Category: Ecommerce

How To Develop A Pricing Strategy That Is Perfect For Your Products
Pricing your products is a tricky thing. What might seem simple at first — simply identify the wholesale product cost, and then up the price to get a profit — is actually quite complex.

There are several different ways you can develop a pricing strategy. To help you navigate this tricky area, I’ve identified some common pricing strategies that you can use for your own products. Read on to discover how to develop a pricing strategy that suits your products perfectly.

How to price your product

There are many different pricing strategies that you can use as a retailer, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. I’ll dig into a few later, but first, let’s go through the basics of pricing your product.

Calculate your variable costs

The first thing to consider when you’re pricing your product are the costs of goods sold. These involve all the necessary expenses that go into producing, marketing, and shipping your product. These won’t stay the same — they will vary according to the product you’re pricing.

Depending on the product you’re selling, these costs might involve:
- Manufacturing time: how much time is spent making these products, and how much per hour do they cost you in labor?
- Shipping: labor time, courier fees, and so on
- Packaging: more delicate products might require more expensive packaging materials.
- Raw materials: if you produce your products yourself, how much are the raw materials that go in them?
- Marketing materials: whether it’s leaflets or paid ads, consider how much these cost per product.
Once you’ve identified all these variable costs, you can accurately work out the final cost of goods sold per product.

Calculate your profit markup

Now you’ve got your cost per goods sold, it’s time to add a profit markup. This includes your profit into the final price of your product at sale.

When you’re calculating your profit margin, bear in mind that you’re only calculating it based on the variable costs per product. This won’t include the fixed costs that your business incurs, such as hosting costs or business utilities.

You should also consider what prices you’re up against in terms of your competitors. If your profit margin far exceeds that of your business rivals, then your customers won’t be impressed.

With that in mind, take your variable costs and divide them by 1 less your required profit markup as a decimal.

So, let’s say your variable cost per product is $15, and your profit margin is 30%. In this scenario, it would be expressed as:

$15 / (1 – 0.3)

This leaves us with a product price of $21.43.

Once you’ve got this final price, conduct a break-even analysis to calculate how many units you need to sell to cover your fixed costs (or find a useful break-even template here). This will help you make accurate forecasts for the year ahead, and you can determine how to set a product price that works for you.

What pricing strategies are open to you?

There are several different pricing strategies open to retailers. Here are just a few common strategies you should consider.

Keystone pricing

This is the most common strategy used by retailers when pricing their products. In short, it involves doubling the original wholesale price of a product to identify what it should be sold at to the customer.

But it’s not as simple as that. There are several factors that can affect keystone pricing.

For example, if your sales are irregular or require significant handling costs, then your final retail price might not account for the extra work involved. Conversely, if your products are popular or readily sold elsewhere, you might need to reduce the retail cost to increase sales.

While keystone pricing is simple and easy to follow, it can easily get complicated. Depending on your business and the products you sell, you might need to iterate with your prices to find the right one for you.

Manufacturer suggested retail price (MSRP)

Manufacturer suggested retail price (MSRP) refers to the recommended price of a product as stipulated by the original manufacturer. This strategy helps keep product prices the same when sold by different retailers.

Products covered by MSRP are usually those which have to conform to accepted industry standards, for example, home appliances such as ovens or refrigerators. MSRP means that big-ticket items aren’t priced at wildly varying amounts.

MSRP makes it simple for retailers — simply save time and follow the recommended pricing plan. However, this does prevent you from getting competitive with your prices. Your competition likely sells the same product for the same price, so getting ahead can be tricky.

Discount pricing

Discounting is a solid pricing strategy that virtually every business uses, and with great success.

While you might get less money in return for your product, the other gains are considerable: higher traffic to your store, an opportunity to upsell other products (and get rid of unsold stock), and the chance to reach a whole new consumer base who might not usually visit your store.

But be wary: too much discounting can negatively impact your business, especially with big-ticket items. As Jennifer Diepstraten says in Marketing Speak podcast, “if somebody is willing to discount and low ball just to get the business, they just destroyed their perception of value.” Be cautious with your discounts — apply them where necessary, but don’t go overboard just to drive traffic to your store.

Bundle pricing

As the name suggests, bundle pricing refers to the bundling of several items for a single price. This is most commonly seen with products like groceries or clothing, but other industries also employ it too.

Bundling products can actually increase sales. Customers feel as though they’re getting more bang for their buck when the saving they’re actually making is generally less than they perceive. However, this also means that selling those same products individually is trickier. Customers feel as though they’re missing out, and may be less likely to buy them alone.

Pricing your product can be tricky. But with the tips above, it’s easy to find the right pricing structure for your products. Don’t be afraid to update your prices as you go — iteration is key to a successful pricing strategy. Use the knowledge here to find the perfect pricing strategy for your products today.
August 9, 2019
The Link Between Ecommerce Customer Relationships and Data Analytics

Customer relationships are as important in ecommerce as they’ve ever been in traditional retail — perhaps more so, because online merchants are competing in a global battlefield, meaning that providing good store experiences really matters to companies operating in this space.

Having a brick-and-mortar store in the right location with the right aesthetic can be enough to pick up some easy sales, but the closest online equivalent to having a good location is ranking well for prime keywords, and that’s much harder to achieve.

Data analytics, meanwhile, fuel the engine for large-scale growth. The accessibility of rich data on every trackable element of online activity (and that’s a large pool) is what allows businesses to comprehensively optimize their operations. Using it to full effect, today’s big brands are persistently finding new and smarter ways to improve efficiency.

So what’s the connection between these two mainstays of the modern merchant? They seem disparate — one emotive, nuanced, seemingly analog, and the other objective, exact, firmly digital — but they inform and contextualize each other. Follow along as I provide a more in-depth look at what I mean by this:

The analog/digital divide is illusory

When machine learning first started getting some traction in mainstream business, it met with some resistance from old-fashioned types who didn’t see its value for complex processes like customer relationship management. After all, they reasoned, people are difficult enough for other people to understand — they’re capricious, awkward, often ignorant, and unpredictable.

On the other end of the spectrum, those who were firmly on the digital bandwagon might have considered the investigation of specific customer cases to be unnecessary. When you have pulped and parsed data from hundreds or even thousands of customers, what’s the point in getting hung up on specific events? That’s how you miss the wood for the trees.

What smart retailers eventually realized, though, is that the inferred distinction is false. It isn’t a matter of analog versus digital — it’s a matter of micro versus macro, and if you want to make the most of your online sales opportunities, you need to consider both. Here’s why:

Performance data must be contextualized

Let’s say (as is entirely plausible) that you either run or work for an ecommerce business. Your system is configured to gather information through Google Analytics or whichever analytics platform you prefer, so your database continues to grow. You thus have access to countless metrics of varying significance: everything from dwell time to average conversion value.

You can spend hours poring over that data, but that time won’t necessarily produce any notable conclusions. The problem? A lack of context. When you look at performance metrics, you see only fragmented reflections of complicated situations. You see how many pages the average visitor looks at, but you don’t know why, so you can’t know what (if anything) it means.

The value of an involved customer relationship management process, then, is in giving you the framing you need to make sense of your data. The more feedback you gather from your customers, the more you can read into your metrics — whether you’re able to understand why a certain page is performing so well, or left with a curious disparity between what your customers say and what your data says (this can be remarkably illuminating, because people are often mistaken when trying to detail their own behavior).

You can’t usefully pursue CRM without analytics

On the other side of the coin, of course, you have the prospect of dedicated customer relationship managers trying to succeed using little more than direct interaction, buyer personas, and nebulous concepts such as gut feeling. It’s extremely valuable to know how to interact with people, yes, but it simply isn’t enough if you’re trying to achieve optimal results.

As noted, we’re not that great at explaining (or even remembering) our own actions. Think about your favorite websites, ecommerce or otherwise: why do you like them so much? Are you absolutely confident that the reasons you can cite fully explain your attachment? Do you recall precisely why you clicked on the link to this piece? However certain you are, I’m inclined to suggest a sliver of doubt. Our subconscious minds heavily shape our decisions.

But the issues with self-assessment don’t stop there. Consider that the human race is excellent at self-deceptions, be they harmful or innocuous, and a great example is that of musical taste. In principle, we should all just accept that we like whatever music we like, and feel no shame or guilt about it — but that’s not how culture works.

Here’s an specific scenario: let’s say that you regularly browse and buy from a music store (whether involving physical media or digital downloads), and one day someone from the store reaches out to you for some feedback about your store experiences. Because you’re embarrassed about your musical taste and you feel confronted, you offer a warped account of the features you like and dislike, resulting in feedback that won’t be too useful.

Our retail habits can be deeply personal and emotional, so our recollections are invariably sullied by ambiguity, redaction, and creative reimagining. But analytics data doesn’t degrade, and while it can be unclear, it can’t be mistaken. Only by using it to underpin your CRM can you establish the foundation you need to achieve consistent results.

The future is driven by integration

In some ways, you can draw a parallel between this link and the one that binds all marketing channels together in modern multi-channel marketing. Retailers that would once maintain distinct departments for distinct tactics — a social media team, an email marketing team, a paid advertising team — now understand that they’re better understood as parts of much broader customer journeys.

Similarly, it isn’t ideal to have a team concentrating on CRM and another handling data analytics. Data analytics should be the connecting tissue between all departments as opposed to a pursuit in itself, because context-free data holds little value, but contextual data is key to turning a small online store into an international retail powerhouse.

Aiming to get more from your ecommerce store, then? Start concentrating more strongly on weaving analytics through everything you do. It’s become highly accessible in recent years, particularly for those using high-end solutions such as Magento’s Commerce Cloud edition or Shopify’s multi-channel centric Shopify Plus — especially since each one (along with various other retail platforms) has straightforward API connectivity with Adverity DataTap. So what are you waiting for? Stop treating data as a gimmick, and start getting results.

Overall, then, the link between ecommerce customer relationships and data analytics is simple: it’s codependency. You can’t have valuable ecommerce data without understanding the customers that produce it, and you can’t manage customer relationships effectively with no way to reliably track the consequences.

July 18, 2019
Ecommerce Sales Through Content Marketing: 4 Examples

Content marketing and ecommerce go hand-in-hand.

Traditional sales strategies such as paid ads only go so far when it comes to convincing your customers to part with their hard-earned cash. Ad-savvy consumers are numb to the hard sell.

But content marketing overcomes this obstacle. It flies under the radar, a subtle product ad disguised as entertaining, informative, or useful content. You can introduce new customers to your brand in a way that feels natural and organic — and it works.

But creating the right kind of content that customers will love can be tricky. So instead of dithering over your content marketing, why not take some inspiration from the best? Read on for four examples of ecommerce content marketing that will inspire you today.

Burberry: taking to the trench (coats) for UGC success

User-generated content is a quick-win for online store owners in a pinch. With an estimated 2.77 billion people worldwide on social media, there’s no shortage of UGC for ecommerce businesses to use in their content marketing strategy.

UGC is more than just an easy way to fill your editorial calendar. It’s a powerful form of content marketing that builds your customer community, showing shoppers that they matter to your brand to keep them returning time and again.

And for an example of UGC done right, one need look no further than luxury fashion brand, Burberry.

Luxury brands have traditionally been slow on the uptake when it comes to social media. But in 2009, Burberry took the plunge and launched its Art of the Trench campaign. The brand created a dedicated microsite on which it could display real customers showing off their Burberry trench coats.

Image Burberry

The campaign transformed its customers into pseudo-models for Burberry, giving some love to its consumer base while marketing its own products at the same time. What really took this campaign further though was the addition of links to Burberry product pages, so inspired customers could buy the same coat themselves with just a few clicks.

This is UGC done right. People-powered and product-pushing, the Art of the Trench campaign helped grow Burberry considerably online.

In the year following the campaign’s launch, the brand’s Facebook followers grew to more than a million, the highest in the industry at the time. Online year-on-year sales increased by 50%, and visitors to the Burberry website hit 7.5 million from 150 countries worldwide in the year after the campaign was launched. Finally, conversions from the campaign were higher than from any other channel the brand used during that period.

Overall, a resounding success, even for a massive global brand like Burberry.

How to get it right

UGC is an inexpensive and self-propagating form of content marketing that pays dividends for brands — when it’s done right. The key to UGC marketing lies in giving your customers a good reason to create, submit, and share their own content, while simultaneously promoting your product.

Find that sweet spot between product promotion and customer involvement, and then promote your UGC submissions across your various marketing channels.

Shopify: case studies that celebrate customers while promoting the brand

Case studies are a valuable form of content marketing. They combine social proof with real-world expertise to deliver value to customers while simultaneously selling your own product or service.

One brand that knows the value of case studies (and how to get it right) is DIY ecommerce store builder Shopify.

Image Shopify

Shopify’s blog is replete with page after page of case studies of its own satisfied merchants. It drills down into a genuine success story of an ecommerce entrepreneur, recounting how they use Shopify’s service to launch their business and grow their brand.

The case studies also serve as a subtle form of social proof. They implicitly endorse Shopify’s service by showing, rather than telling — and it works beautifully.

Part of Shopify’s success as an e-merchant service lies in its eagerness to celebrate its customers’ successes. Such praise reinforces its value as a brand, strengthening its customer community. Shopify regularly champions its merchants, and its case studies are a fine example of that in play.

And the results prove this. In 2017, Shopify reported an increase of more than 200K merchants using its estore builder. As of February 2019, more than 800K merchants worldwide use Shopify, with the brand’s income totalling $1.073 billion last year, a 59% increase from the year before.

How to get it right

Your customers are your own best advocates. Reach out to your satisfied customers and invite them to take part in a case study of your own. Not all products naturally lend themselves to case studies (for example, fashion and apparel).

But creating a story around your customers and their purchase is an unusual alternative that will work for you. It makes for valuable content that both sells your brand whilst endowing you with some authentic social proof into the bargain.

ASOS: influencer-led content that drives engagement

Influencers are hot topic right now (albeit not necessarily for entirely the right reasons). But recent controversies aside, influencers are still a boon for ecommerce brands wishing to grow their business in 2019.

Influencer content delivers an array of benefits for brands. As well as the implicit social proof endowed upon your business by your association with influencers, they also act as a gateway to a whole new consumer base too.

For an example of great influencer content, let’s look at online apparel retailer ASOS. Rather than reaching out to renowned influencers with huge social followings, the fashion ecommerce brand partners with niche micro influencers that are active in their niche.

These influencers, known as ASOS Insiders, share style tips, behind-the-scenes insights, and products on branded ASOS Instagram accounts.

Since the inception of ASOS Insiders, the apparel retailer has seen considerable growth amongst its target consumer base of 18-24 year-olds. In 2017 it reported sales of £1876.5 million, a figure which increased to £2355.2 million in 2018. It goes to show just how successful influencer-led content can be for growing ecommerce brands.

How to get it right

The key to this kind of content is letting your influencer do the hard work. They have a deep understanding of their followers and know what kind of content resonates with them most. When you partner with an influencer, set an objective, but let them achieve it their way.

Top tip: cross-pollinate your content across yours and your influencer’s social presences. This nets you the best exposure, reaching more customers and getting your brand seen as a result.

Shutterstock: on-point insight that its customers can actually use

With the rise of easy-to-use content management systems and simple blogging platforms, the demand for high-quality stock photos has never been higher. Shutterstock has all but cornered that market, providing millions of free stock images to solopreneurs, startups, and big businesses alike.

Part of Shutterstock’s success lies in its savvy use of content marketing. Every year, the brand releases a creative trends report, outlining all the major visual styles that its customers need to know.

Image Shutterstock

Backed by hard data, the report regularly attracts thousands of shares on social media. It’s interactive too, featuring a blend of photos, video, and even music to engage customers. Each trend is accompanied by samples of Shutterstock’s free images, connecting customers with content to drive conversions as a result.

This strategy has helped grow Shutterstock considerably. The creative trends report was incepted in 2015. According to Shutterstock’s annual reports, it reported annual revenue of $425.1 million:

Image Shutterstock 2015 Annual Report

This was followed by 16% growth to $494 million in 2016:

Image Shutterstock 2016 Annual Report

And finally, Shutterstock saw 12.7 growth to $557 million in 2017:

Image Shutterstock 2017 Annual Report

By appealing to its core consumer demographics and helping them keep abreast of the creative trends they need to know, Shutterstock positions itself as a leader in its field, and its year-on-year growth reflects this.

How to get it right

This kind of content positions you as more than just a business — it shows that you’re an active source of thought leadership, a valuable resource that your customers can return to time and again.

Commission original data and distill it into a digestible format that your audience can easily understand. Use it to highlight the value of your own products or service to prospective customers.

Every successful ecommerce business needs a coherent content strategy behind it. It drives sales, boosts SEO, and engages customers time and again. Learn from the best and follow the tips above.

Capitalize on your customers and embrace the power of UGC marketing, and lean on influencers to create engaging content that celebrates your brand in an organic way.

Similarly, you should look to case studies to spotlight your customers while showcasing your product. Combine this with cutting-edge insight that your customers can actually benefit from, and you’ll create an ecommerce content marketing strategy that will grow your business well into 2019.

July 11, 2019
5 Essential Email Copywriting Tips For Ecommerce Brands

Be they online or offline, there are few marketing tools more rich with potential than email marketing. After all, each email begins as an empty canvas upon which you may paint a masterpiece: no character limits, no fixed set of viable image aspect ratios, and no restrictions on where, when and how you might deploy a CTA.

That said, there are similarly few tools that are misused so consistently. Businesses in the digital sphere regularly engage in email marketing without coming close to fulfilling its remarkable potential — and one of the main reasons is the quality (or lack thereof) of the copywriting.

The language you use and the way you present your arguments mustn’t be overlooked. Even if your readers don’t consciously notice the difference between amateur scrawlings and finely-crafted prose, they’ll detect it on some level. This can be hugely impactful, particularly when you’re trying to sell products and there are direct profits riding on the results.

So if you’re running an ecommerce brand and eager to do more with your email marketing, you’ll find that shaping up your copywriting will produce significant improvement. Here are five core copywriting tips to help you sell more through your emails:

Immediately match the subject line

In the grand pantheon of email copywriting essentials, this is the most divinely vital, and failing to adhere to it is akin to repeatedly shooting yourself in both feet before tumbling off a cliff into a craggy ravine. In other words, it’s a big deal. Here’s why:

It’s hard to stand out in an email inbox. You need to choose your subject line very carefully to give your contribution the best possible chance of getting attention ahead of the hundreds of other emails surrounding it — and if you manage to win that all-important click, the clicker will be expecting more of whatever you used to draw them in.

For instance, if you mention an unbelievable bargain in your subject line, you’d better deliver a bargain they struggle to believe, and quickly. Even getting to it in the second paragraph might not be enough. The reader might glance at the top line, wonder “Where’s this unbelievable bargain?”, and back out of the email.

So ensure a message match by writing the email content to seamlessly follow the subject line. Otherwise, all the high-quality product copy in the world might go to waste.

Show the emotion you’re looking to inspire

If you run an ecommerce brand, or at least work for one, then you should already know the basics of selling: in particular, the importance of selling potential buyers on how their life would change if they decided to purchase from you.

The point of this is to evoke emotion, whether it’s a sense of elation at the idea of a happier future or a feeling of fury at how frustrating life without your product has been. When we get emotional, we make irrational decisions — we buy what we don’t really need, and spend more money than we would sensibly prefer to. Both good things for sellers.

But people are better than you (or they) might think at detecting tonal disconnects. Suppose that you’re trying to market a luxury shower gel, eager to have the reader get excited about using it, yet your copy feels dry, cold, and uninterested. If you apparently don’t care about something you’re telling readers to get hyped about, why should they?

The key, then, is to write in a way that reflects the emotion you want to inspire. If you want the possible buyer to get excited, then show excitement. Use stylised text, exclamation marks, reaction GIFs (within reason…), and words with potent connotations.

Should you say that a luxury shower gel is “a powerful cleaner” or “a sumptuous sensory cocktail”? Which one better gets across the vision of a heavenly showering experience?

Space out your primary points

“Look at all the space I have!”, you might think as you look over your blank email canvas. “I can include as much text as I want!”. But don’t let that power go to your head — that you can do something doesn’t mean that you should. There’s a reason why spacing things out is one of the overriding principles of web design in general.

Think about how a reader might be making their way through your email. At a desktop computer with no distractions and ten minutes set aside to focus on your content? Hardly a realistic notion! Perhaps at a laptop with one eye on the screen and another on a TV, or in a store with a spare few seconds to scan through their inbox.

But doesn’t that mean that it’s more important to get to points quickly? Wouldn’t it be suitable to lump them together right away so they can’t be missed? Well, put succinctly, no, it wouldn’t. When you clump two big points together, they both lose visibility — they might be on the screen, but that doesn’t mean that they’ll be read and understood.

This calls for a steady determination to trim any unnecessary content and surround any notable point in enough space that it can actually be noticed. Check out a product page from any big brand and you’ll see that the initial content is sparse (potentially expanding to more substantial content down the page). Don’t make your points fight for attention.

Reflect the overall context

Sending out droves of generic emails is a dated tactic that doesn’t belong in this age of email automation and personalization. Through segmentation, templates, and complex triggering, emails can be pushed out to specific audiences with hyper-relevant content — and this is something you need to factor into your copy.

Consider how different one customer relationship may be from another. Any given email recipient may have purchased from you once, or several times, or many times. They may or may not have used your referral scheme. They might have expressed interest in particular products, or have refused any customization options. Relevancy is essential for transactional emails, and relevancy is contextual.

Now consider how the same piece of copy might have a different effect depending on the context. A pointedly warm and friendly tone might feel justified when directed at a long-time customer, but seem out of place (and even presumptuous) when aimed at a new customer. “Why are they acting like they know me?”, the latter might think.

You should also factor in the types of product purchased, and the clues they provide about levels of disposable income. Should you be pitching expensive high-end products at someone who has only ever ordered budget items from you? Obviously not — at best, it would be confusing, and at worst it would come across as insulting.

How do you achieve this practically? It’s simple enough if you use Campaign Monitor’s dynamic content sections: simply create content for every important scenario and select the segments that should be able to see each part. Conveniently, Campaign Monitor will readily integrate with almost every mainstream ecommerce CMS, with the only current exception being Shopify — and that’s solely because the app is being refreshed (and improved).

Anticipate and answer questions

One-sided as they may technically be, it helps to imagine what it would be like if your email pitches were halves of conversations. This is mainly because your content will inevitably give rise to questions — thought, not said — and it’s incumbent upon you to answer them to whatever extent you can.

For example, suppose that you start a marketing email by claiming that your new jacket line is made from the strongest fabric in the world. It would be entirely reasonable for someone who reads that to mentally ask various questions, such as “What evidence do they have to support that claim?”, “What makes it the strongest?”, and “What are the main competitors?”.

You can’t know about these questions when they arise, but you can anticipate them and answer them immediately. You’ll never be able to see every possible question coming, but you can cover the primary ground easily enough. That way, when someone reads your email and has most of their questions answered in a hasty fashion, they’ll feel more confident in the quality of the product and the reliability of your brand.

A useful trick for this is to directly state the questions in your copy. That way, even if someone has other questions that you didn’t anticipate, you can guide them back to the ones you did, and perhaps even leave them feeling that those questions were the ones they wanted answers to.

Is this really effective? Won’t people recognize what’s happening and recoil from it? I don’t think so. When you ask questions, as I did just then, the reader gets attached to them. We just can’t help it — it’s somewhat alike trying to stop yourself thinking about something, only to find yourself thinking about it even more.

Conclusion

There are plenty more copywriting tips out there — so many that you’ll never perfect the process, no matter how hard you try or how diligently you study — but the tips we’ve covered are the basic essentials. They should be applied to every type of ecommerce marketing email, no matter the product or situation.

Why not give them a try? Implement them when you run your next email marketing campaign to see for yourself how well they work.

June 27, 2019
Inventory Management – How To Set Your Ecommerce Store Up For Success
Stock, delivery, returns, invoices, payments – keeping on top of what’s going in and coming out of your ecommerce business is an endless task – made all the more challenging as your business begins to grow. If you’re eager to get on top (and stay on top) of your ecommerce inventory management this year, then read on as the ecommerce experts at Expandly take you on a journey to inventory management made simple.

Back to basics: what is inventory management?

Inventory management is all about knowing how much stock you hold and where it is (both physically and in the order journey), and then using this information to plan your future stock.

Why is inventory management key to your store’s success?

Having accurate stock levels on Amazon and eBay is great, but inventory management can achieve so much more than that. Keeping accurate, in-depth, and live inventory data can help your business to grow customer numbers, sales, and profits by:

Ensuring you never sell out

Out of stock items will send 67% of customers to your competitors for good. Live and accurate inventory data tells you how much stock you have left and how long this stock should last for – enabling you to reorder stock at the right time to avoid selling out or overstocking.

Ensuring you never oversell

Perhaps even worse than selling out is allowing a customer to order and pay for an item that you don’t hold in stock. This is bad for your customer service, brand, and reviews and is easily avoided with proper inventory management.

Improving your cash flow

Inventory management can also enhance your ecommerce cash flow – by giving you the data to identify any slow-moving stock, set reorder points, and place a value on your warehouse’s contents.

Helping your strategy

Proper inventory management also gives you the necessary data to make informed business decisions such as what product to buy more of, what products to run marketing campaigns on and what products to put into the sale and never buy again.

Keeping you sane

Running an ecommerce business can be a busy, stressful, and endless task. Having a handle on your stock levels, ecommerce SKUs, and product performance makes ecommerce life a little more enjoyable.

Inventory management – setting your store up for success

So, how do you go about implementing an inventory management system that sets your online store up for all of this success? Well, let’s take a look.

Inventory management – the essential information

First, you need to understand the essential information required for a thorough ecommerce inventory management system. This includes the:
- Stock available for purchase
- Stock awaiting shipping
- Stock that’s been damaged or lost
- Cost price
- Listing price
- Time spent in your warehouse
Inventory management – the essential actions

Next, you need to store this information in a format that is easy to update, access, and report on. You can do this either through:

1. Manual inventory management

Using a spreadsheet, record all of the above information and update it (and your sales channels) as soon as anything changes.

2. Inventory management software

Professional, high-volume, or growing ecommerce businesses will do best using ecommerce inventory management software that sits between you and your sales channels, shipping carriers, and accounting software to collate, order, update and report on this information automatically.

Inventory management – the essential considerations

But that’s not all. To really excel at inventory management, you need to consider the following:

Reorder limits

Use all of your new data to accurately predict when products will go out of stock – allowing you to set reorder alerts that prevent you from overselling, selling out or overstocking your warehouse.

Bundles and kits

If you sell some of your products as part of a bundle, you need to remember to update the stock numbers of the individual items as well as the bundle manually or by using inventory management software to do this for you.

Returns

No one likes to think of returns, but it’s important to decide how you’re going to reallocate returned stock to your inventory management process. Will it be destroyed, resold, or reduced?

Multiple sales channels

If you’re multi-channel selling on Amazon, eBay, and your own ecommerce platform (for example), inventory management becomes a little trickier. Manual inventory managers will want to ring-fence stock to avoid the worry of overselling. Those using inventory management should be able to benefit from live stock syncing between sales channels – allowing you to open up all of your stock without fear of overselling.

Reporting

Finally, you want to create a number of different reports that will help you to understand all of your data and plan for future sales, marketing campaigns, and business strategies.

Inventory management – the essential tools

Finally, for the ultimate store success, you might want to consider using these ecommerce tools alongside your inventory management software or spreadsheet.

Additional staff

If you’re going down the manual inventory management route, you may need additional staff to stay on top of things during peak periods (such as Christmas, sales, holidays etc.)

Xero

Once you’ve got your inventory nicely ordered and accounted for, it’s time to get your finances in order. Xero’s cloud-based accounting is a user-friendly platform that allows you to do this, plus with the ability to automatically send sales orders from your sales channels into Xero, it couldn’t get any easier.

Multi-channel ecommerce software

Finally, many multi-channel management platforms include inventory management tools within them – enabling you to combine the costs and effort of listing, order management, inventory management, shipping label printing, and sending sales orders to Xero, into one convenient dashboard.

Final thoughts

Good inventory management is good business sense. Outstanding inventory management is what can set your business apart – you just need to know how.

About Expandly: Expandly multi-channel ecommerce inventory management software brings you essential inventory management tools alongside multi-channel listing abilities, order management, shipping label printing, and Xero integration. Let us show you how with a free inventory management software demo.
June 20, 2019
Reasons To Migrate From Shopify To WooCommerce
Looking to take your ecommerce game to the next level, but feeling like you’re being held back by the ecommerce platform you got started with?

It’s actually quite a common problem — one that tends to appear when you’re ready to assume greater control over the finer details you were previously happy to overlook. One of the most common migrations in ecommerce today is store owners going from Shopify to WooCommerce.

As you’re reading this, it’s likely you’re running your ecommerce store on Shopify. While a Shopify store is a great place to get started and a platform with a lot going for it, so is WooCommerce — and you just might find that migrating from Shopify to WooCommerce leaves you in a much stronger position.

Of course, undertaking the migration process can be difficult and confusing, especially if it’s your first time. If you’re not sure you want to migrate and find yourself stuck trying to make a decision, here are some reasons why you should move your store from Shopify to WooCommerce.

WooCommerce is open-source

Credit: Pexels

Shopify is a closed-source system, meaning that you don’t have extensive access to the vital system files and you’re not allowed (or able) to make widespread modifications. This is fine for most people, but if you aspire to fully optimize your Shopify store — making it everything it can possibly be — then you’ll soon start to wish that you had more power.

WooCommerce, being an open-source solution, grants you that power. If you want to completely rework core parts of the plugin, you’re free to do so. If you want to set apart your blog posts from competitor’s and attract a new type of customer, you can. If you want to create a store with a design style that goes completely beyond what can be achieved with a Shopify theme’s customization options, you’re only limited by your imagination. Open source solutions are a creative developer’s best friend.

Consider yourself creative, ambitious and uniquely placed to conquer your marketplace? You might find it very freeing to migrate from Shopify to WooCommerce.

Developers are easy to find

Credit: Pexels

Shopify supports both add-ons and custom development through its Liquid template language, but the possibilities are limited.

Because Shopify has such a focus on convenience (and features being handled internally), there aren’t so many developers out there working on it. If you decided that you wanted a new feature installed on your Shopify store (and you couldn’t find an existing add-on to handle it), then you might have a tough time finding a developer.

WooCommerce, though, has a thriving community complete with an abundance of developers. Beyond the basic functions, so much of WooCommerce had to be developed by the community, and it certainly doesn’t help that WordPress (the underlying platform) is free, extendable, and the most widely-used CMS in the world — itself supported by countless great developers. It won’t take you long at all to find a decent and affordable WooCommerce developer.

It provides access to countless WordPress plugins

Credit: NeedPix

WordPress has a vast library of themes and extensions, built up over years of mainstream dominance. Any respectable SaaS company or integration-capable suite has a dedicated WordPress extension, making it extremely easy to configure anything from email automation tools to customer relationship management tools.

Because WooCommerce is itself an extension for WordPress, it’s compatible with many of these themes and extensions. Quite often, you can use a free extension designed for WordPress to achieve results that you’d have to pay for if you use a Shopify add-on. Shopify cites its strong built-in features as a reason to migrate from WooCommerce, but it’s clear that a WooCommerce store can be just as formidable once you’ve picked out the right extensions.

What’s more, some of the best WordPress plugins have given rise to WooCommerce-targeted revisions, a good example being the Yoast SEO plugin. SEO is critical for ecommerce, and the Yoast plugin is immensely popular for its power and ease of use. And though the original version worked with WooCommerce, it wasn’t a seamless match, so Yoast developed a WooCommerce-centric version. As WordPress and WooCommerce continue to grow, it’s likely that we’ll see this happen more frequently.

You can shop around for hosting

Credit: Pexels

In today’s hyper-competitive ecommerce landscape, having options matters. For a customer, that means the right product categories and variants to choose from. For a store owner, that means the right to choose the best hosting option.

When you run your store on Shopify, you have no choice in the hosting — it’s stored in the cloud, with the specifics depending on your service tier, and you can only trust the company to take care of everything for you. This can be ideal if you don’t really want to get involved and would rather pay for something convenient, but not if you want a choice in the matter.

Using WooCommerce allows you to choose the type of hosting that’s right for you. For instance, you can try ZesleCP Hosting Control Panel to manage your Linux server and install WordPress using their OneClick Apps. You can pay more or less depending on the features you want, so if you don’t anticipate ever needing phone support, you can use a host that only provides email support and get a better deal.

What’s more, if you have to have an existing business relationship with a hosting company, you can take advantage of any discounts they can offer their customers.

How to migrate from Shopify to WooCommerce

Credit: Flickr

If you’ve decided to migrate your store from Shopify to WooCommerce, you might wonder how to go about it. Well, the answer is simple: use Cart2Cart.

Cart2Cart is an automated migration service tool that does all the work for you. You can get a free demo migration to confirm that it works, then use the pricing estimate tool to see what you can expect to pay for however many products, customers and orders you need to move over.

Considerations to make before you import Shopify to WooCommerce

Before you start the process of migrating from Shopify to WooCommerce, you should consider these considerations and potential challenges.

Is your business ready for the possibility of data loss?

Ecommerce stores are built on robust customer data that informs product selections and website design. The possibility of losing that is enough to scare any store owner away from migration.

To avoid the loss of crucial data when you migrate your Shopify store, make sure you’re paying particular attention to the backup process before you export. You can consider storing your Shopify store data through one of three ways:
- Storing it on a CSV file
- Duplicating your store
- Creating a backup store
It’s better to be safe than sorry. Before you import orders and products from Shopify, make sure you’ve covered yourself.

Can you handle the technical demands of a Shopify to WooCommerce migration?

Credit: Flickr

A Shopify store is fairly easy to manage, even with little-to-no technical knowledge.

However, a WooCommerce store can be significantly more demanding and often require you to have at least a basic understanding of everything from domain hosting to SSL encryption certificates to what an API key is. A little bit more complex than the basics of operating an online store.

To ensure you don’t lose your data from Shopify, do some research into the technical demands of WooCommerce before you find yourself overwhelmed halfway through the migration process.

Shopify is a superb ecommerce platform, make no mistake about that — but it’s far from flawless. Meanwhile, WooCommerce is just as strong in some major ways, and even stronger in others.

If you want to take full control over your store, and have the flexibility to experiment with a huge range of extensions, then migrating to WooCommerce might be the right choice for you and one that pleases your customers in the long-term. Get ready to start the migration process!

And if you want a quick indication of the timescales involved in this migration process then watch the video below.

Embedded video temporarily unavailable. View the original video
May 24, 2019
How AI Is Changing Ecommerce Web Development

Succeeding in online retail isn’t easy, but entering it might be. The barriers to entry are already low, and now AI is entering the equation to speed things along. Here’s how:

Ecommerce is among the most adventurous industries in the digital space. With so much money changing hands, and even the simplest virtual store capable of selling worldwide, it’s easy to understand why even the biggest brands are willing to try new things. If something doesn’t work out, no big loss. If it proves profitable, you can scale it up right away.

This is of particular interest when it comes to AI, something that has already proven somewhat impactful across most industries. Today, it’s starting to change the nature of ecommerce web development at a fundamental level. Let’s take a look at what this actually involves:

What AI Means in a Practical Context

AI is a term that is often used in a vague or unclear way, and this produces a lot of confusion about what it actually entails. As such, it first bears noting what AI means here, and that’s the use of technology to mimic (and thus replace) flexible human behaviors. AI software differs from programmable routines that simply go from start to finish because it is able to adapt (to some extent) to its surroundings.

The key takeaway here is that we’re not talking about a like-for-like replacement for the human brain. AI is a long way off that type of achievement, and it may never reach it. Even if you could trust every part of your online operation to an AI suite, it wouldn’t be a good idea in any sense. Today, at least, AI is an advanced tool that can complement your everyday work instead of taking it over and getting it done for you.

That’s how it fits into the world of ecommerce web development. As we’ll see shortly, it’s starting to work with developers and retailers to get things done more effectively and efficiently.

Its Role in Automating Store Creation

Particularly at scale, ecommerce can take a lot of work to carry out. Products must be updated, stock managed, orders processed, and support requests routed — and that’s once you have a store up and running. In principle, the development stage may be even more frustrating. The more your store will be offering, the better it needs to be. There’s certainly no shortage of competitors out there to take your business if you provide a weak UX.

But this process of starting from nothing and building up to a fully-fledged store isn’t the chore that it was in the early days of the internet. The establishment of the modern ecommerce CMS with its setup wizard and automated suggestions turned the online store from a costly bespoke project to a factory-line assembly viable for rapid production and business trading. Instead of typing code, you can use a GUI to assemble the necessary components (with the code drawn from existing libraries) — often taking a WYSIWYG approach for ease of use.

So where can AI enter into the equation? Think about how much of the development process must currently be planned out carefully, then consider the purpose of theme templates — instead of creating a theme from scratch, someone eager to get on with things can find a theme they like and mostly repurpose it. AI can use mix-and-match elements to build entire stores based on answers to some configuration questions (e.g. “What products will you be selling?” or “What’s your unique selling point?”).

At some point, you might even be able to say “Create a luxury cosmetics store” and have a store builder use your internet history and associated profile to create something to suit your tastes. There will always be room for manual intervention, naturally, but it would be a superb way to get a strong baseline very quickly and with minimal effort.

How it Benefits from the Integrated Cloud Model

The reason that we can realistically envision that type of AI solution is that ecommerce has all the required resources. Multi-channel stores search for customers in every corner of the internet, the whole process enabled through smart integrations, and vast quantities of rich data are created. When a customer signs in to a store through their Google login, it syncs yet more data that can be used by AI applications to develop (or adjust) stores.

Imagine a future of leaving an AI admin in charge of your store’s design (and even its offers). An AI could consistently review competing content from comparable sites before making adjustments accordingly. Is the color blue proving popular? It’s easy enough to adjust hues. Is a new resolution of screen becoming standard? Resample images to better suit that size and aspect ratio.

At the same time, it could monitor internal analytics and adjust placement to run smart A/B tests instead of requiring them to be configured manually, and even use NLP to generate customer surveys to gather invaluable feedback and parse the results. It would need some oversight, naturally, but at some point it would mostly be able to operate independently.

When the modern easy-creation ecommerce CMS became mainstream, a lot of the arduous work behind building a store was automated, but plenty of tasks were left to be handled manually because the technology wasn’t there to deal with them. With so much data available online now, and AI software becoming increasingly powerful, we’re now starting to see more and more flexible functions taken over — leaving store owners with yet more time to focus on selling.

May 17, 2019
4 Ways To Create Better Buyer Personas For Your Online Store
It’s all very well coming up with a content strategy, writing tweets, and shelling out for paid ads, but unless you know exactly who your buyers are, you’re shooting into thin air.

This is why buyer personas are so important to businesses.

The concept of buyer personas has been around for years; it’s essentially a fictional character created to represent your target customer. By establishing the demographic and psychographic information behind your typical customer, you can start to understand behaviors and preferences. That in turn can help you to create optimized content, products and services that are better suited to your customers, and enjoy way higher conversion rates.

Buyer personas make for effective, personalized targeting, customer-centric values and increased profits. Want more proof? Check out these mind-blowing stats on buyer personas.

But it’s not as easy as listing assumed characteristics of your ideal customer and naming your persona “Simple Sally.” You’ve got to do much better than that.

Read on to discover four ways that you can create better buyer personas for your online store.
1. Use the right kind of software to create your personas
Throughout the process of creating buyer personas, you’re going to be collecting a lot of data about your customer experience and you’ll be attempting to sift through it to make your buyer personas.

You don’t want to just sit on this information and then turn it into a Word doc. You need to transform your research into something tangible, easy to understand and professional-looking.

There are various buyer persona tools available online that can provide you with persona templates and how-to guides:
- Hubspot
- Marketo
Have a look at what is available and find one that suits your business best. Buyer personas should be at the heart of your marketing campaigns, so it’s worth spending that extra bit of time developing (and documenting) them.

After all, this is what you’re going to center your strategy around and with good reason: buyer personas will allow you to more accurately target consumers through segmentation and personalization, giving you a higher success rate.
1. Make the most of existing data to identify follower demographics
To create your buyer personas, you will need to start gathering information on your target customers to better understand them and how they will interact with your product or service.

Of course, you will need to do your own bespoke research — interviews and questionnaires are a good place to start — but existing data will help to build solid foundations when establishing personas.
- Look at your ecommerce dashboard, web analytics, and social profile data to get a feel for the different demographic groups that are already engaging with you. By using an ecommerce system, you can make managing and integrating all this customer data easy — and then use personalised product pages
  to help boost those all-important conversions.
- Ask your current customers to help you out by filling in questionnaires to gather information. In return, you can offer them money off a certain product, or gift them with a store voucher.
- Remember that you can also make the most of social media data by using valuable tools like Facebook’s Audience Insights. Social media is a strong resource for persona marketing — check out this post on how to gather useful information on each channel.
1. Fill in the gaps with educated guesses & other people’s data
You’re not going to have all of the answers ready to hand, particularly if you’re starting up a completely new business.

If you don’t have any data yet, you can still make informed decisions by using data from your competitors and filling in the blanks with your own educated guesses.

Using tools like SimilarWeb will help you analyze the traffic and audience behavior of your competitors. Online marketplaces can also be analyzed for competitor sales data and profitability. This will allow you to identify trends and customer intent in your niche, which you can put to good use when building buyer personas.

For any gaps in your data, you can make educated guesses based on logic and empathy. Ask yourself a number of questions about your target audience, their lifestyles and behaviors — there are plenty of posts online that will help you to identify the most buyer persona questions.

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and try to answer as them. This is obviously most useful when you are in your own demographic range — think about what you look for and what you value most.

But don’t forget to think outside the room, even when you — and your team — are of the demographic group that you’re aiming for. It’s easy to get caught up in a company-centric marketing strategy rather than customer-centric marketing, and you could end up making buyer assumptions that are completely wrong.
1. Remember that personas will change
Buyer personas will change and evolve over time. If you want to create better personas, then you need to be flexible and ready to adapt.

You should review and update your buyer personas regularly as a key part of your marketing strategy.

The persona you originally build will be built on information you’ve got from your previous venture, competitor sites, social media and some educated guesswork. And of course, this is a great place to start. However, as you start making sales and forging customer relationship, you will start ironing out the details in your personas.

It goes without saying that tools like Google Analytics will give you valuable insight into the behaviors, demographics, and on-site actions of your ecommerce customers and visitors. You can use this information to define and evolve buyer personas in accordance to your customers’ behavior, wants and needs — ultimately helping you to target potential customers more accurately.

These are four ways that you can you create solid, useful buyer personas for your online store.

Remember to base your personas on data and facts, and to gather this all in one place using persona templates. Keep evolving and updating your buyer personas regularly too — this will help you to make strong changes your wider strategy (for example, to improve the customer journey).

By following these tips and creating better buyer personas, you keep the customer at the center of everything you do. And ultimately, this will lead to a better business with bigger sales.
May 10, 2019
Selecting Your Ecommerce Niche: Create Your Perfect Online Store

If you’re thinking of setting up your own ecommerce store, then you might be wondering where to start. You may have an awesome product idea that you want to turn into reality, or you might just want to make some big bucks fast.

Whatever your reasons, one of the things you need to consider when you’re about to delve into the world of ecommerce is selecting your niche.

Selecting the perfect niche for you can be the difference between a super successful store, or having to sell it on for 50 dollars after a year of crashing and burning.

In this post, I’m going to talk you through selecting your perfect ecommerce niche.

What is an ecommerce niche?

If you’re new to the world of ecommerce, you might be wondering what I’m referring to when I say “niche.”

Your niche in ecommerce refers to the distinct segment of the market that your business falls into. So, where your products fit in the grand scheme of products, and how they are categorized.

Niches vary in size: for example, electronics is a broad niche. Wireless headphones is a narrower niche that falls under that broader one.

Picking a niche means that you have to build your brand and your products around this idea, and market to a target audience.

Why do you have to pick a niche?

Essentially, picking a niche for your ecommerce store means that you’re more likely to be successful and make money.

Sure, there are huge online companies like Amazon that sell everything under the sun to a huge audience. But they’re the biggest online retailer ever, and they’ve now grown so much much that they have a total monopoly on the broad-niche market (and I’d say, transcending niches entirely).

If you’re just starting out as an ecommerce entrepreneur, it’s best to market your store to a particular audience, and do a few products really well. For higher success rates, it’s way better to target your audience with precision, and appeal to their wants and needs.

You don’t want to spread yourself too thin and try to please everyone. If you don’t have a clear idea of who you’re targeting, you’ll miss the mark with your products and marketing, and end up losing money rather than profiting.

Aim narrow with your niche to start with.Once you’ve conquered that, you can broaden your range and start building new ideas on a stable foundation.

How do you select your perfect niche?

There are various factors to consider when selecting the perfect ecommerce niche for you.

Below I’ve listed the things I think all wannabe ecommerce store owners need to take into account when selecting their niche.

Identify your passions and interests

Your ecommerce store is going to take up a considerable amount of time, regardless of whether you’re doing it as a side-hustle or leaving your job to pursue your dream of being an entrepreneur.

So you need to find a niche that you feel passionate about. An area where you’ve got a decent amount of knowledge and you’re happy to dedicating your time to.

If you’re not interested by your concept or the stuff you’re selling, you can quickly lose motivation and no longer push yourself. Things aren’t always easy when running an ecommerce store. Selecting a niche that you care about means that you’re less likely to quit, because you’re invested.

Identify any problems you can solve

The next step you can take to select your perfect niche is to identify any problems that you could potentially solve for your customers.

Ideally, you need to design a product that solves a problem for your customer, or makes their lives easier. This could be something revolutionary — a completely new invention — or it could just be a cheaper or higher-quality version of something already on the market. You’re still benefiting your customer in some way because you’re providing them with an alternative which saves them money, or lasts longer.

If you’ve already got an idea, then perfect. If you’re struggling to combine problem-solving with a topic you’re passionate about, then do some research.

Conduct surveys or research sessions with your target audience. Get a feel for their needs and desires. Identify any gaps in the market that you could fill.

You can also research keywords around your niche using tools like Jungle Scout or Ubersuggest. If you know what people are searching for on Google — any answers they’re looking for, or pain points they have — then you can use these to direct your ideas.

Look at online Q&A sites and forums like Quora to find out what questions people are asking around your topic. This can also guide your problem-solving.

Check out the competition

It’s always important to do competitor research when you’re starting any project.

If you’ve got an area that you want to set your ecommerce store up in, make sure you identify and research the competition. Find out who the big players in your niche are, but focus on who your direct competitors are likely to be.

You can using various online tools to discover more about your competitors, such as how well their site is performing, traffic, backlinks, keywords use and more. Analyzing this data will help you to understand where you can slot into in your niche.

Track ecommerce trends

When you’re selecting your niche, you need to get a feel for the ecommerce market and trends. You don’t want to pick a niche for your ecommerce store that’s actually on a downward trajectory and is losing consumers’ interest.

Google Trends is really useful for researching trends. You can track interest over time (and vary your time range), as well as split your data through location and more.

The main decision you need to make is whether you’re going to go into an evergreen niche or trending niche.

An evergreen niche is one that remains at a steady level — it has everlasting appeal, doesn’t rely on trends or fads, and you’re very unlikely to get huge dips. Evergreen niches are stable and reliable — good if you want your ecommerce store to have longevity.

A trending niche is one where interest and sales spike suddenly over a smaller period of time. Take for example, fidget spinners or unicorn-themed products. They’re influenced by fads and trends, are normally quite specific, and have a huge rise in popularity before falling.

Both have their benefits, so you just need to decide which route to go down. Ideally, you could merge the two and pick an evergreen niche with trending products.

Decide if you want to go micro niche or broad niche

Another factor to take into consideration when you’re selecting your niche is whether you want to go micro niche or stick to a broader niche.

A micro niche is one that focuses on a very specific topic or market. You go as narrow and in-depth in a niche as you can, establishing credibility and dominating specific searches.

There are some great positives: your store makes money by generating a smaller but steady level of traffic which turns into loyal customers. Plus you have less competition and you end up as a specialist in your topic.

The negatives to going micro niche are that you have limited traffic volume, and you’re dependant on a very specific market and small range of products (or just one). This means that if you attract any competition to your micro niche, you are vulnerable to getting bumped out with no back-up plan.

Broad niche stores are safer overall: you aren’t as at risk, and you have the flexibility to expand, draw more traffic, and grow to multiple revenue streams. All great benefits.

As for downsides, you’d have less credibility as a broad niche store, and you’ve got lower conversion rates (although this is boosted by casting your net wider). Marketing is also harder.

Again, you need to decide which of these options fits you best when you’re making decisions for your ecommerce store.

Examples

There are all sorts of great examples of micro niches and broad niches. If you can imagine it, chances are there’s an online store for it out there already.

Have a look at this website for an example of a micro niche store:

Image credit: Unicorn Rhapsody

Unicorn Rhapsody is an online store which specializes in selling unicorn-themed clothing, products and accessories. Their demographic won’t be huge, but they’ll have a distinct group of loyal customers who are willing to spend their money on unicorn goodies.

Want broad niche? Many well-know websites have made a success from being incredibly broad — such as Amazon and ASOS.

ASOS is a very popular online clothing store that fits under the very broad category of “fashion and beauty.” It sells anything from clothing to shoes, to face and body products, to homeware and stationary. ASOS haven’t dug down into any of these specific niches, but instead, sell a wide range of products and therefore appeal to a large audience of customers.

Image credit: ASOS

As for an evergreen niche, there are all sorts of different online stores that have placed themselves in an evergreen niche. You can choose anything from healthy living, weight loss, babies, pets, relationships and more as an evergreen store idea — none of these concepts or areas are going anywhere.

Check out LighterLife to see an online store in an evergreen niche:

Image credit: LighterLife

There will always be a demand for weight loss and health websites. You can sell your products and concept, which will always remain relevant, but vary your marketing depending on trends and seasons. This will help keep your evergreen online store topical and fresh, despite maintaining a constant theme.

As for a trending niche ecommerce store? You’ll need to get good at predicting what is going to become popular soon, or jumping on a bandwagon fast.

At the moment, a trending niche is definitely the beard care niche. Beardbrand is a British online beard care store that sells products, kits and tools for beardy men:

Image credit Beardbrand:

Beards have only started a come-back in the last few years, but as it is now a hugely popular trend, entrepreneurs have been capitalizing on this with beard care products.

As you can see, there are all sorts of things to consider when selecting your perfect ecommerce niche. Hopefully this post will have helped you to understand the important of choosing the perfect niche for your ecommerce store, and has answered some of your questions.

If you have any further questions about ecommerce niches or advice that you’d like to share with store owners just starting out, write to me in the comments below!

March 25, 2019
How To Select The Best Hosting For Your Ecommerce Store
It’s no use having a fantastic ecommerce store if the hosting isn’t up to par. You might as well work on an impressive indoor art installation and then lock the doors and shutter the windows so no one can actually see it. Your store host makes sure that everything works as it should — that people can reach your store and order through it without experiencing any major delays.

But it isn’t as simple as choosing from a set of web hosts ranked on a simple linear scale, because each has its advantages and disadvantages. You must think carefully about what your particular store needs: what platform it uses, what speed it demands, and what level of support you’ll likely need from a host.

Here are some tips for choosing the optimal host for your ecommerce store:

Find a hosting provider that suits your store’s platform

While many hosting providers — most, in fact — will gladly (and competently) host a website using any functional platform, it’s common for any given hosting provider to adopt a strong focus on one specific platform. The practical consequences of this vary, but if a host mentions a preference for a certain platform, you can reasonably infer several things:
- They’re familiar with its unique challenges.
- They can make the setup process straightforward.
- They have some understanding of how the platform is updated.
- They can meaningfully predict its resource demands.
This is important because you’re always going to encounter some issues with your CMS of choice, no matter how polished it may be (and no matter how many resources its creator can bring to bear). When that happens, you can of course try to resolve them yourself, or seek support from the wider online community — but being able to go directly to your web host will save you a lot of time and effort.

For example, SiteGround is a very popular host that places a lot of emphasis on its use for WordPress (and WooCommerce) websites. In fact, it has committed so strongly to that angle that WordPress.org actually recommends it specifically. If you’re interested in using WooCommerce for your store, then, you’d get excellent results with SiteGround.

Read plenty of varied reviews

Critical reviews from expert sites aren’t likely to prove sufficient when you’re trying to get an idea of what you can expect from using a hosting service. They’re exceptionally useful in general, of course — consider the nature of this site! — but they don’t tell the whole story.

In many cases, for instance, a hosting service will offer a critic an extended trial of a service, and have the opportunity to allocate extra resources to ensure that everything performs optimally. This leads to the resulting review reflecting an experience that has little in common with the service provided to the average user.

Similarly, consumer reviews aren’t always particularly useful. Conventional users can’t be relied upon to do much research before they offer their thoughts — an unsatisfied customer might bemoan the lack of a particular feature that’s actually present in the system (having simply missed it), or slate the company for its pricing despite comparable services being no cheaper.

What’s truly important is that you form your own impression in the end: one that’s as well-rounded as possible. Only then will you be able to make a fully-informed decision about which hosting provider to choose.

Carefully consider support packages

You may find a hosting provider that boasts a great amount of relevant expertise, but simply having that expertise won’t do much if they prove unable (or unwilling) to share it with you. And when things go wrong, you need to know that you can get some assistance in a timely fashion. Savvy advice that only arrives a week after your site stopped working won’t help much.

Very often, beginners to ecommerce don’t give too much thought to support requests, assuming that they’ll be able to figure things out as they go. This is a mistake. The quality, nature and convenience of your hosting support will prove vital. Once you’ve established a solid shortlist of viable contenders, narrow them down using support as the primary factor.

At a minimum, consider each of the following:
- Their active support hours.
- How quickly they can respond to requests.
- The channels they provide (e.g. email, telephone, live chat).
- How they come across in conversation.
- What limitations (if any) they place on their support services.
You might find that a support package that sounds good actually has small print stating that the company can decide to stop providing support if it feels that you’ve placed too many requests. Do you want to risk needing assistance during a time of crisis but seeing a fair-use policy cited as a justification for leaving you in the lurch?

Wrapping up, following this process — lining up hosts that cater to your platform, filtering them using reviews, then filtering them down to optimal candidates based on support provision — should leave you in a strong position to decide. Commit time to the matter now so you can proceed with confidence that your store will prove robust.
March 11, 2019