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02
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Daniel |
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john |
With one of our out-of-town developers visiting the head office, a bunch of us went on our first Photowalk around the Market after work. Unfortunately, we went out on the hottest and haziest evening of the summer, but we still had a great time. We walked to a great lookout that overlooks Parliament and the Ottawa River, ended up having great fun 'light painting' on the wall of the National Art Gallery. Luckily, no permanent damage was done.
Some of us take our Street Fighter seriously
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02
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Daniel |
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30
Jul |
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Dimitri |
When the e-commerce model exploded onto the market, the ability for small businesses to open their doors to the world 24/7 revolutionized the retail industry. While that’s still true, the spread of e-commerce means that online retailers go above and beyond to stand out from the crowd. Beyond rock bottom pricing, there are several easy ways online retailers—both startups and established stores—can jumpstart their e-commerce sales. 1. Put your best face forward with a top-notch storefront. As the old adage goes, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and this is particularly true among the often-fickle online shopper crowd. Whether you’re just beginning or looking to revamp an existing site, do not skimp on quality design. Create a storefront with a look and feel that will appeal to your customers, with superb navigation and exceptional usability. Use only high-quality photographs of your products to maintain a professional image. At one time, developing a slick storefront required shop owners to either invest in costly web design software and training to try and build the site themselves or hire an expensive web designer to do it for them. Now, with professionally designed theme stores offered by the leading e-commerce platform providers, it’s never been easier to build an attractive, sleek, contemporary site in a matter of minutes. 2. Make it easy to buy. Ease of navigation is critical—the more complicated it is for your customers to find the products they want (and even those they didn’t yet know they wanted), the more likely they are to pass through without a purchase. Consider how your customers would shop for your products—by style, by application, by size, by feature or some other attribute—and organize your products in a way that most naturally aligns with their shopping style. Don’t miss the opportunity to up-sell, offer add-on accessories, package promotions or “often bought together” products. Especially for stores offering non-essential or leisure items, this opportunity to capture an impulse buy can be a significant source of revenue. By offering discounts on bundles, you can make the customer feel like they’re getting a great deal and demonstrate that you appreciate their business. Keep the checkout process as simple as possible. Avoid overwhelming shoppers with too much data input to reduce the number of abandoned shopping carts. 3. Be responsive to customers. While it should go without saying, maintaining exceptional customer service is vitally important in jumpstarting e-commerce sales. Besides processing orders quickly, make it easy for customers to contact you for help or to get their questions answered. When contacted, respond promptly and thoroughly to customer emails and phone calls with a personalized response. While a canned email to confirm receipt of the inquiry is okay, be sure to follow-up immediately with an actual, detailed reply. One shop, Callie’s Biscuits, has found a unique way to engage with even those customers who didn’t make a purchase: by following up on abandoned carts. Each week the store compiles the e-mail addresses of customers who abandoned orders and sends a personal message thanking them for their visit and asking whether they had any technical trouble in completing their order. As a result, many customers who’d forgotten about loading their cart often proceed to placing the order. It also provides an opportunity to gather customer feedback—if there was a specific reason they didn’t place the order, Callie’s can talk with the customer to resolve the issue and possibly turn the problem into a sale. This kind of “unexpected” responsiveness can be quite refreshing to online shoppers who are more accustomed to being “out of sight, out of mind,” especially with larger retailers. 4. Add a personal touch. Certainly one of the key benefits of e-commerce is the automation factor. The ability to receive and process orders over the web can be a tremendous time and money saver. However, it’s important to maintain a personal touch with your customers that will help them to feel more connected with and appreciated by you and your business. Simple things, like a personalized hand-written note in the shipment box, can go a long way toward maintaining a personal connection with your customers without a significant time and cash investment. 5. Leverage social media. Integrating social media networks with your e-commerce presence is one of the most powerful ways to maintain customer engagement and drive sales. Aside from being extremely cost effective (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace are all free services), it allows you to engage in and maintain a dialogue with your customers—and potentially reach an even greater audience through the social media connections of your existing customers. It’s easy to begin driving sales with social media by posting to your networks about new products, services or other store news. Social network-exclusive discounts can also make your social media fans feel special and encourage them to share the “secret” of your business with their network. Beyond direct sales, though, social media outreach can serve to position you and your company as an industry expert, a trusted resource for information about your niche market. By building this kind of relationship with customers in an indirect and comfortable way, you can build a loyal and lucrative following and grow your customer base exponentially with ease and relatively little investment. In today’s crowded e-commerce marketplace, it’s crucial to leverage every available opportunity to differentiate your business and spur sales. With the right tools at your disposal—including a feature-rich, flexible and affordable e-commerce platform that can grow with your business—and creative ways to personalize your offering to truly speak to your customers’ desires, it’s never been easier to jumpstart sales and grow your e-commerce business. |
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29
Jul |
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Daniel |
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26
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Daniel |
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22
Jul |
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Aurelien |
Shopify provides you with a free “yourstore.myshopify.com” domain with your ecommerce store, but you can also use your own domain name like “yourstore.com”. Having your own domain name is more professional and makes it easier to promote your brand. Storeowner Addison from DrChristophersHerbs.com agrees:
With so many websites already on the internet, you often need to be creative to find a domain name that isn’t already taken. Smashing Magazine wrote a great article to do just that and we have highlighted some key points: 1. The essentials – Be short, catchy and memorable! You should also make your name easy to pronounce and spell. 2. The unspoken rules – Avoid something too similar to competing domain names and make sure not to violate someone else’s trademark. 3. ”.COM” – The ”.com” is the most popular top-level domain and it can be hard to find one that is available. In most cases, you should favor a ”.com” however if you are planning to sell in a specific country only you should consider a country specific domain such as “co.uk” for the United Kingdom. 4. Discoverable vs. Brandable – What’s your strategy? Solely relying on traffic from search engines? Then you should use real words and phrases like TopTvMounts.com that people are searching for to increase your search ranking. If your marketing focus is on paid search listing, banner ads and buzz building, you should come up with a brandable name like Insiders1.com that people will remember. 5. Be creative – Most single-word domains are taken and you might need to create your own word. Try compounding two whole words (YouTube), using a phrase (Six Apart), blending parts of two words together (Microsoft), tweaking a word (Flickr), affixing a word with a prefix or a suffix (Shopify), or making up a completely unique name (Odeo). For more explanations and examples read The Effective Strategy For Choosing Right Domain Names. Here is a list of tools to help you brainstorm names:
Most likely you will not get your first pick; don’t let that discourage you. You will find a great domain name to represent your store. PS: Go here to learn how get your own domain name working with your Shopify store. |
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20
Jul |
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Dimitri |
After six months, and over a thousand amazing online stores started, we are proud to announce the end of the Shopify/4 Build-a-Business Contest and of course, the winners! The participants came up with an amazing variety of ideas, and we loved seeing the kinds of businesses that came out of it all. There was a lot of info, so we thought we’d show you how we saw the contest in the most interesting way we could think of – a Build-a-Business Infographic! Click on the image above to download the full-res version and here to share with others:Some 1,378 stores were opened for the contest, all completely new businesses that were started from scratch, and sold more than $3.5 MILLION on Shopify. And here are the winners. Be sure to check out their stores by clicking below: Congratulations to all the winners, and everyone else who participated! Hundreds of new, viable businesses were started because of this business and we couldn’t be happier. You can read more about the contest at the New York Times and on Tim Ferriss’ blog. Here’s an excerpt from Tim’s post, which has an interview with all five winners: DODOCASE We can’t tell you all how proud we are to have been a part of hundreds of stories like the one above. A big thank you from the entire Shopify team to all the participants! |
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19
Jul |
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Daniel |
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14
Jul |
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Aurelien |
Keri Barrett runs a pretty boutique called First Date and has a great tip for new store owners about setting up shipping rates.
Three Shipping Rate Strategies. Which One Is Best For You?Do you want to offer free shipping? A flat rate? A variable rate? Or even combination of these? Which one should you choose? The answer depends on two components: (1) your margins and (2) your customers experience. A) Free shipping reassures your customers; they won’t be charge excessively for shipping at checkout. It’s also very easy for you to setup in Shopify.
This strategy works great if your store as a limited number of products that only you sell and where shipping cost is no more than 20% of the product price. B) Flat rate shipping share the same advantages of a free shipping strategy. Customers know exactly what they will be charged and it’s also easy for you to setup.
Consider this approach if all your products have similar shipping costs, like for a t-shirt store. In the United States, USPS now offers “Priority Mail Flat Rates”, one standard rate for whatever fits in their boxes. If you can take advantage of this, you should consider flat rate shipping. C) Variable rate shipping charges your customers a different rate based on what they purchased. This method is commonly used and favors by retailers as it give you more control on how much to charge based on your customers order. If you sell many products with variable weight and dimensions or/and customers buy more than one at the time, you should favor a variable rate strategy. In other words, your shipping cost varies a lot order to order. D) A combination of these strategies should also be considered. For example:
This a great way to offer special promotions and increase your average order by encouraging customers to spend more to save on shipping. Here are instructions on how to set your shipping rates Quick Advice About Shipping
OrderCup: A shipping app that can save you time and moneyOrderCup, from the Shopify App Store, can save you a lot of time. It will do shipping labels for UPS, FedEx & USPS (postage included, amount hidden). Pre-filled customs forms for international orders. And much more. |
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12
Jul |
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Daniel |
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08
Jul |
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Dimitri |
The social media revolution has made it possible for business of all sizes to reach an infinitely expanding audience. With the right integration tools, it’s simple and easy to automate your social media activities directly with an e-commerce storefront and eliminate the intimidating time commitment that can accompany the move to a social marketing program. Below are a couple of great examples about how to use social media to promote your business. What’s in it for you?Connecting social media with your e-commerce presence allows even the smallest shop to tap into an enormous—and still growing—potential customer base. With more than 400+ million users on Facebook alone, this single network now boasts more traffic per week than Google in the U.S. The real value in Facebook and other social networks is in their exponentially powerful word of mouth marketing. Believe it or not, 75% of consumers trust peer recommendations of products and services, while less than 15% trust paid advertising. This means you can have a much more honest dialogue with your customers through social media. Direct Product MarketingThe easiest way to get started in with social media integration for your e- commerce business is with direct promotion of products, services, special offers and events distributed through a Facebook Fan Page or Twitter. By sharing news about new products, special offers for Facebook or Twitter followers and even exclusive events, you can build a loyal and engaged following that will want to share their “secret” find with their friends. Contests, giveaways and special promotions designed to encourage fans to spread the message can help to grow your network and customer base. For example, create a contest whereby the 100th follower to Re-Tweet your “deal of the day” receives a special discount or gift certificate. Charmandchain.com, an online jewelry boutique that uses Shopify for their online store, has incorporated word-of- mouth marketing into their Facebook page by offering an incentive for the customer to tell friends about the store. By inviting 20 friends to become a fan on Facebook, follow on Twitter and join the mailing list, the customer is entered into a sweepstakes to win a $300 gift certificate. The message about Charm and Chain is spread exponentially. Brand Building with Indirect MarketingBesides direct promotion of products and services, social media provides an easy and effective way to build brand leadership and trust among your customers and fans. Blogs are an excellent way to weave a bit more of your shop’s personality and expertise into the sales conversation without a direct sales push. Blogging about new products and events is important but by also sharing your knowledge, tips and thoughts on industry news, product trends and other “big picture” aspects of the business, customers will be more inclined to turn to you for their purchases based on this established trust factor. Active participation in community forums is another powerful way to maintain engagement with customers beyond the sales transaction. Answering questions, providing feedback and serving as an information resource in your own or other public forums positions you as an expert in your industry, someone your customers can trust and a company they can turn to in order to meet their needs. Finally, don’t forget to integrate these efforts with Facebook and Twitter. By sharing a link to a new blog post over Facebook or Twitter, for example, you can reach your audience in multiple ways thereby making it easier to keep up to date on your news. Integration Tools Make it EasyWhile integrating social media with your e-commerce presence may be free, it may still come at a price: your valuable time. Maintaining multiple online presences, pages and feeds can be extremely time consuming. Fortunately, with the right e-commerce platform, you can easily integrate—and automate—these efforts to save time. First, build a Twitter applet, Facebook “Like” button and a blog feed directly into your storefront to make customers aware of your social presence and make it easy for them to find you. Second, choose an e-commerce platform provider with social media integration tools that automate the distribution process. This way, when you add a new product, launch a promotion, post a new blog article or have any other bit of news to share, the message is distributed instantly and automatically across all the social networks you’ve established. With just a single point of contact to spread the message across multiple platforms, you can dramatically reduce the amount of time you invest in social media management to improve efficiency without sacrificing valuable customer engagement. While it may seem overwhelming to step into the social media fray, the opportunity for growth by leveraging this evolving medium simply cannot be ignored. With easy-to-use integration tools at your disposal, building a social media presence can not only easily generate an impressive return on investment, but it can also be a fun and energizing way to interact with your customers and learn more about what makes them tick—which can pay further dividends long down the road. Here are a few free apps to use with your online store. Give them a shot and see what they could do for you.
BeeShopy
Check out BeeShopy, which lets you publish your online store directly to Facebook and lets customers and fans buy without leaving your fan page.
Tweetify
With Tweetify you can market your products directly on Twitter.
Socialify
Use Socialify to publish products and promotions directly on your Facebook page. Your fans will have it in their news feed as well. |


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