Dan Cole Posted December 4, 2014 Share Posted December 4, 2014 Just read an interesting post from Practical Ecommerce comparing shopping trends during Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year versus last year. The article can be found here... http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/76417-Black-Friday-and-Cyber-Monday-Losing-Mojo I found the lessons learned for 2015 quite interesting... 1. Make sure your website is optimized for mobile users. By next year it will likely represent a majority of traffic. 2. Stay with email marketing. It is the most effective method. But don’t damage its value by annoying customers with too many promotions. 3. You may wish to rethink your social media efforts as these sites are not driving traffic. 4. To keep up with the major online merchants, you may have to offer discounts earlier in the Thanksgiving week. What plans do you have in these areas for next year? For me... 1. Getting ready to launch my bootstraped sites. 2. Will continue to use Mailbeezs and add additional email modules. 3. I've been slow to use social media and am still not sure how to take advantage of it. I'd welcome ideas on this. 4. This year we got out in front of Black Friday by having a week long Black Friday sale. Next year we'll likely do the same. Dan Need help? See this thread and provide the information requested. Is your version of osC up to date? You'll find the latest osC community version (CE Phoenix) here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
♥joli1811 Posted December 4, 2014 Share Posted December 4, 2014 Just thought worth a mention email campaign last week using mail chimp brought a sales increase from 3 - 4 a day to about (peak) 50 sales x 1 day A massive increase which I still notice x 1 week later now this was a site with a strong returning sales base as the products were food items but must say it did surprise me the power of a decent email campaign. Regards Joli ps: just for the stats 840 emails sent which is not a lot To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
quetevendo Posted December 4, 2014 Share Posted December 4, 2014 I think they are the 4 pillars for any online business. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
burt Posted December 5, 2014 Share Posted December 5, 2014 Great article thanks for the link Dan 1. Make sure your website is optimized for mobile users. By next year it will likely represent a majority of traffic. 2. Stay with email marketing. It is the most effective method. But don’t damage its value by annoying customers with too many promotions. 3. You may wish to rethink your social media efforts as these sites are not driving traffic. 4. To keep up with the major online merchants, you may have to offer discounts earlier in the Thanksgiving week. #1. It's really important that as many shopowners as possible get themselves into a situation of having a shop that is optimized for mobile. We (here in the osc forum, all developers and shopowners) need to evangelize this aspect as much as possible. It does not take a lot of work to get a shop onto Bootstrap. #2. Email marketing. Ultra important. I've been looking into the possibility of doing something in the core - Mailchimp (newsletter marketing) and Mandrill (transactional emails, eg a follow up after 10 days asking for a review) - both these things are way off in the future though. #3. Social. I'm not a social butterfly, I dont like facebook at all, I do use Twitter. Twitter cards are very good as is the opengraph for Pinterest and Facebook - cards and OG are available in osc already, we need to work out how best to leverage them in areal life use sense. #4. Discounts - I guess this is upto the individual shopowner Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
♥joli1811 Posted December 5, 2014 Share Posted December 5, 2014 "#4. Discounts - I guess this is up to the individual shopowner" Discount coupon codes are a great way to catch the customer attention and justify the email campaign Even the ones I get from Tesco I do not delete (I may not use) but saved in a folder JUST IN CASE. :) and the mail is never marked as spam or blocked so it is a reminder I may not purchase immediately but the shop's presense is there in my mail box and at some stage i do check the website again. Regards joli To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
burt Posted December 5, 2014 Share Posted December 5, 2014 Is there anything more that we need to do in the core code with regards to the "special offer" mechanism ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mort-lemur Posted December 5, 2014 Share Posted December 5, 2014 Is there anything more that we need to do in the core code with regards to the "special offer" mechanism ? How about the ability to automatically email customers who have signed up for newsletters at the push of a button detailing items added to Specials that day or week? Now running on a fully modded, Mobile Friendly 2.3.4 Store with the Excellent MTS installed - See my profile for the mods installed ..... So much thanks for all the help given along the way by forum members. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dan Cole Posted December 5, 2014 Author Share Posted December 5, 2014 Other than perhaps email confirmations that an account has been created or that an order has been received I'm not sure you want any of this in the core, do you? There is certainly a need for other emails but I'm thinking they might be better included in an easy to install add-on. Need help? See this thread and provide the information requested. Is your version of osC up to date? You'll find the latest osC community version (CE Phoenix) here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oscMarket Posted December 5, 2014 Share Posted December 5, 2014 Sometimes when i browse some shops (no account created on them) and looking at a product, but think it is to expensive (i am from Netherlands), i miss a button "notify me if price change". Product notification advanced i would say. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
greasemonkey Posted December 5, 2014 Share Posted December 5, 2014 @@Dan Cole some very good points - this one in particular however needs some discussion (in my opinion). 1. Make sure your website is optimized for mobile users. By next year it will likely represent a majority of traffic. Although true - I would call it only somewhat "accurate" based on my results. I have been recently digging around my audience in analytic looking for (and expecting to find) this "truth". However, have a look at the attached thumbnail view of what I see... ....Yes, mobile traffic represents 25% of my traffic today and is growing - but only a fraction of this mobile traffic is from "actual" mobile devices. The vast majority of the mobile traffic to "my site" (I would love to know if I'm alone on this) is actually from tablets. Our main site is optimized with iOSC on 2.3.4 and the conversion rate (in percentage "%") for mobile (handheld non-tablet devices) is VERY good.... better than desktop even. My tablet conversion is low in relation by almost 1.3% to the site average. What is my learning lesson for 2015... Look at all devices and how they are equipped to purchase on your site..... Tablets are not the same as mobile devices - and do not require the same amount of "optimization" as mobile devices - BUT they do require some optimizations... and I'm severing them up the desktop site. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
burt Posted December 5, 2014 Share Posted December 5, 2014 I think in the context of the article, mobile does not mean "mobile phones", I think it means anything that is not permanently fixed to your desk; phone, tablet, notebook, kindle and so on. With this in mind, solutions such as a dedicated "mobile" site such as iOsc don't really cut it anymore...you need 1 fileset that is optimized for all, and that's what osC can now provide. Personally, and I dont know if anyone else does similar...I tend to check prices on the phone or do research while I am actually in a retail shop - is this the right widget I'm about to buy (I did it earlier when I needed to buy a battery for my keyfob). Cost in the shop was 7.99 - I then looked online and found it for 1.99 on ebay with free shipping. I came home and ordered it... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
♥bruyndoncx Posted December 5, 2014 Share Posted December 5, 2014 I think a responsive site is a must nowadays, it supports the just browsing on a tablet really well. Then iosc for mobile phones as an alternate optimized for specific mobile use cases/transactional focus, and a separate mobile app as the icing on the cake where there is more of a content push mechanism from the store embedded (email promo pushes, loyalty cards etc). @@burt few people check prices in our store, more often it is to show us what they found online. It really depends on the kind of goods you sell if you can have big differences or not, and of course how soon you need it. KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON I do not use the responsive bootstrap version since i coded my responsive version earlier, but i have bought every 28d of code package to support burts effort and keep this forum alive (albeit more like on life support). So if you are still here ? What are you waiting for ?! Find the most frequent unique errors to fix: grep "PHP" php_error_log.txt | sed "s/^.* PHP/PHP/g" |grep "line" |sort | uniq -c | sort -r > counterrors.txt Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
♥bruyndoncx Posted December 5, 2014 Share Posted December 5, 2014 stats from google analytics for the last week: 64% desktop 24%table 12% mobile from belgium 55% netherlands 33% and rest of world (2% and less for a 85 countries) KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON I do not use the responsive bootstrap version since i coded my responsive version earlier, but i have bought every 28d of code package to support burts effort and keep this forum alive (albeit more like on life support). So if you are still here ? What are you waiting for ?! Find the most frequent unique errors to fix: grep "PHP" php_error_log.txt | sed "s/^.* PHP/PHP/g" |grep "line" |sort | uniq -c | sort -r > counterrors.txt Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
greasemonkey Posted December 5, 2014 Share Posted December 5, 2014 @@burt dedicated "mobile" site such as iOsc don't really cut it anymore...you need 1 fileset that is optimized for all, and that's what osC can now provide Agreed.... Working towards this - maybe by the end of 2015 I will bootstrapped the main site ... For now I'm building a smaller sub-brand site on bootstrap to get a feel for it. @@bruyndoncx 64% desktop 24%table 12% mobile from belgium 55% netherlands 33% and rest of world (2% and less for a 85 countries) Interesting - in comparison 75% desktop 22% tablet and 3% mobile From Canada 66% USA 19% & 15% rest of world Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cyberology Posted December 14, 2014 Share Posted December 14, 2014 Already made my site responsive, but with the stellar work that's been done with Bootstrap here, I'll probably be looking at switching over to that at some point in 2015 to improve site speed. Email marketing has always had a good ROI. The trick is doing it well, as already mentioned. Social Media- very much depends on your target market and your product. For me, Pinterest vastly outperforms Facebook, with much less input from me, but I have a very visual product and it's demographic falls into my target market. Facebook, although it has my target demographic, has lost all usefulness in getting sales or increasing brand awareness since the changes in visibility for posts, and organic reach. Instagram and Tumblr are much better for products aimed at a younger audience (teens/ twentysomethings) Use social media to promote your brand, rather than sales. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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