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The situation is very familiar to online merchants. Shortly after your website goes live and your first google sponsored ads are launched the phone rings. “Can I speak to the person in charge of your online marketing please?” Seasoned E merchants will know exactly what I am referring to. A company calls you to offer you an amazing opportunity to be one of the merchants within their highly successful sales platform. They have a slot for a merchant selling just the sort of products you sell and they want you to fill it.

They promise 1000s of sales, for which they will take a commission, but there is a small sign up and integration fee, often in the region of £1000. At this point you might have conjured up images of a large Nigerian man on the other end of the phone trying his best with the latest scam. The reality is that the person on the other end of the phone is working in the UK, for a UK registered eMarketing company, but you were right about the scam part!

For legal reasons I will mention no names in this blog post but it’s safe to say that eTailers both young and old need to be extremely careful when signing up for these so called sales platforms. It’s quite typical for these companies to mention a selection of household names, brands and newspapers that they are affiliated with, indeed one of them even associates themselves with a member of the House of Lords! Don’t be fooled by the verbal tirade of positive affirmations about the so called product they are trying to sell you.

Changing names, changing faces

The massive amount of bad press that these companies receive online, on blogs and in forum posts has lead to the unsurprising situation whereby many of them have undergone a name change. As all good marketing professionals will tell you, changing the name of your reputable & established brand is a great idea! (That was me being sarcastic by the way).

It seems that every time they call there is a new member of the sales team, staff turnover in these places is high, very high. With poor record keeping and no joined up thinking the result is that no matter how loudly you shout the word “no” you can expect a freshed faced sales recruit to be back on the phone to you within six months. I have lost count of the number of calls I have had from a relatively small number of companies.

Avoiding the scams

On my travels I have spoken to many internet merchants who have fallen foul of these marketing companies, it pains me every time I hear of another small business who have handed £1000 or more over to one of these truth dodging organisations. Here is my top five checklist for dealing with these companies.

1. Do your research. Google their company name, check out what others say on forums and do some detective work

2. Offer a bigger commission. There is logic to the madness, offer to pay them an increased sales commission per transaction in exchange for wiping the joining fee to zero. If they know that x% of nothing is … well… nothing then they are certain to turn your offer down.

3. Contact other merchants on the platform. If you are seriously thinking of signing up try contacting another merchant who is already on the platform, ask them how they are finding it.

4. There is no magic bullet. Always remember that with internet marketing there is no single marketing method that is going to bring you all the sales you want. If someone is trying to tell you otherwise, they are lying!

5. Bin the hard sell. If a cold call marketing sales person is giving you the sort of hard sell you would expect from a double glazing salesman then end the call. Serious internet marketing plans are not made on the spot and they don’t require you to ‘Sign up today’.

As an online retailer based in the UK we have seen plenty of ups and downs over the last few years. With all this talk of recession, depression and economic meltdown it certainly hasn’t been business as usual. During the summer of 2008 we decided that we wouldn’t be one of those companies that battons down the hatches and waits for the storm to pass. Instead we took it upon ourselves to develop a new arm to the business, expand our product range and begin targeting new customers.

Since 2005 we had been selling a range of budget priced goods online, we had noticed that along with the economic downturn our sales had taken a hit, in fact turnover was down around 20%. Part of the new expansion involved developing a range of luxury products aimed at customers who were not feeling the pinch so badly. Let us not forget, there are still 1000s of very well off people in Britain and Europe who despite the recession still have extensive amounts of disposable income.

To cut a long story short we managed to turn our fortunes around by early 2009, we launched our luxury brand and began to successfully retail luxury goods with price points we had previously had no experience of. Needless to say we wanted to build upon this success. It was decided that some capital was needed to grow the business over a two year period. The need for the cash was essentially to buy stock, grow the range and bring those products to an online audience.

A business plan was drawn up by our company accountant and a meeting arranged with our bank. Now it’s worth noting we have a very good credit history, no unauthorised overdraft use, and we have never defaulted on any business loans in the last. It was decided that we would apply for a loan around £50,000 under the enterprise finance guarantee scheme. Our bank of 4 years confirmed that with no security this would be the best option and that securing the funds should be no problem.

All seemed positive until after going through the motions they turned round at the last minute and rejected the application. There was repeated use of the phrase ‘in the current climate’ with remarks about it being impossible for us to increase turnover in a sector (retail) that is suffering so badly in the recession. There was a total lack of understanding for our business plan, and they refused to see any difference between the suffering sector of high street retail and the still progressive online retail sector.

By this stage our business was getting desperate for extra funds, sales were getting better, the brand growing, but without the funds progress was going to be slow and painful. As a member of the FSB I rang the company that they reccomend for securing business finance after they sent me a letter stating that “Business finance IS still out there” I gave them all of the particulars, emailed them our business plan and waited for the response. Nothing!

I then contacted a local business consultancy and explained the problem and my dire frustrations. It seemed I made the right call! I engaged with the consultants who basically outlined the current situation frankly and honestly. Certain banks (who will remain nameless for legal reasons) are simply not lending to businesses. They say they are, are even going as far as advertising it on their websites, but the reality is that they are turning down all but a fraction of applications for business funding. No wonder there is a recession on!

I was advised of two banks that were lending under the EFG scheme and told that as long as my business plan was viable and profitable they could probably get me the finance, for a fee of course. In this case 1.5% of the loan total! It seemed like the right choice, these guys knew the banks well and were also highly experienced at getting finance for SMEs.

They drew me up a new business plan that was fresh, extremely well presented and made logical commercial sense. It was in fact so well presented that a 5 year old could have understood it, I figured that if this was the case a banker just might be able to grasp it too. What I didn’t know was that the plan had been created to fit perfectly into the slot thats required for bank approval. A meeting was set up with the bank, the consultants came with me and together we presented the plan and the company to the bank manager.

Well what a result! Here I am writing this 4 weeks later with the money in the bank! A total of £60,000 borrowing has been secured with most of that guaranteed by the government under the EFG scheme. Having to switch banks is a small price to pay for having the extra capital injected into the business.

There is no doubt that obtaining business finance is certaily harder now that it was two years ago, but it IS still available and can be accessed if your business plan and application is presented in the right way. It’s worth noting that many banks wont entertain a second reading of your application if the first attempt falls flat on it’s face. You need to get the application right first time or lose your chance with that bank for the forseeable future. The word on the street today is that the government owned banks are the ones to target when you are seeking finance.

For those of you selling a tangible product online the issue of product photography will no doubt be something you have had to deal with. The importance of product photography is one of those things that is so often overlooked by internet merchants. When faced with the task of uploading an inventory to a selling platform merchants will either resort to the CD full of jpegs that their wholesaler sends them or worse still, copies images of the same product from other merchants.

The desperation to have the entire inventory uploaded and online often comes ahead of quality assurance when it comes to product photos. In the world of web 2.0 and intense competition it’s becoming increasingly important to ensure that you have good quality and clear shots of your products. We have consistently found success in marketing products through the use of clean, crisp images of the products and a varied selection of images of each product. Competitors selling identical products to us are losing out because their images are poor quality, dull and don’t give the customer enough information.

How have we achieved such good product images?

All of our product shots are taken ‘in house’ using a selection of photography gear we bought online. The equipment includes a second hand Digital SLR camera, two high quality lenses, lights, a cube tent and some reflectors. We probably spent just under £2000 on the set up which has been an excellent investment, not least because the second hand lenses and camera body could (if we wanted) be liquidated on ebay for pretty much what we paid for them.

Once the photos come off the camera we put them into a well known image editing software to clean them up and re size them. Images for your website will need to be compressed, which is going to affect the quality, using a professional piece of software to do this is essential to guarantee good results. Adobe Photoshops ’save for web’ feature is ideal.   The fact remains that the better your product images are the more products you are going to sell. Your clean and clear images can be another positive edge you have over the competition. Don’t be put off by the high upfront costs involved in either buying the gear or commissioning a freelance photographer. If you are serious about selling online it will pay not to be penny wise and pound senseless when it comes to product images for your online selling platforms.

The majority of Internet retailers will hopefully identify with having somewhat of an obsession with Internet marketing. Whether it be pay per click, SEO, social networking or email marketing, the goal setting is often focused too much on traffic volumes. How many Internet merchants have said to themselves “If only I could rank number one on google for “said”  search term I would be sorted’ ?

The fact of the matter is that traffic, brand awareness & advertising are all going to become very diluted if conversion rates are not looked at first. A quick glance around some business forums shows that conversion rates do vary considerably. Rates of less then 1% up to around 5% seem typical, not very high on the face of it. That means that for every 100 visitors you send to your site a tiny handful will convert into a paying sale. Sticking with the maths for a moment, what if you could double your conversion rate, or even triple it? That would mean your marketing budget and effort could go twice as far, maybe even three times.

If you are already marketing your website, have a good level of daily traffic and are paying for clicks and traffic then it’s time to begin looking into making better commercial use of that traffic. If for every 100 visits you gain one sale, why not try for two instead? The first thing that many internet merchants need to do is find out what their conversion rate is. This may seem shocking to many of you but I speak to plenty of merchants who simply don’t know! Google analytics is a great tool for anaylising traffic, it will also tell you what your conversion rates are and track them over time.

How do I get more conversions from the same number of visitors?

On our quest for better conversion rates we came across this conversion rate blog which is a brilliant source of information. The blog is run by The Conversion Rate Experts who will get involved with merchants with a view to improving their conversions. You don’t need to pay these guys any money to begin improving your conversion rates, many improvements can be made just by putting into action some of the methods they kindly publish on their blog and website.

After reading their blog we began going through our website with a fine tooth comb to try and tighten up weak spots, remove any nuke buttons and make life easier for our customers. The results so far? A 0.8% improvement in our conversion rate!

What did you do to actually improve the conversions?

The first thing we did was to set up a conversion ‘goal’ in our google analytics account. The goals tool is really useful and quite exciting if you are as interested in conversion rates as we are. It allows you to see how many visitors reach each stage of the checkout process, where they most commonly leave, and where they go afterwards. If you haven’t already set goals in your anayltics then do it, I guarantee you will find the results interesting.

We used this data to see common leakage points within our checkout system and to identify where people were ditching their shopping carts and going elsewhere. This allowed us to target any improvements to the weak areas. The end result was a slicker, easier and faster checkout system on our website which in turn brought in more sales.

The second thing we did was to remove all nuke buttons. Nuke buttons are mentioned in the conversion rate blog, they are buttons on your site that simply nuke a transaction before it’s had a chance to flourish into a full blown order. A common nuke button is ‘empty cart’ and amazingly is present on a great number of e-commerce websites. Another great example is ‘clear form’ one of those buttons that has been around for as long as you or I can remember but serves little purpose apart from making people go bananas when they hit it by accident. The general rule of thumb is that if a button isn’t there to help your visitor complete their purchase goal, then it shouldn’t be there in the first place.

There are hosts of other techniques that you can use to improve conversions on your website. Another thing we did was to introduce a colour coded checkout system whereby the customer needs to contine clicking the ‘green button’ in order to proceed. Graphically it works very well and gives our customer a clear picture of where they need to click next, even if they can’t be bothered to read the online instructions (we can all be guilty of this from time to time).

To conclude

So there you have it! If you hadn’t been thinking about conversion rates before you should be now. They are simply too important to overlook and if optimised correctly will reward your internet marketing work many times over. Good luck and happy selling!