When it comes to online sales and customer conversion, connecting with your potential customers and describing your products persuasively is one of the most important parts of selling online.

That’s because after your product photo, your product description is the information people turn to when trying to make a buying decision. And with Amazon a click away, the story you tell about your products (and your business) is your best chance at convincing people to buy from you.

In fact it's a mission critical piece of the online sales puzzle.

Here are five techniques to make sure your product descriptions (and business story) get people clicking the 'add to cart' button.

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By Leo Widrich, Co-Founder, Buffer

The last year has been absolutely crazy year for us here at Buffer. We’ve turned a lot of things upside down and learnt a huge amount about scaling and building out our business.

When it comes to our social media presence, we’ve made a lot of drastic changes too, a lot of which have had a surprisingly huge impact on our business. Here are the top 5 things we’ve changed that helped us reach and interact with more awesome people:

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At Shopify, we’re always working to take our products to the next level. Today we’re excited to present Shopify for iPhone version 3.4 – with more added features and functionality than ever. We’ve updated the dashboard design, added new product management features, and made it easier to run multiple stores on your phone.

As always, the app let’s you:

• Get push notifications to your phone every time a new order comes in.
• Send shipping notifications to customers right from the post office.
• Fulfill an order from your car, a coffee shop, or the airport.
• Call or email a customer in one easy step.

But now we’ve made Shopify for iPhone even better. Keep reading for all the details.

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Marketers at Oreo have been generating a lot of buzz about their cookies these days, and they're using social media to do it. The techniques they're using are extremely innovative, and they're not that difficult to replicate. 

Although this popular brand of cookie is known for its black-and-white striped appearance and its customers tendency to twist it apart or dunk it in milk, the brand is a social media powerhouse:

• 32M+ on Facebook
• 82K+ on Twitter
• 87K+ on Instagram
• 14M+ on YouTube

Over the past few months, Oreo has hit more than a couple social media home runs. Their Tweet during the Super Bowl, the 100-day “Daily Twist” campaign, the "Cookie Vs. Cream" video campaign, and their spur-the-moment banter with Kit Kat demonstrated true mastery of the most popular social media platforms. Let’s consider the promotions then consider the lessons to be learned.

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Dropshipping is a popular method of selling online, but it's often associated with scams, ripoffs and get rich quick schemes. Last week we released a free beginners guide to dropshipping as a part of our new Ecommerce University. It's the most indepth ebook to dropshipping you'll find anywhere, and it tells you exactly how to create and run a successful dropshipping business.

This week, we took some of the best parts from the guide and put together an infographic. Check out all of our findings in the infographic below. Please click on the image to view it in full-screen. 

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We’ve been doing something rather interesting for the past few years that I think you should know about.

It’s called Hack Days. Every three months, we take a break from our regular work and for two full days everyone in the company has free reign to work on whatever project they want – as long as it adds value to Shopify. There’s no limit to the creativity or scope of the projects, there’s only one rule to Hack Days: employees must ‘ship’ their projects no later than 4pm at the end of the second day. At this point, everyone meets in our staff lounge to pitch their finished projects.

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This article is written by author Jacqueline Biggs.

The 10% strategy is all about growing your ecommerce business by making small incremental changes. As you know, marketing is part big ideas and part process. As an entrepreneur you have the ideas, so I'm going to help you with the process part. In this article I'm going to show you how a small increase in key business metrics has the potential to create a huge impact in net profits. 

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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.  

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Do you need a trademark for your ecommerce business? Protecting your online reputation is an important part of building your business and earning your customers' trust. In the U.S. it's easy to start using a trademark (for products) or servicemark (for services). In fact, you can do it in just three steps or less.

The trademarking process starts with (1) determining whether or not your brand or logo is eligible, (2) deciding what level of protection makes sense for your business, and (3) possibly registering the trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). First, lets go over the basics of trademarking in the United States.

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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.

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