Don’t Give Up on Your Customer if Their Payment Card is Declined

Whether we like it or not, business these days revolves around the use of credit or debit accounts and if you’re involved in e-commerce you have to address this situation. It is fairly easy to establish payment procedures using these types of cards for your online business, whether you use PayPal or another authorized reseller such as 2checkout, or you may have your own merchant gateway established. The entire process between presentation of product or service and delivery to the customer requires considerable attention and your business success will depend on your ultimate ability to control the effectiveness of each step.

From time to time, a customer’s card will be declined, but this need not necessarily result in a failed sale. There can be any number of reasons for the decline, including what is known in the industry as a hard decline or a soft decline. In the case of the latter, it invariably means that a system timeout occurred or some other technical issue precluded the transaction from running its course. As a retailer you have to decide when you actually want to process the account, as if you are not physically shipping goods for a specified period, for example, you could just build in a resubmission process, hopefully overcoming the soft decline and not having to contact the customer with notification of failure.

Sometimes you will be notified that the customer needs to contact his or her bank, known as a “referral.” Make sure that the shopping cart contents are retained and that the client can return to consummate the transaction once the referral has been cleared up.

If you find that you are getting a notable number of hard declines, whether the card verification details are incorrect or whether there is a funding issue, consider whether you want to offer alternative methods of payment or not. Tracking sales and conversions through an analytics program will help you to determine the level of the problem as it pertains to your business and whether or not you should really consider alternative methods, if at all possible. Some e-commerce software products support procedures for handling these declines. Either way, you should consider a “so near and yet so far” sale to be very valuable. Just think about how much time, effort and money you have invested in getting the prospect to that point in your sales funnel. At the very least, a communication via e-mail or phone would be in order before you think of abandoning the prospect altogether.

How do you handle declines?

Matthew Toren

Use Affiliate Marketing To Attract Customers Who Would Not Otherwise Find You

Affiliate marketing has been one of the growth areas of the Web in recent years. Sellers of goods and services understand the power of third party endorsement and know that a concerted affiliate marketing campaign could reach many more potential clients than a simple in-house initiative ever could. Anyone involved in e-commerce should consider an affiliate program. If there’s a market for what you’re selling and you have a great USP then you simply need to switch on a family of clones, just like yourself, to help you out!

You can increase your sales potential exponentially by starting your own affiliate marketing program. Work out how much you’re willing to invest and understand that affiliate marketing compares very favorably to the costs of conventional advertising and marketing. Be prepared to “reward” your affiliates very well as they drive business to you.

Many promoters find it best to develop a multi-tiered approach. They will have a fundamental package or service at the front-end, which they are willing to use as something of a loss leader. This product or service will naturally lead to a more expensive product or service and on upward, in tiers. This will require a quite sophisticated sales content or pitch and there should be a natural progression to entice the purchaser of the leading product to buy the bigger package. Using this approach, you can offer a very significant commission to the affiliate to sell your lead-in product, maybe even 75% commission. This should definitely motivate the affiliate and if you have structured your sales funnel correctly you should be able to use the loss leader as an investment towards larger returns.

There are a number of affiliate marketing networks, some specialize in particular niches and others may specialize in upscale. A process of research will uncover the best according to your particular product or service. You will then have to register with the network and may likely have to lodge a certain amount of money representing a potential commission payment due from a sale. The advantage of these networks is that they have a whole host of affiliates lined up and ready to promote your service. Make your pitch enticing to the affiliates and use the power of their own networks to drive sales back through.

Remember that you will have to create sales copy, banner ads and e-mail content for your affiliates to use. The easier you make it for them to promote your site and services the more success you will attain. Remember also that you do not want your message to be doctored by affiliates who do not have the correct amount of information, so you should be sure that your collateral is on target before you sign up with the network.

Have you used Affiliate Marketing to attract customers?

Adam Toren

Use Your Website To Get Purchasers to Your Physical Store

As we transition more toward a virtual world, it is quite amazing to see that more than 50% of “bricks and mortar” businesses do not yet have a web presence. As potential consumers use Internet search engines to do their research before they go out into the real world, those companies without a website risk being left out. For the off-line retailer, however, it is not good enough to just throw up a portal and expect to earn riches, as the entrepreneur must pay attention to the site composition to ensure that visitors make the connection between the online site and the off-line location.

On-site optimization is often focused merely on helping the website achieve a great position in search engine rankings, so that the would be consumer can find the site in the first place. This is of course very important, but if you are mostly relying on actual visitors to your bricks and mortar store then you have to do a lot more.

One of the biggest mistakes that many retailers make when considering a website is to assume that the website should be divorced from the actual physical location for some reason. They assume that a website is only good for e-commerce and they may or may not be geared up, or wish, to sell any of their products online. They are missing the bigger point here – the website is primarily a source of information and they should do everything they can to ensure that the visitor is “converted” in one way or the other.

If the website is not to be used for e-commerce, then the page must be designed to lead visitors easily to information showing your physical location. This will require a clear link in a prominent position on every page, using appropriate texts such as “find our locations,” or “how to contact us.” Some webmasters make the mistake of including contact details within a vaguely termed “about us” section. Don’t make the visitor think twice about anything, make it obvious.

These days it is fairly easy to incorporate a Google maps widget showing in clear detail exactly where your location is and remember to include your opening hours and customer service phone lines in prominent positions. Additional phone lines are very cost effective and should be used to help you track your clients. For example, use a different customer service phone number on your “contact us” page and another phone number on each of your product pages. Remember to keep track of client paths by asking the appropriate questions at the point-of-sale.

Any marketing initiatives that you engage in should be tracked and tested. This may require a process of education amongst your staff. They should get into the habit of asking appropriate questions to determine whether visitors found your location through your website or not. Always try and get your visitors to give you their e-mail addresses, so that you can send questionnaires for more feedback.

Is your website connected to your physical store?

Adam Toren

Give Your Online Shoppers What They Need

As an e-commerce retailer, one of your first priorities should be to give your website visitor as perfect an environment as possible and one which is completely conducive to consummating a sale. Unfortunately, findings of an e-commerce survey commissioned by iperceptions found that this is a perception which may be far removed from reality. Four out of ten visitors arrive at an e-commerce site to conduct research, but only 85% of them are able to complete the task successfully. Of those who arrive with the intention of making a purchase, only six out of ten actually complete this task. These are worrying figures and it pays to try to get to the bottom of this research to make sure that you are giving your online shoppers what they really need.

Fundamentally, your site architecture should be very intuitive. It must relate directly to the source, so that visitors who are arriving due to a marketing process that you have initiated do not have second thoughts about the validity of this trail. Calls to action should be very clear and apparent and you should make sure that you do not place too many obstacles in the way of allowing your visitor to move all the way to the checkout page.

Here are some considerations:
• Have you fully answered a “features and benefits” analysis of your own products or services? You should have answered any potential questions yourself and make sure that you have provided the information and any FAQs; don’t leave any stone unturned.
• Include testimonials and customer reviews. Remember social proof is very important.
• Have you addressed any potential purchasing options and different scenarios – what if the product is being bought as a gift for somebody else?
• Clearly enunciate your return policies, warranties and confirm the security of your purchase arrangements.
• Detail all “supplemental” costs, including shipping and tax early on during the decision-making process.
• Do not require customers to go through lengthy registration processes prior to making a payment!
• Give as many payment options as you can.
• When it comes to check out, do everything you can to make this as simple a process as possible. Multiple checkout pages are not a good idea, as every additional stage here increases the abandonment ratio exponentially.

Choose a trusted confidant, with little direct input into your business or experience of your site, to do a complete run through as a new client. Encourage them to give you honest and complete feedback on every element of their experience and use this information to make your site highly user-friendly.

How have you made your e-commerce site user friendly?

Matthew Toren

RIVworks Brings Down the Cost of Interactive Video

It can be so difficult to set your site apart from the rest, especially without appearing to be overly gimmicky or even cheesy. When you have spent considerable time and effort in the design and layout of your webpages and are sure that you have your optimized message perfectly portrayed, then why not consider looking at a “new niche” (as one of the founders of RIVworks describes it) and put a rich interactive video online?

The concept of RIVworks, as outlined by its founder Ty Ricker, is a video delivery service featuring actors that walk onto the page and describe what you have to offer, pointing out special features, buttons or talking about your site in general. You may have seen this once or twice as you are surfing the web, but generally it is still considered novel and in its infancy. Thus “rich interactive video” engages shoppers and enhances the selling process by making the experience more fun and entertaining.

The service is surprisingly affordable and starts off at only $79 per month. For this you can choose from among the company’s 5000 recorded video clips, using a male or female actor in a “full body” or “half body” format and select whether they walk onto the screen from the left or right.
As the idea is to really project a human element to your website this can have a markedly positive effect on your visitors. We have always preached that you should “humanize” your e-commerce site as much as possible, even if it means just putting up photographs of the owner or staff, including quotation marks around text and attribute content to real people, including links to Facebook pages and so on. If the walk on actor may seem too generic for you, you can opt to spend some more and reproduce yourself. You can also opt to create a custom set of videos, which will mention specific services or site options, although your prices will increase accordingly, up to about $1700.
It seems that the company may also have its sights on creating a video marketplace and offering creative types a platform to sell their wares to marketers just like you, who want to be on the cutting edge.
It is not recommended that you include this type of presentation on your site if you already have an overly rich experience lined up for visitors anyway. You need to be aware of potential conflicts between different scripts and applications and remember not to slow down your page loading times too much!

Have you tried RIVworks? Let us know your experiences.

Adam Toren

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