By Brit Finnegan, Lead Designer and SEO Manager
Now that you have a few SEO tips and best practices in your arsenal, let’s talk about how to implement these tricks, and how Nomad erpCommerce makes it easy to optimize SEO for eCommerce–whether you’re a novice or expert.
ECommerce sales goals can be tricky to set and meet, particularly if you’re a B2B business with only a few years of online sales history. To ensure you set realistic and achievable eCommerce goals for 2019, here are some tips for getting started and measuring success throughout the new year.
Developing an eCommerce website is becoming a priority for many manufacturers and distributors, and a user-friendly site with a secure and reliable infrastructure is the only way to offer your customers the service they expect – and deserve.
Most online shoppers are multi-device users (tablets, desktops, laptops, and smartphones), but in 2015, using smartphones for search eclipsed the use of desktops; research indicates that over 50% of internet traffic is from mobile devices.
Nomad erpCommerce by Sniperdyne is a new, revolutionized eCommerce shopping cart application built to directly integrate with virtually any ERP system–including Exact Macola, Microsoft Dynamics GP, Syspro and more. Direct integration with ERP means data consistency, improved customer experience and less administration time for you: all at a fraction of the time and cost of connecting your ERP with a traditional eCommerce website.
Nomad now allows for website responsiveness and optimization for mobile view.
Responsiveness means that a site can seamlessly adapt itself to any view, allowing your Nomad site to be viewed properly from any device — whether on a desktop computer, laptop, mobile phone or tablet.
As a new year approaches, new trends emerge in eCommerce. One obvious trend is the increase in mobile searching and shopping–but some other eCommerce trends may come as a surprise. We’ve compiled six stats and trends from some of the leading analysts, publications and sources in eCommerce and digital marketing to keep in mind for your 2016 eCommerce strategy.
By Gregg Baker, Business Operations Lead
Businesses large and small have their struggles as they relate to IT services, especially when it comes to updating and maintaining software that may run on every computer throughout the enterprise. That’s why cloud, hybrid cloud and software as a service (SaaS) solutions were invented, and have increasingly grown in popularity. In this blog, we delve into the meanings of these popular buzz words, uses for the solutions and several reasons to consider utilizing SaaS.
By Brit Finnegan, Lead Designer and SEO Manager
The foundation of search engine optimization (SEO) is keywords. Keywords are the words that internet users–and your customers–are thinking about and typing into their search engines in order to find products, services, people, things and answers to virtually any question imaginable.
eCommerce retailers and marketers spend lots of time and resources attempting to pinpoint the right keywords and key phrases that not only best fit their products, but also best match what customers are looking for. Herein lies the art of SEO keywords for eCommerce.
While marketing professionals make entire careers of SEO and keyword optimization, we’ve compiled this brief yet informational guide of SEO keyword basics to help SMBs optimize their eCommerce websites without the need for a large budget.
Frost & Sullivan’s report, Future of B2B Online Retailing, indicates that B2B online sales will account for close to 27% of total manufacturing trade, which is likely to hit $25 trillion by 2020. Today’s B2B customers expect the same range of multi-channel purchasing options they experience as consumers. Your customers once pored over print catalogs or worked with sales reps to make their purchases; now, many of them start their sales journey on your website or via a search engine.
The research and advisory firm Frost & Sullivan predicts that by 2020, the B2B online market will reach twice the size of the B2C online market, generating revenues of $6.7 trillion. And, according to an Accenture study, 94% of B2B buyers currently conduct online research during the buying process.
If your company wants a piece of the pie, your eCommerce website must be “up to snuff.” But what makes a B2B website stellar? Here are 5 ways to ensure that your eCommerce site gives your customers what they want.
A positive customer experience is critical for customer retention. According to a study conducted by customer experience pros Walker, customer experience will overtake price and product as a company’s key brand differentiator by 2020. To ensure the highest level of customer satisfaction, you need clear visibility into customer interactions, rapid response to customer questions, and an easy way to monitor escalations and customer service team performance.
Aggressively going after online market share is a Herculean task for any company, let alone small to mid-sized companies that can’t match the sizeable budgets or marketing teams of large corporations. Because of this, many smaller businesses don’t even bother trying to compete.
By Michael Bates, Lead Project Manager
When it comes time to launch your shiny new eCommerce site, you’ll likely be focused entirely on making sure the customer experience and integration are seamless. While the site itself is crucial, you should also be considering something equally vital:
“59% of B2B buyers and sellers prefer not to interact with a sales rep and 74% find buying from a website more convenient.” —Forrester
SMB manufacturers and distributors have traditionally faced difficulty in the world of eCommerce, in large part due to a high volume of product offerings and the complex pricing structure that goes along with them. And in a B2B or wholesale environment, pricing becomes even more daunting when considering different pricing situations for different customers. While this information is housed neatly in the manufacturer or distributor’s ERP, getting this information out of the ERP and into an eCommerce site has resulted in a data entry and rekeying nightmare or an altogether non-existent online sales presence. So fax, phone or mail has remained the name of the order game for B2B eCommerce.
When done right, your website can serve as a 24/7, always-on salesperson, managing information requests, qualifying leads, and converting leads to customers. When you create great content and add tools to automate repetitive sales tasks, your website can take over some of the heavy lifting, saving your human salespeople for where they’re needed in the field.
Every online retailer is competing for consumers’ dollars and trying to make their brand stand out. No eCommerce site is perfect, especially when it first goes live, but as your site matures you should appear higher in the search results. If you’re not getting the business you want, assess the possible issues – often, the culprit is bad data hygiene.
Today’s B2B customers expect a B2C experience when they visit your eCommerce site. But deciding to sell to consumers in addition to your distributor network is a big leap with several considerations. Channel conflict is an issue for many companies, especially with the internet allowing anyone to sell via the web; it might be difficult to start selling to consumers without upsetting your existing distributor partners – they may see it as competition, so minimize channel conflict where possible.
By Brit Finnegan, Lead Designer and SEO Manager
There’s no denying that buyers are more and more frequently turning to online and mobile searches to find the products and services that best fit their needs. And while SEO is an important part of any website, it’s especially important for eCommerce retailers, as the ability to attract new customers and keep existing customers coming back to a site can offer a huge competitive advantage.
B2B eCommerce sites can be powerful tools to improve search engine rankings. Here are several tips to help your online business rank higher in search results – and outrank the competition.
ERP, which stands for ‘enterprise resource planning,’ is the software businesses use to manage their daily activities. ERP systems link and define business processes, enabling a seamless flow of data; by combining data from multiple sources, ERP systems eliminate duplicate information and data re-entry errors to provide accurate and up-to-date information. ERP systems are essential for businesses of all sizes and in all industries.
What happens after your customers place orders on your eCommerce website? Do you have a manual process wherein you print orders out and dig through your inventory before you can ship products to customers? Do you have issues with delayed shipments, out-of-stock inventory you weren’t aware of, or returns because of fulfillment errors?
Small and mid-sized businesses should be able to hold their own against their larger competitors when it comes to eCommerce, but sometimes simply building the website is cost-prohibitive, never mind integrating it with your existing ERP. Working with a major eCommerce software provider such as Magento, Shopify, or Big Commerce requires custom-built integration and synchronization with your ERP system, which means you might pay a lot more than you bargained for. (And that doesn’t even consider the cost of site design and SEO.)
By Torre Tribout, President, Sniperdyne
In the past, many SMB manufacturers and distributors did not see a need for eCommerce. But with the emergence of new and affordable technology, SMBs are now fully embracing eCommerce as a competitive advantage.
In the past, if you wanted to sell products online, you spent a ton of money with your marketing or advertising agency to build your storefront. While many businesses still use those resources for their eCommerce websites, integrating your shop with your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system now requires working with someone with a deep understanding of how integrations work. Why? Because the typical marketing or ad agency doesn’t have the knowledge, staff, or technology to connect your eCommerce website to your existing ERP system.
A well-synchronized ERP-eCommerce infrastructure increases the volume of parts your sales reps can sell, improving their ability to compete (and preventing them from going to your competitor).