Ecommerce Tips Blog

SEO and Yahoo! Store – Perfect Recipe for Success

SEO and Yahoo! Store together make the perfect recipe for success of your ecommerce business!

The friendship between SEO and Yahoo! Store goes back to very the inception of Yahoo! Store and it has always been the most SEO friendly ecommerce system for its ability to generate static html page URLs. Most other feature rich ecommerce system would generate URLs with query string “?” which are not liked by search engines. All major search engines have repeated declared that they have issues crawling and indexing pages with more than two query strings in the URL.

Although some pro-active ecommerce systems have now adopted this feature but Yahoo! Store system still remains the most easy to use and automate for SEO. A custom RTML enhancement (Automatic Meta Tags) can help generate Title and Meta tags automatically from you page heading and description.

There are several other SEO features inbuilt in Yahoo! Store manager to make your easier and they are as follows:

• You can submit automatic XML Site Map for search engines dynamically for all products and pages
• You can also generate and submit your Product Catalog to Shopping Comparison engines
• You can use Yahoo! Site Explorer feature to view the indexing status of your website in Yahoo! Search Engine
• It also allows you to setup Google Site Map submissions right from Store Manager
• Instantly setup a Blog using Wordpress or MovableType

Apart from these you can very well setup other standard SEO fixes like Domain Canonicalization, custom 404 error page etc. The bottom line is that SEO and Yahoo! Store have good chemistry between them to help your ecommerce business prosper well, effortlessly!

Social Media Marketing is the Future!

Social Media Marketing is the future of online marketing! Specially if you are an online retailer and you target a niche market.

With over 180 million active online users MySpace alone presents a huge market for your products and then you have Facebook, YouTube, Del.icio.us, Digg and other emerging media channels with active internet users.

Spending enormous time and effort on SEO and burning $$$ on PPC campaigns may no longer be the vital ways to market your products/services online. You can actually get better targeted and more engaged audience online through popular social networks. Oh and did I hear you correct about your concerns for ROI? You need not worry about that at all as you do not spend money marketing on social networks at all!

So does it really work? What better proof than Barack Obama’s recent triumph through social media marketing? Be it managing poll campaigns, connecting through voters, raising donations everything was done online – that too without spending millions of dollars on advertising.

People were connected through existing social networks (access to existing online users), they were promised vital information before it goes to media (engaging them and spreading the word viral way) and the result was maximum. The same can be used to market your products to your niche markets!

Too Many Products? It can bring More Sales

If you think you have too many products to handle on your Yahoo! Store, think AGAIN!

Imagine looking at Analytics of your Yahoo! Store and seeing that you have got more than 90% traffic from search engines. Thats what most of the online merchants would like to see, yeah? But then you realize what it takes (finding the right SEO company, huge cost for SEO blah, blah…) to get there.

So is it just a big pocket dream? Not really, your large inventory online could do it for you. All you need to do is to get maximum of your product pages indexed by search engines – specially Google, because thats where most of the people are searching and people are searching for specific product codes/full product names.

This way you have a better chance of getting on top of the organic search results for those less competitive keywords – your product numbers/full names and thus more traffic for your store and thus more sales!

So what it takes to get most of your product pages indexed by search engines? You just need to optimize each product page by making a unique title, meta keywords and meta description and thats it! If this sounds too much work, obviously for hundreds/thousands of products on your store, you can use the Automatically Generated Meta Tags enhancement and get it done in a flash!

Now that you have optimized all of your product page, how do you know if your pages are actually getting indexed by search engines specially Google? You can setup Google Webmaster Tools and see the index stats of your Yahoo! Store pages and then keep improving until you get all of them indexed.

Wish you More Products, More Traffic and More Sales!

Enjoy Gmail on your Yahoo! Store

I just wanted to share this little trick to all those who love Gmail. You could actually setup your favorite Gmail on your Yahoo! Store and use Gmail interface to check your emails.

We have installed Google Apps on our domain www.website4retail.com which is a Yahooo! Store and we use Gmail. I actually check my email ’shubie at website4retail doc com’ on Gmail interface and it works sweet for me for the fact I love Gmail over any other email program (either webmail or POP3 Apps).

Its easy to setup if you have a Merchant Solution store and takes just few minutes to change MX records and creating an advanced DNS zone which is pretty much straightforward if you following the instructions at Google Apps and Domain control panel at Yahoo! Store.

Cheers!

Improving checkout process can trigger more sales!

You’ve got a great website selling awesome products and you also get good amount of target traffic – but the conversion is still low?

It could well be the plain and standard checkout process of your Yahoo! Store. Researches show that the average shopping cart abandonment rate is 64-70% and reducing the same is crucial for the success of any retailer.

We recommend the following enhancements for Yahoo! Store checkout process:

1. Site Matching Design:
Since your Yahoo! Store comes with a standard checkout manager with a different URL and your customers need to be assured that they haven’t come to a different website your checkout manager should ideally have the same design theme.

2. Security and Privacy Guarantee:
Reassuring your customers with a prominent message can surely help avoid shopping cart abandonment.

3. Additional Payment Options:
You should atleast have Paypal as the additional payment method to avoid loosing those customers who prefer paying by Paypal. More and more established retailers are adding Paypal as their payment option.

4. Shipping, Delivery and Returns Terms:
This worries most of the customers and a major reason for shopping cart abandonment. So clearly mentioning your terms for Shipping, Delivery and Returns can increase sales dramatically.

5. Coupons and Discounts:
Having your customers checkout with a coupon code or order value discount helps minimize their options to think about cancelling and they even keep coming back for more!

Click here to Get A Quote for improving your checkout process with all these improvements start selling more!