Online Marketing & E-Commerce News Munich

The biggest Risks for Your eCommerce Traffic and Conversion Rates

In this article I want to give you an overview of the biggest risks for your eCommerce traffic and conversion rates. This list doesn’t claim to completeness but wants to inspire you to rethink your potential to optimize. Let me give you some ideas.

 

Slow Loading Times

One of the most important conversion rate boosters is speed on all devices. Google announced the loading time has to be less than 3 seconds to get considered. Amazon knows 100ms increase in loading time costs 1% of revenue, while Yahoo told us
400 ms more means that 5-9% of our users think there is nothing else coming and break up.

 

Missing Responsiveness

One of the top conversion rate killers is a lack of mobile responsiveness. The explanation is simply the increased mobile traffic. Try to create a clear and structured navigation for mobile devices as well and use AMP to speed up your pages significantly.

 

24/7 Support

Offering direct contact possibilities might be important to simplify pre and after sales support. Especially a service hotline is a very welcome way to address short questions but also for complex products consulting is an important element to convince users of your products and services. As an alternative you can include chat functionality. Just an email address would be the better than nothing solution.

 

Missing redirects

Imagine you are lucky because one of your clients remembers your product and bookmarked the product detail page. In the meantime your company created a product update and forgot to redirect from old versions to the updated product. Missing redirects are really unneccessary. Moreover you should take care that you redirect correctly. 301 redirects make only sense if you have a 1:1 replacement URL, because otherwise Google will probably see a 404 error. So, ensure to check your URLs. In case, your product pages have very different content you should work with product widgets on outdated product detail pages.

 

No significance in A/B tests

Run your A/B tests until you reach signifance. Keep in mind: p < 0,05 is not significant. In case companies don’t care about this rule, its strategy is nothing else than p-hacking. Some practical tips for your A/B tests are:

  1. Prefer to use active verbs instead of nouns whenever possible e.g. “Try for free” instead of “Free trial”.
  2. Less is more: In fact, A/B testing has shown that removing any fields that Aren’t crucial will have a huge impact on engagement.
  3. Define clear tracking goals and evaluate what makes more sense to measure: Impressions, clicks, shares, comments, repeat visits, etc.
  4. Try to integrate personalized elements in your A/B tests.

 

No Product reviews

Based on the dedicated review base at Amazon, many users expect product reviews in an online shop today. On one side it shows potential customers: I am not the first and only one interested in that product. On the other side, the review statement itself offers credibility and valuable information. Of course, the information character can be only guaranteed be qualified feedback. Indeed, for many people the five star symbol works sublime like an official quality guarantee.

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What to Prepare for the EU Data Protection Regulation 2018

The EU Data Protection Regulation is a great thing. Its main advantage is to harmonise the European law and simplify the structure. That means that it will lead to a more uniform design of all product and service providers who want to sell within the EU or even from outside the EU.

Currently the EU Data Protection Regulation gets a lot of attention due to the high fees in case of non-compliance. In addition, the regulation contains a novelty: the possibility of a class action, which is not commonplace in the European area.

 

What is the EU Data Protection Regulation?

The data protection regulation concerns above all the personal data. By principle this includes all data that makes a person identifiable, such as IP addresses, geodata, etc.

 

The Consequences of the Reversal of the Burden of Proof

The essential point of the Data Protection Regulation is the reversal of the burden of proof. Thus, the company has to prove that it does nothing wrong with the data of its customers. So far, this process has generally been reversed per se, so that the customer or website user had to prove to the company that the company had acted reprehensibly.

In order to meet this burden of proof, we recommend a processing directory for each company that documents the company’s order and data processing. This also suggests that user data should be forgotten or deleted, for example, as soon as they are e.g. no longer needed for an order processing.

In addition, it makes sense to take a data protection impact assessment in order to act in a transparent way for users and companies. As part of a new software development, this principle must be a priority during development. This can be summarized under the claim “Privacy by Design”.

 

Each Data Collection asks for a Legal Basis

Only those data surveys are legitime, that are imperative to fulfill the contract or based on a clear voluntary consent. The last-mentioned case includes for example active signups to a newsletter via double opt-in. Nevertheless a right of revocation must be granted. The cases in which there is a legitimate interest in data may also be lawful under Article 6 (1) (f) GDPR. An assessment is made on the basis of the following criteria: type of data, transparency, data sensitivity, degree of data encryption, pseudonymisation and right of objection. This third aspect opens up a certain scope for considerations of interest.

 

Privacy Information requires Supplementation

The privacy policy should define who is responsible in a simple and easy-to-understand language. In addition, the purpose and legal basis of the data processing and the recipient of the data must be mentioned. Data transfers to non-European countries and the storage period must also be included. For companies with more than ten employees, the announcement of their own data protection officer is mandatory.

 

Extension of the Persons Concerned

Each user has the right to get informed about their own data, the right of correction, the right to be forgotten or the deletion of data as well as the right to transfer their own data.

 

The Sample of E-Mail Marketing

E-mail advertising is only allowed, if an explicit consent has been given. If the e-mail addresses of existing customers appear in a mailing that does not have explicit consent, this is legally incorrect. It calls for a final interpretation to what extent such a coupling of data use is legitimate.

In general, data may only be stored as long as its needed for a user-confirmed purpose. The data can only be submitted to third parties under very strict conditions on the case of a clear legitimate interest.

 

Immediate Duties

An update of your company’s privacy information is essential. In addition, you should be aware of what user data you collect in your organization and how you proceed those data. Identify all data processors and review the formulations of forms and privacy information. Make sure you have your own processing directory. Ensure it’s easy to understand when, where, why, and how long you’re collecting user data. If users request that information, the company is obliged to provide comprehensive information in time.

Corresponding support can also be found at Trusted Shops.

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Top Learnings at Internet World eCommerce EXPO 2018

The Internet World EXPO is an annual trade fair in Munich (see more). On two days in the beginning of March more than over 17.200 digital experts met 420 exhibitiors and discussed with 250 speakers, including the chairman of FDP Christian Lindner, the entrepreneur Jochen Schweitzer, and many others. The event started with the Internet Shop Award one evening in advance. This year, the Shop Award winners are About You, Mediamarkt, Mymuesli and the Frankfurter Brett. In this article I prepared an overview of the top learnings at Internet World eCommerce EXPO 2018 for Your business.

Top Learnings @InternetWorldExpo

1. Challenge the best Product Filters for Your Online Shop

An online shop without product filters might be very confusing but also too many filters might be overextended. The secret of success is to focus on the user relevant filters and this is only possible in case, you know your persona very well. Stay up-to-date and work on your user experience.

Let me give you a proper example: Selling sofas simply doesn’t mean the one and only filter has to be the sofa color because the size of a sofa matters much more in respect of decision relevance. The sofa size is essential because this is the key criteria to fit in the clients living room. In step two you can ask for the preferred interior style, in step three or four you also focus on the sofa color.

Of course, you should offer different filter criteria but never in an unstructured and confusing way. Keep it simple. In consequence you highlight your focus by sorting products in a customer relevant style.

2. Consider Multichannel in Your Sales Strategy

Only 15% of all online business is based on an own eCommerce solution. 50% of online business is linked to marketplace platforms like Amazon or eBay. Those numbers visualize the importance of marketplaces. In terms of customer trust, reliability, and user experience, platforms offer big advantages that will take you time and ressources to create those for your own online shop. On the other side your business model has a strong dependency on the marketplace in case you have no other selling channel.
Based on that ambivalence I recommend you to build your business on an own online shop solution integrating multichannel selling via reliable marketplaces. Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule but in general it’s an effective strategy to stay independent and benefit from the marketplace system at the same time.

3. Make it Mobile Responsive

Indeed, it’s nothing new that mobile responsiveness matters. Actually it becomes more and more important. In 2018 Google makes it a clear priority task considering AMP and the “Mobile-First-Index”. Moreover the innovative smart speaker calls for fast loading times because a high percentage of voice search inquiries are done via mobile devices.

This tendency will become even stronger within the next years and you should be prepared for this process. Certainly, the most important aspect might be the loading time but also the layout, content elements and a clear navigation are important elements. Quite often it makes sense to design your own mobile navigation in a simplified way. We can be sure that no user will scroll one meter down to find your contact details. Try to apply minimalistic guidelines and improve your user experience.

4. Use and Learn out of A/B Testing

Sometimes it’s difficult to say what really works for your users. A/B testing is a performance-driven way to focus on the right elements. It’s great to compare the scrolling behavior, clicks and click-through-rates of different images, call-to-actions, or layout versions. The possibilities are very extended but it’s important to define clear targets in advance. Only targets enable you to measure results.

The second key condition is significance. There is a saying: Never trust a study, you didn’t fake yourself. But never forget your target: You want to improve the performance of your online shop. So it’s in your own interest to reach significance and honest results. Don’t impress yourself with non-significant results. In conclusion A/B testing enables your business to track the most honest customer feedback: behavior. Jonathan Midenhall, the CMO of Airbnb would say:

5. Increase the Cart Timeout

A very simple and fast improvement might be to increase the cart timeout. The use of mobile devices shows us that most people create wishlists or shopping lists on the mobile while the payment process will be finalized on desktop versions. In case your timeout is only ten minutes, all the products in the cart will disappear after ten minutes.

In consequence you provide a frustrating experience because the potential client has to research all articles in your online shop catalogue to recreate the initial shopping list. For everyone who wants to rethink the purchase, there is no convincing chance to order without a rush. To diminish the buying pressure during checkout you can simply extend the cart timeout to 48 hours or even longer.

6. Integrate Rich Snippets

Rich snippets are helpful to improve your optical visibility. Those are displayed in Google search results. This means we speak about an extended version of snippets including special elements like star ratings, links, pictures, prices or further details. It’s nothing new but still relatively seldom used. You can make a difference by using them. By the way, rich snippets will also increase your click-through-rate.

Those are our top learnings at Internet World eCommerce EXPO 2018 for your business.

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eCommerce Trends 2018

The essential principle of eCommerce is change for your customer, so your approach needs to reflect the mindset of moving on for the next big thing. Don’t keep going like always even when you realise there is a customer need. Focus on that and optimize your user experience to build up loyal customers. With that said, let’s have a look at some eCommerce trends 2018 that e-commerce store owners should pay attention to this year.

1) Personalization based on Machine Learning

In terms of e-commerce, personalization means the tailored online customer experience for each individual customer. In order to design the perfect customer experience for every individual, you need to collect data like geographic location, social behavior, shopping cart history, and search queries.
Following a study by Accenture, 75% of customers like it when brands personalize their communication to them as long as the customer keeps control over collected data. Moreover you should consider, that personalization is the thing you should focus after ensuring accessability, relevance and usability of your online shop. To visualize that, let’s give you an example: It’s silly to wait 5 seconds loading time for the product detail page of a blue t-shirt with your name printed on it, although the user looked for the search term “blue jeans”.

First of all your online shop needs to be easy accessible on all devices, second your products should be relevant for the user need. Third it should be user-friendly. The blue t-shirt will never satisfy someone who is looking for a blue jeans. Last but not least we talk about personalization.

Dynamic category pages & crossselling

One option is to create relevant category and product pages for the user based on the search terms and interests of the purchase history. In case you know person A bought a television, you can offer cross-selling offers like the matching DVD player or wall mount system.

Predicitve recommendations

Analyse the purchase data from all your customers to identify the likelihood of customers to buy from special product categories. For example, in case you realise persons buying a television tend also to buy movies, you should bundle or recommend movies on the television product pages. Product recommendations can increase revenue up to 300% (read the whole article by Retention Science). Beside the famous Amazon “Other people also viewed” section, also Netflix is a great example of predictive recommendations. Netflix works with “taste communities” and recommends to other users what’s popular in those communities.

2) E-mail Marketing

E-Mail marketing provides great ways of brand building. Despite of the fact that e-mail is such an important element of communication, most of the companies send not 100% consistent branded e-mails. Of course, marketing mailings look brand-consistent but after-sales communication looks often completely different. DHL sends you a tracking ID but you have no idea to which online order that is linked to: no logo, no brand name, just a long number and a link. Of course, it shows a high potential to design brand-consistent after sales mailings.

Especially because e-mail marketing drives more revenue than all social networks together. Moreover it’s easy to measure your results in terms of click-through rates, opening rates and so on. A/B tests are simple to realise but one learning you can take as proven: You never show respect to your customers by spaming them. Focus instead on reminder e-mails to abondoned carts or incomplete transactions.

3) Digital Wallet Payments

Did you know that 10% off Starbacks US orders were payed with the Mobile Order and Pay app? Amazon Go launched the cashierless store: customers enter, pick the items they want to buy , and walk out of the store. Items will automatically be scanned and charged to the customers account. It’s so convenient, it’s so innovative. Digital wallet payments via mobile phone are the future. According to predictions by Statistica, mobile revenue will increase to 50% of all e-commerce sales this year. The main reason for that prediction is the development of digital wallet payments like Amazon Pay, Apple Pay or Visa Checkout.

4) Voice Search

Thanks to smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home, voice search is on the rise. For SEO this trend implies new challenges because voice search often provides a single answer instead of multiple results. This means number two is already too far away for the user.
Also advertising needs to find a new position in that content.

In respect of eCommerce, the biggest is the question how to provide in-depth product details optimized for voice search. Preparing your online shop for that big shift in user behavior, you should ensure to understand your persona. Ask yourself what customers are looking for: products, price, availability details, and also product reviews. Guarantee to provide information for all of those needs. Moreover the product content has to be written in a fluent and appealing way and using correct grammar. In the end, voice assistants require a chance to vocalize and read your content easily. In consequence of the fact that voice search is often used on mobile devices, your mobile version should be optimized in speed and performance.

5) Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality will be important as brands launch features that enable customers to apply mobile devices to visualize products in their home before purchasing. The wonder of augmented reality gets ready for eCommerce.

Before ordering, customers will be able to see how an object looks in their environment. This includes even huge items like furniture or bathtubs. Ikea Place is such an innovative augmented reality app that lets consumers experience, play and try adding Ikea products into any room. The 3D furnitures are true to scale, can be changed to all available colors and can be moved from one place to the other in the virtual experience. This supports the users purchase decision with a “real life” experience of owning the item without physically purchasing and placing the item in their home.

Also Amazon added augmented reality to the search function of its conversion-driven app. You can view thousands of products in your home before you buy, including electronics and tools.

Overall augmented reality shows huge potential to improve the shopping experience by making it more realistic. In consequence the return rates of furnitures, electronics and similar bulky goods might be significantly decreased. The barrier of “what if I don’t like it and need to return it,” will be reduced.

6) Social Marketing

Social media platforms like Instagram and Pinterest provide a perfect chance to integrate products in a visualized lifestyle. This means, social media supports the process to make your products real and part of an individual experience. Moreover the buy-button is so close and users in the right mood looking for inspiration when they spend time on social media platforms. For existing customers, social media can be also an effective tool to reply to customer service inquiries.

7) Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is still a very effective way to drive your sales in 2018. One common misconception about this marketing channel is, that you need to hire a famous personality like George Clooney to be successful. This is not true when you consider the micro-influencers all across social media that offer relevance instead of just status. The credibility of those “normal” people with an own opinion is pretty high because it is natural and trustful and less artificial like testimonial marketing. One of the biggest advantages of the internet is indeed that you can use word of mouth without having to interact face to face.
Instagram or YouTube, Pinterest or Snapchat, influencers give your eCommerce business a high potential to bring you a significant boost in traffic.

Conclusion

This article focused on the biggest eCommerce trends 2018. For sure, it would be pretty tough to realize all aspects mentioned above but maybe some of them.

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The Best Open Source eCommerce Solutions

Selling your products or services online, calls for an online shop. Of course, choosing the right open source eCommerce solution depends on the amount of daily website visitors, the number of transactions, your wide range of products, and the type of products you want to sell.

Obviously there is a huge difference in system and server requirements between selling configured glas vases or digital video downloads. Please ask yourself, what special requirements your online shop needs to serve.

Open Source eCommerce solutions cover an extensive range of relatively cheap basic functionality up to custom-made enterprise editions. This is why it’s so essential to define your company and also your customer requirements first. Linked to that is also the question of budget and how much you want to invest. Moreover it’s important to know in advance who will do the online shop maintenance tasks. Does this person need extended coding skills? To sum it up, the right choice of a shop system is a big decision and has to be a sustainable and project based one.
This articles introduces you to four excellent Open Source eCommerce solutions and their characteristics.

Overview of Opensource eCommerce Solutions:

Magento

Let’s start to talk about the eCommerce super hero for mid-sized and big companies: Magento. This open source platform offers everything needed for an online shop with unlimited extension possibilities.

  • Easy and intuitive article management with own attributes
  • An integrated Content Management System (CMS) to edit text and images
  • Flexible extension possibilities
  • Huge community
  • and more

Magento is suitable for different shop systems. It’s easy to adapt for your individual needs. At the same time you should consider, that the system server requirements are quite sophisticated. In addition the backend design is very complex and adaptations and extensions are cost intensive in comparison with other solutions.

Magento offers an Open Source and an On Premises edition. Second option provides more possibilities but it’s also significant more expensive. Magento is suitable for the German market. This means the shop system is available in different languages and currencies.

To implement the shop we recommend a professional agency service.
Companies like Fraport, Mont Blanc and Christian Louboutin trust in Magento.

Shopware

One of the most used eCommerce Solutions was developed in Germany and offers comprehensive functionalities in the standard version. It’s easy to extend the online shop system Shopware and adapt it considering your changing needs and growth.

Shopware is available in four different editions. An upgrade to the next version is very simple. This means Shopware is a eCommerce solution growing with your business without big issues.

The backend is well-structured. For the setup we recommend an experienced agency as well.

Shopware customers are for example Euronics, L’Oréal and Gaastra.

Oxid

The shop system Oxid is tailored for the German market. Oxid focus on omnichannel strategies. That system suits for different shop versions (B2B- and also B2C-Shops). With support of the appropriate moduls, it’s easy to adapt and scalable.

We want to highlight the available interfaces for ERP-systems, and logistic- and fulfillment providers, that ensure an optimized order processing.

Moreover Oxid allows you to create and manage different Sub Shops. Oxid has an own shop offering a variety of extensions. Many of that extensions are for free.

Also for this open source eCommerce solution we recommend the support of a professional agency.

Oxid customers are for example Porsche Design, Deutsche Post and Mercedes Benz.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a plugin for the Open Source Content Management System WordPress and the most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress. Until today it was downloaded worldwide more than 40,5 million times.

It’s simple to integrate, too. In addition this shop system is easy to extend and scalable as well. To make it short: the eCommerce system grows with you.
Another advantage is that WooCommerce is even extendable to a mobile app. On the WooCommerce website numerous extensions get offered – some of those even for free.

The special WooCommerce German Market plugin ensures the legal security for Germany and Austria. The plugin includes templates for delivery costs, right of revocation, terms and conditions and imprint. All of those texts are mandatory in Germany. Furthermore there are some additional features like delivery for free based on a defined sales price or shipping cost notes for non-EU-countries.

WooCommerce customers are for example All Blacks, Luvd, Xeroshoes, Zanerobe, Weber, Tokki and Pro4mance.

Conclusion

Of course, there are more then four eCommerce Solutions on the market but those are the most popular ones with an Open Source edition. Moreover the above mentioned shop systems Magento, Shopware, Oxid, and WooCommerce are the most common solutions on the German market.

Whatever eCommerce solution you choose, in the end it matters to evaluate all relevant factors in advance.
It’s definetely important to create a well-performing, scalable and extendable system. Finally you invest money, time, and work in your project and it’s really annoying to realize after a while that you experience strict limitations. For example you identfy new needs or higher sales rates and need to update your system. So, we recommend you to be selective and take care of every individual functunality in detail. That process takes time but in the end your result is a system able to grow with your business. Changing your shop at a later stage might cost ressources and nerves.

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