They also have a blog : Future Now’s Marketing Optimization Blog

If you are tired of text book internet marketing reads, this plays out like a compelling novel. I can’t put it down, suddenly it all makes sense!

So what effect does page rank have?

One simple one really in my eyes….how high your site is indexed on Google. It has little to do with your keyword optimisation and relies heavily on back links. So if your search engine optimisation sold you on creating a profile of back links then you will have noticed a drop in page rank, and also a drop in position. A lot of websites will also find their traffic diminishes as they are not as far up the search listings.

Do not fear my SEO buddies, optimisation is an ever changing and growing animal and your SEO should not be a static being. Change and adapt when Google ‘Master of the Universe’ changes its ever fickle mind.

Kidsontalks now has a page rank of three, so its not all bad. Technorati says I have 16 back links.

Keep up to date with the latest page rank theories: ‘Digg Favourites Slapped By Google’ its seems this story is more complex than it first seemed. Google said it was penalising paid links ’selling’ page rank, but the only paid links I use are well Google Adwords for Hairfreax anyway!

You could find at least 6 different types of online shopper within your own set of friends and family. A small sized start-up online business may not be able to afford professional customer modelling, but these techniques are still important, even to the smaller player.

New to the Net:

These buyers are still getting used to the internet and the idea of e-commerce. They use the web for research purchases and start will smaller value items in safer environments. A common start off point for these shoppers is eBay, where all the sellers are rated and they can proceed with caution. At this early stage this shopper can either become addicted to the life of e-commerce or be put off by a bad or fraudulent purchase.

This buyer needs a simple interface, and a way to verify the e-commerce site. Make sure you have clear precise pictures, a simple stream line jargon free checkout and display your returns policy clearly outlining your responsibility as an online retailer. You can invest in an eBay type feedback system such as FeeFo.com which is an independent customer feedback system and also feature customer testimonials. Make sure you use well known and simple payment processing for example Paypal, Lloyds Cardnet or HSBC.

Bargain Hunters

These shoppers rely heavily on marketplaces such as eBay and shopping comparison engines. They have no real brand loyalty and are just shopping for the lowest price. You need to convince these shoppers they are getting the best deal. Make sure you products are included in shopping comparison engines and have an RRP shown so they can see the great deal they are getting. Within this group you have the impulsive bargain hunter who wants to purchase now and a competitive bargain hunter willing to bid against other shoppers for the deal. EBay is a bargain hunter’s paradise; you can almost use eBay to cater primarily for these customers, letting them battle it out for bargains and also have fixed price items for your impulsive bargain hunters.

Precise Shoppers

These shoppers have a surgical approach to online shopping. They know exactly what they want and will research until they find the best fit to their criteria. These shoppers are hard to please as it is luck of the draw that you have the product they need. You need to make sure part numbers and the true name of your product is present in the product title to allow precise optimization. Product configuration tools like the ‘Build your Porsche’ cater for these types of shopper and are great for a multitude of shopper types.
These shoppers need customer opinions to make sure the product will fit it intended purpose and also great customer support so they can seek verification for the seller about the item.

Hobby Shoppers

Shopping for these buyers is a past time. I fall straight into this category myself. It’s an addiction and I almost need to find something to buy online if I have a penny to spare. I often have to quell the urge. These shoppers purchase frequently and enthusiastically. These are the most adventurous shoppers and you need to grab their attentions by offering engaging tools to view the merchandise as well as product recommendations and incorporating social media into their purchase. These shoppers love community applications such as forums, bulletin boards and social shopping sites.

Direct Shoppers

These shoppers buy out of necessity. They do not shop around or waste time. They want the information now and to find the product within the 3 click recommended navigation. Excellent navigation and product organization is needed to cater for these shoppers. These shoppers need all the information at their finger tips in close proximity to the items, as well as quick access to customer support. Live chat appeals to these kind of shoppers, as they want answers quickly. These shoppers respond well to expert and customers opinions and testimonials.

Nervous Shoppers

My mother very much falls in this category, afraid to ‘put her credit card’ online or that she will be subject to fraud. Identity theft has risen to 1 in 4 in the UK so this is a valid concern. These shoppers start off by only using the internet to research products they mainly buy offline. To make these customers feel secure you need to clearly state your security /privacy policies and use a SSL certificate at checkout. These shoppers watch out for the little padlock at the bottom of the browser so make sure you have no non-secure items on your secure pages. Non-secure Google analytics tracking code is famous for this, they have a https version. You need to state that their information is secure and not sold or distributed. These customers also need customer support, with most of these shoppers wanting to hear from a human before they make their purchase. You need to make sure you include a phone number contact for these shoppers, and also an option that they can pay over the phone for their purchase. You might find these shoppers are only leads for your bricks and mortar or catalogue operations. These are still valid customers as most types of customers have a little bit of the nervous shopper in them.

You can not please or cater for every shopper that will land on your e-commerce site, but you do need to consider the information you need to give your customers and the shopping experience as a whole. Always consider your product type and match it with your typical customer profile. These are generalisations on shoppers, but as with the colour symbolism and psychology, every product type attracts a different set of customer profiles! You can even go as far as moulding your search engine optimisation to match what each shopper type is looking for. Intelligent search engines will deliver your products and message directly to these shopper types, Google personalised search will make this easier for you.

- Set up a separate advertising campaign and make sure your merchandise fits
- Create specific seasonal landing pages for your products to improve optimisation at this earlier stage. Remember you have 4 seconds to convert your customer so make sure you test and fine tune these pages.
- Pull last years top searches, there is a good chance last years searches will mirror this years
- Dust off last years successful email marketing campaigns and make sure you don’t repeat mistakes
- Don’t repeat on last years ‘non sellers’ If they didn’t sell last year they won’t this year either
- Make sure your items can be found in time for the Christmas season, search engines can take a while, which not try shopping comparison engines or other pay per click methods and specifically design them for the Christmas market.
- Be prepared to change your promotional activities quickly in response to the market. Don’t wait till next year to get rid of a dud method.
- Make sure those changes you were going to make to the site are made and you don’t start fiddling mid season.
- Streamline your checkout, make sure all the information is displayed and your customer has minimal fields to fill in. No one likes a cumbersome checkout when your Christmas on line shopping. Time is of the essence.

Another point highlighted by Lets Talk E-commerce

Make your shipping process completely transparent.

As the big day approaches, online shoppers have one big question: “Will I get my order on time?”

A small targeted adwords campaign (costing me £3 in clicks) made sure that I drove a bit of traffic to my new URLs ( ALL the site URLs have been changed to text URLs. I am still fearful of this as SEO efforts will be temporarily effected by this change)

Support was lightning fast. Being in customer support for the last 2 years, its nice to remember what it is like to be the other side of the fold.

I also created a new google sitemap pronto and changed all the links to individual products in the blog associated with the site. Its only a hobby site targeted at a niche market, but I feel absolved for investing the money into the site this week.

If you have a site under 500 links, try: Create your Google Sitemap Online – XML Sitemaps

but if you want more links, try: GSiteCrawler which is an application to download for windows. It is also free (you can kindly donate) and you can also export as a google base file for a product based site.

I have now practised what I preach, and changed the Hairfreax URL’s to text based URL’s and I am now writing individual HTML titles and meta for each category. It has been a long time coming, and will take a long time to do. Translation of the site will also take time!

Choosing a starting point – Your e-commerce platform.

In general there are three options:

1. A site hosted and created by a company for example Shopify
2. A site created for you but it is hosted on your own server space for example Cubecart
3. An Open Source Shopping Cart such as Oscommerce

Pro’s and Cons:

1. For option one, you don’t have to worry about updates, support is probably available and you never have to worry about complex code, and for most of the time any code. They do have you over a barrel though, so you need to make sure it is a company you can trust and get data out of if you need to leave. They hold your sales information, customer details, design, images etc and they can shut you down. This option is best for the new e-commerce business if you are running it from a non technical point of view.

2. Hosting your own Webstore. Unless you pay said company to do so you will be responsible for security updates and any downtime will be up to your hosting. This option is my favourite for the adventurous. Its all your, the data, the site, but you will come up against it sometimes. There is paid and community support with most systems. You will pay less in subscriptions etc, but all the data is yours and you are in full control.

3. Open source. Its free, usually heavily supported by a community, you have full freedom with your store. The downside is the code editing. Unless you want to pay ( and you might as well choose one of the other options if you are going to do that) you will have to edit the code yourself and learn a lot on the way. It can be a heartache as support is not guaranteed and totally voluntary, but it is also FREE!

Next to consider is the functionality and features you NEED:

Inventory management – Import, export and sort inventory (bulk uploads and updating methods for inventory crucial for large catalogue) You will need to be able to sort, search and filter your inventory.

Image Hosting ( option 1)

Manageable sales data and order processing- Sales and various stages of orders. You will need to also be able to export sales for accounting purposes.

Inventory based shipping AND flat rate shipping – the most basic of shipping methods which can be used to fit a variety of models

Space for Meta Data – somewhere for you to edit your site html title, keywords and description for search engines

Basic statistics – either space for Google Analytics integration or home grown basic statistics

Customer Data – ability to send a newsletter and export customer data

Secure Payments – SSL and a secure payment method for credit cards for example paypal payments pro or cybersource integration.

Paypal – its too big to ignore. make sure you can accept paypal standard transactions with your secure credit card processing.

Multi tier Category Management – you will need sub categories to manage your user experience.

SEF URLs – Text based URLs for your products.

Currency Conversion – a website need to be international so Dollars, Euro’s and Pound Sterling at least.

Inventory Quantity by Attributes – you want drop down attributes on your products for the various options, for example shoes in their various sizes and colour combinations, with quantity attached.

Ability to cname if not hosted on your servers ( option 1) – you need to be able to make sure the site ’seems’ hosted and you have better urls for example http://www.yourdomain.com/redshoes and not http://www.randomcompany.com/yourcompanyname/redshoes or http://yourcompanyname.randomcompany.com/redshoes

Newsletter Function – to send basic marketing emails.

Functions you will WANT but you don’t necessarily need to survive: (next bit coming soon)

This will be updated as the industry changes and I have time to write more. I am not going to list all the available e-commerce solutions as there are plenty of sites to do that. This is the most organised one though:

E-commerce Shopping Cart Solutions Examples

If you need advice on any of these you can contact the authors of the blog (see at the bottom of the page) or myself as I will review any of these systems for you on my blog:

1. You can attract more customers to your site by specializing your marketing campaigns. By having such a very specialized site, you can focus any ads you create for a specific sector of people. You’re also more likely to have a specific set of keywords that will indicate to search engines exactly what is on your site. This can help you achieve a higher page rank.

2. You can gear both the content and the design of the site to better close your sale. Rather than combing through all sorts of different types of products, the content on your site will better match what the consumer was looking for in the first place. You can even design the site better because your niche has a common interest for you to base it on.

3. You can spend less money on marketing because you have fewer competitors. Rather than working harder and competing with an already saturated market, work smarter to gain loyal customers who have a specific need or interest.

With my Hairfreax site I found point one to be very true. Once I got going and selected around 10 keywords to use the search engine optimisation was easy to achieve for my niche market. With point two, its still mainly in progress, the design that is. I am planning heavy payment integrations and streamlining the product range over the Christmas period, and design will come last. But with the launch of Gothfreax, I am doing just that! I spend less that £20 a month of advertising, and my biggest sales month to date was without advertising.

Pure optimisation fall out paid for my holiday.
Another good article is from Etail Dtail – an introduction to online marketing for new online sellers. covering affiliate marketing, SEO, pay per click on both search engines and shopping comparison, banner exchanges and promotional discounts. I would recommend reading this post if you are new to marketing your e-commerce store online.

The website I am currently working on is a very niche market, in fact I have two projects running one off my own back for a small business in Birmingham and one within work for an existing client. I imagine I will blog about the trials and tribulations of niche SEO, and report of the results achieved by various techniques.

I should write an article ‘An E-commerce Store from Start to SEO‘ as a guide for new etailers, as its something I seem to be doing and refining everyday. Consider it a working title.

The man behind eTailology has this website ‘Better Coffee‘ which I will show to my colleges at work (think J-pod by Douglas Coupland) as the amount of fresh filtered coffee brewed in our office is suicidal.

eCommerce Optimization features How-To Articles about eCommerce Marketing, Learning eCommerce and Online Business including eCommerce News, Latest Trends, Platform Reviews and a Store Spotlight section where we look at, review and spotlight some of the most successful retail stores Online.

There are some great guides and articles on learning e-commerce, e-commerce marketing and e-commerce business all with handy rss feeds if you a Google desktop or Netvibes junkie.

And of course they mentioned this blog in the post Best eCommerce Blogs & eBusiness Information Sites which makes me happy.

I shall add this blog to my feeds ( as I use my blog sidebar as a feed reader reader) as this blog is on the pulse!

Example: http://my.frooition.com/050014/product_info.php?cPath=73&products_id=279

However, to tidy up the website I can use attributes, but that will then mean the sizes are not optimised in the HTML title (as a standard product title will be used) and when looking for small shoes it needs to be. I think I will rest on this model for now (as i would have to re-arrange and format the inventory to fit into size drop downs)

She only has around 20-25 lines twice a year so the website will not be cluttered.

Blogging as I am thinking. It is always better to think of your search engine optimisation on creation of the site rather than have it as a after thought, as this can effect your search ranking.