How to Sell Online

Throughout our Build-A-Business Competition our four mentors provided expert advice through a popular video series. Here's a bit about each mentor:

• Daymond John created FUBU, a fashion company with over $6 billion in sales. He's also a regular investor on ABC's Shark Tank.
• Tim Ferriss is the author of The 4-Hour Workweek. He's also an active angel investor and an advisor to Shopify.
• Tina Roth Eisenberg is an internationally recognized designer. She created Swissmiss, Tattly, TeuxDeux, Creative Mornings and Studio Mates.
• Eric Ries wrote The Lean Startup and is an advisor for over 30 startups and small businesses.  

We cherry picked some of their most useful tips and share them with you here. Also feel free to scroll to the bottom and watch the video.  

1. Work Backwards From Your Goal

"Work backwards from a target monthly income goal, design your business to support that, then minimize the amount of moving pieces and automate it. All that can be done with a full-time job, and I discourage people from cutting all ties and losing full-time income to focus on a business. You don't have to make that leap. People tend to think it's employee or entrepreneur, but there's a boad spectrum and you can very slowly and mythodically move from one end to the other." (Tim Ferriss)

2. Start Local

"Always start with your local store and become a local hero. That's how you get attention, you start to get people who become your local cheerleaders. You don't want to scale too quickly, you don't want to take out a big loan until you start to sell, see what works, what doesn't work. And then when you have all the bugs out of the line, then you can go further and further." (Daymond John)

3. Be Consistent

"Make sure your brand is consistent throughout everything you touch. Not only your website, but if you ship something, make sure there's love in the packaging. Make sure they sense there's a human being behind it. Make sure that they feel like there's a human that has touhed the product and they wrapped it carefully." (Tina Roth Eisenberg)

4. Get Scientific

"Treat everything we do as entrepreneurs as a scientific experiement designed to help us figure out if we're actually on the path to a sustainable business." (Eric Ries)

5. Get to the Point

"When pitching it's very important to understand that what is important to you is not necessarily important to them." "Do not over sell. Take your time, hit the exact points you need. You should be able to summarize your company on the back of a business card." (Daymond John)

6. Learn to Communicate

"You need to be able to communicate effectively, the best entrepreneurs I have ever met are all good communicators." "Practice is the only way to get better." (Tim Ferriss) 

7. Numbers Aren't Everything - Listen to Your Gut

"Numbers are important - I don't question that, but I do feel that we need to listen to our gut a little more. All of the really important decisions in my life have been gut decisions." (Tina Roth Eisenberg)

8. Pivot 

"The successful entrepreneurs did not have better ideas than the failed ones. The difference is the succesful entrepreneurs had the discipline necessary to pivot when it wasn't working - to change the strategy without abandoning the whole vision." (Eric Ries)

9. Make Strategic Partnerships

"When I created FUBU, we understood that we could make the best mens apparel, but we couldn't make ladies, we couldn't make bags or fragrance. We found professionals and companies that could make that - we would loan them the name and help them with the art and DNA of the brand. They would go sell it and give us 6%, 7%, 10% - and that's how the brand was able to grow from 20, 30, 50 million to $350 million. That's how you scale a brand." (Daymond John)

10. Use the 80/20 Rule

"20% of your actions, inputs, or products or services will create 80% of what you want - whatever you want that to be. So lets say you have 100 products that are creating 100 hours a week. Chances are if I did an analysis, 20% of those products are producing 90% of my profits - which means, hypothetically, I could cut out 80% of my products, make 90% of what I'm making now and work 20 hours a week instead of 100 hours a week." (Tim Ferriss)

If you run an online store, image optimization is an art that you want to master. From attracting shoppers perusing Google images to reducing site load time - image optimization can be an important part of buidling a successful ecommerce business. 

Have you ever stayed up at night wondering:

• Why is it that when I do a Google image search, my product photos never show up?
• Do I need to add "Alt Tags" to my images?
• What's the difference between a JPEG, GIF and PNG - should I use one over another?

In this post I'm going to answer those questions and more. Prepare yourself for a deep dive into 10 "must-know" image optimization tips:

1. Name Your Images Descriptively and in Plain English

It's really easy to blast through hundreds of product shots and keep the default file name your camera gives them. But before you keep that habit, let's discuss why that's not a good idea.

When it comes to SEO, it's important to use acceptable keywords to help your webpage rank on search engines. Creating descriptive, keyword-rich file names is absolutely crucial for image optimization. Search engines not only crawl the text on your webpage, but they also search for keywords within your image file names.

Let's use this image as an example:

You could use the generic name that your camera gave to the image such as DCMIMAGE10.jpg. However, it would be much better to name the file: 2012-Ford-Mustang-LX-Red.jpg

Also think about how your customers search for products on your website. What naming patterns do they use when they search? In the example above, car shoppers may search using the terms:

• 2012 Red Ford Mustang LX
• Ford Mustang LX Red 2012
• Red Ford Mustang LX 2012

A good habit to get into is to look at your website analytics, and see what phrasing patterns your customers use to perform searches. Determine the most common naming patterns they use, and apply that formula to your image naming process.

If you are not going to get that detailed, just be sure to use good keywords when naming your images (and try to be descriptive!).

Check out this Q&A from seomoz.org to understand the importance of naming files for the images on your website. It can definitely increase your on-page SEO, and help your website and images rank highly.

2. Optimize Your Alt Tags Intelligently

Alt tags are a text alternative to images when a browser can't properly render them. Even when the image is rendered, if you hover over it with your mouse pointer, you can see the alt tag text created for that image (depending on your browser settings).

The alt attribute also adds SEO value to your website. Adding appropriate alt tags to the images on your website can help your website achieve better rankings in the search engines by associating keywords with images. As a matter of fact, using alt tags is probably the best way for your ecommerce products to show up in Google image and web search.

Let's take a look at the source code of an alt tag:

The #1 priority when it comes to image optimization is to fill out each alt tag for every product image on your site.

Here are some simple rules when it comes to alt tags:

• Describe your images in plain English, just like you do for image file names.
• If you sell products that have model number or serial numbers, use them in your alt tag.
• Do not keyword stuff your alt tags (for example: alt="ford mustang muscle car buy now cheap best price on sale").
• Don't use alt tags for decorative images. Search engines may penalize you for over-optimization.

Finally, always do a sanity check of your website from time to time. View the source of your webpages and check to see if your alt tags are filled out.

3. Strategize Your Image Dimensions and Product Angles

One common trend these days is to show multiple angles of your product. Going back to the Ford Mustang example, you wouldn't want to show just one shot of the car - especially if you're trying to sell it. It would be in your best interest to show shots of:

• The interior.
• The rear, especially that air spoiler.
• Close ups of the wheel rims.
• Underneath the hood... it is a Mustang after all.

And the best way to capitalize on these extra photos is to fill out your alt tags. And the way you would do that is by creating unique alt tags for each product shot:

• 2012-Ford-Mustang-LX-Red-Leather-Interior-Trim.jpg -> using the alt tag of: alt = " 2012 Ford Mustang LX Red Leather Interior Trim "
• 2012-Ford-Mustang-LX-Red-Rear-View-Air-Spoiler.jpg -> using the alt tag of: alt = " 2012 Ford Mustang LX Red Rear View Air Spoiler "

The key here is to add descriptions to your base alt tag so that potential searchers land on your website. If you do the extra work, Google will reward you with hungry searchers.

A Word of Caution About Providing Larger Images

Now you might want to provide larger views for your visitors, which is a great user experience enhancement - just be careful.

Whatever you do, don't place the largest image on your webpage and simply shrink the dimensions via the source code. This will increase your page load time because of the larger file size associated with the large image.

Instead, make it a smaller image and provide the option to view a larger image in a pop-up or to be displayed on a separate webpage.

4. Reduce the File Sizes of Your Images

Consider this:

• Most consumers wait about 3 seconds for a website to load on a desktop or laptop.
• ...and about 5 seconds on their mobile device.
• Amazon found that if their pages slow down by 1 second, they lose $1.6 billion a year.
• Google uses page load time as a factor in their ranking algorithm.

If you have images that slowly "drool" down the screen and take over 15 seconds to load - well, you can count that prospective customer goodbye!

So What Do You Do?

When a customer goes to your site, it can take a while depending on how large your files are. Specifically with images, the larger the file size the longer it takes a webpage to load. *Shopify merchants should note that we automatically compress images, so this shouldn't be an issue for you.

If you can decrease the size of the image files on your webpage and increase pageload speed, less people who visit your site will click away.

One way you can reduce image file size is by using the "Save for Web" command in Adobe Photoshop. When using this command, you want to adjust the image to the lowest file size acceptable while keeping an eye out for image quality.

What If You Don't Have Photoshop?

If you don't have Adobe Photoshop there are numerous online tools you can use for image editing. Adobe even has an online image editing application at photoshop.com. This online tool doesn't have all of the capabilities of the desktop version of Adobe Photoshop, but it covers all the basics of image editing and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

Other impressive online image editing tools are:

• PicMonkey - has been described by experts as a "staggeringly great photo editing tool".
• Pixlr - is super user-friendly, and also comes with a 100% free app for your smartphone, so you can edit on the go.
• FotoFlexer- is another fairly advance online image editor. FotoFlexer even allows you to work with layers!

Finally, there is always GIMP. GIMP is an open-source, free image editing software application that can be run on Windows, Mac or Linux. It can do everything Photoshop can do, but tends to be a bit clunkier. But for a free image editing application - you can't beat it.

How Large Should My Image Files Be?

A good rule of thumb for ecommerce images is to try to keep your image file size below 70kb. That can be difficult sometimes, especially for larger images, but I'll get into that in a minute...

5. Know Which Image File Type to Use for the Right Situations

There are three common file types that are used to post images. These are JPEG, GIF, and PNG.

Let's look at the 3 file types and how they affect the same image:

JPEG (or .jpg) images are a somewhat of an old file type and has become the de facto standard image of the Internet. JPEG images are able to be compressed considerably, which results in quality images with small file sizes. In the image above, the JPEG format provides nice quality and low file size.

GIFs (.gif) are lower quality images than JPEGs and are used for more simple images such as icons and decorative images. GIFs also support animation as I'm sure all you Redditors know. Regarding image optimization, it's great to use GIFs for the plain and simple images on a webpage (that are just a few colors), but for complex images and photos, GIFs are not always as attractive - this is especially true for bigger and more photoesque image.

The MacBook GIF above is a case where we can get away with using GIF. This is because the photo is small enough where GIF works well. 

PNG images are becoming more popular as an alternative to GIFs. PNGs support many more colors than GIFs, and they don't degrade over time with re-saves like JPEGs. Even though the PNG file type is starting to be used more, the file sizes can still be much larger than what you would find with JPEG images.

Notice how the PNG-24 image is over three times larger in file size than the PNG-8 version. This is why you need to be very careful with PNGs.

Here's an extreme example, where the image file size has been held constant at 24 kb for all three files formats:

As you can see, JPEG is the clear winner here. GIFs and PNGs must degrade in quality in order to stay at a low file size.

Here are some tips to remember when choosing file formats:

• For most ecommerce situations - JPEGs will be your best bet. They provide the best quality and the smallest file size.
• Never use GIFs for large product images. The file size will be very large and there is nogood  way to reduce it. Use GIFs for thumbnails and decorative images.
• PNGs can be a good alternative to both JPEGs and GIFS. If you are only able to get product photos in PNG format, try using PNG-8 over PNG-24. PNGs excel at simple decorative images because of their extremely small file size.

Most image editing software can save images to any of the file types discussed above. 

6. Know How To Handle Your Thumbnails

Many ecommerce sites will use thumbnail images. They provide a great way to quickly scan category pages without taking up too much real estate.

Thumbnails are great, but be careful - they can be a silent killer to your page loading times. They are usually presented in a critical step during the shopping process, and if they are holding up your category pages from loading - well, you could just lose another customer. Note that Shopify merchants don't have to worry about thumbnail optimization as we take care of that for you.

• Make your thumbnail file sizes as small as possible. It may be worth letting quality slide in favor of a lower file sizes. Remember, the cumulative effect of your thumbnails will have a huge effect on your page loading time.
• Vary your alt tag text as to not duplicate text that you would use for the bigger versions of the same image. As a matter fact, make your alt text wildly different. The last thing you want is the thumbnail being indexed instead of the large image. A case could be made to leave out the alt text entirely.

7. Use Image Site Maps

If your site uses JavaScript galleries, image pop-ups or other "flashy" ways to improve the overall shopping experience - Google image site maps will help you get your images noticed by Google.

Web crawlers can't crawl images that are not called out in the webpage source code. So in order to let them know about these images, you must list their location in an image site map.

Google has many guidelines for image publishing to help your website rank high on the search engine that you can view here. In addition, you can use the extension for images on Google Sitemaps to give Google more information about the images on your website, and doing this can help Google find more images than what would be conventionally found through their search engine.

Although using Sitemaps doesn't guarantee that your images will get indexed by Google, you can absolutely increase the optimization of your website, and especially the images by using Sitemaps. Google Webmaster Tools has many suggestions for correctly formatting your Sitemap and the images for your Sitemap.

On Google Sitemaps it is important for you to add specific tags for all of the images. You can also create a separate Sitemap to list images. What is important is to add all the necessary information, while using specific tags, to any Sitemaps you have or will create. Follow these guidelines that Google suggests when creating a Sitemap with image information.

8. Beware of Your Decorative Images

Websites often have an assortment of decorative images such as background images, buttons, and borders. Anything non-product related can likely be considered a decorative image.

Although decorative images can add a lot of aesthetic appeal to a webpage, they can often result in a large combined file size and slow load times. Therefore you might want to consider taking a closer look at your decorative images so that they don't impair your website's ability to convert visitors into customers.

First, you want to check the file sizes of all the decorative images on your web pages, and use a template that minimizes file sizes for all or most of the pages on your website.

Here are some tips to cutting down the file sizes of your decorative images:

• For images that make up borders or simple patterns, make them PNG-8 or GIFs. You can create good looking images that are only a few hundred bytes big!
• If possible, use CSS to create colored areas instead of using images. Use CSS styling as much as possible to replace any decorative images.
• Take a close look at that large wallpaper-style background image. Those can be huge files. Shrink them down as much as possible without ruining the image quality.

One trick you can use to eat away at the background image size is to cut out the middle of the background image, and make it a flat color or transparent. This can decrease the file size substantially.

9. Use Caution When Using Content Delivery Networks

Shopify merchants don't really have to worry about this since we're a hosted solution, but others need to pay attention. Content delivery networks (CDNs) are fast becoming the go-to place to host your images and other media files. They can increase your page load times and help solve bandwidth issues.

The one drawback is when it comes to backlinks. As you may know, backlinks are critical for SEO and the more backlinks you have, the better your site does in the search engines.

By placing your images on a content delivery network, you are most likely removing the image from your domain and placing it on the domain of the content delivery network. So when someone links to your images, they are actually linking to the content delivery network website.

Therefore, the best rule of thumb is:

• Just because something is "trendy," don't follow the trend like sheep. Determine if it is really the best move for your business first.
• If your website is doing tons of business every month, then a CDN is most likely a good idea since it can help solve bandwidth issues.
• If your site only gets in the "thousands" of visitors a day, chances are your current hosting situation can handle the load you are currently doing.

There are ways around the SEO issues associated with CDNs, but be sure to have a professional help you strategize your move first.

10. Test Your Images!

The entire point of optimizing your images is to help increase your bottom line. We've talked about reducing file sizes and getting the search engines to index them - but what about testing images to see what converts into more business?

• Test the Number of Product Images Per Page: Since loading time is an issue for some non-hosted ecommerce sites, you may find that reducing the number of images on a page will increase click-through rates and sales. But it's also possible that providing a lot of images per page (such as different views) will improve the user experience and lead to more sales. The only way to find this out is to test.
• Test What Angles Your Customers Prefer: You may find that by providing the views your customers want to see, it will increase overall loyalty. A great way to figure this out is to survey your customers about what they like the most when viewing product shots. Surveying your customers in general is always a great habit to get into.
• Test How Many Product Listings You Should Have on Category Pages: 10, 20, 100 products? Test the number of products you list on category pages to see what works best for your customers and their shopping experience.

What Image Optimization Tips Do You Recommend? Please share any tips, suggestions or questions in the comments below.

Performance should inform business decisions and KPIs should drive actions. 

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are like milestones on the road to online retail success. Monitoring them will help ecommerce entrepreneurs identify progress toward sales, marketing, and customer service goals. 

A performance indicator is simply a quantifiable measurement or data point used to gauge performance relative to some goal. As an example, it may be a goal for some online retailers to increase site traffic 50 % in the next year. Relative to this goal, a performance indicator might be the number of unique visitors the site receives daily or which traffic sources send visitors (pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization, brand or display advertising, or a YouTube video).

For some goals there could be many performance indicators — often too many — so often people narrow it down to just two or three impactful data points known as key performance indicators. KPIs are those measurements that most accurately and succinctly show whether or not a business in progressing toward its goal.

Setting Goals and Identifiying KPIs

Selecting KPIs begins with clearly stating goals and understanding what areas of business impact those goals. Of course, KPIs can and should differ for each of an online retailer's goals, whether those are related to boosting sales, streamlining marketing, or improving customer service.

Here are a few examples of goals and associated KPIs:

• GOAL 1 — Boost sales 10% in the next quarter. KPIs include daily sales, conversion rate, site traffic.
• GOAL 2 — Increase conversion rate 2% in the next year. KPIs include conversion rate, shopping cart abandonment rate, associated shipping rate trends, competitive price trends.
• GOAL 3 — Grow site traffic 20 percent in the next year. KPIs include site traffic, traffic sources, promotional click-through rates, social shares, bounce rates.
• GOAL 4 — Reduce customer service calls by half in the next 6 months. KPIs include service call classification, identify of page visited immediately before the call, event that lead to the call.

It should be easy to see that there are many performance indicators, and the value of those indicators is directly tied to the goal progress measured. Monitoring which page someone visited before initiating a customer service call makes sense as a KPI for GOAL 4 since it could help identify areas of confusion that when corrected would reduce customer service calls, but that same performance indicator would be almost useless for GOAL 3. 

With the idea that KPIs should differ based on the goal being measured, it's possible to consider a set of common performance indicators for ecommerce. Here are 32 common ecommerce key performance indicators. Just remember that the performance indicators listed below is in no way exhaustive. 

32 Key Performance Indicators

Sales Key Performance Indicators:

• Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual sales
• Average order size (sometimes called average market basket)
• Average margin
• Conversion rate
• Shopping cart abandonment rate
• New customer orders versus returning customer sales
• Cost of goods sold
• Total available market relative to a retailer's share of market
• Product affinity (which products are purchased together)
• Product relationship (which products are viewed consecutively)
• Inventory levels
• Competitive pricing

Marketing Key Performance Indicators: 

• Site traffic
• Unique visitors versus returning visitors
• Time on site
• Page views per visit
• Traffic source
• Day part monitoring (when site visitors come)
• Newsletter subscribers
• Texting subscribers
• Chat sessions initiated
• Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest followers or fans
• Pay-per-click traffic volume
• Blog traffic
• Number and quality of product reviews
• Brand or display advertising click-through rates
• Affiliate performance rates

Customer Service Key Performance Indicators:

• Customer service email count
• Customer service phone call count
• Customer service chat count
• Average resolution time
• Concern classification

Once you have set goals and selected KPIs, monitoring those indicators should become an everyday exercise. And most importantly: Performance should inform business decisions, and you should use KPIs to drive actions.

Mark Hayes

It's important for ecommerce merchants to plan well in advance for key shopping dates. Consumers begin searching for the perfect gift for occasions like Valentine's Day, Mothers Day, and Halloween up to a month ahead of time.  

The best way to see when consumers begin searching for specific products is by using Google Trends. This free tool will tell you how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume. Here's an interactive example using the term "Valentines Day Gifts" looking at last year:

There are four secret weapons in the marketing copywriter's arsenal that can have immense power. 

1. You

It's the most powerful word in the English language. For most marketers, It's more influential than words like 'money' and 'sex.' Your customers want to feel like you're talking to them directly and the word 'you' does that better than any other word.

Whether we like to admit it or not, we're all a bit egocentric. When promotional copy (or product descriptions / ads) focus directly on us, a powerful subconscious connection is created. 

Here's an example of an online retailer who uses the word 'you' in their product descriptions to increase their conversion rate:

“The Epson ES1000 Ultra Portable Tabletop Projection Screen is the ultimate screen for mobile professionals. Whether you're walking across town, commuting by car or flying to your next destination, this lightweight, compact screen is the perfect traveling partner for on-the-go presentations. When you're ready to present, the Epson ES1000 Ultra Portable Tabletop Projection Screen's unique one-piece design allows you to set up quickly and easily on any tabletop in less than 30 seconds. It conveniently accommodates up to a 50" (diagonal) image. When it's time to shut down, the Epson ES1000 Ultra Portable Tabletop Projection Screen stores quickly and easily in just seconds.” (Source, TigerDirect)

A form of the word 'you' appears 4 times in this clever marketing copy. Notice that the narrative is focused on how this portable projector makes the shopper's life easier. It's solving a problem that most prospects have.

Take a look at all of your ecommerce product descriptions and make sure you're addressing your prospects directly. Use words like "you," "your," and all similar forms to make a connection with your customers and potentially increase sales. 

2. New

When you see the word 'new' you subconsciously think improved, exciting, and I want. According to several behavioral psychology studies, new products, novel solutions, and a sense of adventure draw shoppers to products with the 'new' label.

Take a look at how Apple describes the iPhone 5's design. It's a new design, with new technology, for their new iPhone. Seems excessive when pointed out but it works. 

Dr. Bianca Wittmann is a cognitive neuroscientist who studies how copywriters use language to influence shoppers. She uses the candy industry's obsession with creating 'new' products as an example:

"I might have my own favorite choice of chocolate bar, but if I see a different bar repackaged, advertising its ‘new, improved flavor,’ my search for novel experiences may encourage me to move away from my usual choice." 

Consumers have a positive association with everything new - we're constantly wanting a newer car, new clothes, and the newest technology. As an online merchant you should play to this as much as possible. 

If you sell clothes online, for example, create a section to showcase all your latest products. Make sure your product descriptions, press releases, and blog posts use the word 'new' and focus on new products as well.  

3.  Free

The word 'free' isn't just a price - it's a powerful emotional trigger and a source of irrational excitement. You know that feeling you get at a buffet, where you're full but you keep eating because it's free? Or perhaps all those free pens you took at the trade show that you won't use but you took them anyways? Powerful stuff that word 'free' is. 

Nobody knows the power of using the word 'free' like Amazon. In 1999, Amazon began offering free shipping on orders of $99 or more. Since then they have been experimenting with and perfecting their marketing strategy (and copywriting) to best take advantage of our desire for 'free.' I know I'm guilty of buying another book (cost $10+) just to save $3.95 on shipping. 

Gregory Ciotti, founder of Sparring Mind, argues that the word 'free' exposes humanity's general aversion to loss. In economics, loss aversion describes the idea that people will frequently choose not to lose something (money) rather than to gain something, even something of relatively greater value. 

To make this point, Ciotti refers to research from famous behavioral economics professor, Dan Ariely. In a series of experiments, Ariely found that consumers would pick a free item over a very low-cost item, even when that low-cost item represented a greater overall value. 

When Ariely offered buyers a choice between a Lindt 'Lindor Truffle' for 15 cents — about half of its usual cost — and a Hershey Kiss for 1 penny, 73% chose the Lindt because of its apparent value. But when the price of both items was lowered by just one cent to 14 cents and free respectively, 69% of shoppers took the free Hershey Kiss. 

So how do ecommerce merchants use this research, along with Amazon's "free shipping" strategy to increase sales? As an example, a retailer in the Northwestern US offers free shipping on some orders. The retailer first offered free shipping for orders of $50 or more. On average shoppers spent a little more than $50 on the site. 

In November 2012, the policy changed, so that free shipping required a minimum $75 purchase. The retailer's average order rose to nearly $80. People spent more just to get something 'free' - so consider offering free shipping after a certain purchase threshold on your ecommerce store.

Furthermore, using the word free in your email campaigns can significantly increase open rate. Christopher Penn, the co-host of the “Marketing Over Coffee” podcast has pointed out that in-spite that the word 'free' can set off some spam filters, it's often worth using in email subject lines because of how dramatically it boosts open rates. Shoppers simply like the idea of getting something for nothing - and can you blame them?

4. Guaranteed 

Comparison shopping engines (CSE's) give ecommerce merchants the opportunity to attract new customers, increase sales, and go head-to-head against the competition.

This is an important guide that will explain what comparison shopping engines are, tell you the 10 best and show you how to get your products listed.  

What are Comparison Shopping Engines?

Example: Lets say I want to buy a Rubik's Cube and want to see what my options are. I go to Google Shopping (one of the most popular CSE's around) and do a search. Here's what comes up: 

For ecommerce merchants, comparison shopping engines are an opportunity to put your products in front of very interested buyers. These are not people perusing a virtual storefront like a window shopper at the mall, rather CSE users typically have already made the decision to buy and are simply looking for the best deal.

10 Popular Comparison Shopping Engines 

1. Google Shopping

Google Shopping is probably the largest and best know comparison shopping engine. Products submitted to Google Shopping will also be displayed on standard Google search results and are integrated with Google's pay-per-click platform, Adwords.

2. Nextag

Nextag has been in operation since 1999 and has as many as 30 million visitors each month. Nextag is consistently a top performer for traffic and conversions on CPC Strategy's quarterly review of leading CSE's. You can list products, event tickets, real estate, and even travel bookings. 

3. PriceGrabber

In addition to presenting products on its site, PriceGrabber has a market research tool, Market Report, that allows retailers to track consumer purchase and product pricing trends. When you list your products on PriceGrabber, you'll also be listed on Yahoo Shopping which is a nice added bonus.

4. Shopping.com

Shopping.com is part of eBay's family of companies and is another great channel for merchants to put their products in front of perspective buyers. Shopping.com also partners with The Find, another CSE on this list.

5. Shopzilla

With about 40 million month visitors and a pedigree dating back to 1996, Shopzilla is one of the best choices for ecommerce merchants looking for some extra sales. This comparison shopping engine has an impressive 100+ million products listed. 

6. Become

Become is another leader in the CSE space, allowing thrifty shoppers to compare prices, read or write product reviews, and simply search for the best possible online shopping deals.

7. Bing Shopping (Free)

Bing Shopping offers free product listings that appear directly on Bing search results pages. Bing Shopping has earned a lot of consumer praise for doing an excellent job of providing consumer friendly results. The service does not accept new merchant feeds during high-traffic shopping seasons, so get started early with Bing in 2013.

8. Pronto

With about 70 million product listings sorted into various retail verticals and millions of visitors monthly, Pronto certainly merits consideration for any retailer's 2013 CSE campaigns.

9. The Find (Free)

In addition to showing product and price comparisons, The Find can help shoppers discover new products with personalized results.

10. Amazon Product Ads

Amazon isn't technically a comparison shopping engine, but they work in a similar fashion. When you register for Product Ads you can upload your products manually or via FTP. Amazon will then create ads for your products using the information provided in your product file. When you set your budget, your ads will go live and you'll pay-per-click.

The Cost of Comparison Shopping Engines 

In a pay-per-action model, retailers will pay a percentage of the value of a sale made as a result of being listed on the CSE. No one pricing model is best, so choose which works best for you. 

How to get Products Listed in Comparison Shopping Engines

Most CSE's require retailers to submit a formatted product feed. This feed must meet a CSE-defined specification and should be updated frequently. The CSE uses scripts to parse and ingest the data from the feed, displaying the included information on results pages as appropriate.

Shopify merchants have several apps available that make submitting product feeds to CSE's easier and in some cases, automatic. For example, RetailTower is a free Shopify app that can help prepare feeds for many of the top CSE's listed here. Regardless of how a feed is created, smart merchants will work to optimize descriptions and prices get the most sales possible.

Have you had success using comparison shopping engines? Let us know in the comments!

By: Walter Chen

For the last three months, I’ve been focused on one question: How do I publish at least one high quality article every single day that will increase sales? 

In learning how to answer that question, I sold $20,000 of my product (iDoneThis) with content marketing alone. I'm going to share with you the 3 tricks to blogging that I learned over the last three months - all of these strategies can be easily applied to your ecommerce business. My mantra is simple: remix, reuse, and republish.

1.  Don’t create content, remix “de-risked” content

The two links that got by far the most attention were: Marc Andreessen’s Guide to Personal Productivity and Jerry Seinfeld’s Productivity Secret. I pulled out one interesting tip from Andreessen’s guide on how he stays productive and made that interesting nugget an entire blog post. Then I played on the title of the successful Seinfeld post by calling my article, “Marc Andreessen’s Productivity Trick to Feeling Marvelously Efficient.”  

I had no doubt that people would love my post because the content had already been de-risked. Sure enough, tens of thousands of people read, shared, and learned a valuable productivity technique from the article.

2.  Reuse, reuse, reuse: one successful blog post is another successful blog post that’s yet to be written.

Writing just one blog post that strikes a chord with your audience is a huge accomplishment. Given how hard it is to write a single blog post that tens of thousands of people love, I used to feel paralyzed by the huge challenge of writing yet another post.

Then I began to wonder, had every single one of my potential customers seen my blog post? Wouldn’t that snippet of knowledge that I’d shared also be useful and interesting to people who weren’t on the receiving end of the distribution channels that I’d initially used?

This is how I began to realize that if I wrote just one successful blog post, I had the seeds to write many more successful blog posts.

For example, I wrote this blog post for my company blog: Silicon Valley’s Productivity Secret, which over 40,000 people read, but I struggled for months afterwards to write another post that would achieve comparable success. I started to think I was a one-hit wonder.

That’s when I realized that there were many people out there that hadn’t read that one hit. I rewrote the article, condensing the originally longer narrative post into an easily digestible, useful “tips” post. It was published on Business Insider as 4 Secrets To Silicon Valley's Productivity where over 2,000 people read it:

The best part about all of this? It took less than an hour to write. As this process becomes more and more natural, you’ll produce content that’s of higher quality because it will become more and more refined around what’s interesting about the article. And remember, it’s absolutely vital that you never unexpectedly give a publisher content that has been published elsewhere, because that will make your contact look foolish and that channel will likely be closed to you.

3.  Republishing creates leverage — it’s like creating clones of yourself

The deeper I got into this content game, the more I noticed how professional content publishers leveraged the techniques I described above. Buzzfeed and Business Insider are two publishers that have elevated content remixing to an art form.

When I was browsing around Business Insider one day, I was surprised to discover that much of their content is actually republished content from other publishers. In turn, Business Insider articles are also republished on other sites.

I had an idea: even though my company iDoneThis was not in the content publishing game, wouldn’t it be awesome if the iDoneThis blog could get in on this republishing game plan? Then I wouldn’t have to remix or reuse articles, and they would automatically get republished for broader consumption.

I pitched the contributors editor at Business Insider with a simple value proposition. I have 5 articles that 10,000+ people have read, and I’m producing more high quality content every single day. Do you want my valuable, de-risked content for free?  

She said yes, and now our best articles go on to Business Insider regularly, which helps spread the word about what we’re doing at iDoneThis to thousands of people every day, and I don’t have to lift a finger.

Conclusion: More content, more community, more profit

Content helps you stand out from the fray, creates communities and trust in your voice, improves search optimization, and gets the word out and people in the door, whether that’s a virtual or brick-and-mortar door. 

Use the remix, reuse, and republish strategy to leverage the existence of great original content and your resources to maximize the ability to pique people’s interest to click, try, and buy, and understand who you are and what you do.

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Walter Chen is the CEO and founder of iDoneThis, an easy way for companies to track and celebrate what's getting done.  He blogs about productivity, management, and starting a company on the iDoneThis Blog.  Follow him on Twitter at @smalter.

This is a guest post by Andrew Youderian of eCommerceFuel.com. 

This is the story of how I stalked the writer of this blog, convinced him to let me write regularly for Shopify and generated thousands of visits to my site – all as a blogging newbie. 

Guest Blogging Prerequisites

Step 1: Identify High-Profile Blogging Opportunities

Step 2: Identify Your Target Blog Owner / Editor 

Step 3: Start Promoting Their Content 

A. Sharing Post Socially

B. Leave High-Quality Comments 

C.  Mention the Blogger in Other Posts

The Shopify blog frequently has great articles on ecommerce marketing and operations. But they stand out as my go-to site for inspiration due to the number of beautifully designed ecommerce shops often profiled.

A Caveat: Be Genuine!!

Step 4: Be Patient and Personable

Step 5: How To Make Your Pitch

Guest Blog Pitch Email Template 

Step 6: Writing a Killer Guest Post

RESULTS: Is It Really Worth It?

Traffic Statistics

Conversions

SEO Benefits

Credibility

Yep, It's DEFINITELY Worth It 

You might remember that Opena Case was one of the winners of our Build-A-Business Competition last year. They won $25,000 cash, $7,500 in Google Adwords Credits, plus a VIP trip to New York to have lunch with Seth Godin. The founders of Opena, Rob and Chris, sold a massive amount iPhone case beer bottle openers - most of which leading up to Christmas.  

Since the holiday shopping season is almost upon us, I asked Rob and Chris what they did to sell so many products. 

Here are their 4 tips to help you prepare for the busiest time of the year:

1. Tell Customers Your Product Is The Perfect Gift

There is no room for subtlety here. Visitors to our homepage may not be personally interested our product, so we remind them that they have a whole bunch of shopping to do. They might not want a beer bottle opening iPhone case for themselves, but someone they know may want one.

2. Market To The Gift BUYER, Not The Receiver 

You'll notice we mention that goods ship out of Hong Kong, United Kingdom, USA, and Australia. Since we ship from multiple counties, we're able to quickly deliver anywhere in the world. Make sure your customers know what you offer, and how long they should expect shipping to take.