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More Great News!! Just like we have done for the past few months we are going to credit the Monthly Store fee back to our users through March 2010 – the credit will appear on our statements as Auctiva Commerce – Subscription Promo (insert month here) 2009.
Thank you,
Auctiva Commerce
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Great News!! Just like we have done for the past few months we are going to credit the September Monthly Store fee back to you – the credit will appear on your statement as Auctiva Commerce – Subscription Promo September 2009.
Thank you,
Auctiva Commerce
All -
I am pleased to announce that Auctiva Commerce has been updated to include the following features:
Optional Automation of Google Base Feed Submission – Store Admin
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With this release we have added the ability for your Google Base Feeds to be automatically sent to Google on a daily basis. This will help to ensure that Google has a current view of your product set and will also save you time since you will only have to set up automatic submission once. After that it will be on “auto-pilot” so to speak.
One Important Note: Due to bandwidth restrictions only .zip files can be submitted to Google using the automated feature. We will create a .zip file for you and submit it to Google but you must register the same .zip file name with Google as well in order for the upload to be successful. To register your .zip filename with Google go to: http://www.google.com/base/newfeed?ensureUrlPresent – you will need to sign in once you reach the Google Base page.
After you have registered your .zip filename with Google, choose the “Create, Compress and Upload Feed Nightly” option from the tasks dropdown on the Marketing > Feeds > GoogleBase Feed page and click on the little arrow to the right of the dropdown list to activate.
There is also an Auctiva Commerce Help document on the subject which can be found “Here”.
Additional Google Base Attributes – Store Admin
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In this release we have added four new attributes to your Google Base feeds. These are all optional but may help your products to be found via Google Base. The four new attributes being added to your Google Base feeds are: Brand, ISBN, MPN, and UPC. For brand we are dual purposing the manufacturer attribute which already exists on the Product Detail page. Similarly for MPN we are dual purposing the Manuf. Part No. field which also already existed in the Product Detail page. ISBN and UPC are new attributes which are being added to the Product Detail page. If you have data in these fields it will be sent to Google as part of your Google Base feed.
Bulk Upload – Store Admin
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I am pleased to announce that in this release the Bulk Upload feature has been implemented. To use the Bulk Upload feature go to Inventory > Bulk Upload Inventory. From this page you can view the Help documentation for this feature (http://auctivacommerce.com/help/Entry.aspx?id=How-to-bulk-upload-inventory) and download a Sample Product Upload file that you can use to upload your inventory items.
Note that you can load up to 5,000 items at a time without external image links. If your items have external image links you can upload up to 2,000 items per upload file.
In addition the following bug fixes were delivered in this release:
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– Update to correctly process orders when gift certificates and other payments are applied
– Clean up of erroneous red box which was displaying on the Place Orders page.
– Clean up of required fields display on Checkout pages
– Update to currency provider page to correctly display the provider
– Correction to customization preview window to support scrollbars
– Correction to Tax Codes report to correctly utilize date ranges
– Update to variant pricing logic to correctly display discounting of variant price
– Fix to the Remove Selected logic on the Manage Inventory page
– Display fix to the Manage Currencies page
– Correction to fix the “Narrow by Results” search function
– Correction to category logic to correctly reflect category moves and deletions
– Correction to kit logic error messaging
– Fix to Customize Links button error which was causing an error page to display
– Correction to minimum / maximum purchase quantity validation logic
– Added validation to subscriber group naming to correctly limit length of subscriber group names
– Correction to correctly maintain price and quantity changes for manually entered orders
– Update to shipping estimator to correctly display shipping estimates when the Enter key is used
These fixes and updates have been deployed live and where applicable Help and or FAQ documentation has been updated on the Auctiva Commerce Help Site (http://www.auctivacommerce.com/Help/Default.aspx).
Thank you -
Chris
Your loyal customers can be a critical channel of revenue for your store. Auctiva Commerce can help you retain customers by helping indentify the most valuable customers and encouraging them to continue shopping on your store.
Just because you have repeat customers does not mean that you necessarily need a customer loyalty program. Some stores may get repeat business because they offer hard to find products, or shipping to a region that no other store can provide. Before you start cutting your customers a deal, understand the risk and opportunities that are associated with promoting customer loyalty with coupons and other savings.
As a general rule, customer loyalty programs are focused on retaining customers who might otherwise do business with a competitor. The sole purpose is to help a business keep its current customers. Are you doing business in a competitive market? If so, you should strongly consider investing some time and money into developing a customer loyalty program that will help keep your customers coming back to you.
Even if you don’t have a lot of competition, you can always consider giving loyal customers something in return to show your appreciation. Just make sure that your promotion is in line with your business goals. If there is really no risk in losing a particular customer, you probably should not consider giving them a deep discount. That will eat up your profit margins. In this case, you may want to consider a customer loyalty program that simply adds value using means other than discounting prices with coupons. A simple Thank You email message is a great way to show your appreciation and it won’t take anything out of your profit margins.
The important customers to target for loyalty programs are the most valuable customers that are at the highest risk of shopping somewhere else. Valuable customers can be shoppers who frequently make purchases or shoppers that have only visited once, but made a large purchase. Sales volume is usually the metric you’ll use to determine the customer’s value. In Auctiva Commerce, you can view a customer’s shopping history and see just how much that person has spent on your store. We’ll show you how to do that later in this post.
It’s not uncommon that a web visitor will want to take a closer look at who they’re buying from before purchasing something from your store. That’s why a well written About Us page is an important part of your storefront. After all, you are the heart and soul of your business. Let’s take a closer look at how you can create the best About Us page for your store and make shoppers feel right at home.
Let’s create a new page for the About Us information. Most web visitors look for this information when they want to learn about who they’re buying from. We’ve got a step-by-step tutorial for creating a new WebPage that you can read or just follow the abbreviated instructions here:
Now let’s turn our attention to the actual content in this page. This information goes in the “Page Content” field. You can click on the HTML Editor icon if you want to use this tool to format your content.
Your About Us page is another store branding opportunity that allows you to communicate who you are and your business values to potential customers. This opportunity shouldn’t be taken lightly. Let’s sharpen our pencils and get ready for a quick writing workshop. First, let’s reflect on our store branding rules:
With these rules in mind, let’s aim at writing about 150 words or 6-8 sentences for our About Us page. You can certainly write more if you like, but remember the most basic purpose of this page is to prove to skeptical buyers that you are a real person and not a scammer. That can easily be done in a few sentences, especially when you focus on being yourself. Make sure to personalize this text where possible and also clearly illustrate the benefits of doing business with you. To achieve this goal, let’s take a look at a few examples.
Product descriptions hold a lot of valuable information about the type of products you sell, which mean that they are also a great resource for search engine bots to use when indexing keywords. Let’s take a closer look at this field and see what you can do to help improve your search rankings.
Not only are product descriptions useful to search engine bots, but these fields are critical in making the sale. Shoppers will read product descriptions to learn everything they need to know about the product before adding it to their cart for checkout. When we optimize this field for search engines, we must also keep the reader (the buyer) in mind as well. This field is an opportunity to build a narrative that is rich with keywords that add meaning and value to the customer. Always keep that in mind. Not only do we want to rank higher in search results, we want to convert this web traffic to paying customers.
Search engines weigh different sections of content more heavily than others and one signifier of importance is a header tag (that’s HTML lingo). A header tag breaks down to several levels of importance, starting from h1 (i.e., the highest of importance) and going down to h5 or beyond. On your Auctiva Commerce store, the most important content is stored in h1 headers. For example, the Featured Products heading on your homepage is enclosed in the h1 tag. This hints to the search bots that this is the most important part of the page. The hope is that the search engine bots will pay close attention to the products that you are featuring.
When it comes to product pages, there’s a different hierarchy for the importance of information. For example, the Page Header is enclosed in the h1 header tag and the Product Description is enclosed in an h2 header tag. So, search engine bots will weigh the keywords in the Page Header as more important. But it won’t stop them from crawling the Product Description for more keywords. Using the HTML editor in the Product Description field, you can add more header tags should you want to create more opportunities to signify levels of importance. For example, you could add another heading in the Product Description field and enclose it in an h3 tag.
The artist in all this header madness knows what to emphasize as important. Ask yourself, what is so important that it deserves a header tag in the Product Description field? Start to answer that question by remembering who your audience is. It’s not the search engine bots; it’s your potential customers. What would be important to them? Search engines do their job by connecting people to the content that they’re looking for. If it’s important to your shopper, it’s likely they’ll be searching for that keyword. Let’s take a look at an example.
Many of you who are long-time store owners probably have an address book full of customers you’ve done business with in the past. But, are you aggressively collecting email addresses of store visitors who are simply browsing your store? Capturing this audience will get you one step closer to converting visitors to paying customers. This is a top priority for both new store owners and those who’ve been doing business for quite some time.
We’ll show you a simple and effective way to start capturing email addresses of web visitors so that you can create a dialog with these potentially profitable visitors. In our example exercise, we’ll use a store launch event as the hypothetical situation. So, if you’re new to Auctiva Commerce this will be right up your alley. More experienced store owners can customize this lesson to fit their specific needs. We’ll be giving you suggestions on how to do that as we go along.
Email lists are a terrific selling tool. It allows you to frequently keep in touch with your customers and drive high-quality traffic to your store. There are a variety of ways to do email lists, including a guerilla-style technique where you send emails to your email list through your standard email client (e.g., Microsoft Outlook or some other email application). This is one of the least expensive ways to operate an email list, however, it can become difficult to manage and design your email campaigns. This method also does not automate opt-in or opt-out functions or provide analytical data.
A good email list managing tool will automate the most essential email managing tasks and provide insights into the success of your email campaigns. This means that when you send an email to the recipients in your email list, you’ll be able view how many of those people open the email and how many of those click on a link within the email (i.e., the click through rate). This additional information can help you decide the value of the emails you send as well as assess which types of emails drive the most valuable traffic back to your store. Let’s say you want to feature a new product on your store next month. What kind of marketing copy would compel your email recipients to buy this product? You could write a hard sale, such as “Just Added to Our Inventory-Get 10% off Now.” Or, would you do better with something softer by writing a paragraph about the product itself and why you are excited to offer it on your store? These are difficult questions to answer, but a good email list tool should be able to offer us some insights. We encourage you to take a closer look at these tools and see if they’re right for you.
Here’s what we’re going to do:
We won’t discuss how to do an email campaign in this exercise. We’ll talk about email campaigns at a later date. This exercise is simply for creating the “net” that will capture web visitors so that we can sell to them, later. Let’s dig in.
Social networking is exploding—and with it, the technique of viral marketing, or using social networks and word-of-mouth advertising to create buzz about new products or brands.
To read the complete article, check out our Auctiva Education Section.
DID YOU KNOW?
Nielson Online reports that YouTube is the No. 1 entertainment site for consumer product advertising. Videos provide great advertising—and they can be very entertaining.
Micro-blogging site Twitter can also be a great tool for promoting specials and discounts. Many businesses are already using “tweets” to promote their enterprises. According to one survey, 66 percent of respondents said Twitter was “somewhat” or “extremely” important to their business.
WHAT CAN YOU DO?
Now go start connecting with others. Your Auctiva Commerce Store will greatly benefit from the exposure. Post links to your store in your social-network accounts, and link to any videos you make in your store’s “About Us” page. Remember, when it comes to spreading the word about your store, it’s all about going viral.
Remember, Auctiva Commerce has a complete Help Section, replete with step-by-step tutorials and video guides.
If you have questions or comments, please visit our Community Forums.
And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter!
Store branding is the next big subject that we’ll be tackling over the next several weeks. Every page of your store is an opportunity to communicate your values to potential customers. Visitors to your website may not have any familiarity with you or how you operate your eCommerce business. Let’s focus today’s discussion around two important branding opportunities on your website: the store logo and description.
Auctiva Commerce store owners are a diverse group of online sellers that sell everything from vintage collectables to personalized doormats. Each store owner will have their own unique online identity (or brand). In this way there is no wrong way to create a store logo. But, we’d like to throw out a few pointers that will help create a shopping experience that inspires buyer confidence and ultimately generates more sales.
A store logo needs to be recognizable and unique, but it also needs to be readable and digestible. That means the logo itself shouldn’t be so eye-catching that it distracts the buyer from their main goal of making a purchase. And it should not take more than a split second for a buyer to decode its meaning. Designs that make you scratch your head are distracting for the wrong reasons. Ornate store logos are fine as long as it’s readable and fits in with the theme of the store. But often times, less is more.
The ideal dimension of you store logo is 270 pixels by 100 pixels. This is the dimensions that our Store Theme Designers use to layout all the store themes. You can use bigger logos (up to 900 pixels by 400 pixels in fact), but if you go too big you may end up pushing other store content below the fold. Wait a minute, what’s “below the fold” mean? In the world of Internet browsing, any webpage content that is positioned below the viewable area on a buyer’s computer screen is called below the fold. This means that the buyer will need to scroll the browser down to see that content. Usability experts know that the odds that an average e-shopper will scroll down to see more content is not in the favor of the store owner. If your store logo is gigantic, the featured products on your home page will be less likely viewed by web visitors. That can mean fewer sales per month.
Using descriptive language is a good idea to help inform buyers who you are and how you conduct business. Are you a mom and pop shop? Do you have a large sales and service staff? Do you do business worldwide? Ask yourself what kind of seller you are and how does the benefit your shoppers. This will become part of your branding narrative that tells potential customers that you can be trusted.
Let’s take a look at some real life examples from the Auctiva Commerce network of store owners. Keep in mind that these are are hard working store owners. Any criticism is meant to be constructive.
I am pleased to announce that Auctiva Commerce has been updated to include the following features and bug fixes:
Addition of Condition attribute to Google Base Feeds – Store Admin
In anticipation of Google’s June 30th requirement to include the Condition attribute in all Google Base feeds we have modified Auctiva Commerce to include this feature. All feeds generated from today forward will contain the Condition attribute. We have added the Condition attribute to the Product Details page of your store admin so that you may set the appropriate Condition per product. Per Google the valid values are New, Used and Refurbished.
Important Note: We have defaulted all products to New – if your products are not New you will need to set each product to the appropriate value.
Finally, since the Condition attribute will be required by Google on June 30th, you need to regenerate and resubmit a Google Base feed to ensure that Google has an accurate view of your products. When you regenerate your feed SET THE OVERWRITE EXISTING FEED FILE OPTION TO YES within the Auctiva Commerce Google Base feed page. This will ensure that your Google Base feed is updated with the new attribute.
An Auctiva Commerce Help Doc that describes how to submit a feed to Google Base can be found
Here.
Shipping Calculator Fix – Public StoreFront
In a previous release a defect was introduced that prevented the Shipping Estimator from showing up when a product was added to the Shopping Cart from the Product Detail page. This has been corrected – now immediately after adding an item to the Shopping Cart from the Product Detail page the Shipping Estimator will appear on the right rail of your storefront.
SiteMap Creation Fix – Store Admin
In Internet Explorer an error message was being thrown when users attempted to use the Create and Submit Sitemap function on the Meta Data and Google Integration page. This has been corrected.
These fixes have been deployed live and where applicable Help and/or FAQ documentation has been updated on the
Auctiva Commerce Help Site.
