If you have a great product that you are selling on your e-commerce website, allowing your customers to write reviews can do a tremendous amount of good for your bottom line. In a bricks and mortar business, a certain amount of business is generated or lost by word of mouth. If you run a good business, people will promote you to their friends. If you run a bad business, people will do the same. It has an impact, just as advertising has an impact, but with an e-commerce website there is so much more potential for this to work for you because virtual communications are easier than person-to-person interactions.

What Kind of Person Reads E-Commerce Website Reviews and How Much can They Help a Business?

According to Dr. Ralph Wilson of Web Marketing Today, people that check comments are termed, “social researchers” and depending on the type of business involved, there might be a lot of them.

A 2007 study by the Kelsey Group found that 24% of searchers for several types of offline services, such as hotels, checked online reviews. 87% of hotel seekers who checked reviews said that the reviews strongly influenced their purchases. Gift basket e-retailer DelightfulDeliveries.com added customer reviews and within two months reported a 20% increase in conversion rates for items rated with four or five stars.

It gives you something to think about, doesn’t it? Customer reviews are a great source of information for something like a hotel or bed and breakfast, but they are just as important for a retail based e-commerce website. If you have reviews of the products that you are selling, it provides your potential customers with a range of user experiences that can help to influence their decision. It might also help them to buy a more expensive product from your line.

What if Someone Writes a Bad Review of my E-Commerce Website?

One could reasonably argue that this does not matter. Wilson goes as far as saying that it “adds credibility.”

They (online shoppers) expect reviews rating merchant customer service on Amazon and eBay. They’ve browsed reviews dozens of times. They know that there is always going to be someone who has a bad experience. But if the strong majority of the reviews are positive, a bad review doesn’t hurt. On the contrary, it adds credibility to the other reviews. If a series of reviews are uniformly positive, many shoppers will discount them as rigged.

If all of the reviews on your e-commerce website are bad then you might have a problem, but if you focus on providing great customer service and good products and or services, your customers should for the most part be happy. The odd bad review is not going to put people off your e-commerce website.

Scripts to Implement Customer Reviews on an E-Commerce Website

If you are using a content management system, you might be able to arrange a free commenting system. This will depend largely on the CMS that you are using for your e-commerce website. Alternatively, there are some commercial scripts that are widely used.. Wilson recommends any of the following: Bazaarvoice, PowerReviews, iNods, and Reevoo as suitable solutions. You could also outsource the coding of your commenting system and get something that is a true fit for your e-commerce website.

There is some debate as to whether or not it makes sense to create all-in-one e-commerce websites. By all-in-one e-commerce websites, I am of course referring to websites that bundle everything into one package. Some e-commerce websites come with a forum, a blog and product pages integrated together to form a single package. Some webmasters will tell you this is great for the brand, others will tell you it can hurt your sales. Who is right? Depending on the situation, they both might be.

Everything on e-commerce websites should be about driving sales or promoting your brand. Where some people go wrong on all-in-one e-commerce websites is that they lose focus of this fact. Blogs can be great marketing tools for e-commerce websites, but a blog can quite often take on a life of its own. If you are selling information services, you can quite easily bamboozle your readers. The last thing that you want to do is to make them feel like they are getting in over their heads. At the same time, toning down your blog work might be selling yourself short to other customers. In these cases, you would do better to keep your blog elsewhere and display some of your best work on your site. All-in-one content management systems are great for e-commerce websites, and it is worth remembering that they are easy to configure and that components can be readily removed or transferred to a different location.

I am not a fan of forums in e-commerce websites. They are prone to spamming and require a great deal of maintenance. There are circumstances in which they can work, but you need to be prepared for a great deal of work. Forums require constant attention.

If you are going to include optional components in your e-commerce websites, just be sure that they are helping and not hurting your efforts. The idea behind all of these extra components is to drive traffic your way, if they are not driving traffic to your e-commerce websites then they are not fulfilling their purpose. Giving blogs and forums a “home of their own,” can be good for e-commerce websites in such situations.

There are essentially three ways that you can go about setting up your own eCommerce website, they vary dramatically in cost and in the amount of time that is required to set them up. Today, we are going to take a brief look at the three different options and give our thoughts on each of these options and give you a few pointers that might help you if you choose either one of them.

Building your own eCommerce Website
Building your own eCommerce website can be an extremely time consuming process. Unless you are a professional web designer, or have a great deal of experience designing and building websites, you should know that it is a lot of work. Still, some people do an outstanding job of this and if you think that you have what it takes, go for it. A good DIY eCommerce website should be a balance of form and functionality. Don’t get too carried away with the design aspect, you want it looking simple and professional. Check out a few of your competitor’s sites for ideas.

Using a Template or Script for your eCommerce Website
This is actually two options, but I am combining them as one because they are, in effect, very similar. Using a template will give you a standard website with limited or no interactivity. Chances are that you will need to pay a little bit of money for your template. The good news is, it is possible to buy single use or limited use templates, this limits the chance of your customers encountering your website elsewhere. Whether you are using a script with a template or a website from a template, there will be a little tweaking involved. The work requirement will be substantially reduced, but you will lose some of the uniqueness that comes from doing a ground up eCommerce website design.

Custom Built Websites and Script Templates
Outsourcing these tasks generally gives the best results, but it can be expensive. On the plus side, you will get an eCommerce website that has been designed by a professional and probably looks better than you would be able to manage. You are probably going to get your website a lot faster than if you attempted to go it alone, professional web designers build websites for a living and they can move quickly. The downside is always going to be that there may be differences in vision between you and your designer. Make sure that you are very clear in regard to the specifications of your eCommerce website and you should be fine.

Do social networks make good alternative outlets for e-commerce websites? The answer to that question is debatable, but the good news is that it is not all that difficult to draw a little benefit from the larger social networks, if you know how to play the game. MySpace has long been quasi-landing page material. It probably started with artists that used MySpace to hock their wares by promoting them and then linking through to their home pages. Facebook is a little more difficult to work with, but it can be done.

Making Facebook Work for E-commerce Websites
Putting Facebook to work for e-commerce websites is a little more complicated than MySpace. The problem with Facebook is that it is so bland. It does not scream e-commerce like its infinitely more customizable cousin. In order to make Facebook work for your e-commerce websites, you are going to need to create a dedicated profile.

Create a new, clean profile page. You will need a good profile shot of either you or your business. You could throw in some catalog shots in the album pages. I would include either Super wall or Fun wall and hide the regular wall. Either of these applications will allow you to add video to your profile page. Some news feeds can make the page a little more interesting and you can play around with the status as you need. Make sure there are plenty of links to all of the e-commerce websites that you wish to associate with the profile.

Networking and making friends. Most people are not going to be lining up to make friends with a business unless you engage them. An alternative profile could be the ticket here. This is where marketing your e-commerce websites through Facebook can be a whole lot of work. Joining into network based discussions and being an active Facebooker will help you to create a large list of friends. Realistically, you are going to need a lot of friends if you wish to make a difference to your sales. There is no need to rush, it can take a long time to see results in this department, especially if you have other commitments.

The hard sell can work. Perhaps the biggest benefit of being a part of a large network and having a large group of friends is that it makes it easier to buy and sell goods. While Facebook does allow targeted advertising, selling within networks work. It is time consuming, but people do browse those ads. It can be a good way to build interest in your e-commerce websites.

The fact remains that making Facebook work for e-commerce websites is a lot of work that may or may not result in anything. If you put in the effort and are able to pitch to a big enough market you might see some benefit for your e-commerce websites.

If you are running your own e-commerce website then it is likely that you are doing so either from a site that has been designed from the ground up or with some kind of pre-fabricated script. There are advantages to either option when it comes to running an e-commerce website. The choice that you make will depend largely upon your budget and your needs.

What you Need to Know about Designing an E-Commerce Website from the Ground Up
Designing an e-commerce website from the ground up can be a tremendous amount of work. It is this fact that turns a lot of people off the process, but if you have the patience and the expertise or budget, it can be a great way to build your e-commerce website. It is the only way to ensure that you get exactly what you want. The trouble with this approach is that it can be quite difficult to incorporate third party components on your e-commerce website. If you want to have a forum, or a help desk they will need to be tweaked to fit the look of your site. This can be quite off putting for many people and can be a lot of work. Also, it is possible that you will find yourself with more customer databases than you should probably be using. If you are going for a ground up site design, it is essential that you spend the time and or money that is required to integrate all of your website components. A help desk can look a little bit different if you want, but a forum should have the same thing. Stick to your brand wherever possible.

Note that if you wish to build your e-commerce website from the ground up, it is probably best to stick to scripts for individual components. There is a good selection of scripts for forums, blogs, shopping carts and help desks and it can save time and money to make use of them. Not to mention the fact that these scripts usually come with support communities of their own and are constantly under development. If you are looking for a great commercial forum script, you cannot go past VBulletin, though a few good free alternatives exist, VBulletin has such an incredible range of customization options that it is worth the modest investment.

The Content Management System Advantage
A content management system, or CMS as it is commonly known is a great way to build a highly optimized e-commerce website quickly. There are a number of scripts on the market, but by far the most interesting CMS that can be applied to an e-commerce website is Drupal. Drupal offers a full range of features and really is an all-in-one solution. Once you install Drupal, there is a bit of work involved getting it ready for e-commerce website applications, but with a range of free themes that only require minimal setting, you can have a uniquely branded professional looking website up in no time at all.

The advantage of CMS scripts is the time that they save. The hard work has been done for you and some of the best scripts are free. As everything is already integrated, it really saves a lot of time and effort. If you are planning to build a community into your e-commerce website, a quality CMS is definitely worth considering. The trouble with using a CMS is that they are primarily designed with community usage in mind. Building in the functionality that you require for an E-commerce website will take a bit of time, but certainly less time than it would take to do a ground up site build.

E-commerce and email have a love-hate relationship and have done so for some time. A recent article on The Email Killer - Parts 1 & 2">Site Pro News declared RSS an email killer, listing a host of potential benefits that could potentially make it work as a communications solution. I tend to disagree with the article on a number of levels, but they do point out some great aspects of RSS that make it an excellent publicity driving tool for the e-commerce sector.

I was shocked to see the stats on email deliverability rates for the typical business. The fact is, even if you have come by a person’s email honestly (that is - you did not buy a bootleg list of emails from some guy in a dark virtual alley) the likelihood of them actually receiving that message from you is 60% or less.
So, let’s say you have a list of 1000 customer emails - which you have worked hard and paid real money to acquire. When you send a message, 400 of them (on average) don’t get it. It either automatically lands in their Spam Folder or gets deleted even before it reaches them.

Even companies like Aweber who make a living sending emails for other people and have intimate agreements with email providers like Gmail, AOL and Yahoo, only get a 90% deliverabilty rate - on a good day (they claim %99.4 but I use Aweber and when I factor in the whole opt-in and email management process, at least 10% of my emails are undelivered).

RSS is quite different. If someone has opted-in to your RSS “feed”, they will get 100% of your messages. No doubt about it.

The author has really hit the nail on the head with the limitations of e-mail in e-commerce environments. Spam filters are getting more and more sensitive and it is next to impossible to reach some clients. An RSS based newsletter on the other hand has the potential to reach everyone that wants to receive it. As an e-commerce communications solution that gives it excellent potential, as long as people are aware of the technology.

The trouble with RSS is that it has not achieved the kind of market saturation that I would like to see for it to reach its potential. While more people are using it these days, there are still plenty that do not understand the technology; RSS is underutilized. For it to replace email in e-commerce, it would need to be much more widespread than it is now. RSS is designed for syndication not communication and does not strike me as the technology that will be used to carry online communications to the next step. The author has some interesting points and I certainly believe that elements of RSS can be incorporated in a kind of reloaded email system, but there are significant enough changes required that it would be a challenge with existing architecture; enough changes perhaps that we would no longer call it RSS.

For e-commerce, email has some genuine advantages over an RSS style delivery system. RSS stores information server side. The reader accesses the information. If the person that wrote the information decides to change what they have written and the reader has not physically saved it, the information changes. Email keeps it simple, information is transmitted from one person to another. While there are limitations to what you can do with email, it remains a fairly good means of communication. It is simple, fast and gets the job done. Best yet, it keeps communication bandwidth to a minimum which some clients will appreciate.

I hear constantly that email is on the way out. I don’t think it will go away completely. Most people get fewer emails now as a great deal of communication takes place over social networking sites. It would be my guess that this trend will increase for friendly communications. I could see mass communications moving away from email towards a social networking base, but for now, email will retain a place in e-commerce.

Amateur analysts and self-styled market gurus alike have predicted a rough and rocky 2008 for e-commerce websites. Such claims are often ill-informed, unnecessarily worrying and potentially off course. True, the economy is not in the best shape at the moment, but there is absolutely no indication that we are heading for a dotcom specific crash. E-commerce websites are not going to bear the brunt of the economic turmoil, but they may suffer a bit.

The sub-prime mortgage fiasco is what has brought on our present economic woes and we are now seeing a hiccup effect of that going on in countries with close ties to the United States. The amounts involved are having a knock-on effect in other economic sectors, but for e-commerce websites it is business as usual. In the worst case scenario, people will spend less as they will have less disposable income, advertising budgets will become a little constrictive and small e-commerce websites might start to really feel the pinch. The same problems are going to face bricks and mortar businesses as well.

The original dotcom meltdown occurred because people were dealing with a relatively new economic sector. Things became massively overvalued and the whole thing tumbled down like the house of cards that it was. Web 2.0 e-commerce is an entirely different ballgame and is built on much stronger foundations. Don’t let a few doomsayers get you down.

Not everyone has the skills to make a great e-commerce website and not everyone with the skills has the time. Website building is one thing that I firmly believe is best left to professionals. If someone has the budget to afford professional website design, by all means, they should go for it. Even if you are capable of producing your own professional looking website, you are not going to be able to do it as fast as a pro. One of the best sources for reasonably priced, high quality e-commerce websites is Quote Catcher.

With Quote Catcher you set out your website design requirements, your budget and give a few more project details, and then you wait for the quotes to come in. You will get up to five quotes for a project. Once you have your quotes, you can then compare the services of the different web designers and choose someone to start on your website. The Quote Catcher website gives you some valuable hints relating to pricing. Under-price a Quote Catcher Project and you won’t get too many offers. Budgets are designed to give a little flexibility as they cover price ranges rather than actual prices.

If you want a serious e-commerce website, there are plenty of designers at Quote Catcher that can provide the goods. Price fairly and you are sure to find someone that is able to build you the e-commerce site that you want.

If you have been reading our blogs for a while, you might have heard me extolling some of the virtues of the various Content Management Systems (CMS) for various applications in e-commerce websites. The right CMS program gives you all of the tools that you need to set up a fully functional search engine optimized website. The latest incarnations of content management systems do the job better than ever before.

When you use a CMS for e-commerce, chances are that you will have to make a few modifications. You might wish to get a freelance programmer to work ensuring that your shopping cart software is well integrated and to make sure that everything is set up safely and securely, then you can begin to enjoy the benefits of what is on offer.

Right now there is one CMS available that I think is the best all-in-one solution on the market. Drupal has all of the tools that you need to build a robust community website. You can integrate a forum, blog and any information pages that you want. It is highly customizable and there are some fantastic templates out there. The best part, it is free, which makes setting up that much more affordable.

Drupal can provide a great backbone for an e-commerce website, but you will need to spend a bit of time configuring it and tweaking it to make it work for this purpose. If you use GoDaddy for your hosting, they will set it up for free. All you need to do is to set to work on your modifications. Once the shopping cart is integrated and you have the look that you want, it should be ready to go.

With a good CMS you can start enjoying all of the benefits that a good community minded site has to offer. Building up a loyal customer base from that community is a great way to ensure future business for your e-commerce website.

We have eBay Stores, and Yahoo! Stores, but one thing that we do not have at this point of time is real, dedicated Facebook stores. It is coming soon, I can virtually guarantee it. One only has to look at the way different elements of Facebook are being developed to know which way the site is going to naturally steer. The network is evolving and growing at breakneck speed and looks poised for further growth still. I remember when Facebook had 2 million users, it was not that long ago, now they can boast 58 million active users with 250,000 new sign ups a day. They are still in second place to My Space, but how long is that going to last. Where Facebook becomes e-commerce news, however, is with the recent news that they are exploring payment system opportunities:

Participants would be required to adhere to a non-disclosure agreement. “You’ll be among the first informed for anything payments-related on Facebook, including opportunities to participate in any related trials,” Facebook said.

Details are scant but software developers are expected to submit myriad ideas - from eBay style auction systems to buying and selling amongst members using a Facebook currency. - The Australian

With their own payment system, how far away will Facebook stores be? The time frame will be determined by the length of time that it takes them to develop their payment system. Anything financial tends to take a lot longer because it must be tested and retested, but I would hazard a guess that they can have it completed and implemented to at least a limited extent within the year. Only time will tell, but it will be interesting for e-commerce if it does happen.

As a web marketer, I am always looking for great sources of web marketing and e-commerce information. Blogs can be a good source of information, but you really have to be careful with the information sources that you trust. There are some sites that give downright questionable advice. Rest assured, anything you read here is high quality information, and the sites and articles that we refer to can be trusted.

One good e-commerce news site to add to your bookmarks or RSS feeds is the Search Marketing Standard. The quality of writing is exceptional and it has more in common with a magazine than a simple blog. If you want to stay on top of the latest news and trends in search marketing, it is a very good site to read and comes highly recommended by us here at Brick Marketing. Go ahead and check it out and if you have a bit of time, drop a comment and tell us what you think.

Whether you run a website or not, it pays to build and protect your brand. A big part of that is acquiring the right domain names for your business. As your eCommerce websites grow bigger, you are likely to want to cover more domain names. Industry leaders may have hundreds registered. If that sounds expensive, it can be, fortunately there are ways to significantly reduce the costs of your domain registrations and in the process to streamline the application process.

If you are a seasoned eCommerce web master, you will no doubt have heard of Go Daddy. Go Daddy provides highly affordable rates for web hosting and domain registration. More than mere web hosting, their real strength is with domain management. You can easily manage and monitor a large number of domains with Go Daddy. Significant discounts often apply at Go Daddy, especially for bulk registrations and subscriptions made towards the end of the month. For bulk registrations of eCommerce websites domains, go to the link above and save up to 31% on your Go Daddy registrations. You can enter in as many domain names as you would like (up to 500) to attempt to register at once. If the names are not available, or are parked, they will let you know.

Here at Brick Marketing, we have a great deal of experience with Go Daddy and have found them to be a cheap efficient way to register multiple domains. If you have any questions relating to establishing domain names for your eCommerce websites, do not hesitate to contact us.

Sure, there was dot com oblivion once before and it could always happen again, but eCommerce websites are on the up and up. Online entrepreneurs learned a thing or two last time and now we have a more stable online economy. Like the real world economy, for better or worse, the global currency is the United States Dollar. Companies and individuals that do most or all of their business online tend to accept the U.S. Dollar in favor of other currencies. Now with the U.S. dollar faltering, thanks to the lending policies of some of the larger banks, businesses are finding that their value has decreased somewhat.

There seem to be two options for online businesses, hope for the best, or switch to the Euro. The Euro does have enormous potential for eCommerce websites, but I would not be contemplating a switch at this point in time. At this point in time it looks like the best thing to do would be to show some intestinal fortitude and gut it out. The United States boasts a very large online customer base, that customer base earns U.S. Dollars. Changing currencies would simply make products more expensive for the U.S. customer base, who would be likely to look for their products elsewhere where they are cheaper.

A half-way solution does exist and that is accepting multiple currencies. I would only recommend this option for cash rich eCommerce websites. Transferring between currencies incurs fees that are best avoided whenever possible. PayPal offers multi-currency merchant accounts and you will see that for a long time, the larger merchants have been accepting payments from a number of currencies.

If you are considering accepting multiple currencies for your eCommerce website then you need to make sure that you do your traffic research. You want to identify where your traffic is coming from and your customers are coming from. Note that there may be some discrepancies here that multiple currency options can resolve. Traffic analysis can will let you know just about everything that you would want to know about your customer base. Find out where your customers are coming from. If you have a large European visitor base, are they buying from your eCommerce website? Do you think that they would buy more if you offered the Euro? Do you think more European customers would be tempted to purchase if you had the extra currency option? You may wish to conduct some email surveys of your email customer base to let them know that it could become an option. Analyze their feedback before making a decision.

Sticking to the U.S. Dollar is the best idea for small eCommerce websites, unless they are doing the bulk of their business in the Euro. If you have trouble balancing the books now and are living hand-to-mouth, then adding an extra currency will increase your expenses with fees and make balancing the books that little bit harder. The fact is that most businesses do their business in U.S. Dollars. If you are in the information sector, then the U.S. dollar will remain the primary currency for your business in the foreseeable future. A cheaper U.S. dollar is forcing us to tighten our belts a little bit whenever we have to purchase things internationally, but things will pick up sooner or later and it will be business as usual again.

Here at Brick Marketing we are always ready to advise about and help you implement different payment systems. If you need advice or services in this area or any other area web marketing, do not hesitate to contact us.

What do you do if you have a great idea for an eCommerce website but lack the coding skills to make it a reality? The answer is simple, outsource the coding to a freelancer. These days, finding a freelance programmer is easier than ever, thanks to a clever new website called GetaFreelancer.com. GetaFreelancer.com allows you to find freelancers to work on your project under prearranged conditions for a prearranged price. A lot of the time it is a really good way to save money on a project. Freelance coders have lower overheads, often they work from home, they may be looking for a regular job but not have one yet, they may even be in college and paying the bills with a bit of coding on the side. Freelance coders can shave a fortune off the cost of eCommerce Websites.

When you are working with freelancers, there are a few things that you ought to be a little bit wary of, especially if you are running an eCommerce site. The person that you are working with is a stranger. You wouldn’t give a stranger access to your bank account, likewise you want to avoid giving a stranger the keys to your payment system. It is best advised to choose your freelancers carefully and think very seriously about how much access you give them to your site. Once they have finished with coding, have it inspected by someone that you can trust and change your passwords. It is always better to be safe than sorry.

Freelance coders can take out one of the major headaches of eCommerce websites. It is often tough to find people that are prepared to code little things, but with GetaFreelancer, you generally can. If you are looking for an easy way to improve your website, it is certainly worth considering. If your are interested in learning more about eCommerce, or want to take a look at some of the custom tools that we have developed, please visit us at Brick Marketing.