Run an eCommerce site? Need some advice

[cstreit]

Hey folks,

Looking to speak with a few people that run a substantial sized eCommerce site. Nothing in the scale of Pelican but lets say one that does 6 figures plus in a year or more. Automotive related would be great, but not that important.

Wanted to ask a few questions, compare notes, and perhaps even kibitz on advertising tips, getting conversion rates and traffic up, etc... might be a good discussion group thing. Any takers?

[cstreit]

bump. Anyone? Sheesh!

[MysticLlama]

I did for a few years, drop me a PM and I'll answer what I can / give you a hand.

[scottmandue]

I would like to do the same but with home electronics.

I bought my last two home theater systems online and I'm curious how much of this is just drop shipped?

[cstreit]

First some background. My company provides turnkey ecommerce and B2B exchange solutions to dealers of distributors and manufacturers. (ie we handle the transaction, dealers and/or distributors handle the fulfillment). Similar to an Amazon.com model we collect a txn fee when something sells.

Obviously the more traffic we can drive into our customers sites the better we do. Two questions are on my mind right now...

1. Regarding SEO - How does one seperate the wheat from the chaff? There's a myriad of websites that offer everything from services to strategies around this, but I have yet to find anyone that offers true qualitative analysis of results. (ie something beyond self-promotion)

2. Increasing average ticket. - Another clear driver of revenue is increasing the average total order value. Beyond "also boughts" what are effective strategies for doing this.

Scott, as you suspect, a LOT of dropshipping going on, however the tide is turning as manufacturers and distributors are getting tired of swallowing the inventory carrying costs. This is part of what we're all about.

[id10t]

Re SEO, you have to be careful. Too many tricks and google will drop your page rank. But, the techniques are as documented as they can be for how to get a higher rating. I do know that one of the key things are links that are in context with where they are linked from. More in-context links, higher page rank. Also what words are used to link to (the words you clikc on).

There have been a few "ask slashdot" type questions about getting a better google result, you may want to search their archives - http://slashdot.org

There are also some good log analysis tools out there - if you aren't running your own machine, ask your hosting provider to send you logs. I use analog (www.analog.cx) and have heard good things about webalyzer.

What kind of widgets are you dealing with? Or are you just a middle man for all sorts of stuff? If you can fit into a general area, have you considered running a forum or some other community? Run it on a linode.com virtual server or similar (minimal cost/mo), have banners, etc. going to your clients sites

[cstreit]

Well I'm not going to resort to trickery like link exchanges, etc. to get them ranked. Far too risky. Our clients are all brick-and-mortar businesses so there is no shutting down and restarting if they get blacklisted.

We run on VPS nodes already. I'm not dealing in widgets, I own a SaaS model software company, the customers deal in the widgets.

[imcarthur]

Originally Posted by scottmandue

I would like to do the same but with home electronics.

CE vendors are a dime a dozen. We do not drop ship to our vendors because we don't have to & the margins don't justify it anyway. They buy inventory from us & stock it. And we keep them on a very short leash. For every real authorized vendor, there are several who claim to be authorized who source thru gray market/transshipping etc who make even less money.

I have a waiting list of wannabe on-line vendors . . .

Ian

[deathpunk dan]

I'm the e commerce mgr for a low 8 figure catalog/e tail business. I have 6+ years experience in a variety of roles, including strong SEO/SEM background.

I can help you. PM or post here.

[cstreit]

I don't necessarily have an issue with drop-ship vendors per se providing they can manage the customer service and information needs of the consumer. Obviously there is a proliferation of sites that do nothing other than collect and transmit orders and couldn't answer a specific question if they had to... ...but they aren't all like that. Inventory costs are high and covering a wide line of products from manufacturers can require huge buy-ins that just aren't affordable to the new business. Call it a "micro-business" if you will. It really boils down to the ability to service the customer.

Anyway, DDan, thank for the response. I'll PM you some details but the real question out for discussion is this: What strategies REALLY work to increase search engine rankings. There are a lot of "jump-site" type of ideas out there that will inevitably get you blacklisted and plenty of other ways to ensure you will NOT be successfuly.

Obviously content and context-appropriate linking is a good method... ..but not the end-all be-all. Linking from other relavent and ranked sites also rates high but this is tough to do when the relavent sites for an e-tailer are typically competitors.

[deathpunk dan]

Chris
I'm of the mindset that practicing what some call Holistic SEO is the way to go. This means everything stems from quality content, intelligently organized. This is decidedly unsexy, non-black hat optimization that stresses on page elements, site architecture, bot crawl path, and the usual slow and steady backlink building process. We have a leg up in that our domain has existed for a decade, with thousands of relevant and time-tested (ie not popped up overnight) backlinks. Within our fairly small niche, we are a strong brand so people tend to naturally link to us on enthusiast sites, forums, and industry related sites.

In a pm, I'll tell you which 2 recent books are the most valuable. Most print stuff on SEO is woefully outdated or too basic to get anywhere.

As you know, the efficacy of organic/natural search for driving web sales depends in part on what you are selling, competition, length of sales cycle, seasonality etc. For us, we receive a TON of traffic for phrases like 'boat paint' or 'epoxy resin', but those phrases don't necessarily directly convert customers. No different than someone who is looking at getting a new television set and googles 'hdtv' or similar info-gathering-level phrase vs searching for a specific tv, part number etc. For us, product level phrases work much better, but obviously have less volume and sometimes less competition. The real win for us in the long tail. The smaller volume phrases that convert really well. Our site has 50,000 skus, so there's a ton of opportunity for this.

You are right, there are a zillion alleged SEO pros out there. At least half of them are garbage. They'll tell you things like 'we'll get you on the first page of the results/#1 ranking guaranteed!'. Run away from *anyone* who promises you anything specific within a small time frame. Look for SEO firms who have worked with database driven sites in competitive industries, look for case studies. If you think you've found someone you are interested in, fwd me their address and I'll take a look if you like.

Ranking doesn't mean anything unless there's a corresponding, trackable, and documented $ improvement. As far as terms to optimize for, check your internal site search logs, your competitors sites, use the adwords tool to analyze deep pages, subcategories, and category level pages on your site etc.

Link building sucks. Try to get something on meta filter, digg, or some other social/news type site. Are you a linkedin member? I think your profile can display a link. Same with facebook. Not sure if they specify no-follow on either.

Do you have a blog for each site? Start a blog, and in posts link to important parts of your site, varying the link text whenever possible. This is a great way to get deep parts of your site crawled. Get your blog linked within all possible networks. As its' not obviously commercial, sometimes blog links are easier to obtain. Wikipedia was a great source for 'authority' level backlinks, but people abused it and no bots don't see those links. .org .edu. and .gov backlinks carry more authority than .com or .net sites. Are there any you could target?

Do you have an XML sitemap that google can see (see webmaster tools under your google account)?

What kind of analytics package are you using?

And finally, do not think of SEO vs paid search. I know there are some on here who hate paid searchh but...Adwords sometimes has a leg up because you have control of the landing page, your visibility, and the creative. You can spend thousands of dollars with an SEO expert with no guaranteed results, but you can monitor your ROI from Adwords almost in real time. We will spend $400k with google alone this year with a 200,000+ keyword inventory, and track everything a million different ways. AOV, conversion rate, cost per conversion, gross profit, avg gp for visitors referred by each phrase, lifetime value etc.

You can even run a script on your site to display a contact phone # corresponding to the referring search engine/search engine campaign etc if you want to grab a few 800 numbers.

I could go on and on but I won't because I'm getting sidetracked and am out the door in a minute anyway. Please let me know if any of this is helpful or too obvious/idiotic.

Dan