Targeted stores work

An article I recently read about NetShops caught my eye. In case you don't know them, NetShops is a company that runs over 200 very targeted Internet stores.

Each store is totally focused on a specific niche. Are you looking for a coffee table? There's a store just for that. Don't know where to put your bottles of wine? There's a store that is dedicated to wine racks. Tired and need a break? Head to the hammocks store.

Their strategy has proven very successful, and they keep adding new, niche-oriented stores to their portfolio.

When I first started blogging, the reason for it was mostly that I wanted to point out something that I see over and over on my job: Internet retailers that focus on a niche - if they know their stuff - will be successful. If they are not focused, or forget to stay on track, they have a much harder time.

There are many reasons why this is the case. If you have a few minutes, go back to The niche is the trick (first part) and The niche is the trick (second part) for more on the subject.

The story is not going to change in 2008. If anything, social networking (the idea of people coming together on the Net based on something they have in common) will make this even more true. Stay focused on what you know best. Become more and more the "go to" Web site in your niche (or at least one of them). It will pay off.

Some ideas:

- First and foremost: write good copy for your Web site, keep it current and make sure it is effectively indexed. Your home page should contain some of it, and change regularly to link to the new articles you have written. Those articles should link to products and categories in your store. Basic, extremely effective search engine optimization, without doing anything special.

- Create a community around your store by allowing visitors to write product reviews, post on a forum, and maybe even collaborate on a wiki. These are all things that have become quite easy and inexpensive to implement.

- If you haven't already done so, start a blog on the subject, then link to it from your main Web site.

- Consider attending industry trade-shows. Start small, see if the ROI is there. Given the cost of Internet marketing these days, spending a few thousand dollars on target offline marketing might turn out being money well spent.

And if your Web store ends up being one of the leaders in your niche, NetShops might even write you a check :-)

Tips & Tricks: Using a custom Google search engine on your Web store

Google recently started marketing a pretty interesting tool called "Custom Search Business Edition". Let's take a look at what it is and how it could help your e-commerce store.

What is it?

It'a a Google-powered search engine for your Web site. What does this mean? In a nutshell:

• You can add a search form anywhere on your Web site (e.g. on every page, at the top)
• The results come from Google's index (fast, good results)
• You can define the "portion" of the Google index that the results come from
• The search results can be an integral part of your Web site, with no ads

For example, here is a search for "Google Checkout" on our Early Impact Web site. Notice that the results include both static content (e.g. Web pages, PDF files) and dynamic content (Knowledge Base articles). The results are framed within our Web site interface.

Pricing

This service has been part of Google for a while. What's new is that now you can get an ad-free, cheap version of Google, seamlessly blended into your Web site design. Pricing right now is as follows, based on the number of pages that are being searched:

• Up to 5,000 web pages: $100 per year
• Up to 50,000 web pages: $500 per year
• Up to 100,000 web pages: $850 per year
• Up to 300,000 web pages: $2250 per year

About the search index

A custom Google search engine is a subset of the whole system. Results in the custom search engine exist in Google. You cannot "add" content to the index. You can only filter it so that results that exist in the Google search engine do not come up in your custom version of it. In other words: your custom version of Google is a filtered version of the Google index. Filtered so that it only returns results that you want to show (e.g. only pages that contain your Web site URL).

Getting your store pages to come up in the results

Your store catalog pages (e.g. categories and products) will come up in the results only if they have been indexed by Google. So make sure that Google is building a good index of your store pages.

This article is not the right place to talk about good search engine optimization for your Web site. That said, the approach to getting your store properly indexed is probably known to you by now: use a store map, a Google sitemap, and lots of Well-designed, text-rich static pages to link to your catalog.

In fancier terms: build a lot of link popularity for your category and product pages within your Web site. If you do, you can be almost positive that all of those pages will be found and indexed by a search engine spider.

Why it can help your e-commerce store

Your shopping cart software already has a search feature. I'm sure that's the case. It could be more or less sophisticated, but it's there. The issue is that the search feature included in your e-commerce system typically only searches your store catalog, not the rest of your Web site. What about your forum, knowledge base, regular HTML pages, blogs, etc. etc.?

Could a search that includes those documents help? Could you convert more sales if customers were able to search all of that content? Search is king, they say. That's true on your Web site too. Many studies show that a majority of visitors to a Web site are likely to use the search feature, if it's there.

Since the cost of adding this Google service to your online business is rather low, I would give it a try.

But how can you easily combined the custom Google search engine with your other search feature? Here is a simple suggestion for quick implementation. I'm sure that a much fancier integration of the two could be done, but let's keep things simple and "non-technical" for now.

Combining a Custom Google Search Engine with your e-commerce search form

Again, this is just a suggestion for quick implementation. If you have access to a good developer, they can probably use the API that Google has made available for the custom search service to get a much fancier integration implemented on your Web store.

What I am suggesting is that you alter the advanced search page provided by your e-commerce software to include both the Google Custom Search form and the rest of the search filters. That way you can offer your store visitors a way to either perform a generic Web site search or a more specific store search. The latter will typically have more search filters available (more or less advanced based on how sophisticated your shopping cart software is).

Here is a visual example of this approach. The search form for the Custom Google Search engine is at the top. Technically speaking, the page contains 2 HTML forms.

I hope this helps you convert more store visitors into customers!

Licensed vs. Hosted Shopping Carts

Should you buy a licensed shopping cart or rent a hosted e-commerce solution? It's a big decision. There are clear advantages and disadvantages with both approaches. Practical eCommerce just ran two interviews on the topic.

• They interviewed me as the "licensed carts" guy. See what I had to say >>
• Michael Valiant of 1ShoppingCart is the "hosted carts" counterpart. Read his opinion >>

It's an interesting debate, with no winner. There's no winner simply because both solutions have reasons to exist and businesses for which they represent the right fit.

The important part is that - if you are in the process of deciding how to build your estore - you understand the good and not-so-good aspects of both solutions.

Tips & Tricks: Optimizing your "Search Box"

Search is a key feature for any e-commerce store. According to recent studies, half of visitors to an online store begin their visit by typing a keyword in the search box. And consumers that use the search feature appear more likely to buy than others. If that is the case, then...

1. Search Box
   Make sure that you estore layout does contain a "quick search" form in a place that makes sense. If it's not there, some customers may be turned off and walk away. Below we're going to spend a bit of time looking at where that search box should go.


2. Search Results
   Make sure that your search feature returns relevant search results, offers ways to narrow the search, and provides a friendly way to browse the results. I still see a lot of small business e-commerce tools pay little or no attention to their search feature. Technologies like AJAX can be very helpful in enhancing the search experience (at Early Impact we did a lot of work in this area: try a search on this demo store).

Even if your shopping cart does not have a strong-enough search feature, there are a lot of third-party tools that you can employ to improve the search capabilities of your online store. This will be the topic of another post.

For now, let's focus on the search box. It's such an important piece of your store layout (again, likely 50% of your visitors will use it!), that it deserves a lot of attention. Specifically, where should it go? On the left? On the right? How should it look?

I'm a big, big advocate of learning from people that are very good at what they do. So let's look at how the Top 5 online retailers (according to US online sales) position the search box on their store layouts. You'll see that the result of this bit of research is not what you might have expected.











Just by looking at these 5, leading retailers, there are a few things that we can learn and apply to all of our stores:

• Search is definitely key. Each store puts the search box in an extremely visible location. Office Depot even highlights the "Search" button in red.
• The Search Box is at the TOP. Not in a left or right-side column. It's always at the top.
• The Search Box can be right at the CENTER. The search box is so key that the top 3 online retailers put it right at the top center. You can't miss it.
• It's a good idea to write what type of search customers can run (e.g. "Keyword Search" vs. "Keyword and SKU search") right in the input field. That way there are no surprises. You can use simple JavaScript to remove that default text "onFocus" (useful links for this task)

Time to update many of our store layouts :-)

Should you use Google Analytics?

Is Google's free Web statistics service worth your time? We've been using it on our Web site and Web store for quite some time now, and have integrated it in our shopping carts. Here's my opinion based on the experience.

Summary

If your shopping cart can provide order information to Google Analytics, then the e-commerce reports generated by GA can help you understand where your sales are coming from and make it a good choice for your business.

The report that you can view by selecting "Traffic Sources > Keywords > E-commerce (tab)" will trigger a "wow" for many Internet merchants that have not seen something like this before (it details exactly how many orders each keyword phrase used in a search engine triggered in a given date range - see example below from our own Early Impact account). Since it's free, I'd give it a try if I were you.

Pros
What we like in Google Analytics (here I'm focusing on the most unique aspects of the system as there are many other services that offer good Web stats).

• E-commerce Reporting
  For an e-commerce store, this is without a doubt where the biggest value is. If your shopping cart program passes order information to Google Analytics, you will be able to see reports that merge sales and traffic data. What this means is that you can look up which keywords customers used to find your Web site, and whether they ended up generating any orders. This information is powerful as it can help you fine-tune your landing pages (and your Web store overall) to focus on revenue-generating keywords.
  
  For a list of e-commerce applications that have been integrated with Google Analytics, see the "e-commerce integrations" area of the GA forums.


• Shopping Cart Abandonment "goal"
  GA allows you to monitor specific behaviors on your Web site. The call this feature "goals", which is a somewhat confusing name. The idea is that your "goal" might be to get people to register, and you can track the "visit to registration" conversion by telling Google Analytics which pages (URLs) are used in the process. For an e-commerce store, this becomes quite interesting if you apply it to your checkout process. Rather than a goal, you'll be keeping an eye on your shopping cart abandonment rate. By telling GA which steps customers take during checkout, you can monitor the drop-off at each step (GA has some pretty neat visual reports for this). For instance: view cart -> login -> billing -> shipping -> payment. If you saw at high drop-off at the "shipping" step, it might indicate that your shipping rates are too high.


• Interface
  GA just released an updated interface. Tons of flash-based reports that look quite nice and that make changing the date range on reports quick and easy. The customizable "Dashboard" (your start page) is useful too.


• Email Reporting
  There are many options for receiving regular reports from your GA account, without having to log in. I like the fact that you can have the system send you a PDF copy of your customized "dashboard": it's a quick way to get a summary of your Web stats, and you're saving a hard copy of some of your statistics for your records (in case Google goes belly up and your Web site stats with it... but that's not going to happen anytime soon anyway :-)


• Cost
  GA is free, and that's hard to complain about. But, your Web hosting company probably offers you free stats too. Again, the real value for a Web store is in the e-commerce reports.
  

Cons
Things that could be improved.

• Refunds and Cancellations
  There is no way to "remove" a transaction (e.g. an order was cancelled). What you can do is post a negative transaction that offsets the original one. This is tricky to do unless your shopping cart software has a built-in feature to help you with it. Ask you e-commerce software provider about it (the screen shot below shows you what we did in ProductCart). Bug GA could make things easier in this area by providing some functionality right into their console.
  
  
  
  Missing Transactions: A by-product of this issue is that when you post a negative transaction that completely offsets another one, the two transactions "disappear" when you view a report for a date rage that includes both, but they are shown when the date range does not include both. This creates confusion as some orders are shown in some reports and not others. I have already notified the Google Analytics team on this, and hopefully they'll post a fix.


• E-commerce Reports
  I'd like to see more options to organize and save custom e-commerce reports. For example, even simple features like the ability to sort by order number or order date is missing (you can sort by order amount and you can specify different date ranges, but you can't easily sort within a date range).
  
• Reliability
  I should also note that some people recently complained of reliability problems. Google was quick to point out that no data was lost: the issue was just that the Google Analytics console could not be accessed. I don't see that as a big issue, and I'm sure that with Google's deep pockets, more powerful data centers will reduce the chances of that happening again.

I'm always interested in hearing your thoughts. By the way: if you end up using Google Analytics, keep an eye on the Analytics blog as the GA team postd there pretty frequently.

Google Analytics and Spry

I haven't posted much lately because I've been spending time reading and learning about a couple of interesting technologies and solutions that will definitely affect small business e-commerce in the upcoming months.

1. Google Analytics
   A good, free Web statistics solution (from Google's purchase of Urchin). It's easy to track statistics on your Web site (and Web store) using Google Analytics. And the price is hard to beat. Look into it if you haven't yet. But... where things get really interesting is when you can tie your e-commerce store to your GA account so that sales data is fed to the system. Then Google Analytics can output some really neat reports about where your sales are coming from. There are a couple of issues with handling refunds and cancellations, which is one of the things we are working on at Early Impact. Check with your shopping cart provider to see where they are with Google Analytics integration. You might be able to turn it on already.
2. Spry
   Adobe (ex Macromedia) is working on a framework for AJAX that will make it easier for an ecommerce development company to add more, cool interface elements to our applications. For example, you could have your ecommerce store tell you which customers exist in the database as you type the customer name, facilitating and speeding up searches. You can read about Spry and play with some of their demos at: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/ - Spry can also help you add some cutting-edge looking navigation to your storefront.

I'll blog more about both things in the upcoming weeks.

Understanding the new PayPal

PayPal: one of the most recognized brands in ecommerce. It used to be synonymous with the ability to exchange payments in a peer-to-peer world of PayPal users (there are over 50 million of them), where payment notifications are sent via e-mail.

You can still do e-mail payments with PayPal, but PayPal today is not a payment system: it's a suite of many different payment systems.
What are they? How do they differ from each other? Which ones should you use, if any? Let's take a look.

Website Payments Standard
Customers pay on the PayPal Web site. When you activate this payment option on your store (if supported), customers will temporarily leave the store, pay at the PayPal Website (with or without having a PayPal account), and come back to your Web site at the end of the transaction.

Website Payments Pro
This is a combination of two payment systems:

• Direct payments: customers pay by credit card, without leaving your store, and without knowing that PayPal is involved at all (no PayPal branding on the payment page)
• Express Checkout: in a nutshell, this is PayPal's answer to Google Checkout (actually, they came up with it first, so maybe Google copied them :-)
  It works very similarly to Google Checkout in terms of the user experience: it's an alternative checkout process. That is: no registering/logging in on your store, but rather off to PayPal where the same login information can be used for any store that supports Express Checkout.

Payflow Payment Gateway
PayPal bought the Payflow payment systems from Verisign in November of 2005. There are two options:

• Payflow Pro: this is your standard payment gateway: there is a payment form on your Web site (if your shopping cart supports this payment system), customers don't leave your store, you need an Internet merchant account.
• Payflow Link: customers leave your store and pay for the order on the Payflow Link payment page.

Are you confused? I was. For example, take Website Payments Pro's Direct Payments and Payflow Pro: they both allow credit card payments, on your Web site, without any PayPal branding. What's the difference?

I asked Matt Watts, business development manager at PayPal. Here are some of the things he said.

What are the main differences between Website Payments Pro and PayFlow Pro, in terms of features?

Website Payments Pro combines a gateway and merchant account into a single solution. Merchants intending to use this service open a PayPal business account, submit an application, and are vetted accordingly. The reporting functionality is limited with Website Payments Pro, so for any merchants who are transacting over about two-hundred orders monthly, they’d most likely want to use PayFlow Pro. PayFlow Pro is a gateway only and requires the merchant to find their own banking relationship for the Internet Merchant Account. PayFlow’s functionality is more advanced from a reporting standpoint, so reconciliation of transactions is much easier.

When would you advise a company to adopt WPP vs PayFlow Pro? What are the elements that should trigger a decision towards one solution versus the other?

If the merchant is new to the e-commerce landscape, they’re probably better off working with WPP for processing, simply because it’s an all-in-one solution that is inexpensive. However, for merchants who are established, process numerous orders daily and need more advanced reporting, then PayFlow Pro is the better solution.

[Massimo's note: getting an Internet Merchant Account for Payflow Pro is probably harder than getting approved for Paypal Website Payments Pro, especially if you have a brand new business].

Could a store have both PayPal Website Payments Pro and PayFlow Pro active ( e.g. to use PayPal Express)?

It would be possible for a merchant to have PayFlow Pro and WPP active on their site. However, merchants typically have one gateway and one merchant account for direct credit card payments. When Express Checkout has been integrated into a shopping cart like ProductCart, then it can be used with any gateway the merchant wants to use (ie. If the merchant is using Authorize.net, PayFlow, or WPP, they’ll be able to add Express Checkout).

[Massimo's note: assuming your shopping cart supports both, you would not activate Direct Payments and PayFlow Pro on the same store, since to the user they look the same = a credit card form on your Web store. But you might indeed want to have Express Checkout active together with another payment option (e.g. Authorize.net or another payment gateway). If you enable WPP Direct Payments, then Express Checkout is enabled automatically].

When would you advise a company to adopt PayFlow Link?

PayFlow Link merchants typically don’t have much experience with e-commerce and they want a solution where they can cut and paste HTML into their website to post payments to our secure form. Since most shopping carts have other payment gateways integrated and merchants don’t need to worry about the integration, PayFlow Link becomes irrelevant since the primary market it serves is lower-level, new merchants who can’t integrate API-based solutions.

[Massimo's note: Back in the old days when SSL certificates cost hundreds of dollars a year, a payment system like Payflow Link was a popular option as you would send customers to a secure page, outside of your Web site, and didn't have to buy an SSL certificate. But... it's 2007 and the cost of SSL certs has come down dramatically, so having your own SSL certificate should be a no-brainer if you are serious about running a professional ecommerce store.]

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All right, so, here is how I see it.

• Express Checkout (WPP): Activate it on your store if you want to provide an alternative checkout option, similar to Google Checkout. When you activate Direct Payments, Express Checkout is also enabled automatically (this is a PayPal requirement)
• Direct Payments (WPP): an easy way to support credit card payments on your store, without having to get an Internet Merchant Account through your bank.
• PayFlow Pro: a more robust payment gateway that is the way to go if your store gets/is busy (several hundred orders a day). You do need an Internet Merchant Account.
• PayFlow Link: if you use a professional shopping cart, you don't need it.

(WPP) = this is part of PayPal Website Payments Pro.