Category Archives: Marketing & SEO

Google’s “Trusted Stores” E-Commerce Certification Program

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Google recently announced a new e-commerce certification program called “Trusted Stores”, where stores that go through an approval process with Google will be allowed to add a “Google Trusted Store” badge to their online store.

Google intends for the trusted store badge to give consumers a boost of confidence when shopping online, and it comes with a $1,000 guarantee to cover the purchase… which should really help to increase sales in your online store when the program is up and running.

The way it works is when a visitor to your online store hovers their mouse over the trusted stores badge, a live “report card” type tooltip will pop up. Easy to understand grades like A+, A, B and C are awarded for quality of service features like customer service and fast or reliable shipping.

Right now it’s just a pilot program with a limited number of retailers, but all Spiffy Stores owners can apply to participate by filling out this form. There’s no guarantee that Google will accept your application… as it’s currently only in Beta, and you’ll need a great history of reliable shipping and great customer service for them to even consider your application.

Learn more by watching Google’s overview video below, or click here to watch it on YouTube.

Adding URL Redirects makes migrating your online store even easier

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A URL redirect can help your customers find your products on your new Spiffy Store site when you migrate from another software platform and your old links are still cached by the search engines. This makes the whole migration process easy and painless as you don’t run the risk of losing sales because your customers can’t find the right products.

In simple terms, a URL redirect lets you map from one web page address to another, and this is the kind of feature that you’ll find supported by most modern ecommerce and online shop builder software.

However, here at Spiffy Stores we like to provide our store owners with the best possible tools for running their online stores, so we decided to go just that little bit further to help you solve your problems without actually creating more work for you.

If you look at the URL Redirection solutions offered by other hosted e-commerce providers, you’ll quickly see that in most cases they don’t offer any form of pattern matching or wildcard support for the redirections. This means that for a large store, you may be forced to enter many thousands of redirection mappings to support the full range of possibilities. Even worse, some don’t even offer a bulk import/export feature, so you have to type in all your redirects by hand.
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Google Shopping arrives in Australia!

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Google have just announced that they are launching both the Google Merchant Center and Google Shopping in Australia!

If you’d like to use Google Shopping to reach more customers, just log in to your Spiffy Store Toolbox and head over to the “Marketing >> Product data feeds” section.  You can then set up a new feed for the Google Merchant Centre by following the instructions in that section.

When you’ve done that, the next step is to log in to the Google Merchant Centre, create a new feed , and choose Australia from the drop-down menu. If you’re new to the Google Merchant Centre, we recommend reading the “Getting Started” articles in the Google Merchant Help Center.

Store owners that choose to advertise their product catalogue can also do so using AdWords’ product extensions as well.  Product extensions use the product information submitted by the retailer and automatically display the extra information within ads, where relevant. To learn more about product extensions, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Happy shopping!

Enhanced product tags

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Here’s a small but useful enhancement that has just been released for your Spiffy Store.

We all know how important it is to add tags to your product, as they help your customers find the right product and add extra information about your product that search engines can use to help you get a better ranking for your online store.

Well, we’ve just made it easier to add more descriptive tags to your products. From today, you can create multi-word tags which means that your tags can more accurately reflect the terms that your customers will be searching for.

When you create or edit your tags, they will now be separated by commas, which means that you can include multiple words in a single tag.

Now you can create a tag for ‘spiffy stores online store software’, rather than being restricted to the single words, ‘spiffy’, ‘stores’, ‘online’, ‘store’ and ‘software’.

Don’t forget that product tags are also used in the keyword meta tags for your site, and whilst these are going out of style, they are still very important to use.

Covetish.com added to your store data feeds

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With an emphasis on local fashion, Covetish.com enables their members to seek what they covet like never before, searching across hundreds of fashion retail sites in a single click.

Developed for an Australian audience seeking all their favourite brands in one place and an international audience hungry for Australian fashion, content is sourced from designers, high street brands, boutique retailers and established online stores.

With over 1,000 brands to covet, members edit their style from a comprehensive catalogue of what’s available online.

For more information about the Covetish.com Merchant Program, visit the Covetish.com site.

To add a covetish.com data feed to your store, you first need to sign up for the covetish.com Merchant Program, and then create a feed in the Marketing section of your Spiffy Store.

New Data Feed functionality: Get more exposure for products in your store

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We’re pleased to announce that Spiffy Stores now provides data feeds for popular shopping comparison sites.  By using the new XML data feeds built into our online store software, you’ll now be able to attract more visitors, which should convert to sales.

Online shopping is one of today’s growth areas, and many customers want the best price they can get when purchasing online. This is where price comparison sites can help online shoppers get the best deal. For you, as a merchant, these sites can help you get a wider exposure for your products in a cost effective manner as your products will be seen by a larger number of customers who are shopping on line for similar goods.
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25 Tips for improving conversion rates in your online store

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If you’ve already set up your own online store, or you’re just starting an online business, there are many things you’ll need to do to ensure the success of your new online business.

This article is the second in a series of articles designed to help you get the most out of your online store. In my last post, I covered ways to increase traffic to your online store.  If you follow our tips to increase your traffic, then more orders should start coming in.

If you follow the tips below to increase your conversion rate, then you could effectively reduce your advertising costs, whilst converting more of your visitors to buyers.

In e-commerce marketing, a conversion rate is the percentage of unique visitors to your online store who actually buy something.

Generally, if your store is laid out well, and you have good product descriptions and images and your products are reasonably priced, you should achieve at least a 1% to 2% conversion rate.

That can be easily increased to 3% if you follow the tips below.  If you go further than what we suggest, you can increase your conversion rate even further. Continue reading →

Marketing your new online store

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Increasing traffic to your online storeThis may come as a shock to people starting a new online store, but the days of “If you build it, they will come” are well and truly over.  Just creating an online store doesn’t mean that you’re suddenly going to become an overnight Amazon.com

To be successful selling online, you will need to market your online store. If you don’t… you’re really wasting your time.  Seriously.

Over the next couple of weeks starting today, I’ll be publishing tips on how to increase traffic to your online store, how to improve conversion rates in your online store, and going into further detail about our proven methods for doing so.

At the end of the day, you can take our recommendations with a grain of salt, but be warned… if you don’t do any of the things that we recommend, your store just isn’t going to succeed!

So here’s the first instalment for you…  20 sure-fire ways to increase traffic to your online store. Continue reading →

Email Marketing Made Easy

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Email marketing in your e-commerce storeWe’ve just released a bunch of new features, and this is the first of a series of blog entries to let you know about the changes.

As you’re probably aware, email marketing is an important part of  running an ecommerce site. At Spiffy Stores we’re always on the lookout to find new and better ways to help you run and promote your online store.

The first of these changes is a feature to help you create an email marketing mailing list. To recognize the importance of Email marketing, we’ve added a whole new section under “Marketing” in your store toolbox for the subject.

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