A Quick Monday Roundup
There are several interesting articles that I have seen today.
Seth blogs about a lack of organizations or individuals, that tweak existing websites. Not full re-designs, but people that work only on the small stuff.
I have to agree that this could be a great Niche for a competent company to fill. I’m not sure how a company would effectively market themselves, but word of mouth seems to be an efficient way to market a company like this. I imagine that once you get going, the referrals could be huge.
CakePHP is a Ruby on Rails equivalent for PHP. Oatmeal from seomoz reports on a website that they recent re-designed using CakePHP.
It looks like an amazing platform to publish with. I’m not sure how widely it will spread as it requires a fairly involved installation procedure and the learning of its proprietary sub-language within php. The benefits may definitely be worth the effort to learn, especially if it catches the mainstream php developing world.
Buying text links for relevant traffic!
If you are moderately up to date in the world of SEO, you would know that there exists a lot of debate about the effectiveness of purchasing text links for a website. While buying links used to be a great way to get a website up in the rankings, it isn’t nearly as effective any more and can have negative effects on a website if the linking is considered spam.
So taking the ‘bold’ assumption for this post that there can be no positive SEO benefit from paid links, can it still be worth it to purchase text link advertisements?
My answer is absolutely…
Some Simple Ways to Build Trust
Websites that lack trust are often plagued by low sales, and low conversion rates. If visitors don’t immediately trust a website they will leave, and not come back. New sites have a harder time gaining trust because they don’t yet have a reputation or any reason for a visitor to think they are trustworthy.
Here are 3 ways to make your website more trustworthy:
10 Ways to ruin visitor experience on your website.
After a few weak opening posts, I am going to kick off the blog with something that I think is actually useful for ecommerce website owners: 10 Ways to ruin your visitor’s experience on your website.
Stop Compromising
In one of the most thought provoking posts I have ever read, Seth Godin posts that businesses should compromise less and not compromise more.
This advice can be applied to just about any objective to make it more successful. How many times do you visit a business, or a website and they passively force you down their narrow hallway of options.
Do your customers a favor, make products and services based on what they want, not what you want.
Customer Service and Response Time for Websites
How many times have you emailed a website that you were planning on making a purchase from but didn’t receive a timely response?
Occasionally, about half, most of the time, every time…
The record that I have seen in a poor response time, is 92 days, set by an industrial printer company when I was inquiring about selling a large Xerox printer. I had completely forgot about and gave up on the whole situation two months before they contacted me. This is the absolute worst I have ever seen, but it doesn’t take 90 days to be a poor response time.
How fast should a customer receive a reply?
A business should respond to a customer as fast as humanly possible. I personally am online about 12 hours per day, and my own rule is no more than 5 minutes from when I receive the message. My Microsoft outlook receives new messages at least every 5 minutes, so it should take me no more than 10 minutes to send a response from when it is sent to me. The people that work in the sales and support for my company have a 1 hour limit, during business hours, but the 5 minute rule is always stressed.
Even 30 minutes would be a great improvement over the 24 hour standard that many businesses carry.
To be perfectly honest, my company would have been out of business years ago if we waited 24 hours to respond to an inquiry.
There are situation where you don’t have the answer to a question immediately and need to correspond with someone else to get the information you need. In cases like this, you can follow up on someone’s email, and let them know you are going to get back to them shortly. The point is that you contact your customer immediately with or without the information that they are looking for.
If your current response time is more than a few hours, you can be pretty sure that you are loosing business because of it. Your visitors can find whatever you sell, most likely at the same or better price somewhere else, in just a few minutes.
Don’t loose customers because you don’t respond soon enough. The only thing worse than a bad response is no reponse at all.
Welcome to the Ecommerce Blog!
Thanks for stopping by the recently launched ecommerce blog. The goal of this blog is to provide information for website owners, marketers and generally anyone interested in ecommerce.