Ecommerce SEO

Electronic Commerce websites popularly known as eCommerce sites are some of the largest in the world.  Thousands or even millions of products generate millions of links, thereby implementing and managing SEO (Search Engine Optimization)  strategy for an eCommerce site is extremely challenging and poses potential time constraints.

SEO friendly navigation and internal link networks are vital for search engine spiders to crawl your site. Use the sidebar on the homepage to link category landing pages and make sure that the site map has an organized structure that lists all the main product categories.  Internally linking product description pages together through “recommended product” links or “those who searched this also like this” links is an effective way to pass link juice throughout the site.

Some of the most essential SEO factors to be considered by e-retailers are as follows

1. Site Architecture

Great site architecture is all about improving how users and search engines find their way around your site. It’s about getting the best, most relevant content in front of users and reducing the number of times they have to click to find it. The same applies to search engines, by flattening your site architecture; you can make potential gains in indexation metrics such as the number of pages generating search engine traffic and the number of pages in a search engine index.

2. Internal Search Engines

Utilize the internal search engine to support SEO efforts.  So many sites have beyond mediocre search engines where customers will search for product and nothing shows up.  But, when navigating through the sites pages, that product is listed.  eCommerce sites need to be able to produce search queries for product names, models, SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) and relative items.  Investing in powerful internal search engines is a necessity for a successful eCommerce site.

Unlike tracking external search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, which generally only list keywords for which you rank,  internal search metrics provide you with much more valuable information.  Internal search engines can help you understand which keywords customers are actually using which will help with targeted external SEO and PPC (Pay per Click).  This internal search data will also show which keywords are converting into sales and which keywords are causing people to leave the site.

3. User Experience

User experience is crucial to a successful eCommerce site.  After looking through sites such as Amazon.com, Overstock.com and Newegg.com, there are a few user experience factors that these successful eCommerce sites have in common. In this fast paced world we all live in, no one wants to click through three pages of the site to finally see the price of a product, thus, upfront pricing and product descriptions are necessary for conversions.  Product sorting options are also great for a user, for example, showing highest or lowest priced items, best-selling items, newest items or relevant items at the top of the on-site search query.

Creatively designed Rich Snippets, while not necessarily increasing search rankings, improves the presentation of pages in the search results, increases click though rates and increases the user experience. 

4. Website URLs

Another SEO practice that needs to be looked at is the use of long, crazy URLs.  There are countless numbers of eCommerce sites that use URLs that do not use keywords and are not SEO friendly.  For example, this fictitious site, http://www.myecommercestore.com/, uses a URL that looks something like this for a product page that sells military style cargo shorts, “http://myecommercestore.com/ – productid=9876/, when it should look something like this, “http://www.myecommercestore.com/ -military-cargo-shorts/.  Using keywords in the URL will add benefit to SEO.

5. Product Detail Pages

Having optimized content on product description pages is one of the most important SEO factors for ecommerce because they contain the most valuable content which determines the ultimate buying decision of the ecommerce customer. The product description page is where the customer finds pictures, product specifications, reviews, and pricing options to eventually make a buying decision.

6. Product Feeds

It is common for small, mid-size and even large e-commerce sites to offer feeds of their products for use by affiliates. While this is a terrific marketing tactic, it can result in an exact copy of your product pages appearing on other sites. Not only does this result in duplicate content, but can result in sites with better authority or better organization outranking you for your own products!

If possible, provide an alternate version of your product information in your feeds, which will ensure that each product page on your site is unique. Another tactic is to only include select fields in your feeds, and reserve the full product data set for use on your own site.  Probably the most effective strategy is to build out user-generated content, such as reviews, on your site to ensure your own product pages are unique, while beefing up the keyword universe on any given page.

7. Breadcrumbs

Consider the following factors to be very essential for implementing breadcrumbs effectively:

* Be consistent – If you’re going to include breadcrumbs on one page, include them – in the same place, using the same stylization – on every page. This gives you the maximum possible number of links, while maintaining a consistent atmosphere for readers.

* Use the appropriate link structure - For each element of the breadcrumb path, the title of the referenced page should be used as the anchor text, enabling users to quickly jump between tiers of pages on your site.

* Exclude the current page – Breadcrumb navigation should only include links to pages in the tiers above the active page. It isn’t necessary and would, in fact, be confusing to add a link to the current page within the breadcrumb.

8. Social Factors

This is now such a widely-recognized sentiment that it almost seems commonplace, but simply jumping on the social media bandwagon will not necessarily result in substantial SEO benefits. As with other marketing activities, it is important to identify and exploit opportunities that will specifically benefit search marketing efforts.

For on-site content, user-generated comments and reviews offer a way of enriching the keyword universe of a page, and the continual addition of content provides the search engines with a reason to spider these pages more often (and rank them higher based on content freshness, if this is indeed a significant ranking factor.) Aside from your main e-commerce site, supporting social media locations such as corporate blogs can also broaden your content base and provide inbound links that will benefit your main site through interlinking.

Social Media should not be overlooked.  Google does take Likes, Shares and Retweets into consideration when determining search rankings.  Adding Facebook Like, Share and Twitter Tweet buttons to the product description pages will allow users to link to the site through social media.  Interacting with your customers in social media is an amazing way to increase brand awareness and conversions.

9. Proper Redirection

Once the SEO friendly URLs are set, please make sure if additional steps are required for  the search engines to credit each of your pages properly.  Often, this involves creating proper redirection to improve the flow of SEO authority throughout your site.

The following are a few of the different types of redirection you’ll want to have in place:

i.) WWW versus non-WWW – Select one or the other for consistency in your backlinking efforts, but then also set up 301 redirects that inform the search engine spiders that both versions of your URLs should be treated the same.

ii.) Homepage redirection – Although it’s commonly seen in the internet retailing world, don’t automatically redirect your root URL to another page on your site. Doing so will prevent the link equity you receive to your homepage URL from being distributed correctly, resulting in less effective SEO.

iii.) Past model years – If you sell product lines that are updated each year, create new pages for your latest models but then redirect all pages from past years to the newest version using 301 redirect codes.

iv.) Proper redirection might seem complicated to implement, but it’s worth the extra effort in terms of ensuring that your site’s accumulated SEO authority is distributed correctly.

10. Noindex and nofollow

Another SEO for eCommerce best practice you’ll want to pay attention to is the use of noindex tags to indicate to the search engines that certain pages should be left out of the search results and nofollow link tags that prevent PageRank from being distributed to unimportant pages.

For most eCommerce sites, you’ll want to implement noindex and nofollow tags on the following site pages:

i.)   Contact page

ii.)  Order and shopping cart pages

iii.) User account pages

iv.) Archive pages

Noindexing these and any other unimportant pages on your robots.txt file and adding nofollow tags to any internal links pointing to these pages will help the search engine spiders determine how to focus both their indexing and ranking activities most effectively.

 11. Proper Canonicalization

If you use any type of CMS or ecommerce platform to manage your website, there’s a good chance your system is automatically creating multiple URLs that all point to the same page.  If you allow all of these pages to be indexed individually, you risk having your site subjected to duplicate content filters.

The best solution for this issue is the “rel=canonical” tag.  When added to the <head> section of each of your pages, the canonical tag allows you to specify whether or not the search engine spiders should index each given page or treat it the same as another URL.

And while you can add these tags by hand, a much better alternative is to search for an external plug-in or add-on program that’ll allow you to create canonical tags automatically.

12. Site Speed

If you’re running your website off an eCommerce platform like Magento, Big Commerce or Volusion, be aware that the size of these systems can result in decreased site speeds.  To compensate, you’ll need to purchase web hosting that can support your chosen program, as well as take on-site actions (like combining scripts to minimize necessary launch resources or host images and other files on off-site CDNs) in order to improve site speed as much as possible.

13. Fresh Content

If there’s one thing that all website owners – not just eCommerce retailers – should take from the recent Penguin update, it’s that content quality matters when it comes to SEO.  And if your website is still populated with the same stagnant content you put up when you first launched a few years ago, you simply can’t compete with newer, more active sites when it comes to overall quality.

As an internet retailer, one of the best things you can do for your website is to include a blog or other feature that allows you to post regular, fresh content updates.  Not only will this allow you to improve the relationships you have with your readers, it’ll also increase your potential keyword exposure and improve your odds of being featured in the SERPs included in Google’s recent freshness update.

Considering all the above SEO factors, we can implement the following as SEO tips

1. Maintain a Uniform and Clean Website Structure: The home page of your website should reflect the product categories; while all the inner pages should follow a common webpage structure. 

2. Use a Unique Title Tag: Every product page should have a unique title. An eCommerce site can contain any number of web pages. You can ask the programmer to code the title from the page content and product name. This makes your SEO more dynamic.

3. Select an Appropriate Keyword: The keywords must be unique for every webpage. They must reflect the important phrases within the webpage content. For an eCommerce site, you can ask the programmer to select keywords from the content and product name.

4. Create a Relevant Description Per Web Page: The description of a web page is the snippet which appears in the SERPS. Every visitor reads the snippet and then clicks on the search result. It is very important to include a description relevant to the webpage content.

5. Include Breadcrumbs for All Inner Pages: A breadcrumb is like a secondary navigation structure. It helps the visitor to navigate back to the main product category page. A breadcrumb also helps in the internal linking of the website. Overall, including a breadcrumb makes the website SEO friendly. 

6. Use a Heading Tag: Searchbots assign a lot of importance to the heading tag. The heading tag is SEO friendly and can be used to format the title of the web page content.

7. Avoid Usage of Flash: Avoid using flash on every web page of your eCommerce website. This will expand the site loading time. If the use of flash is inevitable, include textual content in the flash. Search engines are capable of reading the text in the flash file.

8. Optimize Images: Add the Alt tag to all the images of your website. Search engines cannot read images. The Alt tag is a means of ensuring that the search engines read the alternate text for images.

9. Optimize Anchor Text: Anchor text appears between the anchor opening and closing tag. It is good practice to use keywords as the anchor text.

10. Create an SEO Friendly URL Structure: The default URL structure of a dynamic website contains parameters. Search engines are not capable of understanding these parameters. A good URL structure must contain words separated by hyphens. 

11. Generate a XML Sitemap: A XML sitemap contains all the URLs present in the website and makes it easy for searchbots to find and index all web pages. If the number of web pages on a site is large, you can create a number of XML sitemaps and then submit these sitemaps to Google via Webmaster Tools. E.g. sitemap1.xml, sitemap2.xml.

12. Limit the Number of Outbound Links: Always link to a safe and secure website. If you are not sure about the quality of the website you are linking out to, use the no follow attribute.

13. Submít to Search Directories: Forward your website URL to good quality search directories. Most of the search directories take a few weeks to link back to a site. Fill in the details of the submission form carefully, so that the administrator accepts the submission.

14. Submít to Article Directories and Social Bookmarking Sites: Article submission is the quickest way of obtaining high quality backlinks. You need to select the do follow bookmarking sites and submit the URL to them. Growth in traffic is a plus point of submitting to social bookmarking sites.

15. Integrate a Secure Payment Gateway: A secure payment gateway is the heart of an Ecommerce website. Get a trust seal from Verisign, TrustE, etc. Visitors will be more likely to trust your site and to make an online payment.

16. Track User Behavior with a Good Analytics Tool: You can track and analyze visitor behavior with a good analytics tool. You need to select an analytics tool based on your requirements. If your eCommerce website operates on a large scale, you can opt for a paid analytics tool. Otherwise you can use a variety of free tools to obtain the best results.

Latest Trends : Video & Visual Search

Numerous studies have shown the power of video and rich images to enhance our ability to process information quickly. While the web originally was almost completely text-based (HTML to be precise), that is changing. By some measures YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, and it’s no surprise: people prefer to consume certain types of information in video format, and high-quality video support in modern browsers is the standard.

Statistics cited by Bing note that web visitors are able to process information up to 30% more rapidly when it’s provided in a combination of video and text, rather than text alone. Additionally, 65% of us are visual learners, and more likely to digest information and learn from it, in a visual form. Most types of eCommerce  notably apparel and products suited to emotional and personal tastes, excel with visual additions.

There is no doubt that video can be powerful on the web as a conversion tool, as well. A comScore study revealed that when video was included in the shopping experience, visitors were 64% more likely to purchase than without it, and stayed on the site for an additional 2 minutes.

Inference

While Google is the top dog and should be of primary focus in SEO, Bing is an important component of a well-ordered, strategic campaign. In addition to incremental increases in traffic from Bing, eCommerce sites can expect a much more shopping-prone demographic: numbers released by Microsoft state that Bing users are 11% more likely to buy than Google users, and 31% more likely to purchase than the web’s general user. It is a decidedly “shoppy” demographic that eCommerce companies should not ignore.

Trends in eCommerce and SEO continue to surprise. Staying on top of consumer shopping behavior with discounts and free shipping, offering rich product pages and video, and embracing the coming wave of visual search, will pay dividends. Additionally, ecommerce teams should pay special attention to duplicate content issues, especially at the product and search levels, and with faceted navigation.

References

• http://www.palmerwebmarketing.com/blog/25-ecommerce-seo-tips/
• http://www.macronimous.com/resources/SEO_for_Ecommerce_site_development.asp
• http://www.shopify.com/blog/4627892-10-crucial-seo-tips-for-ecommerce-entrepreneurs
• http://www.smarte-commerce.com/tag/seo-tips-for-e-commerce-websites/
• http://www.smarte-commerce.com/
• http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-for-ecommerce/40596/
• http://searchengineland.com/5-essential-concepts-for-e-commerce-seo-31713
• http://searchengineland.com/3-important-trends-to-watch-in-ecommerce-56890

Web Analytics

Introduction
In recent years, it was mystery to track visitors to a website and also their sole
intention.Web masters put counters on web pages to track the visitor activity
in the website. True web analytics capabilities were limited to large
corporations that could afford to spend thousands of dollars per month on
software to track and report on web activity.
Today, there is a wide range of web metrics measuring and tracking
applications available, making analytics one of the most talked about
topics both online and off. Although some of these tools are still expensive,
a number of analytics programs available now are completely free and just
as effective.
Since analytics tools are easier to use and more affordable than ever before,
more web-based businesses are now tracking activity at their web sites.
No matter how many visitors come to your site, you can use analytics to
gain insight into what your users like and don’t like about your web pages
so you can improve their experience while increasing traffic. Analytics can
be a powerful tool, so now is a great time to learn more about web metrics.
Use this guide to understand the basics of what web analytics are and why
they’re important, what metrics you should track, and how you can use this
information to optimize your site and encourage customers to visit often and
buy more.

What is Web Analytics
Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of
internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.
Web analytics is not just a tool for measuring website traffic but can be
used as a tool for business research and market research. Web analytics
applications can also help companies measure the results of traditional
print advertising campaigns. It helps one to estimate how traffic to a
website changes after the launch of a new advertising campaign. Web
analytics provides information about the number of visitors to a website
and the number of page views. It helps gauge traffic and popularity trends
which is useful for market research.
Need for Web Analytics
If you’re new to the web analytics game, the term may sound a bit
intimidating at first, but even non-tech savvy users will find that the
concept is fairly straightforward. Simply put, web analytics involves
measuring, collecting, analyzing, and reporting web site traffic and behavior
with the end goal of optimizing the success of your site. Whether you’re
looking to boost e-commerce sales, generate more leads, or enhance brand
awareness, analytics data can be used to learn a wealth of information about
your business and your customers. This type of information includes how
customers find your site and what they do when they get there. Not only that,
but analytics can help you figure out how much time they spend on your site
and can give you clues that point to why they leave. When you put it all
together, taking a close look at your web analytics can help you attract
more visitors to your site—and turn more of those visitors into paying
customers.
Types
Off-site web analytics refers to web measurement and analysis regardless
of whether you own or maintain a website. It includes the measurement
of a website's potential audience (opportunity), share of voice (visibility),
and buzz (comments) that is happening on the Internet as a whole.
On-site web analytics measure a visitor's journey once on your website.
This includes its drivers and conversions; for example, which landing pages
encourage people to make a purchase. On-site web analytics measures the
performance of your website in a commercial context. This data is typically
compared against key performance indicators for performance, and used
to improve a web site or marketing campaign's audience response.
Technical Approach
There are two main technological approaches to collecting the data.
The first method, logfile analysis, reads the logfiles in which the web server
records all its transactions.
The second method, page tagging, uses JavaScript on each page to notify
a third-party server when a page is rendered by a web browser. Both
collect data that can be processed to produce web traffic reports.
Conclusion
Though still a relatively new invention, web analytics is becoming an
increasingly popular and effective web site optimization tactic used by
online business owners. By providing deep insight into the who, what,
when, why and how of web site traffic and visitor behavior, web analytics
tools can help you improve the usability of your site and boost sales.
Ultimately, your main objective is to create a web site where visitors want
to browse and buy.

References

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_analytics

2. http://www.geotrust.com/resources/guides/web-analytics-for-ecommerce.pdf

ECommerce with Social Media

Introduction
Online retail sales are anticipated to grow 10 percent annually for the next five
years, accounting for 53 percent of all U.S. retail sales by 2014.
- Forrester Research.
Females make up 57.9 percent and males 42.1 percent of internet
users who made any type of purchase online.

Ad spending has reached nearly $450 billion per year and the fastest growth
areas in digital are social media and ecommerce. In 2010, we saw the rise
of flash sale sites, such as HauteLook and Rue La La and the discount site
Groupon.Total advertising spending currently an $449.7 billion per year.
Of the global ad spend, web marketing will rise from 14 to 18 percent in 2013
mostly driven by video and social media.

Males and females almost equally use social sites (47% vs. 53%)
61% of Facebook users are middle aged or older, with the average age being 37
StumbleUpon Drives More Than 50% of Social Media Traffic.
18- to 24-year-olds don’t dominate any particular social networking site,
they’re spread out all over - Stats from Pingdom.


7 Tools for Social Media eCommerce


Twitter & Facebook Updates
Facebook and Twitter dominate the social media space. With their social
networking capabilities at your disposal, you can reach out to fans and
friends in a scope that word-of-mouth advertising could never come close to.

Blog
Blog is an online journal which for business owners can be a powerful tool
to keep your customers “in the loop” about your store’s news and updates.
Use a blog to post news about your upcoming products. Post some ideas
about how your products can be used, or offer your customers updates
about new features within your store. A built-in blog capability lets you
schedule and manage your posts, and provides an industry standard RSS
feed to provide syndication capabilities for your blog.

Facebook Store
You can create a Facebook Fan page for your business, and use it to
advertise your store. Acquire fans to your store and post business specific
updates about your business to them. But why stop there? With a Facebook
Application, you can easily link your online store directly to your Facebook
Fan Page within its own tab. Select which products are displayed, such as
products within a specific category, Home Specials or items “On Sale”.
What’s more, you can empower your affiliates with the ability to create their
own online stores within their Facebook profiles and choose which products
will be displayed.

YouTube Video Integration
Bring your products to life and improve your visitor experience by adding
video footage to your product pages. Product images are important, but
a full motion video of your product can really help you sell it to your
customers. YouTube video integration lets you easily search YouTube
directly from your store’s control panel, select a video – whether it’s
a product review, demonstration or viral commercial – and instantly display
it on your product page.

Social Bookmarking
Visitors to your site may not always buy at that specific moment in time,
but will likely return to your store when they’re ready to purchase. Make
it easy for them to return to their favorite products by adding social
bookmarking to your products. With Social Bookmarking added to
your item listings, your customers can instantly bookmark individual
products to their browsers, email, or even to the popular social sites
like Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg and Twitter at the click of a button.

Facebook “Like” Button
Add a Facebook “Like” button to your products and let your customers
advertise your products for you on their Facebook pages. Their friends
can see this and perhaps take enough of an interest in the item to become
your customer as well.

Embracing Mobile Apps
Mobile phones today are so much more than just phones. In fact, these are
essentially hand-held computers complete with Web browsing capabilities
used by consumers to share products, information and comments with
their friends in real-time. It is important to provide a complete mobile
interface for visitors shopping your site on an iPhone or favorite smartphone
You will want to include optimized pages for Home, Products, Categories,
View Cart and Checkout. That way, visitors can easily browse and add
products to their cart and checkout, all within the Mobile interface.


Five Social Media Tips for Ecommerce Marketing


1. Track Customer Communication Channel
Facebook,Twitter,LinkedIn and YouTube, there’s no limit to the number
of social networking channels available for your business to leverage.
Key to successful social media marketing for ecommerce is choosing the
right channels to reach customers.
Customer Survey: Customer polls can suggest the most prefered social
channel for interaction. Monitoring social sites: Use a free tool like Social
Mention or Trackur. For something far more robust use tools like Radian6
to discover how and where customers are talking about your brand, your
competitors or target keywords.
Leveraging the stats: Some sites like Facebook are transparent when it
comes to user statistics. Or leverage research conducted by third-party
firms like eMarketer.
Revivew: backlinks, job postings, news announcements and keyword
rankings of competitors on a regular basis to get a glimpse into their
online marketing health.

2. Track Competitor 
Whether your ecommerce business is new to social media marketing, or
just need to take your efforts up a notch, competitive intelligence can be very
useful. Spend some time by conducting a competitive audit of your top
five competitors on the social web. Include:
The social sites in which they are active
The type of content they publish on the social web
The number of followers/fans/views they have on each site
How they promote specific products, programs or events via social media

3. Promote Exclusive Offers Through Social Media
In order for your ecommerce business to gain a following on whatever
social channel you choose, entice customers with something they can’t
get anywhere else.
For example, promote a contest via social media in the client’s blog
and Facebook fan page to promote a Halloween contest to name the
best costume. This initiative not only drove additional traffic to the
client’s website, but also helped increase the number of Facebook fans.
Alternately, offer an exclusive item to social media followers or fans, such
as free shipping or a weekly coupon. You can also offer “breaking news”
that does not appear anywhere else, like pre-product release announcements
or an inside look at your company’s inter-workings.

4. Don’t Just Push Products and Promotions
The primary goal of your ecommerce site may be to sell products, but
your social media marketing strategy should encompass a wider range
of tactics that simply promoting offerings. With too much product pushing
and not enough engagement, you’re unlikely to experience optimal success.
Incorporate some of these ideas into your ecommerce social media
marketing strategy:
Share messages or news stories from external sources
Create a blog on your website and feed blog content to your social accounts
Ask questions, participate in discussions or poll your customers via social
media. Post pictures from company events or videos from your CEO’s
speaking engagements

5. Introduce Social Media Outlets
1-800-Flowers first ecommerce site to launch a Facebook store, allowing
customers to browse and purchase its products directly through Facebook
and JC Penny maximizes the use of social media for its marketing efforts.
1-800-Flowers may be an extreme case, but ecommerce sites large and
small can still indirectly sell products through their social profiles.
There are plenty of third party facebook applications for promoting
facebook ecommerce.
For example:
Best Buy provides a link to the order page on your website. It may not
be quite as simple as purchasing directly from the social profile, but it can
be just as effective.

Conclusion

If you aren’t discovering which in social networking channels your customers

spend time and include them in your ecommerce marketing mix, you’re
probably missing out on building relationships, community and increasing
new customer acquisition through online word of mouth.

Social media is the best environment where the ecommerce customer relationship thrives best.

References

1. http://smallbiztechnology.com/archive/2010/06/7-tools-for-social-media-ecomm.html/

2. http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/812-Employing-Social-Media

3. http://sparxoo.com/2011/02/02/ecommerce-social-media-stats/

4. http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/03/ecommerce-marketing-social-media-tips/

Email Marketing

What is Email Marketing
Email marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as
a means of communicating commercial or fund-raising messages to an
audience. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current
customer could be considered email marketing

Why Email Marketing
Almost all basic business communications are done via email not via social
networks. The perception is that it’s more secure, private and user friendly
(centralized contacts, integrates with calendar, easily accessible via mobile
devices). Another benefit of email is that it’s a direct private channel of
communication to alert customers on new product offerings or promotions.
At the same time, customers can use e-mail to provide feedback and
ask questions.


Essential Characteristics of Email Marketing.
• Legitimate mailing list.
Do not send spam. Spam is illegal in some parts of the world. In the US it
is illegal under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Never buy or rent mailing
lists even if they are touted as "opt-in." A purchased email list is never
opt-in; it is always a spam list. If you send spam, you will be reported,
blocked by ISPs, harassed by SpamCop, blacklisted. Not only your email
address but your whole domain may find itself on blacklists and blocklists,
which can' be good for your SEO either. If you are on a shared IP address,
other users will suffer too.

• SignUp for Customers.
Create a signup center on your site, visible from all pages. You can also
use other techniques to get people to sign up. For example, take them to the
signup page when they click on "Lean more" information links. Or create
pop-ups inviting them to sign-up once they have posted a blog comment.
Always let them know that you won't share their information (and be true
to your promise).

• Email Policies
Always include your company’s physical address in each email message.
(This is required by the CAN-SPAM Act.)
Always include an easy unsubscribe option, preferably via a live link.
(This also honors the CAN-SPAM Act).
Include a prominent FTAF ("forward to a friend") link.
Creating valid HTML email newsletters and announcements with a
canonical link element may help marketers boost search engine optimization.

• Email Automation
Sequence and automate your email marketing campaigns with autoresponders.
Most email marketing software today supports schedulers and event-triggered
autoresponders. This is a big subject that can be researched independently.

• Email Delivery Tracking
Track delivery and open rates. The best email marketing applications today
have this ability. You will know how many of your messages bounced,
how many ended up in a junk folder, how many made it into the inbox,
how many were opened, and how many had the links in them followed
to your website.

• SMTP Options
Invest in a good SMTP (email delivery) service, don't just send via your
regular email provider. Such a service can provide you with a dedicated
email server and IP, scale and monitor your email campaigns, authenticate
your emails and perform reputation management for you, including dealing
with spam reports, ISP blocks and blacklistings (they call this black list
resolution).


Email Marketing Timing and Tips
• Provide advance notice
If you're sending out your Midnight Madness Sale email at lunchtime on
the date of the event you can expect that the majority of subscribers
may not even get to read it, let alone act on it, before it's all over.
You might not want to tip your hand to your competitors about special
sales, but the deepest discounts won't move merchandise
if your customers don't have a chance to shop before it's history.

• Specify dates & times – "Special offer today only…" and exactly when
 is "today"? Thursday March 23rd Only may not sound as marketing
-zingy as Today, but it's going to be more understandable to your readers,
especially the ones that don't read their emails every 8.3 seconds.
Remember that some of your customers may see your email appear on
their smartphones but may not open it until days later at their desktop or laptop
computers.

• Include the time zone
An inordinate number of email marketers feel that their city is the center of
the universe and that subscribers should not only be able to be prominently
aware of where the company's office is, but should also be able to
instinctively calculate the difference to their own time zone when responding
to time-specific offers.Keep in mind that 10 am in Greenville, Massachusetts
is 9 am in Greenville, Iowa; 8 am in Greenville, Colorado; 7 am in Greenville,
California; and 6 am in Greenville, Alaska.

• Track the delivery time
Not all ISPs deliver emails in nanoseconds, so you may find that while your
Gmail customers are swiftly receiving their newsletters, the Hotmail addresses
lag hours behind or vice versa. The variable delay situation is aggravated
should you be rash enough to dare to place an attachment with your emails
in which case some may disappear outright.
A good practice is to set up a number of seed email addresses with major
ISPs which you can use to determine the best- and worst-case delivery
scenarios for each and accordingly adjust your send times.

• Send at the time that they usually respond
You can track your response rate by time and thus understand the dayparts
where your customers may be more likely to respond.
By analyzing the timing data to group individuals who habitually open
and/or click at specific dates and times such "weekdays between 1 pm
and 4 pm" or "Saturdays between 9 am and noon" will allow you to optimize
your sending timing to that specific category of email subscriber.

• Don't send trigger based reminders
That friendly little reminder to ask
why they didn't open your email is a fast track one way ticket to
unsubscription or even worse, a spam folder relegation.
When your subscriber entered their desired frequency in your
preference center, they expected to have your emails land in their
inbox at the specified periodical level. Violating their expressed desires
will disembowel your subscription list.


References:

1. http://seoforums.org/seo-questions-answers/2444-email-marketing-search-engine-optimization.html
2. http://www.designdamage.com/how-to-integrate-email-marketing-seo-and-social-media/
3. http://www.practicalecommerce.com/blogs/post/867-The-Top-7-Ways-To-Master-Email-Marketing-Timing
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_marketing

Electronic Commerce

Electronic commerce (e-commerce) is the use of computers and telecommunication
technologies to share business information, maintain business relationships, and conduct
business transactions. Its origin can be traced back to the Electronic Data Interchange 
(EDI) activity in the 1960's. EDI refers to the set of activities that are related to the 
electronic facilitation of the transactions between vendors and buyers (purchase orders,
waybills, manifests and schedules). Currently, e-commerce depends mostly on the 
Internet as the underlying platform. Business transactions are events that serve the 
mission of a business.A transaction provides the primary medium by which a business 
interacts with its suppliers, customers, partners, employees, and the government. 
Transactions are significant because they capture and/or create data about and
 for businesses (Whitten & Bently, 1997). Examples of transactions include purchases, 
orders, sales, reservations, shipments, invoices, and payment processing.


E-commerce began in the 1990's and was largely driven by the invention of the
World Wide Web. The adoption of e-commerce has led to many new 
business models.The most important models of e-commerce are business-
to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer(B2C), and consumer-to-consumer (C2C).
C2C e-commerce refers to the use of the Internet by consumers to provide
goods and information to other consumers it offers an effective way to 
exchange goods and information between consumers. B2C ecommerce
mostly refers to the use of the Internet by a business to provide goods 
and services to customers; it offers consumers a fast and efficient way
to access various products and services from retailers all over the world
without leaving home. B2B ecommerce refers to the use of the Internet
between businesses to order products, receive invoices, and make payments;
it reduces production costs, accelerates ordering processes, and improves
inventory management. By exploiting efficiency, economy, and speed of 
the Internet, e-commerce simplifies and reduces the cost of processes
involved in business transactions.


References
International Journal of Information Science and Management

eCommerce Wishlist

Introduction.

The last few years E-commerce websites have grown at an enormous rate. Different E-commerce platforms provide various types of features to its visitors. Wishlist and gift certificates are among one of the very important features of eCommerce websites though this extremely useful feature is not utilized by many E-commerce website owners.

Helpful Features:

• Repeated visits to the website in order to modify (add/update)and check the availabilty of the items in the wishlist.
• Viral Marketing where people share their wishlist and also earn rewards on generating new references.

Suggested Features:

●      Email Wishlist to Friends: Enabling the option to email the wishlist would greatly empower inviting new customers. Existing customers can also email wishlist with personalized messages to get reviews from their near ones.

●      Stock updates: Email notifications when your wish list items go on sale, are low in stock or are back in stock (for out of stock items). These engagements tend to bind the customer interactions with the ecommerce website.

●      Make It Linkable: Make it easy for users to share their lists with other by giving them a unique and easy to remember url to access the wishlist. For example, www.yousite.com/wishlist/customername. Some sites hide the wish list behind a form post url or something that requires login. Avoid this.

●      Social Media Integration: Sharing wishlist on Google+,Facebook and Blogs can provide great brand exposure, as well as drive traffic.

●      Reward / Affiliate System: Reward your list users by giving them an incentive to share their lists with others. What can be better than emailing your wish list to friends and earning 10% if they buy something for you?

●      Diversify Your Wish Lists: Target diversified their lists by letting users choose a theme such as birthday lists, Christmas lists, shopping lists, etc. Each list type caters to a different type of customer.