Can your customers trust you?

Posted on April 6, 2009 by Asi Erenberg Filed Under Trust, website planing, Usability | Leave a Comment

If you’re a niche ecommerce business, establishing trust is your top priority. Here’s how

If I had to choose the single most important attribute of a niche ecommerce business, I’d say it was trust.

Establishing trust with your customers is crucial to the success of an online business. For you, the business owner, it translates into a higher conversion rate and a lower cart abandonment rate. For your customers, it translates into the ease of mind that leads them to feel comfortable handing out their credit card information, without worrying about identity theft or number stealing. They have to believe that your ecommerce site is the front-end of a real, legitimate business that will supply what it says it will – not a Read more

Design a business, not a website

Posted on March 2, 2009 by Asi Erenberg Filed Under website planing, Conversion Insights, Usability | Leave a Comment

Many ecommerce businesses will be redesigning their sites in 2009. Some may be spending the money just because their site needs a “new look” – but for most it will be because the site has never really done what it was meant to do in the first place.
A recent survey by Internet Retailer magazine noted the following reasons for site redesigns: “Improved site optimization is the top priority for 72.9% of merchants, followed by clearly organized home, category and product pages at 62.4%, better navigation at 49.4%, improved site search at 47.1% and faster checkout at 40%.”
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Making it BIG by focusing small

Posted on August 10, 2008 by Asi Erenberg Filed Under Niche Success Stories | Leave a Comment

16 Fast Growing Online Niche Retailers

In recent years, niche online retailers have posted some of the fastest growth rates among the Internet Retailer’s Top 500 biggest web businesses (measured in annual revenue). 2007 was no exception. Among those Top 500 companies earning at least 30% growth in revenue year over year, around 3 in 4 were specialty stores or specialty store conglomerates. Read more

THE VIRTUAL FITTING ROOM -

Posted on August 1, 2008 by Asi Erenberg Filed Under The Near Future | 1 Comment

Making an online shopping trip more and more like the “real” thing

A lot of wild and wonderful predictions are being made about how computer-use is going to totally transform the shopping experience. Totally transformative changes have happened already – not least the way that customers looking for goods or services now automatically turn in their masses to a search engine (usually Google) to find them. The use of the Search function is leaping upward at the phenomenal rate of 20% a year, and it’s brand-new users who mostly account for that growth. Existing users, for their part, are boosting their use by 25% year. Read more

Keyword Espionage

Posted on July 17, 2008 by Asi Erenberg Filed Under Keyword Research | Leave a Comment

A little spying on your competition can often help

As we figure what precise keywords we should choose to draw people to our website, it makes a whole lot of sense to also get really savvy about what our competition might be doing in this field.
The great guiding principle in picking keywords is of course sheer logic. Our job, after all, is to figure out just what the customer has in mind when he or she is searching, and that is best figured out logically. But it helps, too, to know what keywords the opposition uses and finds effective — and of course what words don’t work so well. Read more

Design: Too Important for Just Designers

Posted on July 14, 2008 by Asi Erenberg Filed Under Usability | Leave a Comment

The look of your site is a lot more than looks

We naturally want a website selling our goods or service to look good. That’s a no-brainer.

But striking the right balance between aesthetic attractiveness and the best kind of functionality doesn’t come easy. But it’s really important. Read more

The Vital Search Within

Posted on July 3, 2008 by Asi Erenberg Filed Under Conversion Insights, Usability | Leave a Comment

Making it easy for visitors to find what they want INSIDE your store is essential

“Search Within” might sound to the initiated like some eastern meditation technique, but of course in online commerce it’s much more down-to-earth. Search within your online site, enabling customers to quickly find exactly what they went once they’ve arrived at your site, is hugely important. And there are ways to ensure it works well, as well as some common pitfalls that can be avoided. Read more

Helpful Insights

Posted on June 27, 2008 by Asi Erenberg Filed Under Book Reviews | Leave a Comment

John Battelle’s now-classic book gives guidance

There’s a lot of powerful wisdom in John Battelle’s engaging book “The Search” that can be applied in the world of e-commerce.

It’s a lot more than a biography of the supposedly “Do No Evil” gang behind the ever more gigantic (and maybe nowadays a bit evil?) internet behemoth, Google. Battelle himself says in his introduction that his story is more than that of one company - stunning thought that company’s rise has been. Read more

Reading a Searcher’s Intentions

Posted on June 6, 2008 by Asi Erenberg Filed Under Keyword Research | Leave a Comment

There are logic-based ways for attracting the customers you need

It helps to be a bit of a mind-reader. Especially if you want your online store to be a success.
Truth is … everybody’s mind is different. Customers will naturally search the web for the products they want, but - and here’s the challenge - their idea of the right term or keyword to use in their search might very well not be yours. Read more

The Ladders

Posted on June 6, 2008 by Asi Erenberg Filed Under Niche Success Stories | Leave a Comment

How narrowing the field of operation can widen the rewards

The Single Focus philosophy emphasizes a niche-style “boutique” approach online, as opposed to replicating the Walmarts or K-Marts of this world.

One telling example is the success story of a job-finding site, TheLadders.com that chose to specialize. In the online job-market world, the big-box, WalMart role was traditionally played by Monster.com, CareerBuilder and Yahoo’s Hot Jobs, all vast online emporiums for jobs in every walk of professional life.
TheLadders, under founder Marc Cenedella in New York, decided to concentrate on a strictly limited range of jobs – just those paying $100,000 a year and above. And it narrowed down the job fields to just twelve professional areas, from Technology, Finance, Human Resources, the Law and eight others. Read more

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