Following usability guidelines for your eCommerce site are obviously important. Design aspects of your website such as quick downloading, easy navigation and interaction with no ambiguity trigger sales, however selling to foreign markets requires extra consideration. An eCommerce site that only focuses on their target audience in one country cannot exploit the internet’s global reach and many eCommerce sites are losing much overseas business due to the usability of their site to international customers. Foreign consumers may have heard about your site and are able to find it easily but any marketing employed by your business will be wasted if they cannot connect with the content on your site, preferring instead to use a local site. Research has suggested that internet users are four times more likely to purchase from a website that communicates in their own language and over 50% of web users speak a native language other than English so connecting to these non English speaking countries will potentially double your audience and hopefully double your sales!

Localisation refers to designing your website in a way that can be adapted for and is appropriate to international customers. Taking into account language and cultural differences will allow you to communicate with more customers worldwide and increase sales. Applications can be localised to different levels depending on the user group or culture you expect to use your site. You may wish to keep the content of your site the same but translate local measures such as currency or time or you may decide to translate the product text and terminology to suit the appropriate country. Some eCommerce sites even go as far to change colours, images and symbols to suit the target culture as customers perceptions of service quality differ from country to country. For example, The colour red means error, stop or warning in western culture however this isn’t the case for Asian countries. In pursuing a global market, businesses should be sensitive to elements such as this. If you understand their local cultures, how they use technology and their expectations you will most likely be successful in selling to them.

Even simple differences between variants of English can make or break a sale. For example, British English and American English obviously differ with British using shopping basket and Americans preferring shopping cart and spelling variations such as colour and color. Customers who recognize that the site is based abroad will become less trusting of it, hence less likely to purchase from it. This isn’t a case of automatic translation but researching your target markets expectations and customs.

When did you last check your eCommerce site for these issues? Can you get more sales from applying simple changes?

For most eCommerce sites, the biggest loss of revenue is at the checkout due to shopping cart abandonment. Around 60% of shopping baskets are abandoned before customers have completed their purchase meaning businesses are losing thousands of potential sales. Reasons for basket abandonment can be; high delivery costs, checkout problems, lengthy registrations, fear about the security of their personal information or that the shopper is merely browsing or comparison shopping.

Here are 10 tips to reduce shopping basket abandonment rates and INCREASE SALES on your eCommerce site…

1.       Keep the checkout process short and simple and don’t ask for any information that isn’t necessary. It may seem like the perfect opportunity to gather information about your customers, however lengthy registrations can put customers off and cause them to abandon their baskets.

2.       Make all additional costs i.e. delivery charges clear from the beginning of the checkout process so there are no shocks about seeing the total of the basket suddenly increase due to shipping costs right before the customer is about to make their payment.

3.       Give full contact information during the checkout process to reassure customers you are a real company and reduce their anxieties about purchasing online.

4.       Inform customers about the policies you have in place either on the checkout page itself or via a link available on it. These may include security, privacy, delivery, return and customer service policies. It is often a good idea to place links to these policies in relevant places, for example, delivery and return policies next to the shipping costs and your security policy next to the checkout button.

5.       Include a progress indicator showing steps of checkout so the customer knows steps they have already completed and those left to complete. Also give the customer the option to go back a step if they need to review or amend what they have done. It is a good idea to limit the checkout process to two or three steps.

6.       Provide links back to items selected in the shopping basket so customers can double check they have selected the items they wanted.

7.       Using pictures of products inside the shopping basket has been known to reduce abandonment rates by 10%. Again this is to ensure the customer knows they have selected the item they planned to purchase.

8.       Make editing the shopping cart easy. It should be simple to change products, change quantities, add and delete items. If customers become confused or frustrated about doing this they will abandon their shopping cart without making a purchase.

9.       Show stock availability for each item on product page so that customers don’t have to reach the checkout before realising the product that they wanted is out of stock or backordered.

10.       Offer the option of saving the shopping basket. Comparison shoppers often add items to their shopping baskets without any intention to make a purchase at that time. Give them an option to save their basket for later purchase. Also, this is another reason to show stock availability on the product page; if there is limited stock left for the item they are looking at, it may encourage them to make a purchase there and then.

There has been a huge increase in companies opting to use voucher codes on affiliate’s websites in the hope that these will be turned into sales. Consumers are always looking for savings on the internet and so offering voucher codes has become an effective marketing strategy for merchants.  A voucher can often turn a consumer from window shopper to an actual customer. In return, the affiliate receives some sort of commission, usually in the form of a percentage of the total product sale amount or a fixed amount per product sold. We plan to use voucher code websites as part of our marketing plan for Eliot Turner.

I have identified the top 10 UK voucher websites:

• www.myvouchercodes.co.uk
• www.vouchercodes.com
• www.freeinuk.co.uk
• www.latestdiscountvouchers.co.uk
• http://www.vouchers.co.uk/
• www.hotukdeals.com
• www.everydaysale.co.uk
• www.promotionalcodes.org.uk
• www.discount-voucher.co.uk
• www.spendlessonline.co.uk/voucher

And a few international sites:

• www.couponcodes4u.com USA
• www.vouchermate.co.nz NZ
• www.buckscoop.com.au AUS

All sites are essentially the same, offering similar discounts. www.myvouchercodes.co.uk claim to be the UK’s  No.1 discount code website offering deals from 1000’s of stores, hence likely to have the most hits and obviously the international sites are seen by a wider audience. We will take this into consideration when choosing which voucher code sites to use as affiliates.

Competitor analysis involves learning more about the businesses that function around the same target demographic as you enabling you to assess their strengths and weaknesses whilst identifying opportunities and threats to your own business.

Often businesses become obsessed with competitor analysis whilst others can ignore what their competitors are doing completely. A healthy medium would be to track competition, react to changes but focus on your own plans.  After identifying the main competition in the market, it is useful to recognize the threats they pose, their company objectives and strategies and their weaknesses, this can only add to the strength of your own business.

It is useful to create a competitor profile for each of your competitors as it enables you to gather all relevant information in one place allowing you to formulate an effective strategy to implement, monitor and adjust where needed. Competitor profiles include their background, financials, products, marketing, facilities, personnel and corporate and marketing strategies. Knowing your competition’s planned strategies allows you to plan a response through your own strategy whilst at the same time revealing strategic weaknesses.

We have identified accessorize as the main market leader for this type of jewellery, however there are many that sell handmade jewellery offering similar products to Eliot Turner that are certainly market competition.

Here are the ones I have identified as the biggest competition:

The Spotty Dog Shop

Lisa's Handmade Jewellery

FarFallina

Purple Label

Pia Jewellery

Silver Wire Designs

We plan to create competitor profiles for our competition; however, we do not want to concentrate too much on what our competition is doing instead focusing our time and energy on our own plans.

On Monday 29th June, Justin and I spoke at the SuperMondays event held at Newcastle University about the eCommerce experiment to a crowd of approximately 40 people. Thanks to Ross Cooney for inviting us to take part.

This was going to be a video post but time didn’t allow! I’ll be going into more detail about running prize draws and where to submit them later this week.

We now have our domain name online and a prize draw running. Head over to http://www.eliotturner.com to enter and try and win a Handmade Swarovski Silver and Pearl Jewelery Set (Necklace, Bracelet and Ear-ring Set). The prize draw is a world wide prize draw so please pass it around and give it some link love. The only restriction is that it is one entry per person.

I believe that any business with clear goals which everyone in the organisation is working to will always succeed. We sat down as a team to discuss the goals for Eliot Turner for the coming year.

We decided to set 5 realistic goals which are:

1.      Achieve a turnover of £100,000 in the first year of trading
2.      Develop 1000 unique daily  visitors to the website by the end of the first year
3.      Primarily use social networking to build the business
4.      Build a brand which can be trusted on both a national and international market place
5.      Diversify into two other market areas by the end of year one. Initial ideas have been handbags, hats, beauty products and designer clothes

Looking beyond this it is worth to mention that one of our long term goals is to create a £1 million turnover by the end of year three.