Monthly Archives: September 2011

How can I make use of the Magento advanced search?

When you set up your store you should aim to break down as much of your product as possible. During set up you will normally set these up as attributes, within an attribute set. You can then specify which of these fields will be searchable in the advanced search, a basic advanced search may look like this; In this example, we are going to add fields to this search, in this case whether a suitcase is expandable or not. How to make an attribute appear in the advanced search;

1. Navigate to  -> Catalogue -> Attributes -> Manage Attibutes
2. Find your attribute that you want to edit and click on it, this time it will be suitcase_expandable
3. On the front end properties section. Look for available in advanced search and change this to be Yes

4. Save the attribute and your attribute will now appear in your advanced search parameters.

Advanced

Putting all your effort into getting more visitors to your online store? You could be missing the real money spinner!

So you have an ecommerce store and you want to sell more products or more product quantity. What do you do?

• Do you spend all your time trying to optimise (Search Engine Optimisation) your website so it comes top for of Google for all of your products?
• Do you start increasing your Adwords budget so you get more click throughs on your Pay Per Click campaigns?
• What about sending more regular emails to your existing clients and prospects?

The answer is you could do all of that, and that should get you the results you are looking for  but if you just do this then you could be wasting money and time  there is something you should be doing in your ecommerce store which will improve your sales without doing any of the above and then when you do the rewards will be higher. What am I talking about? Well how about looking at how many visitors come to your before you get a sale? Look at your analytics for the last month (typically this will be Google Analytics  if you don'­t have any installed get it installed now) and work out how many visitors came to your website,divide this by the number of sales you made in the same period. This will give you a visitor to sale conversion number. For example, last month your ecommerce store received 5000 visitors and you made 50 sales. 5000/50 = 100. So for every 100 visitors who arrive at your site you get 1 sale. Your task is to improve on this.The next thing to do is to start looking at how you can make it easier to purchase from your website. Maybe your checkout process is cumbersome. Perhaps there are barriers to someone buying that means they are dropping out of the sales process every site is different but it could be things like-

• Having to register for an account and not begin able to just purchase the items as a guest
• The delivery cost is too high
• Your prices are not competitive to others selling the same items
• Your store does not offer the right payment options

I could go on. Now you are aware of the types of problems, try placing an order on your website. Then ask friends, family and colleagues to find and try and purchase a specific product from your website do not help them, tell them your ecommerce store website address and the product you want and then leave them to it. When they have completed the task get feedback from them how easily did they find the product, could they work out the checkout process, did they come across any problems. The more people you can get to do this the better the information you will obtain. Hopefully you will identify where problems might be. Implement some remedies to sort these; you may have to go back to your ecommerce store designer/ developer to do this. Once these changes have been implemented, measure the conversion rate over the next few weeks. Imagine if by doing this you managed to get an increase on conversions of just 20%? Using the example above this would mean you would get a sale for every 83 people who visit your website instead of every 100. If an average sale is worth £50 you would be earning £3000 per month instead of £2500 per month for the same number of website visitors. Now when you start improving the visitors numbers your return on investment (ROI) will be significantly higher because of your higher conversion rate. I'­ve used small values here to illustrate the point so scale these figures up to fit your store. Can you see that if you then look at increasing all the following elements ñ visitors to sale, average value of a sale, frequency of repeat visitors and total number of visitors then only small % improvements in each of these could make a massive difference in the £ turnover of your ecommerce store. For now do start working on making small incremental changes to make a big difference to your profit. That is good Internet Marketing. Fore more information on our ecommerce marketing courses, take a look here.

Lately I have been spending a lot of time looking at ecommerce stores and what makes a good one and what makes a bad one. Well my research has come to the conclusion that there are a lot of bad ecommerce stores out there, fear not, Future Clients Training is here to help. So if you are running an ecommerce store, or you are looking to set up a online shop of some description here are a few tips to make sure you head in the right direction with it.

1. Remember the purpose of your online store

This entry was posted in Internet Marketing, Ecommerce and tagged google analytics, google tools on 9th September 2011 by Deryck Harlick.

I posted on twitter a few weeks ago that I thought I was all caught up after holidays, but by, Google can make some announcements in a week but I think I