Tips & Advice

This area holds posts and articles which cover general eCommerce tips and advice rather than being focused on a particular key area.

Introduction To Affiliate Marketing

by Darren on March 18, 2012

If you’re looking for a new source of customers for your ecommerce website then consider this…

How would an influx of targeted visitors which you only pay for if they actually buy something? Sound interesting?

I’m talking about affiliate marketing, and for the right types of business it can be a great additional traffic stream.

How Does It Work?

With affiliate marketing you have a number of people (called affiliates) acting on your behalf to promote your website. You set them a commission rate which is either a % of sale value or a fixed amount.

The affiliates then go out and promote your site with a special affiliate code, this code ensures that when a visitors arrives at your site through an affiliate link they are tagged as a particular affiliates traffic source.

How Refusing To Make The Tough Decisions Ruined This Business

by Darren on February 24, 2012

One of my first ever consulting jobs was on an ecommerce website that specialised in selling children’s furniture.

It was run by a husband and wife team from their home and most of the furniture was shipped straight from manufacturers directly to customers.

This was quite a few years ago, probably around 2005, so ecommerce was still a fairly new endeavour at that time.

Their site was basic, they had no ecommerce platform at all and had manually built each page by hand, this lead to many issues for them.

Are You Forcing Customers To Register Before Purchasing? Don’t!

by Darren on February 14, 2012

Forced Registration Is Bad

One question that gets asked regularly is should you make customers register for an account on your website before making a purchase?

There have been lots of studies and testing into this and the outcomes are pretty conclusive, yet so many sites still get it wrong!

The short answer is that in most cases you should not force potential customers to register before making a purchase, here are the reasons why:

1. Long Forms Turn People Off

Just like in the real world, when someone is confronted with a form asking for lots of details most people are turned off.

The Secret Of A Good eCommerce Experience…

by Darren

Is making your customers experience as painless as possible. Sounds easy? It should be, yet so many sites get it so wrong. I’m going to pick on a company called Scan, they sell computer hardware and related items and we occasionally buy components off them for our business. Over the past two days I’ve had [...]

How To Generate Extra Sales From Your Existing Customers