Your ecommerce New Years Resolution

What are the top 3 tasks you'll tackle in 2011?

[CPC_Andrew]

Just interested in what you'll be tackling for 2011. Some suggestions to your list (Disclaimer: I'm a comparison shopping expert that works with CPC Strategy, so these may be a *bit* skewed):

- List your products on Google Product Search, Bing Shopping, and Shopmania (all free shopping engines).

- Formulate CPC rate bidding strategies for your paid shopping engine campaigns.

- Create a comparison shopping campaign audit schedule.

What are your top 3?

[jwolthuis]

Our top 3:

1) List products on Bonanza

2) Utilize USPS Regional Rate boxes

3) Improve website filtering/ordering based on product traits.

[sobole]

Not let Goog run me

[lorax]

1) Rebranding of site
2) Modify shipping/order fulfillment process
3) Double product offerings

[ssgumby]

1. Add better upselling features
2. Branch out marketing/branding efforts
3. Begin new ecom site, different niche

[topr8]

making more use of my off line opportunities to promote my ecomm store

[fabulousyarn]

evolve my social presence
redo fulfillment so it doesnt eat up so much time and moolah
maximize amazon and shopatron oppotrunities
clean up the dang website, again, more

[CPC_Andrew]

@jwolthuis - hopefully Bonanza works up their traffic volume to be a powerful investment.

@sobole - diversify! Have you tried comparison shopping engines?

@lorax - I'm always a fan of trying out new products. It's a great way to test where the market is headed and to find bright spots (and bad ones) that you can highlight or hide.

@ssgumby - are you referring to personalization / product recommendation? Very hot topic I've only heard great things about.

@topr8 - where and how do you plan to advertise?

@fabulousyarn - what ways will you evolve socially? More personal involvement on Facebook and Twitter?
Re: Amazon, are you on the Amazon marketplace, Product Ads, or both?

I'm kind of surprise no one mentioned optimizing for mobile commerce, or maybe you have mobile sites already?

[dpd1]

I'm taking some major chances. I raised a lot of our prices quite a bit on the first. And if everything doesn't come crashing down, I'll probably do it again mid year. I decided I can't keep going the way I am. It's too much to manufacture and also sell, and I have zero time for anything. If I can make the same money for less work, that's at least something. So in essence... I'm almost trying to lower sales. Sounds insane, but that's the only solution I can think of.

But in a good way, this can help free up time for developing new products and other improvements, which I think is ultimately more important for growth.

[gpilling]

@dpd1 since you make your own stuff, you might consider making 'deluxe' versions that are 25% more expensive at retail, but just have some minor added (low cost) features. Some people just want the best of everything, no matter the cost.

[HRoth]

I second gpilling's idea about deluxe stuff. I began offering two types of widgets, one of which is custom. Sales of these items have been surprising, and that's with not doing any kind of promotion except to have a link to their page on the main page. These widgets sell for 5-6 times my average total ticket.

One of my goals is expand that line of widgets and create even more expensive versions. I do expect word of mouth to help me with selling these widgets, though. I have already had two referrals. I also want to create a gallery of these widgets to attract buyers who are doing image searches. Nice thing about image as opposed to text is that I can watermark them.

Goal two is cannibalize text from my ecommerce site in order to build a pure content site. To that end, I am working on rewriting each page and shifting it over. This will take a long time.

Goal three is not related to my ecommerce site but related to making money, and that is to write many more blog entries than I have been as well as writing articles for the blog so that I can finally monetize that baby this year.

[jwolthuis]

@dpd1 It seems that whenever we raise our markup, our sales actually increase. It's counter-intuitive, but that's what the raw data tells us.

We tried to be "The Wiz" (Seinfeld fans know that nobody beats The Wiz) with lowest prices, and that lead to lots of overtime with very little profit. It's better to increase prices, work less, and enjoy the profits.

[dpd1]

@dpd1 It seems that whenever we raise our markup, our sales actually increase. It's counter-intuitive, but that's what the raw data tells us.

Thanks guys.

Well... I guess that's a good problem to have. I certainly hope it happens to me. Like I said... If the sky doesn't fall, I'll probably upgrade a lot of stuff again, later in the year. What I've done is pretty much like you guys said... I left alone some of the more consumer/budget type stuff, but raised the more high quality/commercial type stuff. Basically what I did to make a reputation, is sell high quality commercial grade stuff to consumer people for less. It worked, but now that I have a rep, it's time to move on and go after the people with money. So I also want to make stuff aimed directly at them for even more now.

[werty]

My ecomm site needs a lot of work:

1. Increase Products Offerings
2. Beef up descriptions
3. Streamline Checkout Process
4. Scale PPC
5. Links Links Links :P

[ssgumby]

@ssgumby - are you referring to personalization / product recommendation? Very hot topic I've only heard great things about.

Im talking about the customer adds widget A to the cart, we show them a complimentary widget B at a lower cost and free shipping but only when they buy them together.

[fabulousyarn]

CPC_Andrew

Evolving the social presence to be more active, and get deeper into the headspace of my customers (for me that means more blogging, more videos, interactive chat sessions and a new web-tv show touring the region with local producers).

I am on both amazon marketplace and product ads, and both are turning into significant reveunue and traffic streams.

[Hugene]

1. Start doing eCommoerce ;)

[votrechien]

Great thread.

1. Implementing better inventory tracking to ensure all of our products, stock permitting, are listed across eBay, Amazon, PPC networks, shopping comparison engines.

2. Implement better conversion tracking to be able to determine the source of 90% of all of our sales.

3. Increase our traffic 300% across all of our websites through a combination of more broad PPC bidding, better organic rankings, shopping comparison engines, and loyalty programs.

4. Increase the number of products we import under our own in-house name by 40 products.

5. Outsource 10 hours of my own individual work to either a VA or other employee.

[CPC_Andrew]

@dpd1 - it makes sense, jwolthuis hits the nail on the head when he says it's counter-intuitive. And the most important benefit may just be the development of your next big thing, which hopefully you'll get a little more time to accomplish, but you may just get busier with your higher prices, not a bad scenario either way.

@werty - <snip> I like your list.

@ssgumby - awesome idea. Would love to see it in action.

@fabulousyarn - that's a great idea and something I am pursuing as well. The best thing is there's not much cost to see good ROI.

@Hugene - Great idea! :)

@votrechien - Re: #2, are you using multiple sources to track your data and averaging the results?
<snip>

[edited by: buckworks at 3:28 am (utc) on Jan 6, 2011]
[edit reason] Self-promotion [/edit]

[jleigh]

1. Increase exposure from Facebook Fan page / Twitter
2. Increase product line / inventory
3. Hire more employees

[CPC_Andrew]

@jleigh - is your #1 increasing exposure on Facebook / Twitter because you see the most potential there, or have you actually been seeing sales and traffic? I've heard mixed stories from retailers about the effectiveness of social media.

[Mark_A]

update all datasheets that contain incorrect details (a pain)

[CPC_Andrew]

@Mark_A - a pain but worthwhile. By data sheets are you talking about product titles and descriptions as well? Updating them to target qualified consumer keywords could give your products a traffic boost.

[Mark_A]

Each product in the shop has a link to a pdf datasheet, but the B&M company has moved three times in the life of the website and many of the datasheets are out of date. Of course for many of them the original files are no longer available which makes it a double pain.

[fabulousyarn]

I just found the answer to about 8 of my new years resolution - and its called odoro (yes, odoro.com) a new start up that I found while clicking about on mashable.
It is a lovely order fulfillment system that does order fulfillment/part and split shipping, drop shipping, inventory management in a really cool way (like, building orders for you for vendors based on your stock levels - woohoo). I may actually be able to keep my new years resolution!

j

[fabulousyarn]

4. Increase the number of products we import under our own in-house name by 40 products.

Good one. Me Too.

[dickbaker]

Get off the stick and either make my move to total ecommerce or go back to selling advertising only, as the two don't mix well.

I think that making the purpose of my site less murky will help with Google, too.

[CPC_Andrew]

@Mark_A - ouch.
@fabulousyarn - good luck with odoro, looks interesting!
@dickbaker - great idea.

[werty]

@fabulousyarn / @CPC_Andrew - Ordoro.com! I was looking at the odoro.com and did not see how that made sense. Ordoro on the other hand looks pretty interesting. We have been using stoneedge to handle things like this... for smaller stores this may make WAY more sense since I am guessing it is not $2k upfront, but rather a monthly fee. Will check out the demo.

[jennienina]

Great Thread!

My goals for 2011

(1) Move to a new e-commerce platform (away from my custom platform)
(2) Rebrand
(3) SEO, SEO, SEO

I am looking for advice and comments on monthly leased e-commerce platforms such as Volusion, Big Commerce, 3-D Cart -- Any opinions?