is not Open Source in the way that Drupal or Joomla are. You are allowed to modify the source code but there is not a large community of developers for support and what community exists is not directly responsibility for the direction and upgrades of Zeuscart. The company AJ Square Inc., is apparently, responsible for maintaining the software. You may use the free version but must pay for the more advanced version with support.

Zeuscart seems to be a nice shopping cart. It has a modern look and feel and is very presentable. It did not have the extra Search Engine Optimization tools that I desired and that caused me to want to keep on looking. Someone on a forum had raised the objection that Zeuscart had had a security issue which could lead to Cross Site Scripting. Hints of this can be found across the Internet with This Site being one example. People tend to think that software owned by a company rather than a volunteer based community may not, and I stress may not, get speedy attention to security issues. I loved the way that Zeuscart looked but I moved on primarily because of the SEO and security issues. Another quirk was their registration process. When you receive your validation email you proceed to the site and are told that you may now change your password. Try as I may on a couple of occasions, I never found a member area and found no place to add or modify any information. That was sort of an ominous sign to me.

A Cute, Fast, Usable Cart

After some research I decided to try Cube Cart. Cube Cart is a nice little cart which is easy to install and is light weight. I found that there a number of really nice themes and modules available for Cube Cart. There is a tendency for sites which offer themes and modules to require registration and to then have them domain restricted. The theme which you register must have a key applied and then will only work on that exact domain. I obtained a very nice free theme called ‘Orange Crush’ at http://www.mycubecart.com. I had to jump through some hoops to get a registration key and get it registered. It will work at that domain only and it has their link in the footer which cannot be removed without paying a licensing fee. These limitations didn\’t seem too intrusive so I kept Cube Cart for one of my two sited. I find that Cube Cart is very user friendly and dependable. It was very easy to set up. The categories are easy to establish and the pricing, payment and other modules were very easy to cope with. For selling digital downloads there is no upload feature. To set up digital downloads one must use FTP to upload them to a folder on your server. This means that you must be sure to list the exact file name, to a tee, or the download will not be available. You can use Google AdSense easily with Cube Cart. In fact I find Cube Cart to be very appealing with an easy interface and it looks sweet. My shop is located here and I like it. The cart does have some limitations in the area of SEO, not offering a complete set of tools to aid Search Engine Optimization. I believe that if I had 8 to 10 solid hours I could have my cart set up and ready to go online.

Presta Shop – A Great New Cart

I wanted to install one more store and I looked further for a good cart with good SEO tools and options. I found that PrestaShop was an up and coming Shopping Cart which was getting some very favorable attention. PrestaShop is a very light weight shopping cart which has nice modern looks and a very good feature set. I found PrestaShop to be very easy to install. There is a large number of modules in the stock installation of PrestaShop. There are modules for meta keywords and meta description, Google Sitemap, traffic analysis, Google Analytics, newsletter, customer notifications, specials, canonical url and many more. The features of PrestaShop offer a lot of ways to gather and analyze the traffic and visitors to your site. Several of the payment gateways are with foreign companies, since PrestaShop originates in France. It does offer the option of PayPal and also Google Checkout also. The shop is fast to load even though it is loaded with a large number of modules.

It was easy to set up categories and to begin to install products. Setting up your display of products is very easy and there is a color selector feature for products which come in a number of colors. Upload of Cover images is very easy as well as the upload of digital products. Digital products are very easy to deal with and they are uploaded to a secure place on the server without the need to use FTP. Prices can be set at $0 on digital products if you want to offer some free items. The selection of a free item will make it available instantly as a free download. Pricing of products can be set with a discount which will expire after a set period of time. Registration is required for purchase of products with PrestaShop but modules are available for a fee, which will enable a one page checkout for people who do not want to register to buy. Some free templates are available for PrestaShop and customization is possible through templates and CSS.

This is the outcome of my shopping cart comparison in. There are many others that I have not covered. However in my opinion, Cube Cart and PrestaShop are fine php shopping carts – my top two picks. After I got my PrestaShop set up at this address The Ebooks Planet and was pleased with it I noticed that I had an email asking me if I wanted to vote for PrestaShop for the 2010 Open-source Award in the E-commerce category! I did vote for this fine cart software and was glad to do so. Then I found that on November 18 PrestaShop won the Open-Source Award for 2010. I pick PrestaShop as the big winner.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/ecommerce-articles/four-free-or-open-source-shopping-carts-compared-and-the-powerful-new-winner-4407992.html

About the Author

Do you need an Ecommerce Shopping Cart solution for your products? Find the whole process comfusing and distracting from your main business focus? Why take time out from the things that you do the best to learn a new field that is foreign to you.

Allow me to set up an effective online store for your business. I have 12 years experience in Web Design and 4 years experience in CMS and Shopping Cart design. I am a qualified Website Designer.


Categories: Ecommerce, Selling
Tags: , , , ,

Shopping Carts: Five Tips for Evaluating a System

29th November 2010 |

By Pam Hogan

Google the phrase “shopping cart” and you will get 946 million hits. To say there are a lot of directions you can take when it comes to selecting this ecommerce tool is an understatement.

However, it’s very important that you know what you’re looking for in a shopping cart system so that you will be happy for years to come. This is one element of your ecommerce that you don’t want to have to swap out any time soon.

So many people get lulled into the great offers of free shopping carts that abound. You’ll see ads that mention design combinations, and the ability to take all credit cards, the fact that you can make changes quickly and easily. Now when I see descriptions like this I hear the line, “where’s the beef?” These are features meant to impress but in truth they are just fluff. So, be suspicious when you read features describing a shopping cart system and there’s no meat to it.

So, how do you evaluate a shopping cart? Below I have provided you with five elements to consider.

1: Can it handle the delivery of digital products? If you think you might want to sell an ebook or special report or some other digital product then you need to make sure your cart can handle the delivery of soft goods as well as hard.

2: Some carts limit your ability to alter your pricing which means you won’t be able to create a special offer without some act of congress.

3: “Time is money” is an expression that never gets dated. You don’t want to have to reenter information from your shopping cart to your accounting program. Instead, you want to evaluate the shopping cart you’re considering to be sure that it integrates with your accounting software. Otherwise, you’ll be doing far more work than is necessary.

4: Would you like fries with that? This is a question most of us have been asked at some point. If you answered yes, you bought the upsell. Upsells are the easiest way to make extra money without doing extra work. Isn’t it easier to sell french fries to someone who just bought a hamburger than it is to find someone from off the street who wants to buy your fries? Of course it is which is why you want a shopping cart that can handle sophisticated upsells.

5: If you haven’t yet put up your first website it might be hard to imagine that one day you may have several sites. But the truth is that online shoppers respond better to masters than Jacks of all trade, which is why the people making money online have a site dedicated to a niche, talent, or field. You too will probably have more than one website in time which is why you want a shopping cart that you can use on an infinite number of sites without them being tied together in any way. Following this tip can save you a lot of money and headache in the future.

Evaluating a shopping cart may seem overwhelming because it’s a piece of software that most of us don’t think about until we need it, and even then we’re not entirely sure of everything it’s supposed to do. So, bear this in mind there is a reason why the shopping carts hosting companies offer with their hosting plans are free. Free doesn’t buy you much, nor does $9.99 a month. On the other hand, $59 or $79 a month should put you in possession of a sophisticated cart that can do amazing things for your business. It’s well worth taking the time to look under the hood and kick the tires when it comes to the shopping cart.

For a complete checklist for evaluating a shopping cart I would like to offer you access to the FREE ebook “How to Pick a Shopping Cart that Makes Money.” Get your copy from http://www.TheRightCart.com where it’s always free.

Pam Hogan is a best-selling author and nationally recognized trainer who enjoys helping other business owners use ecommerce to expand their enterprises.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Pam_Hogan
http://EzineArticles.com/?Shopping-Carts:-Five-Tips-for-Evaluating-a-System&id=5368430


Categories: Selling
Tags: ,

Make people want to buy from you

3rd February 2010 |

Making people buy from you online is harder to achieve than selling off line. When selling online it is often harder to find and engage objections, there’s no body language to pick up on and customer feedback sometimes doesn’t get through on time. Here are couple of tips to make people buy from you.

1. Offer multiple means to contact you – Selling online successfully is often the case of appearing available to people who are unsure and dealing with objections. The more types of communication means you are able to offer, the more this availability will help convince people of your service and products.

2. Lead with customer service – If you want people to buy from you, you will first have to make people trust you. Leading with customer service and successfully resolving possible issues has the potential to reach people who haven’t yet bought from you, but have heard of your customer service.

3. Appear honest and trustworthy – Online shoppers are very smart, if things are too good to be true, most will know they are. Look to describe your products as accurately as possible, encourage customer reviews and show both the glowing and the not so glowing reviews, and of course take feedback on the chin and react quickly.

4. Offer choice and ensure availability – People reaching your online store expect to find the perfect product for them and buy it then and there. Therefore, it makes sense to ensure you offer plenty of choice and that this choice is available to purchase. Plan well ahead and look for new trends. 

5. Always stay competitive – Smart shoppers go online to because of the choice, the ease of ordering and… the price. If you want people to buy from you, on top of ensuring choice and availability, the price must offer excellent value for money. Check your prices regularly to ensure you haven’t lost that competitive edge.

Article contributed by specs sellers Glasses Direct. The UK’s largest direct seller of prescription glasses and spectacles.


Categories: Selling

Some of the links on this page are Affiliate Links and lead to sites where I can earn commission income should you buy anything. Graham Jones is a participant in the Amazon EU Associates Programme, an affiliate advertising programme designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.co.uk

This site uses cookies. For more information please see the Privacy page.

twitter facebook linkedin youtube rss Google Plus