Auctiva Commerce Blog

Google Checkout Users -

Want an easy way to let your buyers know you accept Google Checkout?  You can easily create a securely hosted Google Checkout Acceptance logo within your Google Checkout account and include it on your Auctiva Commerce store.  Google provides a Google Checkout Acceptance logo code snippet specific to your Google Checkout account in the Tools > Acceptance logo section of your Google Checkout account.  Just copy the code provided by Google and place it on whichever portion of your Auctiva Commerce site you desire – the footer, for example.

Note that if you want to center it you need to move the Google script code within the DIV they provide and add a bit of CSS – I used the following setup to include and center the logo on my test store and it worked like a charm with the Wood Deco theme.

<div style=”margin: 0pt auto; width: 200px;” id=”googleCheckoutLogo”>&nbsp;<script src=’https://checkout.google.com/buttons/logos?merchant_id=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx&loc=en_US&f=png’ ></script></div>

If people click on this logo they will be directed to a Google Checkout page about your store; this page will include any Google Checkout buyer reviews of your store from previous transactions.

Thx,
Chris

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By now probably everyone knows the importance of utilizing Google Merchant Center feeds to promote your store’s goods and services, but did you know you can integrate your Google Merchant Center account, your Google AdWords account, and your Google Checkout account to display Google Checkout badges next to your items in Google Product Search and Google AdWords?  This is a powerful promotional tool which increases conversion rates in both Google Product Search and Google AdWords.  This is a highly recommended practice for all online sellers that offer Google Checkout.

Google has provided an Instructional Article and a Demonstration Video which explain how to set up your Google accounts to display the Google Checkout badges.   Note that it will take a few days for the badges to appear after completing all of these steps.  For sellers that accept Google Checkout I highly recommend that you set up your accounts to display the Google Checkout badges – it should help you to create sales and increase your click through rate on any Google AdWords ads you may have running.

Happy selling -

Chris

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FYI -

There will be an approximate 1 hour outage for Auctiva Commerce on February 18th starting at 11:00 PM PST. During this time, users that attempt to access your store will be directed to a webpage informing them of the outage.

What we are doing: This outage is necessary to perform database cleanups and updates in order to improve performance for Auctiva Commerce.

Services affected: All Auctiva Commerce merchant admin and public storefront sites.

Thx,
Chris

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Check out this week’s installment of featured Auctiva Commerce Stores!!

Bruzel Entertainment: At Bruzel Entertainment you will find the lowest prices around for DVDs, Books, Blu-ray, and Pre-orders. Check out our website and see what great best-selling products we have for sale.

http://bruzelentertainment.com

Grand Opening Special:  As a special Grand Opening promotion, we will be shipping all orders via Two-day Air for the cost of Standard shipping costs. This promotion will continue until July 31st. So, come order your favorite books, DVDs, and Blu-ray, and get them fast with Two-day Air.

Rocky Mountain Wholesale:  Extremely discounted prices at or near wholesale prices, great products, no hassles, just click, we ship, and you save. We offer, Home Decor, Garden Decor, Gifts, Collectibles, Home Electronics, Portable Electronics, Tools, Video Games, Computer Accessories, Toys and much more. Something for everyone on your shopping list.

http://rockymtnwhl.com

Grand Opening Special: Additionaly 10% off of all products. Use Coupon Code GO10 at check out.

Inspirational Gifts & Decor:  Meaningful gifts that warm the heart, encourage the spirit and bring a little inspiration to life.

InspirationalGiftsAndDecor.com

Grand Opening Special:  Use the Coupon Code: Grand25 and take 25% off of all adult jewelry. Valid 6/29/09 through 7/6/09.

Stamps-4-Your-Pleasure: Welcome stamp collectors of all levels.  We are here to help you start a stamp collection or complete one already in your album pages. Worlwide, Topicals, Classics and much more.
Come help us become the best on-line philatelic store that you will proudly recommend to all fellow philatelists.

http://stamps4yourpleasure.auctivacommerce.com

Grand Opening Special: Send us an e-mail with “discount pamphlet” in the subject line and receive some very lucrative and interesting information. edek01@distributel.net

The Bikini Store

http://www.thebikinistore.co.uk

Grand Opening Special: The Bikini Store offers 10% discount for the first month during our grand opening.

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Store Launches

Customizing your storefront theme can be a lot of fun. Here are some quick tips for new store owners on how to customize different parts of your storefront.

Editing the Home page

Your Home page is important part of the shopping experience. In many cases, a visitor to your store will view the Home page even if they entered your storefront from another area (e.g., they first arrived to a product page from a Google search). Customizing this page with a short welcome message will add value to their shopping experience. You should tell your web visitors what your store is all about.

Read the Customizing the Home Page tutorial for more information.

Editing the Contact Us page

When you first start your store, the Contact Us page will have a placeholder address in the Contact Us page. You’ll want to make sure you edit this before you start doing business. Make sure you provide a way for customers to reach you for questions regarding orders, shipping and purchasing. The Contact Us page is broken down into two sections. The sidebar on the Contact US page contains your contact information. This could be a mailing address, email address or sales phone number if you have one. The main content section of the Contact Us page is blank and you can use this space to write a little bit about what a customer should expect when they contact you. How long does it take for you to respond to inquiries? Make sure you let them know.

You can also use the main content area to explain little bit about yourself if you don’t plan on adding a separate About Us page (see our post on the About Us topic).

Read the Customizing the Contact Us Page tutorial to learn more about how to edit this page.

Once you’ve edited your Home page and updated your Contact Us page, you’ve got your basic storefront theme ready to go. You can add more WebPages to your theme if you’d like or add more links in the header or footer. These edits take a little bit more experience with HTML code. You can read more about making these customizations with the Add a Link to the Footer and Add a Webpage tutorials.

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Store Tips Store Launch, Store Themes

Great news!! Now you can easily showcase your items on any site and drive more buyers to your Auctiva Commerce shop with our Auctiva Commerce Store widget. This new tool—built on Auctiva Marketplace Platform(AMP) technology—allows you to display a sampling of your items in a scrolling gallery to give shoppers a glimpse into your store, grabbing their attention and enticing them to venture further.

Display this widget on your blog or even place it on a friend’s site to reach a new audience. It’s easy!

To access the Auctiva Commerce Store widget, simply log into your Auctiva Commerce Store, hover your mouse over the Marketing tab and select Widgets. Customize your widget with the background and text colors you want and then click the “Get Widget Code” button. This will generate a snippet of code, which you can paste into the desired Web page so your widget will display.

** Please note this widget uses JavaScript, which some sites do not allow.

This is the first version of our Auctiva Commerce Store widget and, as a result, we’ll continue enhancing it in the coming months so you can get even more out of this new tool. And don’t forget that developments on AMP will also continue to give you more ways to drive traffic to your store.

If you have any questions about the new Auctiva Commerce Store widget, or any other aspect of your Auctiva Commerce Store, please contact our Customer Support representatives. They’re always available and happy to help.

Enjoy our store widget!

Thx,
Chris

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We’ve Improved our Software!!

We’ve added 26 enhancements to our Auctiva Commerce software to help you operate a successful online store and improve your buyers’ shopping experience. We’ve made adjustments to improve shipping dimension calculations, added a shipping method and much more. Below are a few more of the many enhancements we released during our latest release cycle.

• Special characters in your product names. Include any of the following characters in your item titles: !,&,”,’,\,/,(,),[,[,-,#,$,%,^,@,`,~,*,+,;, and :. It’s your shop; you decide how you want your titles to appear.
• Up-sell your items. We’ve added a checkout link to your up-sell pages so buyers can easily purchase these products.
• PayPal adjustments. We’d make changes to ensure PayPal gets the appropriate address when buyers enter different shipping and billing addresses. No more mix ups!
• Customize in IE. Easily customize our Blank theme in Internet Explorer.
• Cross-sell adjustment. Auctiva Commerce will now check to ensure cross-sell items are public before displaying them, so you won’t have to worry about buyers running into problems when they click on these cross-promotional items.
• Adjustment to resize external image. Auctiva Commerce will now automatically resize your images.

To see a complete list of all of the enhancements we’ve made, please read our post on our Community Forums. And as always, if you have any questions about your Auctiva Commerce account, please contact our Customer Support representatives. They’re always available and happy to help.

Enjoy the new features,

Chris

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More great news!! As a celebration of Auctiva Commerce’s first birthday we are waiving the monthly store fee through June 2010. This is our small token of appreciation to all of our loyal users that have grown with us over the past year. As I reflect on 2009 we accomplished quite a bit – check out the summary list of enhancements that we delivered to improve Auctiva Commerce:

* Bulk product import and editing
* A streamlined checkout process
* A variety of payment gateways, including Authorize.net, Google Checkout,
PayPal and PayPal Website Payments Pro
* Integrated shipping quotes for USPS, FedEx, UPS and Canada Post
* Increased stability and security
* A Shop tab with filtered search capability
* Google Product Search category mapping and related enhancements
* 90+ store themes

And we’re not planning to stop there. In 2010 we’re planning to deliver:

* Better customization: more freedom to modify your storefront design
* More payment options: adding support for international payment gateways
* Google enhancements: additional product attributes to give your items better visibility in searches
* Additional data feeds: allowing product submission to more comparison-shopping engines

I’m excited about all that has been accomplished during this year and about the direction we’re heading. Hopefully you are as well – I think with the enhancements already delivered and the ones that are planned we can make 2010 the best year in e-commerce yet!!

Happy Selling -

Chris

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Increasing the average sales amount per order is a great way to grow your business. This can be done using coupons and cross selling techniques. Let’s take a look at a few examples.

A simple way to increase the average sales amount per order is create an incentive for customers to spend more. You can use a coupon that will discount a fixed amount or a percentage of an order when a customer spends a specified amount. For example, if your customers spend an average of $18 per order, you might try promoting a $5 off coupon for orders of $30 or more (before shipping costs). This might encourage some shoppers to add more items to their cart and increase your overall revenue. Of course, you’ll need to calculate your risk and see if you can afford to discount prices.

Another great way to increase the average sales amount per order is to present shoppers with cross-selling and up-selling scenarios. Cross-selling and up-selling are two techniques that are used to get a shopper to either purchase a more expensive product (up-selling) or to get a shopper to add additional products (e.g., accessories) to the order (cross-selling). These tools are built right into Auctiva Commerce so that you can let your storefront do all the sales work. Read the Up-Selling tutorial and Cross-Selling tutorial for more information.

Beware of using Free Shipping promotions for the purpose of increasing the average order amount as they generally take too much out of profit margin. In this way, you won’t actually boost average order amount after you calculate your cost for covering the shipping.

Feel free to leave your own examples in the comments section. We’d love to hear how your growing your sales.

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Store Tips Coupons

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Want to help ensure that buyers can find your products? Then it is recommended that you map your Auctiva Commerce Store items to the product categories we are offering. We will automatically include your products in our new marketplace platform. That means your items will show up in our brand-new shopping portal, Elefy.

We want to help sellers connect with buyers who want to shop outside of the “Big Box.” Elefy emphasizes a unique shopping experience for buyers. If you are seeking the type of buyers who value variety and prefer purchasing from individual sellers, our platform will bring them to you. Mapping to our platform categories ensures your products are searchable in the exact categories you want them to be.

Start now! It only takes a few minutes to decide where your items fit best and as you add new inventory, individual products will be automatically associated to the appropriate external category. These choices are fully editable in bulk, or one item at a time.

Our online tutorial can take you through the category mapping process, step by step.

Happy Holidays !!

Chris

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