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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
If you have an osCommerce-based online business, you need this book. Packed with expert guidance on all aspects of building a better online, this book will make your store stand out from the crowd.All approaches and techniques described here are proven to have worked well for successful osCommerce-based online businesses among the, over 650, all around the globe with which the author has been actively involved as developer, project manager, or online business consultant.osCommerce is an open-source e-commerce solution written in PHP and MySQL that can be set up on various platforms. More than 10,000 businesses and sole traders all around the world benefit from its features and flexibility. The importance of the osCommerce community consisting of over 100,000 can not be stressed enough as this is where both online merchants and web developers can communicate and find solutions. There are many "contributions" ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù modules for osCommerce that further extend its functionality ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù making it suitable for almost every business's requirements.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2007
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Table of Contents
osCommerce Webmaster's Guide to Selling Online
Vadym Gurevych
osCommerce Webmaster's Guide to Selling Online
Copyright © 2007 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, Packt Publishing, nor its dealers or distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: December 2007
Production Reference: 1071207
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-847192-02-8
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Vinayak Chittar (<[email protected]>)
Credits
Author
Vadym Gurevych
Reviewer
Monika Mathé
Senior Acquisition Editor
Douglas Paterson
Development Editor
Nikhil Bangera
Technical Editor
Ajay S.
Editorial Manager
Dipali Chittar
Project Manager
Abhijeet Deobhakta
Project Coordinator
Patricia Weir
Indexer
Hemangini Bari
Proofreader
Chris Smith
Production Coordinator
Shantanu Zagade
Cover Designer
Shantanu Zagade
About the Author
Vadym Gurevych holds a Masters of Software Development degree from Kharkov National Technical University (Ukraine) and has been creating commercial software products for businesses for 10 years. His interest in learning more about the management and business side of the process led him to join DataLink UK Ltd. in 2001 as Project Manager.
Based in the UK, Datalink (which also trades as Holbi) concentrates on providing a wide range of bespoke e-commerce solutions to its local and international customers. In those days, Vadym didn't imagine managing open-source projects, but since 2002 he has been creating osCommerce-based sites and this has become Datalink's main source of revenue since 2004. Now Business Development Manager of DataLink UK Ltd., Vadym is responsible for strategy development and business decisions, and for ensuring that his team of 30 provides customers with the most efficient solutions. Since he finds it exciting and sometimes challenging, he still personally supervises major sales deals and manages major projects. He has been happily married to his wife Elena for almost eight years now, and also finds time to write/maintain a popular blog, http://www.oscommerceblog.com, and contribute to http://www.datalinkuk.com and http://www.holbi.co.uk.
I'd like to dedicate the book to my wife Elena who inspired me to write the book and helped me a lot along the way, and who was very patient with me being "absent" while working late evenings and weekends, and to my father Eugene who I hope will find it interesting to read it.
I'd like to thank these wonderful people who helped me a lot with the book, and without whom I would have never done it:
Vladislav Malyshev, the best business partner I've ever had, and all my colleagues at DataLink UK Ltd., and Timo Brueggemann who introduced me to the world of osCommerce. Packt Publishing team of editors whose help was of the most value, Monika Mathé and Achim Keiser for their reviews and valuable comments, Appliance World UK Ltd. team for their trust and cooperation, James Knight and Russell Brammer for hundreds of fresh ideas and inspiration they gave me.
About the Reviewer
Monika Mathé, fascinated by being able to combine logic and creativity, became a software developer and Oracle Certified Database Administrator.
Landing a position in a marketing agency and working with everything from Oracle to SQL Server and HTML, ASP, and JavaScript, she learned more about marketing campaigns, e-commerce, CMS, and CRM.
Being an active member of the osCommerce Online Community, she knows preemptively which questions will arise in new shop creation. Presently, she is creating as many customized shops for clients as time permits.
With special thanks to my family, my forum friends, and my clients all over the world. You are the spice of my life!
Preface
osCommerce is an open-source e-commerce solution written in PHP and MySQL that can be set up on various platforms. More than 10,000 businesses and sole traders all around the world benefit from its features and flexibility.
The importance of the osCommerce community consisting of over 100,000 cannot be stressed enough as this is where both online merchants and web developers can communicate and find solutions. There are many "contributions"—modules for osCommerce that further extend its functionality—making it suitable for almost every business's requirements.
We will look into the practical techniques and proven strategies to increase online sales: learn from an expert! This book is for anyone administering a small/medium sized osCommerce site.
This book will help you increase your sales and profits with expert tips on SEO, marketing, design, selling strategies, etc.
What This Book Covers
Chapter 1 is a brief introduction to osCommerce, and teaches you how to calculate and monitor profits. Attracting visitors to your website is an essential task to gear the business up.
Chapter 2 reviews several ways to advertise and get visitors to your site, including: organic search, banners, pop-ups, link exchange, affiliate programs, newsletters, forums and blogs, and online directories. This chapter has extensive insights on how to track the efficiency (and other variables) of an advertising campaign.
Chapter 3 shows you how to race to the top of search engine result pages. You will learn methods, techniques, and actions to make your store easily accessible to and indexed by search engines. If you decide to keep ahead of the game and hire a professional SEO consultant, you will want to dig deeper into this chapter where we review aspects of hiring professional SEO consultants and show how to track SEO campaign results. This chapter familiarizes you with the good and bad search engines practices and helps you find which keywords work best.
Chapter 4 concentrates on solutions and practices that help authoring original dynamic content, for your users and customers to post content online. We review the benefits of using dynamic content solutions like CMS, forums, blogs, and feeds, and their integration with osCommerce.
Chapter 5 gives you insight on why it is important to build customer confidence and how to do it. We review ways to improve your online store and business model to make customers more confident about placing orders with your online store. A good design often spells the difference between failure and success.
Chapter 6 covers effective design of an online store; here you will learn to optimize design for different types of customers and customize it to match your corporate identity. We discuss common-sense approaches to developing design templates and also tackle practical issues like caching and improving page loading speed using database and PHP script optimization to ensure a smoother customer experience.
Chapter 7 takes a look at how sales can be improved in osCommerce by improving your product catalog. It concentrates on improving navigation and making customer interaction intuitive and friendly.
Chapter 8 is a discussion on how and why order values can be increased, and what effect this has on the turnover and profit figures. It shows how to increase order values by putting both the customer and the online merchant in a win-win situation. Understand the dynamics of cross-linking products, creating product bundles, configurable products, and employing the minimum order amount strategy.
Chapter 9 covers how to run a properly planned promotion campaign, while keeping an eye on operational costs. The turnover of an online store can be increased by increasing its market share—this chapter shows your how. From grabbing customers to maximizing what you get from your suppliers, running affiliate programs, and B2B programs for trade customers.
Chapter 10 shows you how important it is to monitor and constantly improve the conversion rates of online business, and analyzes how conversion rates affect profitability of the business. It shows how to improve the checkout process in osCommerce, and how to utilize individual customer accounts to increase sales.
Chapter 11 is a further exploration of monitoring of the performance of the website by creating and of course understanding various reports, and using statistical information to improve the efficiency of an osCommerce-based online business. In this chapter you will get an insider's understanding of using and extending the reporting facility of osCommerce, including: reports to plan your advertising budget, re-arrange advertising campaigns, track and forecast sale figures, find bestselling and most profitable products, manufacturers, and categories and highlight certain products by marking them as featured, locate best-buying customers and reward them, track stock and ease re-ordering of the most popular products from suppliers, track customers and use previous order history for marketing purposes, send targeted newsletters to customers, and even plan your online store's net profit figures and its profitability.
Chapter 12 will take a look at how the online store can benefit from having repeat customers, and how to convert customers into repeat customers. This chapter shows how to increase this conversion rate by providing loyal customers with additional benefits, like a loyalty points, referral bonuses, etc.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
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Note
Important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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Chapter 1. Increasing Profits and Sales with osCommerce
I was thinking about how to start this book. There's definitely going to be a lot to tell, explain, and discuss in the further chapters, but the first one was not that obvious. So what to start it with?
Probably from: Why are you reading this book right now?
According to the U.S. Census Bureau News (dated May 18, 2006):
"The Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce announced today that the estimate of U.S. retail e-commerce sales for the first quarter of 2006…was $25.2 billion, an increase of 7 % from the fourth quarter of 2005."
This of course happens not only in the US, but also in the UK, Europe, Russia, East, Japan, Asia, Australia—literally in every place where access to the Internet has been made easy by the governmental and commercial organizations, and where there are online payment methods in use.
Selling goods and services online is in most of the cases easier and cheaper than running a brick and mortar store or mail catalog business. Of course, this doesn't work for everyone, but most small, medium, and large businesses already benefit from using e-commerce for online sales. Some businesses go 100% online, some use e-commerce supplementary to their main business. And of course a well-thought-of business idea, competitive products or services, and strong organization are the primary keys to success, as with any traditional business.
This book is first of all dedicated to the businesses that use osCommerce or osCommerce-based e-commerce solutions to drive their online sales. It is dedicated to business owners, general managers, and e-commerce and marketing managers. It will be useful to web developers and web designers who create osCommerce solutions. Knowing how to make the most of an osCommerce-based online business is a benefit not only to the business itself, but literally to everybody who's involved as supplier, developer, or consultant.
osCommerce is suitable for small, medium, and large businesses. According to www.oscommerce.com, there are over 11,000 online stores, and these are only the ones registered in the Live Stores directory. For just one of the examples that prove that the e-commerce solution is really great for businesses of any size, look at the Google Store website www.google-store.com, which is based on osCommerce. Self-employed online merchants, family businesses, small businesses, retailers of almost any size, manufacturers and distributors—they power their online businesses with osCommerce.
Why osCommerce?
Having now worked with osCommerce for more than five years, while interacting with many companies and individuals, I have never found a person who wished to switch to another solution once they had an osCommerce-based online business. Instead, I've seen quite a number of people who'd like to move to osCommerce from other, custom made or publicly available online store solutions.
It's very easy to start selling online using osCommerce. Its standard installation already contains all the features and facilities to build an online store and start online sales.
For end customers, it is easy to browse and search for products, use the shopping cart, personal account with previous order history, checkout with several shipping and payment methods, and all this in multiple languages.
For Shop Administrators and online merchants, it has first of all a manageable product catalog with a tree of categories and products, a tool for customer and order management, and sales reports—among other things.
But the real key to the success of osCommerce lies in it being an Open Source solution, and in a community of more than 100,000 members who have developed more than 3,500 useful contributions (add-ons). Taking compatibility issues aside, an osCommerce store owner can add credit modules, features, images add-ons, informational boxes, additional languages, order total modules, payment and shipping modules, reports, templates/themes, and other contributions to an osCommerce-based website. More members join and more contributions get submitted daily.
Besides the standard version of osCommerce developed by its team, there exist alternative versions. Some are free, while some need to be paid for. Alternative versions usually contain a number of contributions already pre-installed, so that the store owner gets an even more featured solution for online business.
What is the Book About?
Being familiar with osCommerce and most probably already using it for your business you (business owner, marketing manager, e-commerce manager, web master) would like to learn how to increase online sales, how to increase profits and minimize expenses, how to improve your online business.
This book gives you tips and tricks from which you will gain maximum possible mileage for your osCommerce installation. This book has a plenty of advice and explains approaches based on the real-life experiences of osCommerce store owners and osCommerce developers. Every piece of advice in this book can be applicable or not applicable to a particular business—and the final decision should always be made by the business owner or online store manager.
So, what are the main goals that we try to achieve with every business?
Profits First
OK, now we have come to the point where we want to increase profits. But first before increasing them, it would be useful to know how to calculate profit. Is the online business profitable or not?
Your accountant would probably have an answer to that question, but let us see how it's possible to calculate and monitor profits in an easier way.
So what does profit consist of? First of all, we will need to determine a period of time for which we will calculate the profit. It can be a month, a quarter, a year, or maybe a week or even a day. Then, we will need to find out the total turnover generated by the website during this period. A little trick here is that some of your offline (phone, shop) sales will be actually generated by the website. In order to properly track the online business's profits, you will need to have a referral tracking system in place. It will be enough to ask the customer before taking a phone order, where they heard about you. If the answer is "your website"—here we have another sale generated online. And so, we write down the turnover for that period of time.
Now the less pleasant part—expenses. Here we need to firstly determine the cost of products sold for the given period of time. If you buy products and your suppliers change price as time goes by, it will make perfect sense to store the product costs from the suppliers in each order placed by your customers, so that you can see the actual profit level for any period in the past.
Then come the taxes. You may have taxable and non-taxable goods in the product catalog. Also, not all your customers pay tax, so the calculations here have to be very accurate to find out proper figures.
Then comes delivery and handling charges, which actually depend on the goods you sell; but many online businesses tend to consider the handling fee to be equal for every product or order.
Note
We should clearly understand the difference between the Actual Shipping Charges (i.e. the expenses paid to deliver the goods to the customers) and Customer's Shipping Charges (i.e. the amount charged to the customer in addition to the order amount to cover the delivery charges). We will deduct Actual Shipping and Handling Charges to find the profits.
One more very important line in the calculations is the advertising expenses. While sometimes it's not possible to know the exact amount spent on a certain advertising campaign per given period, it's always possible to find out an approximate amount. For example, finding an approximate daily expenditure for a certain advertising campaign and multiplying it by the number of days in the period you're calculating the profits for. Of course, we should be aware if multiple advertising campaigns were running at that time, and calculate all advertising expenses.
We should continue with deducting operational costs like service and labor expenses, which would consist of the costs of updating the website, running the office, the warehouse, the call center, paying the employees, etc. It makes sense to take an average service and labor cost of running the business for the same period and split it into two parts correspondingly to how much turnover has been generated by online and offline parts of the business.
Online Turnover
+ Offline Turnover (referred from the website)
- Product Costs
- Taxes
- Shipping Fees
- Handling Fees
- Advertising Expenses
- Service Expenses
- Labor Expenses
So for each given period of time, approximate actual profits generated by your online store would consist of Online Turnover plus a Part of the Offline Turnover generated through the websites less Product Costs, less Taxes, less Actual Shipping and Handling Fees, less Advertising Expenses, and less Service and Labor expenses.
OK, we have all those nice figures, we know how to find approximate online profits—what should we do next? We will learn how to monitor profitability of the business on daily/weekly bases. Its very important to be able to see the dynamics of how the profit level changes daily or weekly, as this is the only way to make business decisions based on facts rather than on "gut feeling".
We will play with an electronic spreadsheet and draw up a table there. MS Excel or Open Office Calc will do well. Let's put in the following columns:
By filling in the table daily or weekly, we will not only see the profits changing as time goes by we will also see, for example, how the turnover changes—and most importantly—how the relation between Profit and Turnover changes with time. Obviously, the higher the profit percentage of the Turnover, the better optimized the business model is.
Sometimes you will find that even though the turnover has increased, the profit has stayed the same—which means you're doing more work for actually the same amount of money.
Sometimes you will find that even though both the turnover and profits have increased, the figures in the last column (relation between Profit and Turnover) have worsened—this means that the business model needs optimizing as operational costs have grown too fast (and too much!) as compared to the profit.
This table, if filled in regularly, will also give a good idea of how the advertising expenses affect profits. And, assuming all major website updates and improvements are put into the Comments field, they will give an idea of how this or that feature, change, upgrade may have affected the online turnover and profit.
The Strategy to Profit
Now we know how to calculate turnover, calculate profit, and see the dynamics of profit change with time. We can now concentrate on what this book is about—reviewing various possible ways to increase profit.
There are several strategies applicable to an online business, and we will cover them all in further chapters. They are:
Summary
In this chapter, we have seen a brief introduction to osCommerce, and learned how to calculate and monitor profits. We have reviewed at least one simple and straightforward method to see profit figures changing with time, and have briefly touched several business strategies that become possible with osCommerce. We will review them in more detail in further chapters of this book.
We didn't talk about how to select products for online sales, why osCommerce is the e-commerce solution of our choice, and what to do with a pet dog when it misbehaves—because this book is dedicated to those merchants who already trade online or are planning to start online trading in the nearest time, and have already chosen osCommerce as the online store solution; also, we have no idea about the latter!
This book is based on over five years of the author's continuous experience building online businesses with osCommerce. All approaches and techniques described here and further are proven to have worked well for over 600 successful osCommerce-based online businesses all around the Globe in development or improvement of which the author took active part as osCommerce developer, but mostly as project manager or online business consultant.
Chapter 2. Advertising an Online Store
"Why does my website or product need to be advertised?"; if you ask yourself such a question—this chapter will most probably not answer it. Only a few, if any, websites and products are so unique that the customers will run off their feet to find a path to their web pages and place orders online. Because of the most serious competition ever, in almost every market niche, attracting visitors to your website becomes an essential task to gear the business up.
What can be Advertised?
This in fact, depends on your advertising and marketing strategy. One can say at least three types of advertisement may attract more visitors to your website.
First, the website itself can be advertised. Potential visitors should be given descriptive and attractive information about the website, and about products and services they can get there.
Secondly, new and unique products can be advertised. This will stimulate potential visitors' interest in products and services available from your website.
Finally, the advertisement may contain information about discounted prices and special offers on the products available from other online and offline stores. It will explain the benefits of buying those well known products and services from your online store.
