MightyMerchant eCommerce Blog

Of course it does! You already know that it works in person. Say you’re out trying to grab a quick bite to eat for lunch and you’re buying a sandwich. The cashier asks you if you want a drink or chips. You say yes, even though you weren’t planning to, and then you’re getting a large drink instead of a medium. Or you’re at a nice restaurant and hadn’t planned on getting desert, but when the waitress bring ’round the dessert tray, you can’t resist the death-by-chocolate triple layer cake.

First of all, what is cross-selling and up-selling? Cross-selling is suggesting a product that is similar to what a shopper is currently looking at. It could be either a different, newer, or improved model or accessories for the product. Up-selling is offering shoppers another product that is usually more expensive. For instance, a shopper might place the ‘good’ model in their shopping cart. Up-sell suggests the ‘better’ and ‘best’ models as well.

Amazon.com is the king of up-selling. If you’re shopping for CDs (which I hardly ever do-ahem.), they “bundle” other CDs together and tell me that if I buy all of them I’ll get a discount. This is a technique that has been shown to greatly increase sales, especially with me, because if the order total is $24.95 and they tell me I qualify for free shipping if I spend $25, well, I’m on that ‘continue shopping’ button like a hobo on a ham sandwich.

A website doesn’t have a friendly salesperson to suggest that your customers buy the extra fancy lead crystal dog water bowl to go along with their rhinestone studded gold plated collar and tag, so your cross-sell and up-sell strategy steps in. The additional benefits lie in the fact that a cross-selling feature allows you to display other popular items or high ticket merchandise as the customer browses, with the hope that the customers will buy it on impulse along with his original selection. It works! Put this feature to work for your site and say hello to more sales in 2008. And yes, MightyMerchant has a cross-selling and up-selling feature :). Just ask us about it, or go here for more information.

Posted on December 6th, 2007 by Vanessa
Filed under: Marketing and Promotion | No Comments »

Chances are you’re aware that even print publications like newspapers and magazines utilize audio and video on their websites. Search for “New York Times” and their website returns the title, “The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia.” So, when serving only written content isn’t enough for even a print publication, maybe there’s some substance to this idea of utilizing audio and video to create a more engaging website.

I’m not talking about starting a viral marketing campaign with some wacky interactive game or videos of your employees in chicken suits doing the Macarena, but if you wanted to take your marketing in this direction you certainly could. (If you do this, make sure to send me a link, I want to see it! lol)

What I’m talking about is simply harnessing the power of video or audio clips to provide more incentive for your customers to buy your products. I can think of a number of ways this would be beneficial.

• A product that is complicated to use or install-post a video of the process. Even if you think a product is simple to use, it may not be for other people, and a visual of the process helps provide confidence to buy.
• A product that is adjustable for the user’s size-post a video of the process.
• A product that is meant to be used in conjunction with another product-post a video of the process.
• Demos of just about any type of product.
• Walk people through a more detailed description with up close images of almost any product-you guessed it, post a video.
• Are you an artist or craftsman? Post a video of yourself making your art.
• Do you sell handmade items? Post a video of the person making the item and talking about it.
• Post video of real testimonials about your products.
• How about a walking tour of your facilities? Yep, post a video!

Audio and video enrich a website and if used correctly can engage your customers on a deeper level than the written word alone. (But sites that automatically begin playing audio or video are often more annoying than effective.) Here’s an example of a site, LifeBites.com, that uses video and audio effectively. From the left-navigation menu, click on ‘Daily Bite,’ and you are rewarded with a sound clip. LifeBites.com posts video interviews, and features change. Another site, Cervelo.com, sells engineered racing bicycles. The site was not designed by a professional so it is not as polished as you would expect for a highly successful company, but a large part of their success lies in their effective utilization of thorough product descriptions, historical archives, blogs, video and images.

Have you seen any examples of good use of video on a site? If so, please share them!

Posted on November 30th, 2007 by Vanessa
Filed under: Multimedia | 2 Comments »

A couple of days ago I mentioned that I wanted to share our new sites with you. We get to work on a lot of sites at MightyMerchant, and these great sites deserve a little exposure (and link love!) when they’re just getting started. This one, IsleOfSkyeBagpipes.com, went live on November 5.

The challenge for this site was to provide the many options that Isle Of Skye needed their customers to be able to select. MightyMerchant has a feature called “shared options,” which allows add-on choices. For Isle Of Skye, the options are a little more complicated, as some of them affect the price of the product and some do not. This is an important feature that many ecommerce merchants really need! In this example, in the drop down selection boxes you can see that some choices add on to the cost:

Shared options goes one step further so that the customer could create groups of options that he will use over and over. For instance, if all of the bagpipes share the same Mouth Piece and Tuning Slide options, he can just select to use that Shared option group, rather than having to enter those choices for each product individually.

The couple who started Isle Of Sky Bagpipes, Mike and Sarah, are passionate about sharing their love of bagpipes and offering quality bagpipe merchandise. Mike has been the Director of Piping at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota since 1999. It’s great to have you aboard, Mike and Sarah!

Posted on November 25th, 2007 by Vanessa
Filed under: New Sites | No Comments »

At MightyMerchant, we have an amazing array of clients that are successful in many areas of ecommerce. Not all of our clients engage in online commerce–our system is flexible enough to be used for most any type of content management–but most do.

If you’re looking to have a cheesecake delivered anywhere in the country, one of our clients, TheDessertCafe.com, can do it! Want to book a photographer for your Oregon wedding? Try another one of our clients, Oregon wedding photographer Bruce Berg. Bruce has been photographing Oregon weddings for over twenty years now, and he’s won more awards than any other Oregon photographer.

Our clients can book you an expedition, and provide you with fishing lures for the trip. Need a baby sling or other kids clothes? I was browsing through our Client Gallery recently, amazed by the entrepreneurial spirit I found there. (I’m realizing how easy it would be to buy all of my holiday presents this year from only MightyMerchant customers!)

I wanted to do something to highlight the great looking, fun, and functional sites we get to work on here at MightyMerchant, and I thought you might enjoy taking a peek, too. To that end, I want to use a little bit of blog space to welcome our new clients when their sites go live, and share a bit of the excitement with you.This site, BodyJaz.com, went live on November 1. They sell massage products, aromatherapy items, candles, fitness supplies, and all kinds of bath and body products. You can even design your own fragrances for oils and lotions.

The BodyJaz site features Customer Accounts, which allows customers to save their log-in info, an online registration form for classes, a newsletter sign-up feature, and an organization that allows customers to shop by brand or product.

I hope you’ll take a moment to check out some of the other great websites our clients have. SiteBeat, the monthly MightyMerchant newsletter, features a Client Profile in each issue (the December newsletter will feature JewcyWrap.com, a site dedicated to fun and funky Jewish themed gift wrap-an appropriate site for the month of December *smile). We have some awesome customers, and I’m glad to be able to share them with you!

Posted on November 19th, 2007 by Vanessa
Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

Google Analytics is a free and powerful way to track the performance of your website. If you’re not already using Google Analytics, let me give you 5 reasons to do so:

Discover how customers find you. From the left navigation menu under Dashboard, click on Traffic Sources>Search Engines. This report tells you the traffic that all of the search engines have sent you, from the big cheese Google to tiny crumb Netscape. On the left side is a search box with a pull down menu with choices ‘containing’ and ‘excluding.’ You can exclude Google from the results this way, and get a feel for how many people come to your site from other search engines. Another nifty feature is the Segment box at the top of the page. You can segment these remaining results by keyword. This segment button also sorts by city, browser, operating system, and many other parameters to help you in an ad campaign.

Discover how your customers search. In Traffic Sources>Keywords select the ‘unpaid’ link to the left of the segment box. This view tells you the keywords customers use to find you that you are not paying for. Optmizing for these keywords would give your sales a boost without ads.

Discover where people leave your site. Go to Content>Top Exit Pages. If the majority of visitors leave your site from the homepage, you’ve got some work to do. Ask yourself some serious questions about your homepage layout and what you could do to make it more appealing and usable.

Discover your top referring sites. Referring sites are those sites that have linked to you and send you traffic. You may sort through these referring sites by both paid and non-paid links. Click on Traffic Sources>Referring Sites, then choose the Goal Conversion. If you have configured goals, this will tell you which of those referring links results in successfully meeting a goal. Usually goals are sales, but they can also be downloads or sign-ups. Which of the referring sites are successful for you? Don’t throw money at the sites that aren’t bringing you anything.

Monitor your email success. The links in your emails can be connected to Google Analytics so that you can tell which emails are effective at converting to sales. It’s easy to configure most email programs. Try this resource for coding emails, ROI Revolution. Once your email is coded, return to Traffic Sources>All Traffic Sources. Under the graph, click Show>Medium and choose ‘email’ as your medium. (This medium will be whatever word you chose when you coded the email. You could pick any word, but ‘email’ is the obvious choice. It could also be ‘newsletter’ or whatever word makes sense to you.) Within this medium you can track your conversions by email, region, or other factor.

This is but a handful of the ways Google Analytics can help the ecommerce webmaster. MightyMerchan’s article on using Google Analytics has more information on useful and easy-to-access reports. If you crave even more information than what Google Analytics provides for free, for a one-time charge of $100 MightyMerchant can configure Google Analytics’ Ecommerce statistics. This resource is not available in the standard Google Analytics interface but provides valuable information by linking all of these traffic sources and keywords to the revenue they generated, giving you even more control over your advertising spending and site optimization efforts.

Posted on November 14th, 2007 by Vanessa
Filed under: Analytics | No Comments »