Mr. Alan Avid Treadgold from Oxford Institute of Retail Management (UK) said: “In countries in Europe and America, one in every 10 supermarkets has closed due to the rise of online shopping. Retailers in Europe did not think that the consumer trend here is changing so quickly”.

Change or go bankrupt. This is a problem not only for retailers but also for businesses. And that is why has led to the inevitable birth of e-commerce platforms. BigCommerce, Shopify, Magento among many other platforms are playing an important role in this revolution.

What types of data can I migrate to Magento 2?

Depending on the method you use to migrate to Magento 2, you need to pay a little attention to what types of data are appropriate for this process. Most of the apps I’ve reviewed and used support basic data types so you can rebuild your online store on Magento so you don’t have to worry about any issues at all. This is the problem.

What can you migrate to Magento 2?

1. Product data with the following data components:

• Name, SKU, Short Description, Full Description, Weight, Status, Manufacturer, Country of Manufacturer, Tax Class, Sort Order in Category, Product ID
• Price, Special Price, Special Price From-To Date, Group Price, Tier Price, MSRP
• URL, Meta Title, Meta Keywords, Meta Description
• Custom Attributes
• Quantity, Stock Availability, Manage Stock, Backorder

and other related information.

2. Taxes

• Tax Class: (Name)
• Tax Rates: (Country, State, Percent)
• Tax Rules: (Tax Classes + Tax Rates)

3. Customers

• Customer ID, First Name, Last Name, Email, Customer Group, Newsletter, Gender, Date of Birth, Passwords, Created Date, Order History
• Billing Address: (Company, Address 1, Address 2, Country, State, City, Zip Code, Telephone)
• Shipping Address: (Company, Address 1, Address 2, Country, State, City, Zip Code, Telephone)

4. Orders

• Order ID, Order Date, Order Status, Currency, Total, History, etc
• Order Products: Name, SKU, Option, Product Price, Quantity, SubTotal Price, Discount Price, Tax Price, Total Price, Order Comments Shipping Price
• Order Customer: Name, Email, Billing and Shipping Address: (Full Name, Email, Company, Address 1, Address 2, Country, State, City, Zip Code, Telephone)
• Invoice, Shipment, Credit Memo.

5. Reviews

Created Date, Status, Rate, User Name, Description, Summary, Product, Title, Type

6. Multistore

7. Cms Pages

Title, Created Date, URL, Description, Meta Description, Meta Keywords, Status, Content Heading

And overall, almost everything can be migrated to Magento 2 from the platform you’re using.

Simple Steps to Migrate to Magento 2 for Non-Techies

Before entering the process of converting data to Magento 2, there is one very important thing that you must do: install Magento 2 in the latest version. Version 2.4.2 is the latest one that solves nearly 300 problems that have been reported by online retailers who are using it. Be sure to follow these steps:

• Set up a web server that meets Magento 2’s system requirements
• Download Magento 2 package to your web server using Composer or you can download the source code directly at https://magento.com/tech-resources/download and upload it to your web root folder.
• Install Magento 2: you can start the installation via Web Setup Wizard or via the command line (SSH).

*Note: You must install Elasticsearch before installing Magento Commerce or Magento Open Source 2.4.x.

After this work is done, our challenge has become a lot easier. With the development of algorithms, online services/tools/converters were created to help maximize data migration. The execution time is only a few hours and you will no longer need to pay any extra labor.

I’m planning to move data from OpenCart to Magento and I choose Next-Cart to perform this task. Fast and efficient, are the features that I noticed with this online tool. You can finish the migration is a few steps:

# 1: Set up Source Cart

Simply paste OpenCart store URL and your API information in the appropriate boxes. You can rest assured because the instructions will be extremely easy to understand. Download the Kitconnect Package for OpenCart then unzip and upload the entire Kitconnect folder into your OpenCart root folder.

# 2: Set up Target Cart

Similar to the Source Cart, but this time our object is Magento 2. Paste your Magento store URL into the appropriate field and do the same steps

# 3: Select data you want to migrate

As I said above, most of the basic data can be easily migrated to Magneto 2. So what you need to keep in mind is the full selection of data because I know no one wants to miss out on important data. Products, orders, customers … are important information fields that you need special attention to.

If you feel the need to tweak any piece of information, Additional Options and Advance Attributes Mapping will give you the freedom to adjust the migration.

# 4: Perform full migration

Complete all 3 steps above and you will be empowered to migrate from any e-commerce platform to Magento 2. Make sure the bandwidth is stable so that the process won’t be interrupted.

When you received the CONGRATS message, that means your shopping cart is successfully migrated.

Superior Scalability

You can never be 100% sure when you’ll have an unprecedented order volume or some sort of virality — your software has to be future-proof, from end-to-end. When you properly integrate your enterprise-class ERP tool and shipping software, you’re able to safely scale. Ecommerce, in particular, is a competitive industry. If your systems aren’t reliable and scalable, your business can’t grow.

Closing Thoughts

Breaking up with a “buddy” for a “new relationship” is never easy (no matter how you understand it). But sometimes it is necessary for development. Hopefully, my tutorials will help you to easily migrate data to Magento 2 even in low technology.

Select your migration tool at: https://next-cart.com/supported-carts/magento/ and get help from Next-Cart team to complete your migration.

We had a chance to sit down with the head of the Fulfillment Department at ASEA to ask them what they thought about ReadyShipper X after switching to our system. Here’s the scoop.

Q: What were your Pain Points like before using ReadyShipper?

Eli: Well, I was one of the ones who recommended ReadyShipper to the team.

The user-friendliness of this program compared to what we used to use is night and day. Being able to manipulate your own boxes, batch print, and the customer support that you offer all stand out. Knowing that we can reach out to you guys is the biggest difference between or current and our older system.

Q: What’s your favorite feature of RSX?

Jose: Being able to batch print and control that… with options for splitting boxes or using multiple boxes. The way that the API communicates makes a big difference. Additionally, this gives a better way to control our product more without having to rely on a 3PL.

Q: What would you say is the best part about using RSX as compared to your old shipping software?

Jose: From my point of view, I’ve seen different software before, and being involved in the direct selling industry, the biggest selling point for RSX, in my opinion, is ease-of-use. It’s very user-friendly!

CASE STUDY

ASEA was facing a number of hurdles they wanted to overcome to make their fulfillment department more efficient. Due to inefficiences, workers were staying late, the pick and pack process was sluggish and everyone was working overtime.

Too many touchpoints.  ASEA had a variety of necessary manual actions that were required with each package, such as secondary scanning of invoices during the packing process.

RSX Solution: ReadyShipper X eliminated these touch points, helping ASEA fulfill packages at three times the speed. The result: 300% increase in fulfillment efficiency from day one.

Sluggish label printing speeds. ASEA’s previous shipping software program was a browser-based program that was reliant on internet speed, uptime and loading.

RSX Solution: Once ReadyShipper X’s thin, hybrid-cloud client was in place, they were able to eliminate browser lag and increase label printing speeds to 3 per second. The result: 300% increase in label printing efficiency with eradication of tedious manual functions and uncessary touchpoints.

Poor routing and networking. ASEA’s previous system wasn’t efficient. It didn’t route or network to the nodes properly and required a lot of manual work during the process. This often resulted in longer work hours with the managers ordering pizza frequently to charge up overworked employees who were staying late.

RSX Solution: Now, the entire staff goes home early with fulfillment accuracy increases, fewer manual touchpoints, a greatly improved packing process and nodes that can be networked and assigned throughout the warehouse for greater efficiency.

Non user-friendly system. ASEA’s previous system wasn’t very user-friendly, it had a lot of confusing features and functions and too many pain points to optimize their fulfillment process.

RSX Solution: ReadyShipper X’s user-friendly and intuitive interface helped ASEA’s employees dive right into a new system with ease. The automation processes and integrated functions help them batch print faster, organize shipments and orders, split boxes and choose the carrier of their choice.

No there’s no more late-night pizza for the hard workers at ASEA! All the packages are now shipped in a timely manner. Even better? Everybody goes home early!

In recent years, the holiday shopping rush has gotten earlier and earlier. According to the National Retail Federation, 4% of consumers start shopping for holiday gifts in October, 29% start in September and 5% start even earlier than that – during the summer months!

As such, it’s never too early to start preparing.

With Amazon running Prime Day in the middle of July, and with more retailers gearing up for the pre-holiday and holiday shopping rushes, it’s essential to keep ecommerce holiday marketing on your mind all year round.

Here’s what you need to know to prepare (as early as possible) for this year’s big shopping season.

The Effect of a Changing Consumer

While the holiday shopping seasons have gotten earlier, they’ve also gotten larger. According to the National Retail Federation, an estimated 20%-40% of yearly sales for SMBs take place in the last two months of the year, and holiday ecommerce sales grew 18% in 2018, per a report by Internet Retailer.

As you prepare for the holiday shopping season, it’s also worth considering the other seasons that go hand-in-hand with holiday shopping. Namely, returns season (which runs from December to January), party season, which runs from January into February, and the season for holiday promotions: March, April and May.

Don’t quite believe those months will be your big hitters?

Consider the fact that St. Patrick’s Day recently reached the highest level of spending in the entire 14-year history of the National Retail Federation.

As you move through your holiday preparations, make sure not to forget about Black Friday and Cyber Monday! Don’t dedicate all your time to them, though. While they remain important shopping holidays, they’re no longer the primary events to focus on.

Appealing to Loyal Customers

Loyal customers are the backbone of ecommerce businesses, driving a majority of the revenue (23.5%) while also being the least expensive to market to.

They also do their own marketing by word-of-mouth referrals to friends and family, plus sometimes by advocating on social media or on other public channels, making them even important for holiday sales like an ecommerce 4th of July flash sale. This is amplified when e-tailers implement loyalty programs that reward customers for shopping and for referring others to the brand—it’s a win-win.

As you can see, loyal customers are an invaluable resource, but how do you capture everyday consumers and turn them into brand advocates? Doing so can help you convert one-time customers this summer into repeat purchases that span through the seasonal shopping rush in December.

Improving customer loyalty takes a top-to-bottom approach. Instead of zeroing in on the sale, take a step back and look at the entire customer journey. A more holistic view will reveal areas that can use improvement, so you end up with an optimized shopping experience and a ton of customers who are loyal to your brand for years to come.

The Customer Journey, Defined

The concept of the customer journey was introduced by OxfordSM as part of the Eurostar development more than 20 years ago, but it’s surprisingly not all that popular in the business world.

Econsultancy research found that 50% of organizations have not put effort into understanding their own customer journeys, meaning that you can get ahead of at least half of your competitors by diving into this process early, such as in July, well before the bulk of the shopping season gets underway.

In short, the customer journey is the entire scope of a customer’s experience with a brand. It covers everything from initial discovery (awareness) to loyalty and, when mapped, shows a circle or infinity symbol—a shape without a defined end.

Customer Journey vs. Customer Experience

Another term that comes up when discussing the customer journey is “customer experience,” which ties in but is not the same concept. This is especially true when trying to make your ecommerce independence day sales stand out to consumers.

The easy way to remember the difference is this: The customer journey is based on action, and the customer experience is based on emotion. How the customer feels at each point of the journey is the basis of their experience, so improvements to the customer journey will also improve the experience.

In turn, customers will be more loyal to your brand, which gives them a positive experience. This is why 86% percent of consumers are willing to pay more for products if the brand has excellent customer service. Increased loyalty and spending are two benefits of an improved customer journey… but, how do you know where to start making those improvements? It starts with mapping the customer journey.

Improving 4th of July Ecommerce Sales

There’s still time to improve your ecommerce 4th of July sales strategy. We’ve compiled a list of the best methods you can undertake now to get the biggest results. We’ll also give you five expert tips after this that can enable you to retain these customers and improve loyalty long after they’ve placed their first holiday order.

1. Conduct Market Research

Consumer shopping habits are changing every second, and it’s never safe to assume that the approach you took last year will work this year. Instead, you’ve got to take a proactive approach to get the best possible results for each season.

With this in mind, look at the data and market statistics in your industry and pull together some information about how your target customers intend to purchase this year. The National Retail Federation’s Holiday Headquarters is a great place to find projections about the upcoming holiday season as well as data on past shopping season.

2. Hone Your Marketing Plan

Take some time now to define your marketing goals, lay out areas you want to emphasize, create a budget, and sketch out your plans for breaking into new types of marketing, like online advertisements or print placements.

Once you’ve done this, it’s time to develop a marketing calendar. Having a bulletproof content calendar is especially important during the holiday shopping season, as planning is everything.

In 2016, for example, Hanukkah started on Christmas Eve. This provided a larger sales window for retailers selling Hanukkah gifts and offered an essential opportunity for publicity. Retailers who hadn’t plotted their calendars in advance would have missed the opportunity, and would have suffered lower bottom lines as a result.

Create your content calendar by working backward from big holiday dates to determine what you want to focus on and when the material associated with it should go live. This allows you to take a proactive approach to holiday marketing, and ensures you’re hitting all your major dates just right

3. Develop Marketing Materials

Flesh out your holiday marketing plan by taking some time to develop marketing materials right now. Being proactive in your marketing and advertising materials has several major benefits.

• First, it prevents the end-of-year rush.
• Secondly, you’ll have an easier time finding graphic designers, copywriters, and other specialists to help you.
• Third, you’ll also have plenty of time to fine-tune created materials and plan holiday PR pushes.

4. Look at Previous Campaigns

Knock your sales out of the park this year by taking an honest look at how well you did last year. Ideally, you’ve tracked your results with marketing codes, analytics, or other tools, and you know what worked and what didn’t.

If you look back at these things and notice that one type of marketing was ineffective, scrap the approach and create a new plan for the upcoming shopping season. (Hint-hint: ReadyCloud’s robust reporting and cross-channel data give you immediate insights into the seasonality of your sales, your customer buying habits, trends and more, so you can make the most of this year’s shopping season).

5. Make a Promotion Plan

If you’re interested in promoting products or services, now is the time to consider which items you’ll focus on and make a plan for when you’ll push them.

The best way to approach this is to consider which of your products would naturally see a boost in sales around the holiday season. From there, you can develop a plan for how and when to promote the items that will be your holiday’s hottest sellers.

Why Map the Customer Journey?

As your holiday sales start to stream in, make sure you use this data to your advantage, so you can generate future sales by fine-tuning your method.

This is why customer journey mapping is the top strategy used by CX executives to optimize how shoppers experience a brand, and it can add a 4-15% lift when combined with a solid operations infrastructure.

There are three main reasons to map the customer journey: To get a better return on your marketing investment; To decrease customer service costs; To decrease the length of the sales cycle.

Mapping the customer journey will increase your overall efficiency in regards to time and money, so your ecommerce business runs like a well-oiled machine. Think tanks argue about the best way to map the customer journey, so research will show different steps to take. The following is simply a basic breakdown of what experts recommend.

Step 1: Visualize the Customer Lifecycle

Start with drawing out the customer lifecycle from their point of view. All customer-facing messaging and experiences are important and influence how somebody will interact with the brand.

For online retailers, this includes the marketing, website browsing, checkout and post-purchase activities. It may be helpful to undergo this experience yourself, as if you were a shopper at your own store. This can reveal some areas of improvement, but the better strategy is to collect customer feedback.

For some reason only 20% of businesses currently ask for customer feedback, which means there is a huge opportunity to take advantage and gain valuable insight into the steps a customer takes to make a purchase by asking for product and site reviews post-purchase.

Step 2: Identify Where Your Goals Align

Defining your business goals is a practice that should be revisited on a regular basis in order to improve your marketing messaging and overall have a better, more focused direction.

If you haven’t already decided on some specific goals, do so as soon as possible. That way, you can put them side-by-side with your notes on the customer journey (especially feedback) and see where your goals align with the customer’s.

For example, let’s say a shoe brand has a goal of offering at least three new styles per month. Customer feedback reveals that shoppers found the brand because they want to stay up-to-date with shoe styles. This shows the brand’s goal of refreshing its catalog aligns with the shoppers’ goal of staying trendy.

Maks sure your marketing and customer-facing communication focus on those catalog updates, because that’s what speaks to the brand’s customers.

Step 3: Find the Touchpoints

Touchpoints are the activities that facilitate a consumer/brand interaction, such as social media engagement or signing up for an email list. Webloyalty and Comulino research reveals that the average consumer uses four or five touchpoints before buying a product, and roughly half of them use at least three.

This is a stark change from the average of two touchpoints shoppers used fifteen years ago.

Identifying the touchpoints should be fairly simple after experiencing the customer journey yourself and after collecting customer feedback. You’ll see where and how these interactions are happening, so you can ensure your messaging is clear and optimized, and you’ll be able to allocate resources more wisely.

Step 4: Strategize to Meet Customer Expectations

Before mapping the customer journey, there are inevitably going to be gaps between how the customer expects to experience a brand and how that experience is realized in reality.

Perhaps one of the touchpoints seems off-brand or the checkout process is cumbersome after the easy navigation of the website. These are simply small snags that can be handled with a little strategizing.

Once again, the business goals and customer feedback are incredibly valuable because they provide defined parameters. Then, you can make the necessary tweaks and bridge those gaps, which also help you reduce cart abandonment rates at your online store.

How Mapping Benefits Your Business

Understanding the customer journey is getting insight into how future shoppers will turn into loyal customers. Essentially, it’s a way to predict a consumer’s next move. That’s why 69% of businesses plan to prioritize investing in customer journey mapping and why their marketers want to make it a focus for the next two years.

The numbers don’t lie. A recent Aberdeen survey found that brands that had formally mapped the customer journey were enjoying increased sales, more effective marketing and improved customer service.

Specifically, revenue attributed to marketing activities increased by nearly 25% year-over-year, and service costs were reduced by 21%. Those organizations also saw an 18X faster sales cycle, a 5X increase in customer referral revenue and a 56% increase in cross-sell and upsell revenue.

Aberdeen’s study also revealed only 36% of businesses have clearly defined a process to help them map the customer journey, so now is the time to make moves. You can map it then make improvements so incoming shoppers become loyal customers with lengthy customer lifetimes.

Quick Tips to Improve the Customer Journey

Forrester research shows companies that invest in the customer journey grow 14% faster than those that don’t, so even simple tweaks can make a world of difference. Take these five tips to improve your customer journey:

1. Boost Your Site’s Speed

Per Hubspot, 79% of shoppers won’t revisit an online store after a poor experience with its website performance because slow website speed kills sales. Get rid of bulky plugins and switch to a website host with faster loading times for a sleeker, more efficient digital storefront that appeals to customers.

2. Use Data for Better Marketing

Base your marketing activities on black-and-white data and analytics, which can offer objective insight into its effectiveness. If you A/B test copy, imagery and calls-to-action and collect statistics regarding your sales funnel, you’ll be able to fine-tune your content along the way.

3. Don’t Forget After-Marketing

The post-purchase experience is just as important as the other parts of the customer journey. When done well, it keeps your ecommerce brand top-of-mind for consumers. This is why customized packaging, personalized notes, hassle-free returns, and come-back discounts are all examples of after marketing that increase brand recognition and loyalty.

4. Remove Pain Points

When you experienced the customer journey and collected feedback, you probably got a better understanding of the pain points your customers face. If possible, remove those as soon as you can. You may need to update your site so it’s mobile friendly or find a new shipping software system that gives you built-in shipping savings to keep costs low, as examples. The data you already have will point you in the right direction.

5. Make an Impression

According to a study by Oracle, 74% of senior executives see the customer journey as having a direct impact on the customer’s willingness to be a loyal advocate, and 60% believe the customer has more power than they did three years ago. End that first purchasing experience with a bang that makes your brand impossible to forget so the customer journey is wrapped with a nice, neat bow.

The Phases of the Customer Journey

The phases of the customer journey break down to the following: Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Retention and Advocacy. It can vary slightly depending on who you ask and the industry it describes.

Awareness and consideration are fairly self-explanatory and will consist of your marketing efforts: PR, ads, blog articles and more. These are the pre-purchase touchpoints that shoppers will use on the way to finally making a purchase. Then, the purchase stage happens on your online store. It should be a breeze with intuitive site navigation, snag-free checkout and customizable delivery options to maximize convenience.

That’s when the fun begins. The retention stage is the post-purchase activity that will make or break the customer lifecycle and, if successful, inspire advocacy and a long customer lifetime.

How to Boost Customer Retention

Customer retention is one of your most important goals because it costs far less to sell to an existing customer than to find a new one, and you don’t want your hard work of finding new customers to go to waste.

The truth is that improved ecommerce customer retention strategies can lead to a 10% or more increase in annual revenue. Now that you understand the customer journey and how retention fits into it, it’s time to find some proven tactics to ensure your customers come back time and time again.

One strategy is utilizing email personalization. These are communications that are more interactive and people-focused, rather than product-focused. Think of a happy birthday email that greets them by name and offers a discount to help them celebrate.

Popular email marketing providers like Mailchimp and Constant Contact make personalization easy so you can reap the benefits, such as these email marketing statistics show:

• Increased open rates (6%)
• Better click-through rates (14%)
• Doubled transaction rates
• Improved interaction (up to 50%)

Finally, online sellers should tap into social media for improved customer retention. Did you know that 71% of shoppers are influenced by social channels? Did you also know that Facebook generates 64% of U.S. buy button referrals or that Instagram’s average referral value is $65!

These are just three social commerce statistics that show it’s a powerful driver of customer retention and loyalty and why it should be a go-to page in your marketing playbook.

Fourth of July Ecommerce Conversion Statistics

Ecommerce conversion statistics give you a snapshot of how effective your strategies are for actually convincing a shopper to make a purchase.

Low conversion rates can be attributed to a forgettable website, weak messaging or the like, whereas high conversion rates tell you that more of your site visitors are buying products. Use these metrics to improve your Independence Day ecommerce sales and beyond, so that every marketing event is a roaring sucess.

• The average ecommerce conversion rate is 1-2%, per BigCommerce.
• Amazon’s conversion rate is about 13%.
• Invespcro found U.S. conversion rates are roughly 2.63% whereas globally they’re 4.31%.
• Users who are retargeted to are 70% more likely to convert.
• Display ads get a click-through rate of 0.07%; retargeted ads get a click-through of 0.7%.
• Retargeted ads have the potential to increase branded search exposure by more than 1,000%.
• 46% of online marketers believe that retargeting is grossly underused.
• 49% of major brands have now set aside specific budgets just for retargeting.
• Social sharing and purchases can increase website traffic by 8.5%.
• Nearly 79% of shopping carts are abandoned.
• Conversion rates can improve by 300% with CRM in place.

The Sale Is Just the Start

Too many ecommerce sellers see customers as numbers that drive sales. These businesses never bother to cultivate relationships or try to improve the customer experience, which is why they don’t succeed in the long run. They end up spending far more on marketing trying to capture new customers, and they have low conversion rates because they never researched how to improve the customer journey.

There are clear benefits of investing in your online store’s customer journey. Customers want to have positive experiences while shopping online and will buy from the brands that provide them, and they’ll want to recreate those positive experiences in the future. Loyalty comes naturally, and everybody feels like they’ve won.

Today, shoppers start buying earlier than ever before, which means ecommerce retailers can start preparing earlier than ever before. Planning is essential when it comes to ecommerce holiday marketing. This is one industry where the early bird really does get the worm.

By taking the tips in this post and putting them into play in July and throughout the summer, you can avoid the holiday preparation rush and boost your sales throughout the peak shopping seasons and beyond.

It worked.”

While Amazon and Walmart continue to grow, Jet is standing out as a competing force in the ecommerce world. The platform is growing a massive 280x faster than Amazon!

Meanwhile, Walmart’s ecommerce sales have increased by 63% since purchasing Jet.

Here’s what you need to know about this battle between Amazon vs. Jet, and which of these behemoths is likely to come out on top.

Jet vs. Amazon

While Jet is frequently compared to Amazon, the companies feature some very important differences. Here’s what you need to know about each ecommerce giant, where they overlap, and what makes them decidedly different from one another.

Adding Mobile Coupons to Your Store

While mobile coupons can be a great tool to attract new buyers, you’ve got to understand how to use them as effectively as possible. Like any other marketing tactic, it’s not enough to throw coupons at your customers, and hope it works.

With this in mind, here’s your step-by-step guide to using coupons for your online store.

Jet

While it’s true that Jet shares some traits with Amazon, there are some important differences between the platforms. Here are a few things to know about Jet:

• Jet’s prices drop lower thanks to real-time savings engines. Jet advertises itself as a shopping site dedicated to “saving you even more money.” To this end, the site adjusts for various packing and shipping conditions in real-time to save shoppers money. For example, it costs less to ship items together. This means customers can save more on an order by grouping multiple items with the “down” icon in a cart. This lowers the prices of other items in a cart and increases savings across the board.
• Jet offers savings on bulk orders. If you’re looking for a place to buy in bulk, Jet is your go-to. Unlike Amazon, the website offers savings on bulk orders, which makes it a great place to buy toilet paper, your favorite breakfast cereal, and more. Customers are also rewarded for opting out of free returns, which is not a feature Amazon offers.
• The cart is visible on the side of the browser. When you shop on Amazon, you’ve got to navigate to the cart page to see the items you’ve added or deleted from your cart. With Jet, the cart sits on the side of the browser, which means you can keep tabs on price adjustments, add and delete items easily.
• Jet offers JetCash. JetCash is essentially reward money designed to be used on future Jet purchases. $1 of JetCash equals $1 off any purchase throughout the Jet site. While Amazon offers similar rewards on some of its rewards credit cards, there’s no one-for-one rewards program like this.
• Jet offers Uniquely J. This is a marketplace within the larger Jet marketplace designed to offer items from smaller brands. Shop here to find organic and Fair Trade coffee, soaps, and more. Bundle Uniquely J products to save an additional 10%. While Amazon offers a “handmade” sector, the two platforms are slightly different, with Jet’s focusing more on small brands.
• Jet supports nonprofits. Jet recently launched a nonprofit program, which allows shoppers to make a direct impact with their nonprofits of choice. Shoppers can use this platform to provide things like toilet paper, diapers and toothbrushes to those in need, without ever leaving the Jet shopping platform. Amazon, meanwhile, offers Amazon Smile, which allows shoppers to donate 0.5% of the price of eligible AmazonSmile purchases to charitable organizations of their choice.

Amazon

Don’t let Jet’s meteoric rise fool you: Amazon holds its own when it comes to ecommerce prowess (check out our recent post about Amazon’s lion’s share of the market, if you’re interested in learning more). If you’re an Amazon Prime member, you know exactly how convenient and powerful the platform can be. Here are a few of the things that set it apart from anything else out there:

• Free two-day shipping for Amazon Prime members. If you’re a member of Amazon Prime, you’ll get access to free two-day shipping on most things on the platform. This makes it easier to get the items you need, fast, and streamlines returns drastically. Return shipping is also free, and refunds are generally issued as soon as a shipping label is scanned. That’s not even to mention all the glorious deals that come with Prime Day, which is one of the most popular Amazon shipping days of the year.
• Amazon works with restaurants. If you’re willing to place a $20 minimum order, you can get delicious restaurant food delivered in less than 60 minutes in cities including Orlando, Los Angeles and Manhattan, as well as in 17 other urban areas.
• Amazon offers a cloud storage platform. Say hello to the Amazon Cloud! One of Amazon’s most lucrative and popular features, Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Photos allow prime members to access unlimited photo storage, as well as 5GB for videos and documents.
• Free same-day delivery in some cities. For orders over $35, Amazon offers free same-day delivery in more than 5,000 cities throughout the U.S. While you’ll need an Amazon Prime membership, this isn’t a feature that you’ll see with Jet, and it’s one of the unique things about the Amazon platform.
• Amazon elements. See this as direct competition to Jet’s organic and natural marketplace. Amazon Elements offers access to high-end organic products for Prime members. These products include baby wipes, vitamins, and more.

Two Lions; One Jungle

In a world where ecommerce platforms are essential to everyday life, Amazon and Jet stand out as two of the most unique platforms out there. Both are dedicated to offering comprehensive selections, customer-facing perks and plenty of unique features. Without a doubt, these two ecommerce giants aren’t going anywhere, anytime soon. In fact, shoppers can expect to see more exciting features emerge from the Amazon vs. Jet battle in coming years.

But for the millions of businesses that don’t have deep enough pockets to host their own logistics infrastructure, they instead rely on third-party logistics providers to regionally fulfill customer’s orders and to facilitate returns. Such warehouses enable smaller e-tailers to better compete by offering faster, cheaper shipping, easier, seamless returns and reduced operational overhead.

When it comes to returns, things can get complicated and tricky. Before we delve into how automation can resolve these complexities, let’s first take a deeper dive into the 3PL industry by learning about some key statistics.

READ FULL ARTICLE ON FORBES

“A great e-commerce experience requires more than competitive prices, a robust selection of goods, fast shipping and easy returns … it takes them all. Today’s consumer mindset has changed. Services like Amazon Prime have set the bar at a higher level, with speedy delivery, low prices, a vast selection and hassle-free returns.”

Statistics on Third-Party Logistics

Here’s a closer look at some statistics about third-party logistics, so we can better understand how big this market is and why shippers are increasingly relying on outsourced fulfillment.

• By 2020, the 3PL market will be worth an estimated $935 billion, namely due to ecommerce outsourcing.
• Almost 97% of shippers want big data to be a part of their shipping and decision-making process as well as for advanced supply chain logistics.
• 75% of shippers use 3PL to reduce cost and improve logistics.
• 73% of shippers will check on their 3PL logistics at least once per day with many checking on their data by the hour.
• Cloud-powered 3PLs are proven to reduce cost, improve compliance, boost accuracy and streamline returns.
• 61% of shippers and 54% of 3PL providers agree that data sharing between each entity is a critical component to retention and long-term growth.
• 73% of 3PL users and 92% of 3PL providers agree that by working together, they’re improving overall logistics and efficiency.
• 61% of shippers are increasing their reliance on 3PLs, namely due to cost effectiveness, accuracy and reliability.

How Fulfillment Houses Work

Fulfillment houses are essentially logistics warehouses that ecommerce retailers and other businesses use to outsource the shipping and returns aspects of their business. They operate in profoundly simple and logical manner (a massive guide on this is available at Fits Small Business).

1. The e-tailer signs an agreement with the fulfillment house and sends them the inventory they need fulfilled. Typically, this is done via a purchase order with a delivery address of the fulfillment house, which is authorized to sign off for receipt of the shipment. Or when goods are self-manufactured, they’re directly shipped to the fulfillment house.
2. The fulfillment company then sorts, organizes and stocks the inventory they’ve received, entering this data into their inventory management system for proper tracking.
3. When customers place online orders, those orders are then routed, typically via an API and cloud-based software, to the fulfillment house.
4. The fulfillment house then sorts and manages the outbound orders, shipping them on behalf of the retailer and charging them a fee for their services.
5. If a product is returned, it generally comes back to the fulfillment house, where it’s logged, and either restocked or sent back to the retailer if it’s unable to be resold post return.

How 3PL Returns Work

The disconnect with fulfillment houses is when returns happen. Certainly, fulfillment houses are capable of handling returns. But when there are multiple clients involved, returns can get tricky, especially if some of those clients have high-volume return items, like apparel, which has a 35% return rate in ecommerce.

In most cases of 3PL returns, the returns are scanned in and set aside to be later sorted. The retailer (customer) isn’t usually made aware of what’s been returned until well after the fact, usually when a stock clerk has had time to examine the return, log it, update the system, update the retailer and determine if the return can be restocked.

Once that return has been logged, it’s added to an end of the month report that’s sent out to the retailer (these reports may be more frequent depending on the 3PL provider). The necessary amount of human touches, clerical entries and the accuracy issues they create typically bogs down busy fulfillment houses and eats into their bottom line.

What’s more, the retailer can be in the dark about their returns for weeks at a time, never knowing what their true profit margins were until they consolidate multiple reports from the 3PL provider.

Why Automation is the Key

Automation of these third-party returns is the key to logistical success for all parties involved in the process. With the right system automating the return, the third-party logistics provider minimizes human touches, improves accuracy, reduces cost and keeps the retailer updated in real-time.

How might this be possible? Take a look at ReadyReturns ecommerce returns software, it’s a premium plugin for the ReadyCloud Suite. ReadyReturns is the preferred 3PL returns software for today’s leading 3PL providers. That’s because it connects to the ReadyCloud Suite, giving both the 3PL provider and the retailer real-time insights into what’s being returned, what fees were charged, and whether or not the product can be restocked.

Furthermore, ReadyReturns can handle as many different clients as possible, separating them into individual profiles for the 3PL. What this means is that the 3PL can access all their clients from one dashboard (clicking into each client they need to scan and process a return for), meanwhile the retailer (client) has real-time access to a white label dashboard that keeps them up to date.

How can ReadyReturns streamline your third-party logistics? Give us a call to schedule your complimentary live demo today. Shipping with UPS? Your warehouse and your clients may qualify for ReadyReturns at full or partially subsidized pricing. Find out how. Call us at: 877-818-7447.

Luckily, it is possible to correct them or avoid them altogether.

When you take a proactive approach to packing and fulfillment mistakes, you immediately free up more time, energy, and resources, and create space for your team to focus on more important things – like growing your ecommerce business.

Here’s your guide:

Why Packaging Matters

For this point, we’re going to ask you to consider two scenarios. Here’s the first:

You get home from work one evening, and there’s a package on your doorstep. It’s in a brown box, wrapped in brown tape, and dented on three corners. The address is scribbled in sharpie. When you open it, packing peanuts cascade out onto your floor, like some horrible styrofoam waterfall.

The second scenario is this:

You get home from work one evening, and there’s a package on your doorstep. It’s wrapped in durable brown paper, entirely intact, and neatly presented. Your name and address are printed on a branded shipping label, and the contents inside are protected by plastic shipping pillows.

Now, which of these experiences leaves the better impression?

The answer is easy, of course: the second! Unboxing the second is a much more enjoyable experience than the first.

Unfortunately, lots of ecommerce companies are guilty of the first scenario. They send out products in horrible packaging, and it makes a difference. After all, your product packaging is one of the first experiences a customer has with a product they purchased online, and the way it’s arranged says a lot about the company that shipped it.

In a world where ecommerce is more competitive than ever before, you can’t afford to send out sloppy packages to customers, and you definitely can’t afford to be known as a company that doesn’t care about your shipping or fulfillment.

8 Packaging & Fulfillment Mistakes to Avoid

Whether you’re a new ecommerce brand, or an established company looking for ways to serve your customers a bit better, avoiding these packaging mistakes is essential to your success.

1. Not Offering Shipping Options

Shipping is one of the most critical parts of the ecommerce customer experience.

If you don’t let customers choose a shipping option, you’re bound to lose a good amount of them. Don’t forget that 63% of suburban shoppers report that shipping costs are their least favorite part of online shopping and that 80% of online shoppers report that shipping cost and speed have a direct impact on their purchasing decisions.

With this in mind, offer several shipping options for your customers to choose from. One should be an economy option, and at least one should offer express service.

2. Ignoring Customer Input

When it comes to shipping and fulfillment, you can’t afford to ignore customer feedback.

Instead, you’ve got to pay attention to feedback about delivery delays, shipping packages and service providers, and schedules. The more you heed these things, the better your ecommerce store will perform.

3. Not Using Custom Boxes

Remember that first scenario we laid out? Cheap, ill-suited packaging makes a poor impression on your customers, and it’s not something you want your brand associated with.

Today, it pays to put some work into using the right packaging, something that you can even consider using packaging design software to ensure efficacy. A variety of services offer custom boxes for ecommerce that can be used to really wow your customers. First impressions are EVERYTHING in ecommerce. Going the extra mile to add some zazzle to your package will make all the difference.

As a general rule, the packages you use should take the weight of your items, their dimensions, and their need for protection into account. Not only will this protect your items during transport, but it’ll create a positive customer experience when they arrive.

4. Not Calculating Shipping Expenses

Shipping costs are a fact of life for ecommerce businesses. If you’re not calculating them exactly, you risk creating overhead costs you can’t bear comfortably.

With this in mind, be sure to pay attention to hidden charges, like surcharges, residential and weekend delivery fees, and fees associated with recipient signatures. Weed out the features you don’t need, and make sure you know how much you can expect to pay for the ones you do.

5. Not Doing Inventory of Your Shipping Supplies

You keep tabs on your inventory, so why not your shipping supplies?

If you run out of shipping supplies, it’s tough to get your products out in a timely fashion, and this can have a major impact on the well-being of your company. With this in mind, establish a system for keeping track of your shipping supplies and creating reorder triggers that keep you from running low on anything.

6. Not Preparing for Package Changes

It’s not uncommon for carriers to make changes to package prices and shipping policies.

If you’re not prepared to absorb these changes, you put yourself at risk of price overruns and other budgeting issues. To avoid this problem, it’s essential to keep in frequent touch with shipping carriers and remain updated about alterations they intend to make.

7. Not Validating Customer Addresses

While a customer’s supplied address is usually right, validating it will save you expensive shipping mistakes and overruns. Luckily, this is easy to avoid when you use a shipping software with built-in address verification features.

8. Using Shipping Peanuts

This goes hand-in-hand with using the wrong packaging for your shipments.

If it’s difficult for the customer to open, navigate, or clean up, it shouldn’t have any place in your fulfillment pipeline. Instead, opt for more straightforward plastic “pillows” or cardboard inserts to stabilize items in your boxes.

Better Shipping Starts Here

If you run an ecommerce company, shipping and fulfillment are two of the most important functions your company provides. Unfortunately, lots of online stores get these two things wrong, and it has a detrimental impact on the customer/company relationship. In the world of subscription box services and increased fulfillment, this is truer now than ever before.

When you create a “wow” factor with your packaging, it reflects directly on your brand as a whole and can go a long way toward making your customers more willing to purchase from you again.

Just a few years ago, you’d head to a nearby brick-and-mortar store if you needed some new jeans or a throw pillow.

Today, though, shopping is becoming increasingly digital. Mobile phones currently play a massive role in the shopping experience, and more and more consumers are turning to them for guidance and assistance as they seek out the products they need.

According to Google, about 82% of smartphone users turn to their phones for help with buying decisions- from researching making an actual purchase.

This is a massive number, and it has several major implications for ecommerce professionals. One of the most important things the digital shopping revolution does, though, is shine a light on the concepts of webrooming and showrooming.

Two important ecommerce strategies, webrooming and showrooming have direct impacts on mobile use and shopping.

Here’s what you need to know.

Webrooming and Showrooming 101

First things first, let’s define some terms.

Showrooming is what happens when a customer visits a brick and mortar store to research a product. They want to touch it, feel it, and figure out how it fits or functions. If the customer likes the product, they’ll go online to purchase it.

This means that brick-and-mortar stores essentially become showrooms for online retailers. An effective way to get a good deal, showrooming has become a widespread habit among cost-conscious buyers, like Millennials.

According to a 2015 IAB Digital Shopping Report, about 50% of U.S. adults practice showrooming in some form or another, although consumers ages 18-34 are most likely to purchase from another retailer.

Webrooming is the reverse of showrooming. During webrooming, customers research products online and then head out to brick-and-mortar stores to purchase them. While this can be a big negative for online retailers, it’s a valuable opportunity for physical store owners, and for any company that takes advantage of multi-channel commerce.

Right now, about 70% of shoppers research products online and purchase them in-store.

Impact of Webrooming and Showrooming

Today, webrooming and showrooming are both essential aspects of the shopping experience.  Taken together, they create the foundation of omnichannel retail. If ecommerce companies want to keep up, they’ve got to understand how to make the most of omnichannel selling.

Right now, webrooming and showrooming prove that brick-and-mortar retailers are still essential, but that people want the hot prices made possible by ecommerce. While consumers crave the tactical and physical in-store experience, they’re not always willing to pay more for it.

If you want to nab these channel-hopping customers, you’ve got to figure out how to provide them a “both, and” experience that wins their loyalty and keeps them coming back for more.

Webrooming Facts All Retailers Should Know

Looking for some hard and fast facts about webrooming? Here are a few to consider:

1. 88% of internet users report using webrooming regularly. These customers research products online and then purchase them in a physical store. Meanwhile, 76% of consumers report using showrooming on a regular basis.
2. 69% of smartphone users ages 18-36 are webrooming. These customers want to find the lowest price and have the ability to compare products and offerings. Webrooming is even more common among smartphone users ages 37-48, 71% of whom are webrooming.
3. Forrest reports that more than $1.8 billion in online retail sales came from webrooming in 2017. This number is only projected to rise in coming years, so it’s important to hop on board with this trend right now.
4. Customers prefer webrooming over showrooming. There are many reasons for this. 47% of customers don’t want to pay for shipping, 23% don’t want to wait for product delivery, and a whopping 46% just want to go to a store to touch and feel the product.
5. 68% of consumers have browsed items at a store, then decided to buy them online. This illustrates just how vital webrooming has become to consumers, and what a critical role it plays in the ecommerce environment.

How to Make Webrooming Work for You

If webrooming and showrooming are here to stay, the question to ask is how you can make them work for your business. Here are a few tips to take advantage of changing consumer behavior and ensure it continues to boost your bottom line!

1. Take Advantage of Multichannel Marketing

When webrooming and showrooming work well together, it demonstrates the power of cross-channel commerce. With this in mind, you need to offer a cohesive customer experience that encourages your customers to interact with your brand both on- and offline.

While customers like to research products online, it’s essential to remember that about 50% of them still prefer to make their purchases in-store. Because of this, retailers that have two shopping marketplaces generate about 190% more revenue than those with a single platform.

2. Keep Providing Outstanding Incentive

Part of the reason customers love shopping in-store is the human interaction aspect of it.

If they want to keep growing, ecommerce retailers must continue to provide great service. While ecommerce companies sometimes overlook customer service, 71% of customers have ended a relationship with a company due to poor customer service. As if that weren’t bad enough, the cost to replace the average consumer is about $243.

With this in mind, take active efforts to increase interaction between consumers and sales staff and ensure your shoppers have what they need. Returns and exchanges should be simple, and the shopping experience should be as streamlined as possible.

3. Engage Socially

Since so many customers are already using their mobile phones to shop, retailers can create a better experience by taking advantage of the mobile platform.

Ask customers to like your Facebook page, share your hashtags on Instagram, or participate through ecoupons, online giveaways, and contests.  By doing this, you can knit together the seemingly disparate worlds of webrooming and showrooming and

The Modern Case for Webrooming

Webrooming and showrooming are here to stay. Luckily, that has the potential to be great news for ecommerce retailers. When used correctly, webrooming can be a huge perk for ecommerce companies, and can open the door to successful (and lucrative) multi-channel selling! Need even more statistics on webrooming and showrooming? Here’s an infographic we created to help you out.

Read on to find out what our top seven picks are best ecommerce blogs.  

A Better Lemonade Stand

By and far, A Better Lemonade Stand is one of the most in-depth and useful ecommerce blogs we’ve ever come across. The owner used to write longform content for the number one shopping cart service provide, Shopify. He later branched out and built this blog up to one of the top performing blogs in the ecommerce space. It’s chocked full of tips, guides and so much more that deliver a wealth of information on how you can take your online store to the next level. It’s simply a must-read!

Ecommerce Fuel

Get ready to fill up your ecommerce racecar with Ecommerce Fuel. It’s a top-rated destination for newbies and veterans alike who want to learn the tricks of the trade in easy-to-follow guides that break down the best kept marketing secrets for online stores. From how to sell more products, to how to do SEO for your online store—all the way to how to get a successful drop-ship business off the ground, this blog has you covered from A-Z!

Kissmetrics | Neil Patel

We’re going to be a bit biased about this one, namely because we’ve contributed to it, but also because the founder of this blog, Neil Patel, is widely considered to be the godfather of modern-day SEO. While this blog is not 100% focused on ecommerce, you’ll find that all the tips and tricks offered in it will benefit any website that’s selling a product or service online. If you want to understand how to manage SEO, ecommerce, PR, video and social media to your advantage, this should your number one destination!

Get Elastic

Easily a topper on our list of ecommerce blogs to bookmark and read daily is Get Elastic. It’s a top-150 blog online for countless reasons. Everything you ever needed to know about ecommerce is packed into this robust online offering that’s so rich with information and media that it’s nearly its own ecommerce Wiki. From breaking news to in-depth interviews, growth hacks and business accelerators, there’s something for all e-tailers here!

Hubspot

By and far, Hubspot is one of our favorite blogs for ecommerce marketing. The blog features curated content from a lengthy list of veteran authors who have direct experience in selling online. This ensures that each piece of content they publish genuinely is designed to help you improve your online store from top to bottom. Whether you need new ideas, more tips or just some in-depth help, don’t overlook this rich source of information!

Practical Commerce

One of our favorite ecommerce blogs, Practical Commerce is a go-to destination for breaking news, statistics, studies and in-depth reporting. It also is packed with helpful and highly detailed how-to guides and has a wealth of information that’s offered by today’s leading contributors, too. If that’s not enough, you can sign-up to attend one of the dozens of think tank master webinars they host annually—where you can get a first-hand education on building a stronger ecommerce business. What’s not to like about this resourceful ecommerce blogging destination?

Bold Commerce

The Bold commerce blog is powered by a popular app designer for Shopify. They’ve worked with thousands of successful stores over the years to carefully mold their strategy. Even if you are not selling on Shopify, the tips, guides and information offered here is useful to all online retailers. Whether you need tips on social media retargeting or are just looking for answers to common ecommerce questions, this blog has you covered!

Need Even More Tips?

We have you covered with some all-pro tips and examples that can have you blogging like a superstar in no time at all!

Check out our relate guides:

• 7 Things You’re Doing Wrong With Your Blog and How to Fix Them
• Why Your Online Store Really Needs a Blog
• Get More Traffic With These Pro Blogging Tips for Online Stores
• 9 Ways to Blog Like a Ninja

Using Shopify to power your ecommerce store is a no-brainer. But when it comes to your online product return policy, that’s where things can get sticky (no matter what shopping cart service you’re using). The simple truth is that returns are a pain point for online retailers and easy returns are a must-have for consumers looking to buy online.

Thankfully, there’s a healthy balance that can be found between the two. Use these tips to learn how to easily streamline Shopify returns.

READ FULL ARTICLE ON FORBES

“A great e-commerce experience requires more than competitive prices, a robust selection of goods, fast shipping and easy returns … it takes them all. Today’s consumer mindset has changed. Services like Amazon Prime have set the bar at a higher level, with speedy delivery, low prices, a vast selection and hassle-free returns.”

Understand Why Returns Happen

Before you can begin to streamline returns at your Shopify store, it’s important to first understand why returns happen and what measures you can put into place to reduce them from the onset.

We hate to say it, but in most cases, many of the returns that come back into your store are your fault. Recent statistics on ecommerce returns find that the most common reasons for return are as follows: 22% apparel didn’t fit; 22% item arrived damaged or broken; 22% items was substantially different than advertised online.

By adding things like sizing charts to reduce apparel returns, more padding in your shipping boxes to prevent damage, up to date photos and product videos, verified customer reviews and more, you can reduce these instances of at-fault returns substantially.

How important is your Shopify return policy? These facts tell the whole truth:

• More than 63% of consumers read the online product returns policy before making a purchase.
• 81% of consumers want a convenient returns policy that is hassle-free with no return shipping cost.
• About one-third of all products ordered online are returned by consumers.
• When free returns are offered, sales can increase by as much as 357%.
• When return shipping fees are charged, 81% of consumers are less likely to make a future purchase.
• Zappos gets 75% improved customer loyalty, repeat buyers from free returns, even though they charge more for their products.

Get Your Shopify Return Policy in Order

Now that you understand why returns happen and what you can do to reduce them, it’s time to think about what you’re going to say in your Shopify return policy.

When designing your Shopify return policy, use these four helpful tips to write an ecommerce returns policy that informs customers, amplifies the convenience of making a return, outlines any associated cost or fees, and gives them the flexibility they’re looking for when placing an online return.

Keep in mind, you’re up against juggernauts like Amazon, Target and Walmart, to name a few, and shoppers have ample choices when deciding where they’ll spend their money online.

Four tenants of a good Shopify return policy:

Communication: Make sure that your return policy is clear, easy to read and well defined. Explain how it works, what can be returned, the return-by dates after purchase and any associated rules and restocking or return shipping fees.

[Quick Fact: According to Forrester, 58% of shoppers desire a no-questions-asked return policy.]

Convenience: Online shopping is trendy because it’s fast and convenient. Consumers also want it to be just as easy to send products back. Make sure you offer consumers a way to process a return from your website and print a return shipping label.

[Quick Fact: According to Forrester, 47% of shoppers want an easy way to print a return shipping label.]

Pricing: If possible, offer free return shipping and don’t charge restocking fees.

[Quick Fact: Over 80% of consumers polled by Forrester stated that free return shipping with no restocking fees was a key element they sought with any online store.]

Be Flexible: Be lenient with your return policy. This means offering at least 30 to 45 days for returns. Give customers the confidence they need to make the purchase from your online store, and the sale as well as their loyalty and long-term retention will follow.

Organize Your Reverse Logistics Game Plan

Getting your return policy in order also means shoring up any kinks that may existing in your reverse logistics. Start with how you organize and sort the packages that are coming back into your warehouse. This is made easier when you have the right Shopify returns software powering your reverse logistics processes.

If you’re using third-party fulfillment to process returns, clarify with them how you want to update the process. (Hint: either 3PL or in-house returns can be streamlined with the right software in place.)

Five tips on making Shopify returns easier:

1. Create a returns flow chart to guide your team on how to best process returns.
2. Dedicate an area or workspace for processing returns, relabeling and repackaging items for resale.
3. Consider getting in touch with a local charity to donate unusable returns or investigate options with liquidation houses that offer to buy bulk palletts of returns you can no longer relist.
4. Integrate the right software into your return policy that streamlines your returns from start to finish. This includes from the starting point of the return, on your Shopify store, to collecting any associated fees, tracking its shipment back to you and scanning it back into your system once you’ve receive it.
5. Measure and meter your process. If you’re experiencing heavy volumes of returns, it’s wise to consider adding another employee that can help ease the workload and improve the accuracy of the products that are being entered back into your system.

Why You Want to Make Returns Easy

We’ve already given you some helpful statistics on ecommerce returns. But here are a few candid reasons why you want to make returns easy for you and for your customers.

Did you know that last year broke all records for returns in ecommerce and by a long shot? One reason is become of the massive and rapid growth of ecommerce. Another reason is because major retailers are revamping their return policies to be more in par with consumer demand.

The truth is that more than 66% of your potential customers will read your return policy and base their buying decision on that. Consumers want the Amazon standard when shopping online, which means you stand to lose a large amount of sales if your return policy is hard.

With more than 80% of shoppers demanding free returns, it’s a wise choice to consider eating this small amount on the occasional return and generating more sales in return. If you do this, and streamline how returns are processed at your Shopify store, you’ll gain more long-term, loyal customers and, ultimately, what used to be viewed as a pain point will be realized as a key amenity and sales driver that helps increase conversion rates and decrease shopping cart abandonment.

Need Even More Tips?

We’ve got you covered with this Ultimate Guide on Ecommerce Returns. Use it as your go-to resource for anything returns orientated. It’s packed with helpful information, statistics, infographics, charts and so much more to help you create an ideal Shopify returns policy and process, so you can make returns as seamless and as painless as possible.

In such a crowded market that’s entirely dominated by Amazon, which holds about 49% of the market overall, every step you take to increase visibility is critical. Commonly overlooked are the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) aspects of your product descriptions.

Just use the helpful tips offered in this guide to easily optimize your product descriptions for better search engine rankings, increased traffic and more sales. Read on to learn more.

Shopping Carts & Marketplaces

Before you get started on optimizing your product descriptions, it’s important to understand what options you have with the shopping cart service or marketplace you’re using to sell online. Major marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Etsy and Jet have built-in options for SEO optimization.

The most popular shopping cart services do as well. So, if you’re using 3dcart, BigCommerce, Magento, Shopify or WooCommerce—you can start with the basic SEO optimization options they offer for your products. Consider taking things to the next level by exploring your options with add-ons, plugins and extensions that give you more options for SEO optimization.

How to Find and Choose the Right Keywords

Keywords are very important for product descriptions and help the people who are searching for your products more easily find them. To accurately research the keywords for your products consider using a variety of tools.

• Wordstream
• Keyword Tool
• MOZ
• Sonar (recommended)
• Jungle Scout (recommended)

Each of these tools is designed to help you research and identify the best keywords for your online store. They give you an idea of what type of traffic each keyword generates monthly and how competitive the keyword is to rank online.

What’s more, tools like Sonar help you dig deeper into keyword density, and provide a number of ecommerce ranking metrics as well as allowing you to search for products and keywords via Amazon’s ASIN ID system.

Start with the Title

The first place you’re going to want to start with is your title. Naturally, people are looking for products based on their name/function/purpose. But you’ll also want to get more inclusive by adding information about the product, any type of associated special model details and anything else that’s relevant that you can fit into 70 characters or less.

• Google doesn’t display titles longer than 70 characters with spaces.
• Be sure that you include your primary keyword in the title.
• Make sure brand names are included in the titles.
• Make sure you use the primary keyword one time in the main description.
• Make sure you include the brand name and primary keyword in the URL slug (e.g. mywebsite.com/mybrand-my-product-my-primary-keyword.com).

The example we’ve screenshotted from Pac Sun below gives you an excellent idea of how you properly optimize a product description for SEO.

Create The Product Description

Once you’ve identified your brand names and primary keywords, it’s time to get to writing those product descriptions. You’ll want your descriptions to be concise, descriptive, attractive and appealing to your readers, while also naturally embedding organic keywords within them to give them better position in search engine results.

Important Note: Your content needs to be unique, don’t copy and paste manufacturer product descriptions, or the content will be ignored by the search engines and you won’t see any results.

For more clarity on how you can approach this important aspect of ecommerce SEO, look at our detailed guide: How to Write Better Product Descriptions. It’s chocked full of helpful tips, screenshots, suggestions and examples that can help you write more effective descriptions for all your products. If you’re not skilled at writing, look to services like Scripted, where you can contract a vetted writer to handle this workload.

To help you better understand what some of the most effective product descriptions look like in ecommerce today, check out this screenshot from Van Der Hagen, it’s a glowing example of a perfect product description that’s expertly optimized for clarity, SEO and conversions.

Using and Optimizing Images

Images matter in SEO and they especially matter when it comes to your online store. That’s why we’ve already covered them as one of four ways to boost your online presence in ecommerce. People searching for products are also conducting image searches, and Google scores your pages for quality based upon several factors, including ecommerce image optimization.

Depending on what platform you are using to sell online (e.g. WordPress, Shopify, 3dcart, Bigcommerce, etc.), there will be different ways of accessing the image descriptions of your products.

For this example, we will use a WordPress screenshot, but it works about the same on most other platforms.

To make the most out of your image optimization efforts, follow these tips:

• You’ll want to make sure you rename the image file to include the actual name of the product and any keywords you’re trying to rank for.
• Next, make sure you add a detail description to each image that offers insight for Google to index.
• Add a title to each image as well that includes the primary keywords.
• Finally, consider adding captions to the image, which add more content and help it rank better.

Adding Product Videos

Amazon leads the pack when it comes to offering product videos for consumers. The reality is that smaller online retailers may not be able to afford to offer videos of all their products. But with most smartphones offering HD tech for videos, a DIY lightbox and some time spent can deliver pristine videos that you can add to each product page without breaking the bank.

Why videos? Because product videos are proven to increase conversions and help with the following:

• 14% of search engine results are videos.
• Videos increase conversion potential by 73%.
• Videos decrease showrooming by as much as 46%.
• Videos improve product descriptions by 71%.
• 58% of shoppers trust brands that offer videos over other brands.
• Videos create powerful social and SEO signals that help your products rank.
• Product videos can reduce returns by 60% or more.

To make the most of your efforts, the ideal product video spans 10-20 seconds and helps increase conversions by 60% or more as compared to listings that don’t have a video.

• Videos have a 16.85% conversion rate as compared to standard banners (2.14%) and mobile (1.62%).
• 58% of consumers trust brands with videos more.
• 59% of consumers will watch a video that is part of your website content.
• 96% of shoppers rely on product videos when making a buying decision.
• 6% of shoppers rely on visuals when making a buying decision.
• Consumers who watch a product video are 1.7 times likelier to convert.
• 12% of consumers will watch a video on an ecommerce site.
• 57% of shoppers will return less and buy in confidence when product videos are offered.

Test Quality Score of Product Page

Once you’ve successfully created your product, researched and optimized the keywords, added a punchy title and attractive description with bullet point summations… and after your optimized images, URL slug and product videos have been added, it’s time to check the quality score of your product page.

What is quality score and why is it important?

Chances are that if you’re like most other online retailers out there, quality score ultimately determines trust factors in Google, namely for the PPC segment, or Google Ads. The higher your quality score is, the likelier your PPC ads will be approved and contest for page one listing. What’s more, QC score also weighs into how well your product pages, images and videos will rank against the competition.

If you’re not familiar with PPC, your marketing team can handle this for you. If you have PPC knowledge and want to test your quality score, reference this Google Guide for more information.

On-Page Grading

On page grading is a signature function of Moz, a very popular SEO tool that you can use to improve your rankings. It’s helpful when scoring the quality of pages and also provides suggestions and to-do lists that you can use to improve the page score. A better page score means a better ranking, which results in more traffic and ultimately more conversions.

To help you better understand how on-page grading works, let’s look to this Nordstrom listing of a Michelle Silk Midi Dress. As you can see below, this is an excellent product description for a fancy dress that retails for almost $700. But how does its on-page grading look?

When we run this page through Moz’s On-Page Grader, we can see that while it has a decent page score of 67, there are about 12 other suggestions Moz offers to help get that page score to 99.

By making some simple updates, based on Moz’s suggestions, Nordstrom could easily improve the page score of this listing and therefore improve its ranking and conversion potential.

Pinging Links to Google for Indexing

Every time you create new pages on your website, you’re offering fresh content for the search engines. But search engines can take a long time to index (scan and catalog) the new pages you’ve created, leaving you to wait in limbo for the results.

Thankfully, there’s an easier way. Using a method called “pinging,” you can update Google about your new pages, products, videos and content a lot faster. The best part is that pinging your new product pages to Google is fast, easy and free.

Using a free service called Ping Gates, you can update Google about your new product pages in just a few steps.

Need Even More Tips?

Better SEO for your online store’s product pages is around the corner. Now that you’re armed with the tips offered in this guide, you can take things to the next level and get more robust search engine results for all your hard work and effort.

But if you still need even more tips, we’ve got you covered in these related guides:

• 5 Way to Immediately Improve Ecommerce SEO
• Ecommerce SEO Tips: 4 More Ways to Boost Your Online Presence
• 7 Tips for Optimizing Your Online Store for SEO
• WordPress Ecommerce SEO Tips to Rank Fast