eCommerce Tips

You want your eCommerce website to be relevant. One thing you've been wondering is how to stand out from the competition. Context is king. You will buy and receive gifts for Christmas. As usual. So will your customers. And you want them to buy it from you. Holiday season starts with Black Friday and ends with Christmas. It's a huge peak for your revenue but you know that. You have to adapt your website, the way it looks, but also your approach to selling. Your relationship with your customer

This article is an extension from a previous article on the use of discounts to maximize profits. In it, we examine the advantages and concerns of discounting and address the areas to look out for when considering to do so. It’s a light read, and I highly recommend that you take a look at part one before continuing on as it will give you a better overview and mindset as we begin to examine the different strategies: [Pros & Cons of Discounts: Is Discounting Right for Your Business?]( https://bl

Christmas is a great time to engage with clients. But this is also when competition for attention is the fiercest. To help you get into the best form this Christmas we revisited 6 brands that nailed it in past holiday seasons. As a company, you want to maximize awareness for your brand. Keeping your brand relevant and at the tips of everyone's tongue. When done right, social media can help build traction and drive up your sales. Ted Baker - #TedsElfie People are naturally inquisitive. Integra

It’s Black Friday! And with Cyber Monday just around the corner, we know a lot of you may be on the fence about whether or not to jump on the bandwagon of discounting. Did you know that compared to non-holiday months, November and December earn 30% more eCommerce revenue? But there are pitfalls. I’m sure you’ve seen businesses that are constantly on a discount. After some time, the bright letters “SALE” and “50% Off” start to lose its effect. Of course you wouldn’t want to cheapen your brand b

Your customers come and go. But how do you know if they are happy with their experience on your website? What's the signal? You may be selling more and more, and that's obviously a good sign. But are you really sure? You can feel the pulse of what your customers think about you on social media. It's easy to find both negative and positive tweets about your brand or products. Or they get in touch with you via Facebook, or send you emails to your customer support inbox. But they are not the m

Being a Product Manager is hard, period. Why is that? Martin Eriksson defines [product management]( http://www.mindtheproduct.com/2011/10/what-exactly-is-a-product-manager/" target="_blank) as the intersection between UX, business, and tech. So now, imagine three departments, with three very different types of people. UX being one, sales & marketing being another, and web developers. You, as the product manager, have to move the needle in the right direction with them. And you're kind of the a

Have you ever dreamed of having a robot doing tasks in the background? At AfterShip, we're all in to give you the recipes for doing more, with less efforts. So you can focus on growing your business. Meet IFTTT. You've heard about it before but you might have missed the opportunity to try it. IFTTT stands for “if this then that”. It's a free web-based service that allows users to create chains of simple conditional statements. All automated. They call these conditional statements recipes. One

Last week, we organised an internal hackathon during three days and a half in our office. Most of you might know what a hackathon is. > Hackathon: an event, lasting several days, in which a large number of people meet to engage in collaborative computer programming. Ours was a bit different though. Rules were simple. Pitch any idea related to AfterShip or Postmen. Convince your teammates to join your team. Hack. Demo your product. Win. Two criteria mattered: 1. Execution 2. Business Model

Online and multi-channel merchants have a lot to handle when it comes to their daily business practices. One of the pertinent issues that small merchants as well as already established names have to deal with is getting the product to a faraway customer in the right condition. The bandwagon effect has brought about a boom in business for online firms. As such, there has never been a better time to curve a niche for oneself in the online market. With global sales hitting over a trillion dollars

For online businesses, the ability to measure every single customer interaction has opened up unparalleled opportunities for using data to make better decisions. But even though data are increasingly available to support decision making, the abundance of it has ironically increased the prevalence of gut-based decisions over data-based decisions. > This is a guest post from the team at Compass. [Compass]( http://report.compass.co/free-signup/?utm_source=partner&utm_medium=partner&utm_campaign=af

Twitter is the best social media platform for your business and you might not know it yet. Here's why. Some changes are happening, and it will impact how you're using the platform so far. According to [the Verge]( http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/12/12891562/twitter-tweets-140-characters-expand-photos/ " target="_blank), Twitter "will cut down on exactly which types of content count toward the platform's 140-character limit. Media attachments (images, GIFs, videos, polls, etc.) and quoted tweets

What a time to be alive! Drones, robots, algorithm... the future of delivery is bright. And exciting. Ever since the video from Amazon Prime Air got released, our attention shifted. We now think that the future of delivery = drone delivery. This is partially true. > Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads. > Dr. Emmett Brown - Back to the Future II Here are a couple of other exciting projects that caught our attention. Robby Robby is a tech startup that makes self-driving delivery ro

We've talked about the quick hacks you can implement to make your eCommerce more trustworthy. You know you can't rely only on these, although they do help. You want to make a difference in the long run and build this special relationship with your customers. Trust in yourself, in your story, don't be shy. No matter which product line your are selling, your story is unique. Be bold. As David Ogilvy, famous advertiser, put it: > Don't bunt, aim out of the ballpark. Aim for the company of immorta

[This is the part one of our blog post: The Quick Check-List To Make Your eCommerce More Trustworthy. For part two, focusing on the long-term strategy, click here [https://aftership.ghost.io/quick-check-list-ecommerce-trustworthy-part-two]] Open your Google Analytics and check your bounce rate. Not so great right? People come to your website but they don’t buy. Even worse, they come to your eCommerce store, stay 15 seconds or less, leave and don’t even remember you. What can you do to change t

On this blog, one of our goal is to help you crack the code of building a profitable eCommerce website. Which is why we love when experts like Catalin Zorzini, or entrepreneurs trying to make a dent online like [Steve Finder]( https://blog.aftership.com/productivity-tools-ex-googler/" target="_blank) take the time to bring some eCommerce insights for you. A couple of years ago, Catalin was struggling to find which is the best eCommerce platform for one of his project. So he launched a blog whe