Social Media Planning for Web Store

ECommerce has given an additional platform for consumers to search products, access product information, read product reviews and recommendations, compare prices, get best deals and finally make purchases. Howbeit, eCommerce is a technology designed, developed and implemented to ease the purchasing process.

However, since the products are going to be utilized by the customers, from here the social media comes into the whole picture. This platform gives consumers a medium to interact with others, share their views about various things, make social circle and recommend about specific things.   

       

Lately, webmasters are using this social media channel to offer an additional space to consumers for making well-informed decisions about their purchases. Online marketers are keeping a tab to get deeper insights on the social media activities of their consumers. They are stepping further by searching ways to utilize the social media data and highlight those items or services that are most recommended/reviewed.

Following points will help in growing online community & increasing the traffic to the web store:

Content Posting: Posting content on a regular basis helps online retail shopping cart owners to engage customers for a longer duration. Online customers’ response differently to different types of content postings like textual or image or any video. Additionally, the frequency of the postings also helps in checking the engagement levels with the web store.

Integrating social media buttons: A consistent postings on the social media channel likely results in getting more likes. The best way to increase the number of likes is integrating social media buttons in your web store. This not only serves as an additional platform, but also offers various information regarding the items or services, their reviews and first hand user experience of the products/ services.

Best price deals on social media: Offering the best price deal or deal of the week or an exclusive offer on social media sites drives more traffic to the eCommerce shopping cart. These are the very basic call to action contents. Twitter gives the functionality to display information about pre-sales or any preferred customers’ specials. Facebook gives the flexibility to run contests and any campaigns.

Sift negative feedbacks: Feedbacks are a very strong medium and if used properly, it offers the chance to enhance the overall productivity by streamlining the different processes. Webmasters need to be agile to sift-out the negative feedbacks. Feedbacks with negative impressions possess a ripple effect which discourages the social media community to opt for particular item or services.

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Making Your Online Store Stand Out

The global eCommerce sales, forecasted by eMarketer, are going to reach $ 1.2 trillion by the end of year 2013. This makes it very clear for retailers that it’s not going to be an optional marketing channel. The capability of eCommerce to cross the locational barriers and reaching the national & international customers has allowed the online retailers to opt for this channel. Retailers, worldwide, are encashing on this fad. 

The easy & cheap availability of technology, the technological innovation, pervasive internet technology  and access to  the untapped markets has led a flurry in the eCommerce industry where every retailer tries to carve his niche in the market. However,  whittling  and establishing your online business in this fast changing online space is the real nuisance for many online retailers. 

Additionally, the efficacy of the nuisances related to managing the online web stores are more coarse as compared to managing physical stores. The competition in this online space is much similar an offline physical market and the deciding factors for continuous growth are whipping out the small online retailers. 

The free or easy availability of over the counter eCommerce solutions has helped many retailers to establish their online store and letting them to manage front and back-end of the web store. Customization of any type in the online retail shopping cart to improve the overall efficiency gives higher customer experience and comprehensive centralized control of the online store. The technological innovation in eCommerce industry such as the application of social media and mobile communication devices are indispensable to make your web store noticeable in the industry.

The following points will give you an idea about the making your web store look unique among  your peers:

Tailoring to distinguish: Pre-designed, over the counter eCommerce shopping carts comes with a lacuna of inability to accommodate any tweaks to fit in custom requests. For illustration, personalize products feature is a new characteristic that is difficult to accommodate in off-the-shelf eCommerce platforms.  This feature can be used to incise your identity in any products. Any associated video showing the customization result in the product will effectively influence and enhance the customer satisfaction. 

Higher Control & Functionally: A hosted eCommerce shopping cart softwares suites more to those online retailers who are not much technology savvy. This type of arrangement is meant for transferring the web store’s control to the eCommerce solution provider company so that they can focus on more business-oriented processes.

Here are two points which should be taken care of are that the online retailers, before opting for such hosted arrangement, should check the type of services provided by the eCommerce company and the level & type of control and authority given to eCommerce solution providers. ECommerce companies usually handle the various aspects of eCommerce operations like order management, data feed management, hosting services, security management and web store optimization services. Online retailers should check whether the customization services are included in the agreement or not.

Handing over the important functions of web store management may jeopardize the overall control & authority of the web store.

Innovative application: Digitization of the new innovative marketing channels has given the online retailers an ability to make their web stores more interactive & personalized. They should have to utilize the reports generated data from order management, inventory management, overall marketing and social media. 

Any trends displayed in such reports may indicate particular interests and interactions and it should be used for offering custom rewards or offers or any gift certificates.

The eCommerce platform should be flexible enough to integrate extensions, plug-ins and various modules to offer a unique browsing, transacting and moreover sharing the shopping experience with others.

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24Seven Cart introduces a cogent Order Management feature

In order to accurately manage & speed up the process of placing and fulfilling an online order, LAN Services has introduced a comprehensive and puissant Order Management feature in its eCommerce platform, 24Seven Cart.

Now-a-days, opening an online store is a fad among various businesses. However, it’s not only the opening & operating a web store that matters, it’s the commitment of the online retailer to fulfill all the orders on time that matters the most. An online retailer receives orders on its web store through different ways. Orders are placed directly on the web store or through the Facebook section on the web store or through calling directly to the web store. 

The channel is same for placing an order but the approaches are different. This is done to ease the complexities involved while ordering the goods. Nevertheless, the eminent issue in the process is the timely completion and delivery of the orders placed. It is necessary for creating an assenting image of the web store in the online space.

It is in this regard, LAN Services has introduced a comprehensive Order Management feature in 24Seven shopping cart. This all-inclusive feature offers online retailers a competence to manage not only the aspects related to orders, but also the details related to online customers, shopping carts and detailed reports for insights.

Now the online retailers are able to see and filter the lodged online orders, whether those orders are paid, shipped or partially shipped or declined, cancelled or refunded. Online retailers can even record the important points related to that order. 

This feature lets the online retailers to add a new customer through, both, the admin front of the web store and by registering him through the storefront. Online retailers can edit various information associated with the customers such as their personal details, billing & shipping address and can delete or deactivate a particular customer.

This feature gives the flexibility to generate the order invoices between particular dates or by specific customers. It also offers the facility to write a special comment through pick list.

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Comprehensive Web Store Launched by 24Seven Cart

The changing eCommerce milieu has offered both opportunities and challenges. Opportunities take the form of infinite reach of the retailers to the online customers. Managing the web stores, along with physical ones and integrating payment and shipping modules, poses challenges in the online vertical.

The quantity, quality, human touch and the ease of the transaction are the prominent aspects of the eCommerce industry. After considering these important elements, LAN Services has revamped and relaunched its online store solution, 24Seven Cart.

24Seven Cart is a comprehensive proprietary eCommerce platform that covers the most dynamic elements associated with the online shopping. Following are the vital aspects associated with 24Seven Cart:

Re-marketing: 24Seven Cart offers various opportunities for online retailers to re-market their products and services. 24Seven Cart gives functionalities to approach online customers through various features like displaying product videos, sending newsletters, informing the prospective customers by sending promotional mails, integrated online chat with the customer representatives and re-approaching the customers who abandoned their shopping carts.

Personalization: 24Seven Cart confers online retailers to personalize their offerings to online customers. Additional services like customization in the products, packaging, delivery of goods, gift-wrapping, etc. helps in giving more personal touch to the standardized products.

Cross Channel Integration: Shopping cart platforms, like 24Seven Cart, give chance to display products across different channels of marketing. Displaying products on multiple platforms requires adoption of responsive web design to offer a similar look and feel across all channels. 24Seven Cart delivers similar brand experience on different platforms.

M-Commerce: The mobile compatibility of 24Seven Cart offers customers access to the web stores through their smart phones. The adoption of responsive web design technology lets online retailers display information in a similar way throughout differing screen sizes. Adopting this technology eliminates the need to have different websites for mobiles, tablets or desktop PCs.

Interactive Product Display: Product images are one of the ways to make a web store more appealing. 24Seven Cart presents additional options to interact with the online customers like displaying product videos, customer reviews about the products, and sharing videos on social media channels.

Fulfillment Capabilities: It means an optimizing post transaction experienced to the online customers like shipping integration. 24Seven Cart offers various mechanisms for shipping products which, till now, are seen as an addition to the cost of the product. It gives the opportunity to differentiate the web store through distinct shipping programs such as same-day delivery, different delivery programs etc.

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Penguin 2.0 compatible 24Seven shopping cart platform

Daily, web masters & online managers need to juggle up with various techniques and issues to score ranking on the search engine result pages (SERP) for their websites. Google designs & implements different techniques to manage and rank those websites who abides by its rules & regulations. Among the various Google updates, the most recent one is a Penguin 2.0 which mainly focuses on web spam & backlinks.

Updates on the web sites’ optimization techniques are definitely going to affect, not only the ranking of the sites, but also the online marketing strategies of the web masters. Tweaking the algorithm for updating the optimization techniques resolves various purposes like link building, removing the spam, drafting the anchor text and usage of keywords.

The main purpose of these updates in the algorithms is to enhance & upgrade the quality of online browser’s content. To adhere to the guidelines of the Google, LAN Services has made significant changes in its licensed eCommerce platform, 24Seven Cart. 

This spate of updates in the optimization technique has induced 24Seven Cart to redesign & implement updated SEO practices. The changes integrated into the 24Seven cart as follows:

Anchor Text: The basic purpose of the anchor text is to create links on the web site. Google tracks the keyword stuffed anchor text to the keyword level and lowers the ranking of the web store. It has created filters to avoid over optimization. 24Seven cart uses such anchor texts that are relevant to the web store.

Authority: This is one of the biggest changes Google incorporated in their algorithms to give authority to some web sites. Here authority signifies page or domain authority. Google assigns higher ranks to those sites that have authority in their niches. 24Seven Cart design web stores in such a way that every web store appears unique in them.

Advertorials: These are websites meant for selling the web links to increase the number of links. Google has updated its algorithms to sift those websites that contain such kind of links. To abide by this update, the 24Seven Cart includes a disclaimer and uses nofollow links. 

Clear & precise subject matter: Web stores should use unique & easy to comprehend the content. Managing varied subject matters entails additional accuracy, relevancy and clear information. 24Seven cart gives webmasters to design & develop a resource bank on relative site topics.

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24Seven Shopping Cart Integrates with Retail Pro Point of Sale

LAN Services, the maker of 24Seven Cart web store platform, has finally resolved the long-standing issue of managing point of sales (POS) operation by integrating and launching 24Seven Cart with Retail Pro point of sales.

Point of sale system is definitely assisting millions of retailers in their day-to-day retail management operations. Managing sales, inventories, price adjustments and promotions are the biggest advantages of having a point of sale in the retail store.

However, increased retail sales also demands additional capabilities from the point of sale systems like shipping integration, customer service ability, social media integration for promotion, advance mail management, sales returns etc. In order to resolve these issues, LAN services has launched 24Seven shopping cart integrated with Retail Pro point of sale. 

Now the retailers need not to worry about multi-store point of sale operations as they can integrate 24seven cart with any number of retail point of sale. Additionally, the recurring problem of signing-in the point of sale systems while sharing a large amount of information is also resolved.

Integrating Retail Pro with 24Seven Cart offers ability to pass and update information regarding inventories and customers simultaneously on both the systems. It helps in immediately uploading product and fulfillment data on the web stores and downloads the customer orders to Retail Pro Point of sale. Synchronized Retail Pro with 24Seven Cart mechanizes and schedules the various inventory updates like price and quantity, product attributes and out-of-stock items.

Additional features of 24Seven Cart and Retail Pro integration are:

• Automates information sharing between two different platforms.
• Updates point of sale inventory on different marketplaces like Amazon and eBay.
• Generates various reports on sales, payments, shipping etc.
• Eliminates manual data entry.

This integration has added capabilities to various areas of retail management like catalog management, order processing & material management and payment processing & shipping management.

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