e-commerce

Warp 9, Inc. (OTC Bulletin Board: WNYN), the premier provider of robust e-commerce platforms and services, today announces the findings from a six month year-over-year organic search engine revenue comparison for 2009 vs. 2008. The results:
A 72% increase in FREE revenue!
Read the full story

E-commerce growth has reduced from 25% during June 07 to just 11% in June 2008. Industry analysts feel this might be the result of the recent economic stimulus by the U.S. government.

comScore, Inc. an internet information provider in its recent release stated that there has been a reduction in purchases during the last two months. The report also reveals that the purchase growth drop off started from November 2007.

According to Chairman Gian Fulgoni of comSore, “With the first round of the government’s economic stimulus checks having been mailed in early May, one would have hoped they would have bolstered online spending in May and June,” He also added, “However, recent comScore research reveals that fully two thirds of consumers said they had not planned to spend their stimulus checks and rather intended to use the cash to pay off debt or put the money into savings, a finding we’ll be taking a closer look at during next week’s webinar. In addition, it’s likely the impact of the stimulus may have been felt more offline, where a variety of merchants made it particularly easy for consumers to cash their checks at retail stores.”

The report also discloses that the top hot sellers were video games, consoles and accessories. This was followed by furniture, appliances and equipments.

Christmas season is obviously the highest revenue earner. Customers start searching for gifts and personal purchases many months before Christmas arrives. If you have an e-commerce website and would like to make good use of this season, you should get your basics right now.

Holiday Marketing Plan

Most of the online sellers know where the source of revenue is and which pays more. It’s just that they do not have a clear marketing plan which targets those areas. A well planned start is much closer to the finishing line. To succeed you need to plan first. Take down a pen and paper and put your thoughts on it.

1. Who are your clients?
2. What would you do to reach your clients?
3. Which products yielded you the maximum profits last year?
4. Which product is the most selling?
5. Do you have all features and tools to help customers buy these products on your website?
6. How will you handle out-of-stock and fast-delivery issues? Do you have a backup?

Once you find out the answers for such questions, you would obviously land in a marketing plan. You would know where you are and what you need to do to climb the peak. The climb would definitely be difficult, but the excitement at the top is invaluable.

Analyze your Plan

Now that you have a plan, are you sure that the plan would succeed. Today, not just one, but a number of strategies and plans are required to work simultaneously to succeed. These combinations of strategies and plans makes it a huger structure and tougher to correlate to. One helps the success of other.

To analyze your plan:

Online Stats

Use online statistics to check if your competitors have implemented or are following similar plans that you have worked on.
How successful is the plan on their websites?
What is the percentage of competitor growth?
Use tools like Google Adwords to check the popularity of your product keywords.

Implementation

Now that you have found out the best route to success, start implementing them on the site. The sooner you implement, the faster you would reap results for the holiday season. Always remember that there are millions of potential customers online. However, there are huge number of competitors too who are experienced players.

Holiday Offers

Holiday offers are a great way to promote your products. A good offer can even convert a casual onlooker to become one of your buyers. Offers attract and lure an onlooker. Offers on electronic products can be a great way to increase your product sales.

Use pay-per-click programs to advertise about your offers on third party websites. The advertisements when clicked should land a person directly on the product page and not the home page.

Geographic Sales

If you could deliver the products only in the United States and Canada, its good you focus these two areas instead of the entire world. If it is just a state, set the geographic location on search engines using their webmaster tools.

Holiday Landing Pages

Create or modify your existing landing pages for Holidays. Good images and discounts can increase your sales to a greater extent. Some e-commerce websites change the entire look of the website during the holiday season.

Shipping

Shipping is one major eye-catcher which can make the deal. Various web analytical tools have revealed that many customers leave the online transaction process when they see that the shipping cost is being added to the product cost. This is unpleasing to most buyers and they end up calculating the difference it would make buying online and buying it in a shop. If the product is wide spread and shops sell it for few more dollars, most customers would prefer to buy it in a shop as they have the freedom to see it and check it before purchasing it.

Once these are planned and organized, you are all set to face the holiday season. All the best on your holiday sales!