Building Customer Loyalty with a Reputable eCommerce Platform

If you are running an online eCommerce shop it is imperative to understand how important it is to build customer loyalty. Every business should aim to have people returning to their website time and time again; as this will increase overall profits and even the amount of customers you reach. If loyal customers are kind enough they will recommend you to their friends and family.

Customer loyalty is the best reward that any business can receive and demonstrates that you really do have a market that is worth working on. If people like it and keep coming back then that’s definitely telling you something.

With an eCommerce platform, there are several things that you can do to help retain customer loyalty. For example ask yourself; what is your approach with new customers? Try some of the tips below to help gain some loyal customers:

1) Maintain regular contact with your customers but not to the extent where it appears to be spam as this is extremely off-putting for anyone. Sending special offers to them via email for example is just one of the great things you can do to keep the customer interested in your business.

2) If a customer contacts you, then contact them back as soon as possible. Speed is essential with online businesses and if you’re too late in getting back to them, they may already have found something elsewhere, meaning that you have just lost a customer.

3) Keep everything relevant within your eCommerce shop. Avoid creating extra pages and content that is completely pointless and has no relevance to your business and / or product(s).

4) Allow for your customer to connect and share with each other. This can easily be done by integrating social media in to your website such as Facebook and Twitter. Doing this is straightforward and usually only consists of embedding some code from the social media site to your website.

5) Ensure that your eCommerce shop has a feeling of security. Because more and more people are shopping online these days, it’s essential that they have peace of mind before going ahead with any transactions. Anti-fraud and secure payments are some factors that should be focused on.

So there you have some top tips to help you build customer loyalty. Remember, your business relies on good people who will come back and recommend you to their friends and family; take every effort you possibly can in order to achieve this. Any digital marketing agency will advise you to treat every customer as a friend; the better they rate your customer service the higher the chance of a sale.

Managing Post In An E-Commerce Business

If you’re managing an E-Commerce business, chances are, you are dealing with a lot of incoming and outgoing mail every day. The larger your business is, the higher the number of mail that you have to manage. Have you ever thought about how this affects your day-to-day office function? You might not notice it but you might be spending too much time just going through your mail. Here are a few ways to manage both your incoming and outgoing mail.

Incoming

If you’re using a franking machine, some models have an incoming mail date stamping feature. This can help you organize your mail and open the ones that come in first.  Separate mail according to date and importance and place them into individual bins. If you have a small office, everyone can easily get their mail as they arrive. The problem comes if you have a staff of 10 or more. Pigeon holes are a great idea. Label each hole with your employees’ names. Assign someone to sort or deliver the mail to the corresponding recipient.

You can also have your local post office sort your mail for you. Inquire if they have a service where they can open, sort and then seal the mail again and deliver it to you. This saves you a lot of time. If you have a high security facility, you can also have your mail scanned before delivering it to you. Ask your local postal office about their services.

Incoming mail is not really a big deal. What an E-Commerce business shouldbe wary about is outgoing mail.

Outgoing

Every day, an E-Commerce business receives several orders. The task of wrapping the item, packing it then shipping it is easy if the orders are 10 or less each day. The problem begins when there are 20 or more and the items require some special wrapping and packing. If you have only a handful of people, you might be sacrificing precious time in fulfilling orders. Instead of selling or promoting your business, you end up preparing order after order. Sure that’s great but there is an easier way of doing things that will give you more time to acquire more business. The best thing to do is have an order fulfilment system in place. An order fulfilment is the process from buying to shipping. When a customer inquires about the product and decides to buy it, the process starts. You and your staff should have a clear picture on how to fulfil an order. They must know exactly what to do in each step. You can automate some of the processes but there is only so much that you can do. If you’re doing this in-house, make sure that you have equipment to make things run faster and smoother. You need a franking machine, a printer, a computer and a computer program to manage your orders.

The next best thing is availing a professional order fulfilment service. Check your local post office if they offer this service. They can store your products for you so you don’t need to worry about renting a warehouse if you have a big inventory. You can integrate your website with their technology and all your clients’ orders will go to them. They will then prepare and ship the order for you. You get a monthly bill and all you have to do is pay it. How easy is that? A lot of popular logistics providers now offer order fulfilment. Even E-Commerce sites such as Amazon have their own order fulfilment service.

Different providers offer different packages. Some can handle customer service, re-order stocks from suppliers and accounts reporting.  Some are flexible enough to fit your budget. If you think that order fulfilment should be done in-house to avoid extra costs, think again. The time you spend preparing packages is already hurting your business. Aside from that, you need to invest in a lot of equipment. Add to that the cost of labels, ink, boxes, bubble wrap, etc. Then there’s the issue of manpower. You need to hire more employees as your orders double or triple. You need to pay them salaries and give them benefits. There are also the overhead costs like electricity, warehouse rental, etc. Add these all up and you will realize how much an in-house order fulfilment system is costing you.

In-house is good for start up companies but as you grow bigger, you need to start thinking about outsourcing your order fulfilment. Ask you provider if they can customize the best one for your E-Commerce postal needs.

Building Social Links Can Improve Search Engine Rankings

One of the latest strategies to optimizing your ranking in the search engines is with social links. Social links are Facebook likes, Facebook Shares, Tweets, and Google Plus shares from social media users that create a public link between their followers and the content of a web page.

Social links can help to improve the ranking of articles, blog posts, and websites.  Fortunately, this is actually a strategy that is not that hard for most people to implement. Gaining new quality social links is certainly going to be easier than the text link building part of your SEO strategy. You’ll want to start with the big 3 social networks:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google+

While the above are the biggest social media networks, keep an eye open for smaller more focused social networks that might work well for your niche when it comes to social links. More links are usually better, but you have to make sure that you are not spending all of your time (or money) getting social links from social media accounts that have few or low quality followers. Social Links from bot, fake or junk social media accounts are worthless, while social links from authority social media users are pure gold.

Quality is Important

On Twitter and other social sites, you often hear people or companies brag about how many followers or friends they have. The real question should be whether those followers are real people who read posts and could one day become a customer, client, or advocate. Having a million followers does no good if none of them intends to buy from you or at least re-share your content.

However, having just a thousand followers can be great if they are active social media users and can possibly turn into customers or forward your social links on to their followers. Always look for social media links from Facebook, Twitter, and Google plus members with quality followers or friends.

Start Implementing the Strategy

The first step is to create compelling content that people want to share on their favorite social media networks. Then you need to make it is easy for your visitors to share your content with their friends and followers. The best way to do this is by adding social media icons or buttons to each of your posts. Your visitors will simply click on the Share button, the Facebook button, or whichever social media service they prefer, and it goes out to all of the people in their audience. If enough of the right people share your content it will mean more quality social links, improved rankings, and more traffic for your website.

A Fun Way to Build a Better Rank

Most people are already using social networking in their daily lives, so it makes sense to start using it for your business as well. Social media allows you to connect with many more people than your site alone would be able to reach.

Utilizing social networking offers more than just social links and a better ranking. It offers social connections. Connecting with people who are active on social networking sites is a great way to build loyalty with current and future customers.

SocialLinkMart.com is John Lessnau’s latest web traffic and ranking service. After seeing this market flooded by shady dealers selling massive amounts of social links from bot, fake or junk social media accounts, John saw a need for a honest service that only sold quality social links that actually work. Social Link Mart makes social link building easier for SEOs and website owners by only allowing social link sales from authority social media users. SocialLinkMart offers Facebook Likes and Shares, Google Plus Shares, and Twitter Tweets.

Difference between Google Panda and Google Penguin

The update of the Google Penguin algorithm in the last week of May has brought this algorithm into limelight. Yet many site owners are still unaware of this latest algorithm of Google. The other algorithm namely the Google Panda is much more popular than the Google Penguin. The most common query that is doing the rounds with the Penguin update is the difference between the two. While Google Panda has been in the scene earlier than Penguin, yet both these algorithms are responsible in bringing down faulty websites from their search engine rankings. The main difference lies in the characteristics that they work upon. Below is a brief description of the two algorithms which will help in getting a clear picture of them.

Google Panda

Google Panda algorithm mainly targets websites with low quality content. Content farms were hit the hardest by this algorithm. Even sites with duplicate content from other sites were penalized by Google. The overall ranking of the websites depends on all the pages of the website. If all the pages have poor quality content then the whole site will get penalized for it. The Google Panda algorithm has also promoted quality websites which had been lower in the search engine rankings. The last update was in 19^th April 2012.

Google Penguin

Launched on 24^th April, 2012, this algorithm mainly concentrates on the webspam. The websites which do not follow the quality guidelines of Google are penalized and demoted in the search engine rankings. Black hat techniques like keyword stuffing are looked down upon by this algorithm. Some of the points which should be kept in mind by the webmasters to avoid being penalized are listed below:

1. Comment spamming in blogs using exactly matching anchor text for targeted keywords.
2. Unnatural inbound links
3. Exact match anchor text in outbound links coming from poor quality sites.
4. Low quality directory listing and article marketing

So those who have suffered traffic losses and a decrease in their search engine ranking in the recent times should find out the main reason and work on that to restore their original position.

Upcoming changes in Google’s HTTP Referrer

Protecting users’ privacy is a priority for us and it’s helped drive recent changes. Helping users save time is also very important; it’s explicitly mentioned as a part of our philosophy. Today, we’re happy to announce that Google Web Search will soon be using a new proposal to reduce latency when a user of Google’s SSL-search clicks on a search result with a modern browser such as Chrome. 

Starting in April, for browsers with the appropriate support, we will be using the "referrer" meta tag to automatically simplify the referring URL that is sent by the browser when visiting a page linked from an organic search result. This results in a faster time to result and more streamlined experience for the user.

What does this mean for sites that receive clicks from Google search results? You may start to see "origin" referrers—Google’s homepages (see the meta referrer specification for further detail)—as a source of organic SSL search traffic. This change will only affect the subset of SSL search referrers which already didn’t include the query terms. Non-HTTPS referrals will continue to behave as they do today. Again, the primary motivation for this change is to remove an unneeded redirect so that signed-in users reach their destination faster.

Website analytics programs can detect these organic search requests by detecting bare Google host names using SSL (like "https://www.google.co.uk/"). Webmasters will continue see the same data in Webmasters Tools—just as before, you’ll receive an aggregated list of the top search queries that drove traffic to their site. 

We will continue to look into further improvements to how search query data is surfaced through Webmaster Tools. If you have questions, feedback or suggestions, please let us know through theWebmaster Tools Help Forum.

What is Google Drive

Description

Keep everything. Share anything.

*** Google Docs is now a part of Google Drive! ***
* Keep everything. Share anything.
* With Google Drive, you can store all your files in one place, so you can access them from anywhere and share them with others
* Use the Google Drive Android app to access your photos, documents, videos and other files stored on your Google Drive
* Upload files to Google Drive directly from your Android device
* Share any file with your contacts
* Access files others have shared with you on Google Drive
* Make any file available offline so you can access them even when you don't have an Internet connection
* Create and edit Google documents with rich text formatting
* Edits to your Google documents appear to collaborators in seconds
* Make quick changes to spreadsheets
* View your PDFs, presentations and more
* Upload and convert files to the Google Docs format
* Take a photo of printed text and convert it to a Google document
* Optimized experience to take advantage of larger screens for tablet users, Honeycomb (Android 3.0+)

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1 star	2,445

Average rating:

4.1

35,636

What's New

What's in this version:

1. What's new in this version:
2. 1. Quickly find files that have been recently opened, edited or shared with you
3. 2. Upload/Download all file types to/from your Google Drive
4. 3. Selecting contacts to share with is easier
5. 4. Faster navigation of folders when syncing in the background
6. 5. Choose text alignment in the documents editor

Permissions

THIS APPLICATION HAS ACCESS TO THE FOLLOWING:

• YOUR ACCOUNTS
  USE THE AUTHENTICATION CREDENTIALS OF AN ACCOUNT
  Allows the app to request authentication tokens.
  MANAGE THE ACCOUNTS LIST
  Allows the app to perform operations like adding and removing accounts, and deleting their password.
  ACT AS AN ACCOUNT AUTHENTICATOR
  Allows the app to use the account authenticator capabilities of the AccountManager, including creating accounts and getting and setting their passwords.
  ACCESS OTHER GOOGLE SERVICES
  Allows apps to sign in to unspecified Google services using the account(s) stored on this Android device.
  GOOGLE DOCS
  Allows apps to sign in to Google Docs using the account(s) stored on this Android device.
  GOOGLE SPREADSHEETS
  Allows apps to sign in to Google Spreadsheets using the account(s) stored on this Android device.
• HARDWARE CONTROLS
  TAKE PICTURES AND VIDEOS
  Allows the app to take pictures and videos with the camera. This allows the app at any time to collect images the camera is seeing.
• NETWORK COMMUNICATION
  FULL INTERNET ACCESS
  Allows the app to create network sockets.
• YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION
  READ CONTACT DATA
  Allows the app to read all of the contact (address) data stored on your tablet. Malicious apps may use this to send your data to other people. Allows the app to read all of the contact (address) data stored on your phone. Malicious apps may use this to send your data to other people.
• STORAGE
  MODIFY/DELETE USB STORAGE CONTENTS MODIFY/DELETE SD CARD CONTENTS
  Allows the app to write to the USB storage. Allows the app to write to the SD card.
• SYSTEM TOOLS
  WRITE SYNC SETTINGS
  Allows the app to modify the sync settings, such as whether sync is enabled for the People app.
  PREVENT TABLET FROM SLEEPING PREVENT PHONE FROM SLEEPING
  Allows the app to prevent the tablet from going to sleep. Allows the app to prevent the phone from going to sleep.
  WRITE SUBSCRIBED FEEDS
  Allows the app to modify your currently synced feeds. Malicious apps may change your synced feeds.

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• YOUR ACCOUNTS
  ACT AS THE ACCOUNTMANAGERSERVICE
  Allows the app to make calls to AccountAuthenticators.
  DISCOVER KNOWN ACCOUNTS
  Allows the app to get the list of accounts known by the tablet. Allows the app to get the list of accounts known by the phone.
  VIEW CONFIGURED ACCOUNTS
  Allows apps to see the usernames (email addresses) of the Google account(s) you have configured.
  ACCESS ALL GOOGLE SERVICES
  Allows apps to sign in to ALL Google services using the account(s) stored on this Android device.
  READ GOOGLE SERVICE CONFIGURATION
  Allows this app to read Google service configuration data.
• HARDWARE CONTROLS
  CONTROL VIBRATOR
  Allows the app to control the vibrator.
• NETWORK COMMUNICATION
  VIEW NETWORK STATE
  Allows the app to view the state of all networks.
• SYSTEM TOOLS
  READ SYNC STATISTICS
  Allows the app to read the sync stats; e.g., the history of syncs that have occurred.
  READ SYNC SETTINGS
  Allows the app to read the sync settings, such as whether sync is enabled for the People app.
  READ SUBSCRIBED FEEDS
  Allows the app to get details about the currently synced feeds.