Business Speaker on Online Store Ecommerce
Patrick Schwerdtfeger is a motivational keynote speaker whose topics include making sales online, ecommerce options and online store platforms. He’s a leading authority on self-employment and the author of Marketing Shortcuts for the Self-Employed (2011, Wiley). The 35th and 36th chapters of this award-winning book (2012 Small Business Book Awards) are entitled Making Sales Online and Website Shopping Cart respectively (in Part 3 of the book: Build Your Website or Blog) and they are both included below for your review. The book has a total of 80 short chapters, each ending with an Implementation Checklist. Also, Patrick’s perspective on ecommerce and the various online shopping cart platforms and credit card payment portals is provided below.
Past speaking clients include:
Recent speaking destinations include:
Keynote Speech about Ecommerce and Shopping Cart Options
There are a lot of ecommerce options available today and businesses need to select their shopping cart platform before their online store can start making money. Businesses can install shopping cart functionality on their own website or they can make their products or services available on pre-existing platforms like Ebay or Amazon. Patrick has researched these various options and can incorporate the highlights in his general session or keynote address. He is known for explaining complicated topics in an accessible and actionable way, allowing your attendees to walk away feeling confident and empowered. Let us know what content you’d like incorporated and Patrick will adjust his keynote programs to fit your event requirements.
Chapter 35: Making Sales Online
Are you selling your product or service online?
In the last section, we discussed your expertise and how to categorize that information into beginner, intermediate, and advanced content. Chapter 25 introduced the Motivating Sales Sequence to help you write effective sales copy for your advanced content products and services. Regardless of what your advanced content is, you need to have a way to sell it online. You need a way to process the actual transactions. This chapter will look at a few of the many websites that facilitate online sales by providing product hosting and shopping cart services. These options make it incredibly easy to start making sales on the Internet.
Perhaps the best known online platform for making sales online is eBay. Most people know eBay as an auction site where you can make your products available for open bidding, but that’s only the beginning of what the site offers.
www.ebay.com
eBay allows its users to create their very own eBay store, featuring all of their products in one place. You can then put certain popular products into the public auction and use them to entice shoppers into your store. Also, eBay owns the widely used PayPal platform, making it easy to send and receive money securely. It’s worthwhile noting that eBay is one of the highest traffic websites on the Internet. It’s crawling with literally millions of shoppers all the time. I call that a “raging river” and it’s a great place to put your product in front of a massive buying audience quickly. There are endless resources devoted to leveraging the eBay opportunity and I recommend you simply put “selling products on eBay” into a Google search to get started.
eBay isn’t the only place where you can create your own store. Yahoo! offers a similar opportunity. The Yahoo! Shopping network is a powerful and flexible platform that gives anyone an easy way to sell products on the Internet.
http://shopping.Yahoo.com
Of course, one of the largest online retailers is Amazon. Well, as luck would have it, you can sell your products there too! Amazon has a number of seller programs, including the Advantage program, making it easy to upload products and sell them to the public.
http://advantage.amazon.com
Within the Advantage program, Amazon fulfils the orders for you. That means they ship your product to the customer. They also have a second seller platform where you fulfill the orders yourself. With eBay and Yahoo!, the product delivery is always left to you. With eBay and Yahoo!, you’re the retailer. With Amazon Advantage, on the other hand, you’re the wholesaler and Amazon is the retailer. Because of that, the Advantage program takes a much larger cut. They get the first 55 percent of your product’s sales price. But then, whenever you see a reduced price on Amazon, that discount comes out of their share, not yours.
Keep in mind that these programs are changing all the time. New websites are popping up every day and that increased competition improves these arrangements for sellers over time. Check to see what the latest programs offer and use the platforms that best suit your situation.
There are dozens of other places where you can sell your products, particularly if the product is digital (like an e-book or an audio file). Zipidee is a great example. On Zipidee, you can upload your digital products and sell them to the public.
www.zipidee.com
The biggest advantage of these platforms is that they all have massive traffic already. That means you can put your product in front of their buyers, and not worry quite as much about generating your own traffic. Driving traffic is usually the hardest part! Of course, you can also drive traffic to your own website or blog and then link through to these platforms. That means you can include a link on your sales page (with the killer sales copy you wrote in Chapter 25) that points to the website where your visitors can actually purchase the product.
Making Sales Online: Implementation Checklist
Visit eBay and read about their programs.
Explore the Yahoo! Shopping Network.
Research the latest programs on Amazon.
Check out Zipidee and look for others.
Evaluate based on credibility and profits.
Sell your products on the winning websites.
Link to your products from your own site.
Compare notes and ideas with a colleague.
Chapter 36: Website Shopping Cart
Do you want your very own shopping cart?
Chapter 35 looked at a variety of websites where you can sell your products online, but we didn’t look at selling products directly on your own website. That’s what this chapter is about. Having your own shopping cart is a lot easier than it used to be. There was a time when you had to build all the code into your own website. You had to integrate your website with a merchant account to accept VISA or MasterCard, and you had to integrate that merchant account with your bank account.
It was complicated. No longer.
Today, there are companies that offer out-of-the-box shopping cart solutions that you can easily link to or integrate directly into your own website. In most cases, the people visiting your website don’t even realize the shopping cart is being hosted elsewhere.
A great example is 1ShoppingCart.com.
The websites we discussed in the last chapter—eBay, Yahoo!, Amazon, and Zipidee—the ones that host your products and let you sell them using their shopping cart—make money on the product being sold. In other words, they get a cut of your sales price.
With 1ShoppingCart, you can sell whatever you want and get 100 percent of the money. They do, however, charge a fee for the shopping cart itself. 1ShoppingCart also operates as the merchant account so they make some money on the credit card transactions too. But other than that, all the money is yours. There are advantages to both online selling formats and we discussed some of the advantages of the first group in the previous chapter. Here, we’ll focus exclusively on 1ShoppingCart and the service they offer.
Please note that there are lots of different shopping cart solutions available on the Internet. PayPal offers that functionality, as does Google Checkout, and there are many others. I’m focusing on 1ShoppingCart because this service combines the shopping cart functionality with an e-mail autoresponder. We’ll get to that in a second. With 1ShoppingCart, you can sell anything for any price. It can be a $25 e-book, an $800 consulting solution, a $4,000 retreat package, or a $17,000 custom motorcycle. It can also be a subscription or membership package, meaning your customers are automatically charged every month or every year or whatever you specify.
No matter what you’re selling, 1ShoppingCart allows you to process online transactions in a flexible and seamless way. Even if you consummate an offline transaction without a computer nearby, you can take a credit card number and process the payment when you get back to the office. 1ShoppingCart has a variety of packages, each offering different levels of functionality. The most inexpensive packages start around $35 per month and their premium option is about $100, plus standard credit card processing fees. The premium option includes an e-mail autoresponder as well. The advantage is that everything exists on the same platform. At the time of this writing, I have my products on a variety of different platforms and my autoresponder with AWeber.
Although I’m very happy with AWeber (and I got grandfathered in so I pay only $19.95 per month), it can be frustrating to maintain content on so many different platforms. Also, if I make a sale on Amazon, I have no way of contacting the customer afterward. They don’t give me their e-mail address. With 1ShoppingCart, I would have full contact information for all of my customers. I’ve considered moving everything over to 1ShoppingCart, just to have it all together.
You might want to think about this too. If you have everything on a single platform such as 1Shopping Cart, you could send different e-mails to different people depending on their individual history with you. If customers purchased one particular product, you could tailor an e-mail acknowledging that. If they subscribed to your intermediate content (Chapter 23) but have not purchased anything yet, you could tailor an e-mail to that as well. And for your best customers—the ones who have bought from you multiple times—you could send special offers that nobody else receives.
It’s been proven time and again that marketing is more effective if it’s more personalized. The less “canned” your message sounds, the better. You want each reader to feel like you’re speaking directly to him or her. 1ShoppingCart can help you accomplish these marketing goals; it offers a powerful and flexible solution. The platform can calculate sales taxes and shipping rates automatically. It supports affiliate links and up-sell or cross-sell options. It offers secure sockets layer (SSL) encryption for the checkout process (adding security) and makes payment tracking simple. It’s not the only solution but it’s definitely one of the best.
If you’re serious about selling your products and services online, you’ll need a shopping cart eventually. You can easily leverage other platforms but having your own comes with some distinct advantages. 1ShoppingCart is one option you should consider.
Website Shopping Cart: Implementation Checklist
Visit the 1ShoppingCart.com website.
Read about their various service options.
Research other e-commerce platforms.
Think about what you’d like to sell online.
Make note of the features you could use.
Consider subscribing to their service.
Learn how to use the platform thoroughly.
Leverage the service wherever possible.
Compare notes and ideas with a colleague.
End of chapter – click here to buy the book on Amazon
