The two most common techniques most ecommerce sites use for driving traffic are SEO and SEM (AdWords, etc). Some more progressive sites are using social media, Twiiter accounts, Facebook fan pages, and Facebook advertising, with varying degrees of success. You hear less about the paid shopping comparison engines. For those who don’t know how they work here’s a quick primer (remember there are plenty of exceptions to every rule).

I’ll use the Australian market for examples as it’s the one I’m most familiar with, but the principles apply everywhere. Australia has a few shopping comparison engines: the homegrown GetPrice.com.au and Shopbot.com.au, as well as the Ebay owned shopping comparison behemoth, Shopping.com. There’s also a few smaller players.

The process goes something like this. You setup an account with them. You need to get your products to them somehow. Unless you have a very small number of products, the best way to do this is with an automated feed – XML, CSV or similar. Most shopping comparison sites support 2 or 3 formats, usually similar to each other but unfortunately usually not identical. Your shopping cart software may have a module already to provide a feed for these sites. If not, it’s a relatively small job for a decent programmer to make one. The shopping site sucks up all your products and puts them in appropriate categories. For example, if you have a women’s fashion site, you might have a bunch of products end up in the leggings category.

They get traffic, typically through a number of means including SEO, SEM, and doing distribution deals with other sites such as Yahoo! or other popular portals. People come to the site, typically to a product comparison page. They click through, and end up on your site. You pay when someone clicks.

The great thing is because they tend to attract relatively qualified traffic, the sites convert well and often have a better conversion rate and lower cost per click than AdWords.

If you aren’t using shopping comparison sites, I recommend you investigate them.

Categories: Uncategorized | Date: May 29th, 2010 | Author: Mark | 1 Comment

Magento Professional Edition is out, an attempt to fill the gap between the free Community Edition and the more expensive Enterprise Edition. It comes with warranty, support, and a few nice features like rewards points, gift certificates, and other revenue boosting modules installed out of the box, at a much cheaper price point than Enterprise (from $US2,995/yr for Professional vs $US12,990/yr for Enterprise). It lacks some  enterprise features such as sophisticated permissions, extra security features, etc, but will meet the needs of many store owners who need a supported solution but can’t afford the enterprise license.

Categories: Uncategorized | Date: May 29th, 2010 | Author: Mark | No Comments

Like anyone else, I have my opinions about which shopping carts I like and don’t like. While to an extent that comes through on this site, I do try and remain neutral and not state strong opinions (which I have). I’m going to make an exception.

osCommerce, please, shut down and let your users move on.

osCommerce is possibly the single most widely used shopping cart package on the web. It was started in 2000 – 10 years ago now, and the last major release was 2 years ago! This is the internet folks, 2 years is an eternity. That version wasn’t exactly cutting edge either.

osCommerce is bloated, clumsy, has terrible templating (well, basically no templating), and without adding a bunch of often incompatible and poorly documented add ons, is pretty useless out of the box.

As best I can tell, osCommerce has a few main users:

1. Amateur programmers who see it in cPanel and use it because it saves 20 minutes to install.
2. People whose ecommerce startup is so poorly funded they can’t afford a few hundred dollars for a commercial package (not saying you need to go commercial, but often in my experience price is the main reason for choosing osCommerce – if you are so poorly funded your business is almost certain to fail).
3. People who just blindly accepted the recommendation of their web developer, who has been using osCommerce for 5 years and doesn’t want to learn a better package.

Now, don’t get me wrong, osCommerce can do the job. However, any customizations will take several times longer than they will on a well designed package. It’s lagging behind in technology. Yes, I know about 3.0. But what decade will that be released? And will it really be that good?

If you are price sensitive, there’s a lot of modern free packages available – for example, Magento, OpenCart, PrestaShop and many more.

I don’t want to undermine Harald, the leader of osCommerce, who has lead the projects since its inception. He’s done a lot of awesome work. But I think it’s time to move on to those who can release more than once every few years, who have up to date technology and have an infrastructure based on latest techniques – 2000 was a loooong time ago!

Flame away….

Categories: Uncategorized | Date: May 15th, 2010 | Author: Mark | No Comments