I must hear this question from every client I talk with. “How do I get my website to be listed in the search engines results pages (SERP)?”

The short answer to this question is by submitting your website to the major search engines through their search engine directory submission page. Note: By doing so does not guarantee that your website will be listed, let alone be shown in any search results pages.

Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/

Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html/free/request

MSN (now known as bing): http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx

Now that we have that out of the way for the people who are looking for the quick and easy road to riches, I will answer the question to the best of my ability. Read the rest of this article »

When you’ve been selling your products for an extended time, it is easy to get caught up in traditional ways of marketing. Sometimes you need to inject some excitement into your business to get customers motivated to buy sooner than later.

Instead of taunting how great your product is and the special, limited time offer, how about promoting a contest instead?

While looking into some creative ways of promoting brand awareness for a client, I came across an interesting retail website that allows for visitors to design their own hooded sweatshirt with many design patterns. The person with the best design, based on specific criteria, wins a shopping spree from the internet retailer to spend in-store or on the e-tailers ecommerce website.

Contest can be fun for your customers. It also allows your business to collect leads that you could send emails to that encourage contest participants to buy from your website.

Have you experienced any success with contests in your business? Please feel free to share your experiences.

Imagine walking into your favorite department store and seeing hundreds of shopping carts loaded with products, and no one around to claim the items in them. This may sound strange in the physical world, but in online retail, or ecommerce, this is a very common scenario.

In this article we will discuss the cost of shopping cart abandonment, some reasons why this may happen, and suggest some remedies to reduce the amount of shopping cart abandonment on your ecommerce website. Read the rest of this article »

Top 10 Online Retailers by Conversion Rate:

10. QVC – 18.5%

9. Blair.com – 18.9%

8. Eddie Bauer – 19.3%

7. Coldwater Creek – 20.0%

6. Roamans – 21.0%

5. Woman Within – 22.7%

4. vitacost.com – 23.7%

3. ProFlowers – 24.3%

2. FTD.com – 27.2%

1. Schwan’s – 50.5%

Source: Neilson Online, MegaView Retail

If you are new to ecommerce, or have been selling online for awhile now, you will be sure to find valuable information here to help you succeed in selling your products online. Read the rest of this article »