The powerful influence of social media on consumers is a game changer for many businesses Facebook\’s Martin Gilliard, head of retail (supermarkets and grocery stores), is at the center of where social media and shopping meet. In his role, Gilliard drives the development of data products for the retail vertical. The Retail Gets Real team …
Facebook: The intersection of social media and shopping. Read More »
All a seller who builds a cross-border e-commerce self-built website needs to do is sign up for Shopify, pay a monthly fee, and then choose a Shopify theme for your design. With themes, you can adjust the design and content, while also adding products. These themes are the key to reducing design time, and this …
Payments available with shopify are: Credit Card, PayPal, Shopify Payments. 1. Credit card You can pay your Shopify bill (one-time or recurring billing) with a valid credit or co-branded credit-debit card issued by Mastercard, Visa, or American Express. Your credit card needs to be able to support recurring payments. Currently, paying Shopify bills with a …
While boosting your traffic can generate more sales, it’s also very important to focus on turning your current traffic into paying customers. Through rigorous analysis, you can fine-tune your website to push people closer to making a purchase. This is called conversion rate optimization or CRO. Continue reading to discover some actionable strategies you can use to optimize your Shopify dropshipping store for maximum conversions.
Simplify the User Experience
Simplicity is very key when it comes to designing an effective homepage. It takes only about 50 milliseconds for a customer to make a first impression of your website, so you need to do everything possible to make those moments count. Avoid overwhelming customers with excessive images and text. Instead, stay on brand and message with a simple and visually appealing design.
If you’re not sure what to feature as your main hero, it’s usually best to go with your bestselling or most profitable products, or collections like new arrivals or current promotions. This is so true since 86% of website visitors want to see information about products on the homepage of a website.
Organize Your Categories Effectively
For your customers, navigating your website should be easy, simple, and above all, obvious. Try to avoid separating your products into too many categories. Instead, opt for three to five broad categories that contain more specific subcategories as a dropdown. Order your categories in your navigation bar based on their popularity, with the most popular category at the front.
Use High-Quality Product Images
High-quality product images are one of the most important parts of an effective product page. Data from Just uno shows that 93% of customers consider visual appearance the key deciding factor in a purchasing decision. Try including images that show your products from every angle and accurately represent the look and feel of your products.
As a bonus, include videos that your product in action. For example, if you’re selling t-shirts, give customers a better idea of what your shirts look like in motion and add a video to your product page of a model walking around wearing one. This makes your customers more likely to purchase after watching such a video.
Are you looking for ways to generate and increase sales for your business? To make your business fruitful, it’s necessary to apply appropriate marketing strategies. This is because you’re not the only person selling a particular product online. Luckily for you, if you make an effort to follow and implement the tips that will be discussed, not only will your store or brand (if you have one) stand out, but you’re going to see a massive increase in the sales you make. If that’s the reason why you’re here, continue reading to discover some insightful branding secrets you can use to increase sales in your dropshipping or e-commerce business.
Build Your Brand Awareness
Brand awareness impacts trust in customers, which impacts SEO, sales, and repeat purchases. The more people know and trust your brand name, the higher your sales will increase. To improve your brand awareness, you must focus on being active on social media platforms and delivering high-quality and intriguing content. This will get you more followers to become potential customers for your online store, making you increase your sales.
Get and Add Customers Reviews and Ratings
According to recent research, 87% of customers read reviews online before purchasing a product. This shouldn’t surprise you. Many people consider online shopping riskier, and the process of returning a faulty or damaged product can be tedious and time-consuming. Reviews and ratings help customers establish trust with you, and ensure that they come back again. Therefore, if you’re thinking of data-based techniques on how to increase our dropshipping or e-commerce sales, it’s highly recommended that you showcase customer testimonials, and encourage your buyers to add reviews and ratings to the purchased products.
A payment gateway is an essential part of dropshipping business. It’s a tool that let customers buy something from your online store. The selection of a payment gateway depends on your preference and your target market. So, if you’re looking for how to choose a payment gateway for your dropshipping store, then you’ve come to the right place! Continue reading to discover points to consider when choosing a payment gateway for your dropshipping store.
Ease of Payment
A good payment gateway should bring convenience to you and the users (customers). There’s no point in integrating a gateway that makes checkout payments difficult for your customers. You’ll have reduced sales and increased abandoned carts.
Pay-out Times
Once the transaction occurs, the payment gateways take some time to send money to the merchant’s account. The timeframes vary for each. Do research the payout times before you integrate a payment gateway.
Transactions in Several Currencies
If you are targeting clients from around the globe, then this is a crucial point to consider. Make sure you integrate a platform that offers clients to pay in their local currency. Or at least provides options that are widely accepted in different countries.
Customer Service
For your good and peace of mind, it’s better to pick a payment gateway with excellent customer service. I often see some horror stories pass by of people claiming that their whole account has been set on hold while the customer service doesn’t even reply. Sometimes, they have to stop their advertisements because their cash flow has stopped. In conclusion, a good payment gateway puts your money on hold less quickly, and if it happens, should have great customer service to resolve the issue with you.
Consider Fees and Service Agreement Requirements
Payment gateway is based on the type of transactions a business conducts (online or in-person), and even business sales, revenue consistency, transaction frequency, and the markets served. It’s important to compare how the business model coincides with the payment provider, or a gateway’s fee structure. A few services may require setup fees and contracts, or they may charge transaction fees if a particular order and transaction volume aren’t met.
Ensure Effective Transactions
According to a survey conducted, more than 25% of customers will abandon a purchase if they are compelled to register for an account to complete it. If the checkout procedure uses a third-party shopping cart with an enrolment procedure, ensure that retailers can make it an optional factor that allows for a “guest” checkout.
Make Checkout Easy on All Devices
Studies show that 79% of smartphone users have made a purchase online using their mobile devices in the last 6 months and 83.72% of people own a mobile phone in 2022 and these figures are increasing steadily. As website owners evaluate their payment gateway options, you need to make sure to provide an adaptable checkout experience that is optimized for different mobile devices and network types.
Do you know that the time people spend watching videos online increases at an average rate of 32% per year? Research also says that the average person will spend 100 minutes a day watching videos. To put that in perspective, that’s 25 whole days. Dropshippers need to take note of this if they want to plan on developing their video marketing strategy for their business. Continue reading to discover 7 ways to develop the perfect video marketing strategy for your dropshiping business.
Set Goals for Video Marketing
At the beginning of any social media undertaking, you need to set goals. What do you want your videos to accomplish? Where in the marketing funnel will these videos fall? An example of video marketing is creating brand awareness. Videos are used heavily for advertising. They may start on a product page on the website and then branch out to land in a social ad. Setting your goals and identifying the funnel stage will help you create highly effective calls to action in your video content.
Decide On Your Platforms
Research and data prove that audiences on Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat spend half of their time on the network watching videos. Choosing any of these three to begin your video marketing game would be a good step. If you’ve never used video on any platform, begin with the ones where you have audiences established. Another consideration for choosing the right platform is for you to understand what each one offers and what video dimensions can be displayed. This is essential as if you’d like to repurpose your videos, it’s best to choose platforms that complement each other.
Select Your Video Types
There are many types of videos out there, and we don’t mean where the videos will be placed. Social media videos can be used for many different purposes to support your overall content strategy. Determining the type of video that works best for your brand is an important step in your marketing strategy. Not all videos are made the same and that’s okay. What is most important is that they are supporting your key goals. The videos could be educational, behind the scenes, entertaining, customer reviews, and so on. Once you’ve determined which types of videos to tackle, it’s time to move on to planning the actual video.
Plan The Content Production
When you plan your content production, you will save time and money in the long run. Whether you plan it with a flowchart or old-fashioned pen and paper, you need to know how videos will be created and filmed. You have options for content production and post-production. As you run through the content plan, you’ll find some ways that you need to tweak it or things you missed earlier, especially if this is one of your first efforts in putting together a comprehensive video content plan. After a solid plan is executed, it’s time to move on to post-production.
Know What Post-Production Entails
You want to allow plenty of time for post-production, especially if your videos will be used for ads or have heavier editing needs. Post-production does not mean just cutting scenes and putting them back together to music. It also includes additions like closed captions, text overlays, call-to-action screens, and more. The more you film and the more polished you want it, the more time you’ll need.
An ecommerce or dropshipping business is a business that can reach the rest of the world by leveraging the unlimited power of the internet. It can open doors to a completely new segment of marketing and promote your products at a minimum cost. Just like any business, you must first understand who your market or target audience are, and how your business will attract them. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 25% of new businesses make it to 15 years or more. If you want to be among that 25%, pay attention to these ten tips. Continue reading to discover 10 essential tips to creating a successful ecommerce or dropshipping business.
Get Organize
To achieve success in your business, you need to be organized. It will help you complete tasks and stay on top of getting things done. An excellent way to be organized is to create a to-do list each day. As you complete each task, tick it off your list. This will ensure that you’re not forgetting anything and completing all the tasks that are essential to the success of your business.
Keep Detailed Records
To create successful ecommerce or dropshipping businesses, you must keep detailed records. By having records that are constantly uploaded and backed up, a business no longer has to worry about losing its data. Doing so will allow you to know where the business stands financially and what potential challenges you could be facing. Then, you’ll be able to create strategies to overcome those challenges
Analyze Your Competition
How you analyze competition will vary between sectors. To be successful in your business, you should study and learn from your competitors. After all, they may be doing something right that you can implement in your business to make more sales.
Be Creative in Your Dropshipping Business
Be on the lookout for ways to improve your business and make it stand out from the competition. Understand that you don’t know everything and be open to new ideas and different approaches to your business. You could start with your photo photographs and video ads. That way, you’ll attract more customers to your store, and you’ll see your business on a success boat.
Leverage on social media
Another tip to create a successful ecommerce or dropshipping business is to have an active account on all of the major social media platforms. This allows you to better market your business and interacts with far more potential customers. When your business has an account that you update regularly on these platforms, people can find your business more easily and are more likely to share your business with their friends. You’ll also create a more engaging experience for your audience, helping them feel more connected to your brand and cultivating trust.
As a business owner, you have to be good at what you do for your business to be successful. Operations such as getting a good manufacturer, quality product design, prototype, product quality control, could be tasking and time-consuming. Know that hiring a sourcing agent is the viable asset your business needs to get such tasks done in time. It’s the most efficient way to scale up your business. Continue reading to discover some reasons why your business needs a sourcing agent.
Getting Efficient Manufacturers
Getting a good manufacturer is like looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s often difficult to ascertain whether the manufacturers you have found on sites are efficient and reliable. But a good sourcing agent will know exactly which province specializes in the product you are looking to manufacture. To verify whether the manufacturer is genuine, a factory visit is needed.
Alternatively, a good sourcing agent will have a list of reliable suppliers you can approach. Even if they don’t know a factory that can manufacture the product you want to be made; it won’t take them much time to find someone reliable and suitable. This is because they are present on the ground and have networks they can tap into.
Using an Agent Saves You Time
A sourcing agent does all the legwork for you. The fact that an agent is your local representative means that; you don’t have to travel to that country to look for manufacturers or suppliers. You probably don’t have enough time to keep traveling to source your products. To give you time to concentrate on other essential business operations, hiring a sourcing agent is highly recommended.
Product Quality Control
Insufficient quality control can ruin your entire business. This is because, the moment the consumers realize that your products are sub-standard, they will shift to your competitors. Also, your competitors might be offering high-quality products. Moreover, high-quality products always fetch a reasonable price in the market.
This is because buyers are always willing to pay for the best-in-class products. In most cases, you probably might not have enough time and resources to pull a thorough quality check yourself. Therefore, you need the help of a sourcing agent who is experienced and puts quality as a priority.
Order fulfillment is the complete process from when an order is placed, or a sale takes place to a customer receiving the package. Two of the top qualities customers consider when they shop online are cost and the estimated time of delivery, the latter influences 68% of customers’ decisions to purchase.
A successful order fulfillment process relies on a third-party logistics company (3PL) or a fulfillment center to complete all of the processes required. What goes on in the fulfillment center may seem to be a mystery, but it doesn’t have to be. The process of order fulfillment is about creating a brilliant experience for your customers. Continue reading to know more about the order fulfillment process, what it entails, and how it works.
Receiving Inventory
The first process to order fulfillment is receiving inventory from suppliers. Products may come from a third party, another company department, or a company warehouse. In any case, the incoming inventory must be counted, inspected, and double-checked to ensure the proper amount was received and the quality is acceptable. The bar codes on the arriving products are used in the receiving and storage processes, and to retrieve goods from internal storage later.
Inventory Storage
Once goods are received in the fulfillment center, they are inventoried. Then, they’re either immediately disbursed or sent to short- or longer-term storage. Products are ideally stored just long enough to help organize the orderly distribution of goods for existing sales, rather than to hold products for future sales.
Order Processing
An order processing management system dictates product picking and packing activities per each newly-received customer order. In the online marketplace, order management software can be integrated with the shopping cart on an ecommerce or dropshipping website to automatically initiate order processing.
Picking
A picking team or automated warehouse robots select products from the warehouse according to a packing slip’s instructions. The packing slip contains specific information, such as a list of product bar codes, product colors, sizes, number of units, and location in the distribution center’s warehouse.
Packing
Packing materials are selected by the packing team or automated fulfillment robots to achieve the lowest practical dimensional weight, which is calculated by multiplying package length times width times height. Since space on delivery trucks is at a premium, optimizing dimensional weight is important to speed transport while also potentially lowering shipment costs. Furthermore, packing teams often include return shipping materials and labels in case the customer wishes to exchange or return the product for a refund later.
Shipping
The order is sent to a shipping node or a transportation channel to be shipped to the customer. Shippers and carriers, whether freight lines or airlines, FedEx, the U.S. Postal Service, or other carriers, determine freight billable costs by whichever is greater: actual package weight or its dimensional weight.
Even if the actual weight is low, such as with a t-shirt, packing it in the lowest dimension is often worth it to keep the packaging from adding significantly to the overall package weight. Likewise, most carriers have packaging rules to optimize their profits from the shipping space they have available. Failing to meet those requirements can delay shipping if carriers refuse to accept the order.
Delivery
It is common for shipping routes to involve more than one carrier. For instance, FedEx may pick up a package at the fulfillment center that will later be delivered by the USPS to the customer’s home. There are many reasons for these hybrid shipping methods. One common example is that the USPS delivers even to remote areas where most other commercial carriers don’t. It’s simply just practical to use the USPS for the last mile of delivery in those cases.
