Pinterest has the potential to be the most valuable social media platform for businesses. Ninety-three percent of members use the platform to plan purchases! Pinterest’s unique user base of over 73 million members are looking to spend money on their passion projects and dreams. [Source]

What is Pinterest?

Pinterest is a virtual pinboard where users “Pin” images of:

• things they are planning to do
• things they would like to buy 
• and most importantly, things they are dreaming of doing 

The images are “pinned” to boards to keep ideas and projects organized. Images are linked back to a website or blog post, offering relevant content for the user to easily find and go back to later. In addition to pinning, Pinterest users can also “follow” other “pinners” and individual boards.

Pinterest posts are a creative journey - planning and dreaming about life experiences. Boards span a huge spectrum of interests including:

• food/drink
• crafts/DIY
• home decor
• technology
• humour
• holidays
• events
• travel

So, why should small and medium sized businesses focus on Pinterest as a promising social media marketing platform? 

Here’s some stats on how and why people use Pinterest:

As a business, you cannot afford to miss out on this amazing opportunity to reach potential customers who WANT to spend their money. Pinterest users, more than any other group on social media, are shoppers. They use Pinterest to find inspiration for their next project and are actively seeking products/services to purchase. Adding Pinterest to your social media marketing plan extends your business’ reach into an extremely valuable market segment. 

How to get Pinterest working for your business:

Create a plan - Any marketing effort should be guided by a plan based on your customers and target market. 

Create boards with categories - Using your market research, create 7-10 boards that your target audience would find useful and interesting.

Curate and create pins - Aim to have at least 20-30 pins on each board. To add pins, you can choose photos/articles you find online, upload your own photos, or use a design tool like Canva to create unique pins.

Here’s how to create pins that will help drive traffic to your website:

• Describe your pins well so they can be easily found through search. Balance “real voice” with relevant key words to provide more info about the pin. Avoid overusing keywords as this could flag the pin as spam. 
• Use eye-catching images. Pinterest has a useful guide on how to create great pins.
• Pins that link back to useful content perform well on Pinterest. For example, a freelance photographer might create a Pin to link to their blog post “How to take better photos with an iPhone”
• “Repin" from reputable sources. Find leaders in your industry and “repin” their articles, blog posts, and photos. Follow their boards and interact with them through comments/likes. 
• Use Rich Pins - These are pins with extra information. For example, a Product Rich Pin includes real time pricing, availability and where to buy. Pinners may also get notifications when prices drop more than 10%. You’ll have to apply for rich pins with Pinterest. click here for more info
• Avoid time sensitive information on your pins. Pins tend to be “repinned” for weeks and months after the original pin (engagement on a Facebook or Twitter post only lasts for a few days). For example, a one-day sale that a retail store is promoting on Facebook might get lost on Pinterest, only be “repinned” when it is no longer valid, months later.
• Create a mix of pins from your website and other sources. 
• ​Enable Pinterest on your website - Two thirds of all content pinned comes business websites. Ensure customers can pin your products from your website and content from your blog.

Let everyone know you’re on Pinterest - Post to your other social media platforms that your business is now on Pinterest. Include a few recent pins in your email newsletter.

Be consistent - Pin daily. The more you pin, the further your reach. Regularly follow new “Pinners” and Boards. Comment and participate in Group Boards. 

Use Pinterest Analytics - Pinterest’s own analytics system is very informative and offers great insight into your Pinterest activity. Once you get going, check your analytics to see what works, what doesn’t and then fine tune your strategy. 

Buyable Pins - Pinterest recently launched Buyable Pins for US-based retailers (it is not yet available in Canada). Buyable Pins will further increase sales, confirming the marketing promise of Pinterest. Stay tuned to the PowerStores blog for updates on Buyable Pins coming to Canada!

Conclusion

Pinterest’s unique combination of eye-catching images with useful content attracts doers, dreamers and shoppers. Pinterest’s unique user-base has the potential to make it the most valuable social media marketing platform for businesses today. Using Pinterest for your business not only increases your reach, it also helps you put your products/services in front of people who are looking to buy them. If your business hasn’t already, signup and get pinning to take advantage of Pinterest’s social media marketing power. 

Inforgraphic Sources: MillwardBrown, fortune.com

What is SEO?

Your new website can be an essential tool for your business’s marketing strategy. But in order to make the most of your website, you need people to find it!

Search engines like Google help your website get found. SEO - or Search Engine Optimization - is a way to increase traffic to your website by focusing on where it appears in search engine results. Optimizing your website or web store will make it easier to find on the web.

Marketing Packages now available

Now PowerStores is offering ongoing SEO services to our customers. Our team of experts will implement both on-site and off-site optimization of your business.

Choose the marketing plan that’s right for you:

Ongoing Services

Improving your site’s performance through optimization is a continual process. We offer monthly ongoing services to address your business needs and consistently optimize the online presence of your business. Choose from a monthly plan starting as low as $425 per month, or purchase 6 months upfront and we will waive the initial setup fees. - LEARN MORE

PowerStores is a leading cloud-based web platform designed for small and medium sized businesses. Businesses can use PowerStores and our expert support team to design, set up, manage, and grow a website or webstore.

Whether you’re starting an online business, taking your existing business online, or are ready to upgrade your website, PowerStores has all the key components for a successful digital business, all in one place:

1) Website

A website builds your brand, increases your business’s credibility and, ideally, will bring you more customers. But it’s a lot of work to build and maintain a website, even if you’re outsourcing the work.

PowerStores’ Do-It-For-Me team will design a website to reflect your brand and give your customers an informative and easy-to-use online experience. Here’s how it works:

• The PowerStores expert team will start from one of our beautiful website templates, get your inputs and preferences, and build a website that fits your business brand and needs.
• Once it's built, you can run and manage the site yourself with our easy-to-use web-based tools.

With PowerStores, anyone can have a beautiful, mobile-friendly site at the lowest rates available in the world, all within a quick delivery timeframe.

2) Webstore

Want to sell your products online? The PowerStores Do-It-For-Me Team will deliver a beautifully designed webstore, fully integrated with reputable payment gateways like PayPal and Stripe that support mobile-based transactions.

Site visitors can browse, add to cart, and make payments right from their smartphones, tablets or desktops, using our integrated, straightforward checkout process.

Then you can log into your PowerStores Workspace to:

• Manage your products, orders, and customers from one, easy-to-use online Workspace.
• Create coupons to drive more sales and draw in customers.
• Add apps from our App Store for additional features, like customer service chat, surveys and reviews.
• View reports on order activity, visitor stats, and referral sites, so you can keep tabs on your business.

PowerStores’ platform gives you all the tools you need to digitally manage your ecommerce business, from one convenient place.

3) Blog

Blogging significantly increases a website’s SEO and lands your business higher in Google search results. Whether you’re selling online or promoting your business with a website, PowerStores’ blog platform is a great way to increase traffic to your website. It’s also a great place to link to content on your website and products/services on your webstore.

Your customers will experience a seamless transition between your website and blog, while you enjoy the convenience -- and SEO benefits -- of managing both from the same platform.

4) Social Store

Use social media to get your fans onto your website and convert them into buying customers! With the Facebook Store feature on PowerStores, you can sell your products on your business Facebook page.

Consumers love to research their potential purchases online and frequently ask their social networks for advice. Your Facebook fans can easily view your products on your Facebook page, and share them with their social networks. This will increase your reach and allows you to harness the power of word-of-mouth through social media.

When your fans want more information, or are ready to make a purchase, they click on the product from your Facebook Store and are taken to your website.

Social media is vital to online success - increase your web traffic and engagement with PowerStores’ Facebook Store.

5) Loyalty Program

Once your fans become customers, it’s important to treat them right to keep them coming back. With PowerStores loyalty program, you can award points to customers who register with your website and/or make purchases. And you can decide how customers can redeem their loyalty points. A Loyalty Program helps increase customer satisfaction, customer retention and brand loyalty.

Conclusion

In today’s world, it’s imperative for businesses to have an online presence, and your website is the heart of it all.  But a static website alone is not enough. 

If you’re selling products online – whether it’s physical products, professional services, or takeout menu items – you need a secure, easy-to-use ecommerce store.  And extras like a blog, loyalty program, and social links are now critical elements to success.

And even for those businesses who are not conducting sales online, you still need your customers to find your website, learn about your business, gather the information they need to make an informed decision, and follow your call to action.

PowerStores, with our team of experts, will design and setup your online business and give you the tools you need to manage it, all with minimal cost and effort to you.  For more info, start a free trial or contact us.

Our special offer to all Canada customers -- refer your friends to PowerStores and they will get a $100 rebate on their order! Plus you will get loyalty points worth $100 added to your account for every new customer you refer!

Here’s how it works:

1. Refer a friend to PowerStores
2. Your friend gets a $100 rebate on their setup fees
3. Once your friend signs up, you get 100 Power Points!

Redeem your points for great website Add-Ons:

Your loyalty points can be redeemed for all kinds of add-ons to enhance your website, by improving design, updating content, and driving traffic.  Here are a few of the add-on's we offer (and many more to come soon):

• a new banner design
• marketing and SEO packages
• a custom .COM domain
• view a full list

100 loyalty points gets you a $100 credit toward any PowerStores add-on.  That means you could get a brand new logo, or a new banner for your homepage, for free with just one referred customer!

It's easy to share this $100 offer with your friends - GET STARTED NOW*

Note: This special offer is for Canada customers only

With PowerStores’ newest upgrades to its shipping module, you can set up your shipping fees and logistics rules on a postal code level. This upgraded shipping feature can give you ultimate flexibility -- to set the shipping charges and delivery ranges that work best for your business.  

Here’s why you want to do this, and why it will save you money and headache.

1) Set shipping fees based on postal code

Large delivery services like Fedex and DHL will charge you, the seller, different shipping rates depending on where your customer is.  With postal-code based shipping, your PowerStores website can determine how much to charge your customers for shipping fees, based on the postal code entered by the customer during checkout. 

Your delivery service can provide you with a spreadsheet of rates by postal code, which you can upload to your PowerStores workspace (and we can help you with that!) So you will never lose money on shipping to far away or rural customers.

2) Ship Locally

If your business isn’t ready to expand nationwide or worldwide just yet, you can now restrict your delivery area to certain zip/postal codes. This feature is great for local businesses who only want to deliver within their city, i.e. a bakery who can only guarantee freshness with a one-day delivery window.

You can offer shipping to as many or as few postal codes as you like. Customers will only be able to complete a purchase if their postal code matches the postal codes you have inputted into your PowerStores workspace.

3) Set weight-based or price-based shipping rates by postal code

You can also determine how your shipping rates are calculated, whether it’s based on the weight of your product or the price of the product. Then you can charge higher shipping rates for heavier or more expensive products, to compensate for the increase in postal/delivery insurance. PowerStores allows you to create up to 9 different shipping rate slabs, to cover a range of weights or prices, and to set up the shipping fees by postal code AND by slab.

This advanced method of calculating shipping fees for your customers will help you to ensure you don’t discover hidden costs charged by the delivery company, after it’s too late to charge the customer.

Conclusion

Now you can easily manage where your business ships to, which shipping method, and how the shipping fees are calculated, based on what suits your business the most. Our new postal code-based shipping feature stacks well against the competition and was created with shipping flexibility in mind.  And the PowerStores team will help you set it up for your PowerStore in no time!

If your business is ready to activate postal code-based shipping for your PowerStore, please email support@powerstores.com to learn how to enable this feature on your workspace.

PowerStores announces the launch of its most recent feature, the Facebook Store. All PowerStores customers will now be able to launch their Facebook store with a few clicks. Once the Facebook store feature has been activated, you can sell products from your PowerStore on your business' Facebook page.

Take advantage of one of social media’s most influential giants and get your fans purchasing directly from your Facebook business page. Increase your brand reach and awareness by letting your customers easily share and recommend products to their network of Facebook friends.

Boost E-commerce Sales with PowerStores’ New Facebook Store Feature

Utilizing Facebook for your business is a great way to increase your e-commerce sales. One of the greatest influencing factors in Google's search rankings is Facebook shares. PowerStores' Facebook Store feature makes it simple for your customers to share your products on their timeline, with their friends.

In this digital age, consumers readily rely on the opinions of their social networks when it comes to making a purchasing decision (50% of shoppers have made a purchase based on a recommendation through a social media network*). Your customers are your best brand ambassadors and with the addition of purchasing power right from your Facebook page, it’s now easier than ever to share product purchases and recommendations.

In addition, 51% of Facebook users are more likely to buy the products of brands they follow online*. Make this easier for your customers by activating your Facebook store today!

*Source - Yahoo Small Business

The Facebook store feature is FREE for all PowerStores customers. Watch this video tutorial to learn how to activate your Facebook store!

Or for step-by-step written instructions, view our tutorial.

This article is the third in a series about marketing on Instagram.

Do you want to boost your Instagram marketing effort? Attract more fans and engage existing followers? Host an Instagram contest! 70% of Instagram users have already participated in a contest on Instagram or would be willing to do so (according to the Iconosquare 2015 Instagram study). Instagrammers enjoy engaging with brands and appreciate companies who value customer interaction. It’s easy to overlook an Instagram contest, but it has proven valuable for small business marketing.



Why host an Instagram contest?

Hosting a contest can increase your followers, likes, and overall engagement. A creative, thoughtful giveaway will reach your target audience and increase your Instagram stats. One contest can create the same interest and engagement as months of your regularly scheduled content. It can also get your customers creating interesting and relevant content for you.

The benefits of a well-executed contest will extend beyond the length of the contest, so it’s important to create a clear plan.



Step 1: Create and plan 



Choose the target market, prize, type of contest, and theme.



Target Market: Get a clear idea of who will be interested in your contest, and who you want to participate. Once you have the ideal contest participant in your head, research what they post on Instagram and which hashtags they use to guide you. Targeting the right audience is vital to your contest success.



Prize: Give away an awesome prize. Choose something your followers are going to get really excited about. To keep the focus on your business, make sure the prize is related to you. If you’re a company with one product/service, give that away. If you have a lot of products/services, give a gift card or a dollar value to spend at your business. PowerStores clients can give away coupon codes and Loyalty Reward Points. This ensures your contest entrants are genuinely interested in your brand. Other options include tickets to trade shows and industry-related events. Decide how the winner will be selected (public/private vote, random selection, your favourite, etc). To continue reaping rewards after the contest is finished, you want to attract those who have potential to be interested in your brand (not someone who is only interested in winning an iPad). 



Contest Rules & Structure: Think about how the rules of your contest can help with your marketing strategy.  Here are some ideas we recommend.


1. Select an interesting theme related to your business or industry. Get creative with your theme and encourage your followers to have fun. 


2. Choose a brand or contest-relevant hashtag that participants must use to enter their posts. This is the best way to have all submissions organized in one place for reposting entries, selecting winners and for people to view all submissions.


3. Content that your customer creates for you has high value. If you want to take advantage of this precious resource, make user-generated content a mandatory qualifier for your contest. 



You can host a contest based on likes and/or follows, which means that users who “like” your photo or “follow” you are automatically entered into the contest. This is an easy way to host a contest and doesn’t require much planning. Because it’s simple to enter, it will get you likes and followers. The drawbacks to like/follow contests are that they will attract people who aren’t members of your target audience, and that contestants aren’t creating any content for you to use. This type of contest may not create future engagement on your Instagram feed or in your community. 



Other types of contests include reposting or comment-based entry. Entrants must repost your contest photo or comment on one of your posts to qualify for your giveaway. These entry methods have more interaction than like/follow contests but don’t come with the valuable user-created content of a photo contest. 

You can also use a combination of requirements for entry into your contest. For example, contest entrants must like a photo, follow your brand AND comment on the contest post. However, one of the most common reasons why contests fail is that there are too many requirements for entry. Find a sweet spot between too easy and too difficult to ensure maximum, quality entries. 



Helpful Tip - No matter what kind of contest you host, always require a “follow” for entry. This is a simple yet effective way to increase your potential future engagement. 



Step 2: Prep fans 



Once you've decided on the type of contest, a fun theme and a cool prize, let your customers and followers know about the upcoming opportunity. In the weeks leading up to your contest, give your fans the heads up that soon they can participate to win an amazing prize. Before launch, advertise the contest regularly on social media, email campaigns, your website, and in-store. Use your Instagram bio space to promote the contest while it’s happening. To create some buzz, encourage your fans to spread the word or offer an added incentive to anyone who shares your contest post.  



Step 3: Launch



Before you start your contest, ask a friend or two to go through the contest steps from start to finish. How easy or difficult was the entry process? Did you understand the rules and how to qualify? Was the prize motivating? Do you know when it starts, ends, and how the winner is chosen? This will give you an idea of how your contest is received by others and how you can make it easier and more lucrative to participate.

 On day one of your Instagram contest, give your followers all the info they need to enter. Create an eye-catching post with a high-quality photo of the prize. If you’re giving away a gift card, get creative to keep it interesting! In addition to the prize photo, the post should also include start/end date, qualifications for entry, rules, winner selection, hashtags, and other contest details. Another reason for an unsuccessful contest is misunderstanding how to enter. To avoid losing participants, clearly state how to enter and what to expect.

In addition to the contest-entry hashtag, the launch post should also include other fitting hashtags. Refer to your target audience research in the planning phase to ensure your contest execution is on track. If you’ve been hash tagging for a while, you may already know which general hashtags your target audience follows and uses. Add popular/keyword hashtags relevant to your contest and frequently used by the Instagrammers you want to engage. You can also include general contest hashtags but keep in mind this may attract contest-seekers only. You’ll have more success with general contest hashtags if your contest is easy to enter or appeals to a broad audience. Popular general hashtags are: #contest #photocontest #giveaway #entertowin #contestgram #contestgiveaway #contestday. More on Instagram hashtags for marketing here.

This Instagram contest was hosted by PowerStores customer My Envy Box, and is a great example of a well hash-tagged contest.

Click here to read Instagram’s requirements for hosting promotions on their app. 



Step 4: Maintenance 



Give the contest enough running time to garner attention and entries, but not so long that people lose interest. Two to four weeks is the general guideline for an average contest, ensuring ample promotion before the start date. If you’re running a photo contest, you can promote throughout the contest by reposting submissions. Continue to repost even after the winner has been announced, to show appreciation and maintain the connection you established with your fans during the contest. 



Conclusion

Carefully crafting and hosting an Instagram contest can boost your social media stats. Get creative and have fun with your followers. Instagrammers appreciate brands who want to get connected and see the world from their customers’ view. Find your like-minded fans and get them thoughtfully engaged with a fun contest!

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6 Tips on Getting Started with Instagram for your Business

3 Essentials for your Instagram Marketing Plan

Today PowerStores launched the ability to download a list of customers who added a product to their shopping cart on your ecommerce website and then left without paying for their order. This is called an “abandoned cart”.

What can you do with this abandoned cart list? Well, this gives you a lead on a potential order! You now have an opportunity to contact these visitors and close the deal.

Here are some ideas of what you can do with your abandoned cart list:

• Send them a reminder email
• Give them a discount code to help turn their indecision into a sale!
• Phone them!

When you download the abandoned cart list, each entry will include a link which you can send to your customer. She can click the link to open her filled shopping cart, with her order ready to be paid for. It’s so easy for customers to complete their order with this link!

For more information on how to access your abandoned cart list, view our support article.

You already know that marketing is essential for your business. And if you’ve done any marketing for your small business, you also know that social media is an important part of the overall strategy. The photo-sharing app Instagram is a growing force in social media, especially for business. Research shows that Instagrammers love to shop - more than people on Facebook, who use the older social media site mostly to stay connected with friends and family. So if you haven’t already, it’s time to get your business on Instagram.

We’ve covered the basics here, so now that your Instagram business page is up and running, it’s time to make a plan to achieve your marketing goals. This post covers three essentials to include when creating your Instagram marketing strategy.

1. Use Hashtags!

There a lot of ways you can use hashtags to promote your brand and get more followers.  First off, some examples of the types of hashtags you’ll want to use.

Trending hashtags - Trending hashtags are the topics that people are currently discussing. They can be trending in a specific community/industry/country or trending across all of Instagram. The use of trending hashtags can help increase your exposure to non-followers. It’s best to use them when you find one related to your business. When that happens, switch out your regularly scheduled post for the trending hashtag to reach like-minded Instagrammers. Last week, #nationalsiblingday was trending. This adorable non-profit in New York City got in on the action. 

Top Hashtags – These are the most commonly used hashtags on Instagram. Examples of consistently popular hashtags include #love #picoftheday #fashion #friends #food #repost #beauty.

To see the overall top 100 Instagram hashtags, click here. 

To see a sample of top hashtags sorted by industry, click here.

It’s useful to hashtag your posts with one or two popular hashtags to reach non-followers. Use both general and industry-specific hashtags to maximize your reach.

Brand hashtags - It’s almost always best to use your brand name here. For example, #powerstores. In some cases, a short and clever slogan can work (KitKat uses #haveabreak), but it’s best to do some research beforehand. Include your brand hashtag on your profile page so anyone viewing your feed will see it.

Campaign hashtags - Hashtags for marketing campaigns or contests. Choose a short phrase that captures the essence of the campaign. Make a requirement for entering a contest or participating in a campaign.

Keyword hashtags - These are general hashtags used to describe the content of your post. They describe products and lifestyle.

Locations and events - Hashtag your geographical location (country, city, community, neighbourhood etc). Look for and use event/conference hashtags to reach fellow attendees and fans.

General tips on using hashtags - Use between 5 and 10 hashtags per post for maximum exposure. Any more and risk putting your followers off by appearing obnoxious (this goes for posting more than once a day, too). Use a few different types of hashtags to best describe what’s happening in your post. Knowing which ones to use can be tricky, so when getting started, check out what other businesses in your industry are up to on Instagram. Follow industry leaders, businesses you admire, and customers you appreciate. Research a hashtag you’re considering by typing it in the Instagram search field to see how popular it is and what it’s already used for.

For extra help, hashtagify.me lets you search a hashtag then gives you related, popular hashtags. It can help you find trends and recommend additional hashtags that may be relevant to your post.

2. Show Appreciation

As with all social media platforms, a grassroots marketing plan includes engaging with your customers. This is especially true for Instagram. A great tactic to increase overall engagement and attract more followers is customer appreciation. Re-posting followers’ content shows you’re listening and value their outlook on your brand. A popular campaign by Chobani yogurt showcases delicious food creations made with their products, by their customers. They encourage followers to get creative with their product then post the photo with a branded hashtag (#creationaday). Chobani re-posts the photo with a shout-out to the creator.

While showing the love is bound to get you more followers, the value of appreciation goes beyond customer loyalty. Your customer has saved you time by creating valuable content that genuinely shows how your product or service is actually used. It’s also great insight into what people love about your brand.

Instagram doesn’t give you the ability re-share your followers’ content, but Repost and Regram are two popular apps you can download that will. The free versions of these apps add a watermark to re-posted content and paid versions allows multiple Instagram accounts. Check your mobile’s app store to see what’s available.

There are other ways to show appreciation that work. 41% of Instagramers would follow a brand to benefit from special offers. Reward your followers with exclusive promotions, discount codes, sneak-previews of product launches or priority access to new services. Offer giveaways – such as your products/services, tickets to food & beverage shows, fashion shows, concerts, or other events of interest to your fans. Offering quality benefits exclusively to your Instagram followers will encourage them to never miss a post!

3. Measure what works

Don’t let the effort of creating content, researching hashtags and hosting promotions go to waste. You’ll want to measure how each of your strategies affects the number of likes, followers and comments received. Analytics are the key to refining your marketing plan and understanding what works for your business. Then you can make tweaks in response to how different strategies affect your metrics.

Iconosquare is the most recommended analytics tool for Instagram. Get your basic statistics and analytics to hone your marketing plan. Union Metrics offers a free checkup of your Instagram account which will give you a few pieces of valuable information at no cost. Collec.to’s free plan provides the same basic stats. These platforms also offer paid plans to get additional features to manage your Instagram account.

Conclusion

Instagram is great for business because users want to get involved with the companies they buy from. Instagrammers love to engage and are very active on what’s becoming one of the most popular social media apps in the world. Once you incorporate these essentials into your marketing plan, your business will get the most out of Instagram.

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Related Articles

6 Tips on Getting Started with Instagram for Your Business

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Last November, Google announced that it would be labelling and promoting "mobile-friendly websites" in their search results. This was in response to the fact that 80% of Google searches are performed on a mobile device. People are moving away from their desktops and spending more time on smartphones and tablets. As technology improves, mobile devices are getting better at handling tasks which were once reserved for desktop computers.

On April 21, in less than four weeks from now, Google will update its search algorithm to include mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor for websites.

As stated on Google's official blog:

“This change...will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.”

If your website or webstore isn’t mobile-friendly by April 21, it will take a big dive in Google’s search results, which could significantly impact your website traffic.

If you’re already a PowerStores customer, you can rest easy. All of our themes are responsive, automatically giving your website or webstore the “Mobile-Friendly” label. Your business will rank higher in Google’s search and customers will have a hassle-free experience on your website.

Is your website not mobile-friendly? Visit www.powerstores.com and get a new website!

Instagram is a photo sharing app that has taken the social media space by storm! Users post photos and short videos to share any and all aspects of their lives with friends, family and fans. Before posting photos, Instagram users can easily enhance them using filters. Each filter has a different effect on the photo like adding more contrast, light, shadows, tint or vignette edges, black and white/sepia options. Take a picture with your smartphone, add a filter and share it with the world.

Brands have discovered that Instagram is way to communicate with their current customers and reach potential customers in a fun and unique way. Because Instagram is one of the top ten most popular smartphone apps, it’s an easy way to reach your customers and target market. Create a buzz around your product and engage your community to increase brand awareness and loyalty with this popular and growing photo sharing tool.

As part of a three-part blog series on Instagram, here are some basic guidelines to get your business’s Instagram account started off on the right foot.

1) Communicate your brand consistently. 

What is your business hoping to achieve with Instagram? More followers? Increased product sales? Brand awareness? Know what your main objectives are and work toward them with every single post.

Instagram is a great way to visually communicate your brand’s values through relevant, eye-catching images. These posts can be funny, inspirational, educational, or simply beautiful to look at, as long as they promote your brand image and align with your business goals.

2) Connect your Instagram account with any other social media you use.

Facebook and Twitter will automatically repost your Instagram photos to your existing fans and followers. Link all of your accounts and let all of your social networks know you’re on Instagram to build your initial following.

Learn how to link your social networks and more on linking to your Facebook page.

3) Post a good mix of business and fun images. 

Business images promote your products and show them in action. These are a great way to start a conversation about your product and interact with your customers. However, your followers will get bored by seeing posts that only promote products and feel sales-pitchy. Connect with your followers on a personal level. Share the faces behind your company at work and play. Your followers will appreciate an inside glimpse of your company’s day-to-day life and culture.

4) Use #Hashtags. 

This is the best way for non-followers to find your photos. Hashtags are words or phrases used to categorize posts making them searchable by subject. For example, if you take a photo of a beach and add the hashtag #beach, it will come up in an Instagram search by anyone looking for beach-related posts.

Use hashtags to describe your post and further convey your brand’s message, and it will help increase visibility of your photos.

5) Time your posts for the most engagement.

Post consistently, when your followers are likely to have down-time. Don’t post too often, once a day with a purposeful message is enough to engage your followers.

6) Engage with your followers.

Reply to comments on your posts. Like, comment and re-post your followers’ posts to build brand loyalty and attract new followers and potential customers.

These beginner tips will help get you started with your first posts and create a foundation for your business’s Instagram presence. Stay tuned to the PowerStores blog to learn more about using Instagram for your business. Future posts will cover marketing with Instagram, tools to help you get the most out of Instagram, and integrating Instagram with your website/webstore. Happy Instagramming!

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Most owners of online stores typically run extensive promotions and marketing campaigns to capitalise on the festive season at the end of the year, and watch with delight as their sales volume soars. You are likely one of them.

Now that you have set up your promotions and campaigns for the peak shopping season, it’s time to focus on another equally important element for success - Customer Satisfaction!

If you had any reason to wonder just how important customer satisfaction is to your ecommerce business, we have compiled the top 5 reasons just for you!

1.Satisfied customers are the ones who return

As obvious as it may sound, it’s important to always keep in mind that only those customers who are satisfied with your products and service are likely to return for more. Of course, not every satisfied customer will become a repeat customer, but it’s almost certain that a dissatisfied customer will never return, especially given the large variety of options available in today’s highly competitive market.

2. Returning customers are cheaper to retain than acquiring new customers

If you’ve ever run a successful marketing campaign, you are well aware of the high cost of customer acquisition. The cost involved in getting a satisfied customer to return to your website is a lot cheaper than the marketing spend required to acquire new customers. One thing successful businesses have in common the world over is a high volume of returning customers. And, as I’ve already said, the only customers who are likely to return are the satisfied ones.

3. You can make it part of your brand’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

As you already know, in today’s highly competitive market, customers have a number of businesses to chose from to satisfy the exact same need. Good customer service can often become one of a brand’s USPs that customers take into account when making their choice. Price  is of course an important differentiator, especially for first-time customers - but research has shown that very often, people are willing to pay a slightly higher price for better customer service.

4. It leads to customer loyalty, increasing Customer Lifetime Value

The more frequently a customer returns to your store, the more value he or she creates for you. Your Sale Cost reduces with regard to that customer, while your Sale Value keeps increasing. The longer you can keep a customer satisfied, the more you stand to gain from them.

5. It affects your Online Brand Reputation

Research shows that more and more online buyers are depending upon product reviews and customer testimonials to make their purchase decisions. The more positive reviews you have, the higher your chances of acquiring a sale. On the other hand, negative reviews will turn away customers in a devastatingly efficient way.  So when you start getting those great customer reviews, be sure to post them on your website for all to see!

Conclusion: It's Worth It!

With these important reasons in mind, be sure you go the extra mile to please your customers. Fulfil your orders quickly, communicate well with your customers, ensure your products are high quality and well packaged – all with a goal of ensuring the highest levels of customer satisfaction. You'll be glad you did it! And your customers will too!

After you get your business online, the first thing you’ll likely want is to have people find it. One way to do this is advertising and marketing, for sure.  But one critical (and free) step you should do right away -- once your website is ready and optimized for SEO -- is to index your site with Google, so that people can find your site through search. 

Think for a minute about how you shop online. You search for the product you want in a search engine like Google, and then click on links that show up as results.  So you need YOUR business to show up for people who are looking for YOUR products and services in the same way. 

As we’ve said before, Google is by far the most popular search engine today, with 67%+ of all searches happening there, so it makes sense to focus your attention on Google’s search engine.  You can make sure your site shows up on Google quickly by indexing it.

What is indexing?

It’s a way of telling Google that your website exists. Google’s search bot may eventually find and index your site, but you really have no idea how long it will take, it could take weeks or more.  So this is a way to speed up that process.

How to index your site with Google

Here are the steps:

1) Go to Google Webmaster Tools site. You will need to sign in with a Google Account. If you don’t already have one, you will need to create one.

2) Click on the ‘Add a Site’ button and submit your website URL.

3) You will be given different options to verify that you are the owner of the site. The easiest option is to choose the “HTML tag” option under “Alternate Methods”. You will be given a code that you need to copy-paste in the meta tag of your home page.

PowerStores clients, to paste the HTML tag into your homepage, go to Website > Site Pages in your workspace and select “Home” page, or ask your Guru for help with this. 

4) Once the site is verified, you will get an email from Google that looks like this:

This email will help you set up your Google Webmaster Account.

If you are unsure of how to do the set up, there are helpful links to explain the whole process in easy-to-follow-steps. Whether you make use of the other options or not, be sure to submit the sitemap of your online store.

Once you have set up your account, your website, along with all its pages, will get indexed by Google soon thereafter. And once your site is indexed, it will show up in search results for searches that are relevant to your business.

How is indexing different from SEO?

SEO is about page rank, which is the next step. First, your site needs to be indexed.

Note that indexing does not guarantee your website will appear on the first page of Google search results.  It only guarantees that it WILL show up on relevant search results.  It won’t be missed. 

For a new website, it’s highly unlikely you will show up on the first page right from the start. You need to work on your SEO to get it moving up the Page Rank, hopefully to the first page, for your most important keywords.

Conclusion

Indexing your site with Google is a key and simple first step to getting your site noticed by Google's search engine.  

PowerStores customers, we’re now offering an SEO marketing package, where we will make sure that your site has all the right title tags and meta descriptions, and we will take care of indexing your site on Google for you. Contact support@powerstores.com or your Guru for more information!

Universal Hockey is a professional hockey training institute based in Canada, owned and run by Daniel Bochner. This is his story.

Daniel is a professional hockey player-turned-elite trainer. With his business, Daniel has been offering elite camps, private/semi-private lessons, clinics, consulting, coach mentoring, and off-ice training, amongst other professional training services, for many years now. He has had plenty of clients and has been successful for a long time before he decided to get online with PowerStores.

And yet, Daniel says PowerStores changed everything for him!

It sounds a bit dramatic, but he is very clear in his explanation. “I am a hockey player and trainer. That’s what I do. But I used to spend so much time in the administration side of my business, that it sapped the joy out my work. You see, customers would show up to classes and pay with cash or cheque in person. It was really difficult to manage because I had to keep track of everyone’s information on the spot, handle transactions, update records, and get ready to teach at all the same time. Saying that it was inconvenient is an understatement.”

So, when he decided to get a website which allowed for customers to book their classes and pay online, everything changed and the whole process became streamlined. Now, he spends more time with the students on teaching and training, and both he and his students are happier for it!

So, how did PowerStores work for Daniel?

In Daniel’s own words, “PowerStores was great from step 1 right up to the finish line. They helped me design and setup my site, and their ongoing support when I need it is always fast and helpful.”

According to Daniel, as much as it was a hassle to collect payments from his students, he also didn’t want the hassle of chasing web developers to get his website up and running - or the cost of paying someone each time he wanted to make changes to the dates and availability of his classes, update latest events and news, etc.

He needed a system that was easy, quick, and cost-effective, and PowerStores checked all the right boxes. And the customer support he has received from PowerStores has made the whole experience easy and even - in his words - enjoyable!

Thank you, Daniel! We are here to make sure your online store succeeds and helps your business to grow! We wish you all the very best!

We have talked about why online businesses need Marketing Analytics and what kind of data to look for in Marketing Analytics. Now, let’s look at some specific tools that you can use to gain insight into the performance of your website as well as marketing campaigns.

1) Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the best website analytics tools, and it’s free! You can gain insight into many different parameters related to user behaviour on your website, such as:

• Deep insights into your audience - where they are coming from, their demographics and interests, the devices they use, etc.
• An overview of their usage of your site - number of pages, time spent, etc.
• Tracking your social marketing campaigns and how much traffic they have brought to the site, and
• Details of all sales on your website, to help you identify marketing strategies that work.

Google Analytics also offers real-time analytics, in-page analytics and visitor flow visualisation that can have a deep impact on understanding how well the website is performing and which elements need to be improved.

2) Compete

Compete is a paid tool and its prices vary based on the types of features you need. Compete offers comprehensive information on keywords that attract your target audience to your website as well as your competitors’ websites. Such information can be very useful in creating advertising campaigns that provide a high Return On Investment (ROI).

You can also find out where viewer came from and where they go, for both your website and those of your competitors. This can help you identify the best referral websites to place your ads or content on as well as understand how customers behave when they leave the website.

3) Google Analytics Content Experiments

Formerly known as Google Website Optimizer, Content Experiments is now part of Google Analytics. Content Experiments enable you to test all different segments of your website to identify the best options. For instance, you can try different layouts, images and content on different pages of your website in rotation and easily find out which ones or which combinations perform better than the others. This will help ensure that all elements on your website are as optimised as possible.

4) KISSinsights

KISSinsights is a free survey tool offered by KISSmetrics. It enables you to reach out to your customers directly and get answers to important questions like:

• What are visitors attempting to do on your website?
• Are they able to do it or not?
• How satisfied are they?

KISSinsights is an extremely simple survey tool, and its best advantage is that it’s short and does not impose on your visitors for too long, while providing you with the most important insights you need into their opinion and experience of your website.

5) Social Media Tools

Let’s look at tools for two of the most popular social networks: Facebook and Twitter

Facebook: Page Insights

If you have a Facebook Page for your Brand, Page Insights can provide you with a whole lot of information about it.

You will find the Insights tab in the top left corner of your Facebook Page. 

Here you will get deep insight into the Likes your Page has received, your Posts that have been popular, the kind of audience your page attracts and their ages, genders and locations. Such information can be very useful in targeting your Facebook ads and promotions.

Twitter: Twitalyzer

Similar to Facebook Insights, Twitalyzer offers comprehensive insight into your number of followers, retweet insights, how often a specific account replies or engages with your brand on your Twitter feed, and more.

Conclusion

As you can see, these are tools that assist you in every aspect of your online presence and engagement - your website, your audience and your social networks. Using these tools will provide you with all the data you need to ensure the best performance of your brand on every net property.

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Wanna know what makes a CTO? Here is a little insight into the professional career of our Co-Founder and CTO, Indrajit Chowdhury.

Indrajit was first exposed to computer programming at a summer internship in the early 90’s at a research lab in the University of Wisconsin. But this was no ordinary summer job: Indrajit was at a research lab funded by the Human Genome Project, and here, he learnt how to program robotic arms. It is easy to see how such an impactful introduction to programming can easily lead to a lifetime commitment to the field, and so it was with Indrajit.

Two years later, in 1995, Indrajit found himself in New York, as part of a team of consultants who launched the website for the big media brand, Nickelodeon - which went on to become the highest trafficked kids’ website on the Internet. After that first experience in website development, Indrajit left the Nickelodeon team to flirt with what would later emerge as the second most important passion in his professional life after programming - startups!

Indrajit’s first startup experience was setting up the world’s first Internet grocery store, which was quickly followed by another half a dozen other startups in the coming decade, including a High School Sports Social Networking company, Viral Gaming via Email, Handheld “name that tune” music recognition software, and a Video Email company. 

Fast forward to the year 2000, when after watching his wife struggle to build and manage a website for her non-profit organisation, Indrajit decided to put his programming skills to work to help her.  He created an integrated solution for his wife’s NGO that included website building, online donations, and email marketing tools aimed at the NGO sector. 

This early experience of witnessing the power of software to change a small business’s future led to Indrajit co-founding PowerStores with his partner Cory York. His and Cory’s staunch belief is that Ecommerce can transform the lives of small business owners if it is made easy and accessible. 

At PowerStores, Indrajit’s responsibilities including leading product development, serving as a coach and mentor to his programmers, and technical operations management. And he and his team often stay late on Friday nights for gaming sessions and hackathons, sharing their passion for software programming!

‘No Pain, No Gain’ seems to be the way things go for everything in life, whether it’s a fitness program or even an online business. No matter what it is we want to achieve, we have to endure a painful ordeal to get it, right?

Let’s look at all the hassles you will have to go through (or already have gone through) when you want to build an ecommerce store and/or take your business online.

PAIN #1: Finding the right designer

You need someone who can translate your vision for your website in a web-ready design, while keeping in mind all branding requirements.

PAIN #2: Finding the right developer

Then you need to find a website developer who can translate the visual design into a functioning website, keeping in mind user experience and functionality.

PAIN #3: Finding the right domain-selling and hosting company

You need to decide where to buy your website’s domain name from and on whose servers you will host your website. Understanding the choices and all the features offered requires major time spent just educating yourself on all of it.

PAIN #4: Finding the right payment gateway

If you’re selling online, you have to choose a payment gateway that is right for you, based on many different technical and non-technical parameters, then have your web developer integrate it with your website.

PAIN #5: Finding the right vendor for site maintenance

Once your site is ready and launched, you will need someone who will update and maintain your website on a regular basis. Often, the developer who built your site has then disappeared when it comes time to make changes!

PAIN #6: Finding the right fulfillment partner

Finally, if you’re shipping products to customers, you will also need to find the right logistics partner and then negotiate with him to offer you a reasonable deal.

THE BIGGEST PAIN: The Cost

More than anything else, you will need to start with a large capital investment to pay for all the above-mentioned professionals and expenses.

It is easy to see why so many people are put off by the thought of taking their business online.

But imagine if this process was not as convoluted or as expensive as it is right now… Would you let anything stop you from breaking the Internet barrier and offering your goods and services to the large number of shopping buyers online?

Meet PowerStores.

PowerStores is a DIY Online Store Builder. We believe that ecommerce has the power to transform the lives of small business owners, and that it should be as easy as possible for them to have a great website where they can promote their business and sell products. That’s why we’ve created an extremely easy-to-use platform that’s as effortless as managing your Facebook page.

With PowerStores, you get pain-free access to:

1. Create your own professional-looking website yourself in a matter of minutes using our beautiful website themes.  And they're all free, even the mobile responsive ones.  
2. Or you can have us build it for you in a matter of days, at about one-third the cost you’d pay a web developer!
3. Try out many different designs, colors and other elements of look-and-feel of the website, as many times as you want until you have a website that you like - and it’s all for free!
4. Web hosting on blazing-fast Amazon servers. And the hosting cost is included in your highly affordable monthly subscription.
5. The best Payment Gateways available, like PayPal and Stripe, pre-integrated into your website. Just enter your merchant account info and you’re ready to accept payments for orders.
6. PowerStores tie-ups with several logistics partners to help you find the right fulfillment partners at reasonable rates.
7. Finally, PowerStores is such a simple platform to manage that you will be able to make any and all changes to your online store on your own. You’ll never have to rely on a developer again!

PowerStores offers a host of other features that make it easier for you to manage your website easily, like:

• Easy web-based tools to manage orders, update product info, and communicate with customers
• Integration with social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter
• Discount coupons and Loyalty programs to grow sales
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) friendly
• Blog platform hosted right on your site
• App Store with a wide range of third-party apps to plug into your site

PowerStores does not require any upfront or setup fees, so you avoid a large upfront capital investment, plus the monthly subscription prices that you pay are also extremely affordable. Check out our Pricing Page to see for yourself!

So, what are you waiting for? Join hands with PowerStores, and say good-bye to the pains of cobbling together a website and chasing elusive and expensive web developers! Set up your online store in minutes and watch as your business grows online!

Our recent blog post took a look at why you need marketing analytics and how it can help you streamline your marketing efforts. Here, we’ll explore what kind of data you need to study and how it can guide your marketing decisions.

Let’s consider what kind of data you need to mine from marketing analytics.

Website Performance: What to Track

You will have visitors coming to your online store from many different places, like Facebook, Twitter, blog, email links, organic search, Google Ads, etc. Website Analytics will not only help you indentify which channels of incoming traffic are leading to conversions (ie sales), but will also provide a large amount of valuable data like conversion rate, lifetime customer value, and cost per acquisition.

These figures can give you meaningful insight into what is performing effectively and what isn’t, thus helping you to decide how to allocate your marketing budget across various channels.

Sales: What worked?

Focus on actual sales and conversions on your website. Go as far back as possible in users’ behavior  to track down the path of clicks from how they entered to your online store all the way up to actual sales. Did a click from a text ad on Google search bring the sale? Or was it a link on Facebook? Maybe discount coupons in emails led to terrific sales!

Find out everything you can about what worked. If you compile enough data, you will start to see trends and be able to identify which channels work better than others in bringing in sales. You will also find out what kind of products the user was interested in and you can target your ads accordingly using remarketing tools. (Read more in our blog post covering remarketing).

Offline and Online Metrics: Consider Them Together

If your marketing strategy includes both online and offline marketing, it is important to ensure that the data record does not get interrupted in-between. So, for instance, if you advertise in a local newspaper or you give out leaflets with discount coupon codes on it, it is important that you keep records of these channels so that you can later combine both the online and the offline records to get a holistic picture of how well your marketing efforts are creating conversions on your online store.

There are many ways of doing this. For instance, in the case of discount coupon codes, create a separate coupon code for different channels, e.g. your Facebook ad can have the code FB123, while the code in your emails can be EM123. You can then look at the records of which codes were used to get an idea which channel was more effective in bringing in sales.

Vanity Metrics: What to Avoid

There are lots of metrics available that do not add any meaningful insight into what helps the bottom line. But easy availability of these metrics makes it very easy to get distracted by them. These metrics are called Vanity Metrics and they include elements like page views, time spent on site, number of pages visited, etc. These numbers do not add any value to your marketing strategy and are best avoided, to save time.

Social Media: Keeping a Bird’s Eye View

If there are any social media networks, like Facebook or Twitter, that you use to market your online store, it is important you use marketing analytics tools to keep a bird’s eye view of your performance there. You need not pay attention to every single like and share, but it is important to know where your audience is coming from whether the network is leading to website visitors and especially buyers, the demographic breakdown of customers who found your website through social media, etc. There are many tools that can make it easy for you to access this data, e.g. Google Analytics.

We will provide more in-depth information on various tools that can help you get the right Marketing Analytics data in our next post in this series. In the meantime, you can start identifying the most critical types of data you are going to need with regard to your own marketing efforts. Watch this space for more!

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So you have decided to start a company blog on your online store/ website to drive more traffic, promote your business and engage your target audience. But what should you write on your blog? What kind of content is considered appropriate for a business blog? And, how to create content that will benefit your brand as well as your bottom-line in the long run?

Here are 10 ideas on what to post on your company blog:

1. Tell your Story: People are inherently interested in stories, and you can use your own story to develop interest in your brand. Talk about how you got the idea, how you met your collaborators, how you came to start your business, etc. If there are some really interesting facets to your brand, talk about them - the designers, the craftsmen, the techniques, etc. Introduce the people on your team, talk about their dreams and aspirations. The more people get interested in your brand, the more they will care about it.

2. Make Announcements: Whatever announcements you may have with regard to your brand- whether it is a new product launch, a new collection, a season-ending sale, use your blog to make these announcements. The blog provides a whole new channel as well as attracts a different section of your target audience.

3. Answer your Customers’ Questions: There is an important caveat here and that is ‘before they ask them’. You are surely aware of your target audiences’needs, concerns, demands, questions, etc. with reference to your products. Address these issues long before they actually come up. Use your blog to provide all the relevant information your potential clients are likely to need with reference to your brand, company and products.

4. Educate your Customers: Apart from pre-empting the questions your potential customers may have while buying your product, you can also use your blog to educate your customers in using your product most effectively and efficiently. If you have any guides, tutorials, how-to videos, etc. post them on your blog. Not only can you use this as a ready resource when your clients make a purchase, you also develop a reputation for being concerned with customer satisfaction.

5. Get Customer Feedback: Undoubtedly, a lot of market research goes into product development. You already know what your customers want and you have developed a product to fulfill that need. How about finding out exactly how your customers will respond to your products BEFORE you launch them? Use your blog to provide sneak previews of your products and get feedback on them from the very people who are going to be using them. You will have time for fixes, changes and troubleshooting before the launch, should the need arise.

6. Create a Platform for your Customers: Use your blog to create a space dedicated to your customers. Add their pics taken with your products, post their comments and testimonials, answer questions that they may have, link to blogs they may have written about you. Your blog can become a community space to help create a community of your customers.

7. Provide Industry News and Information: This is your opportunity to establish yourself as an industry expert. Report and remark on important industry news, identify and analyse trends that you see, write your opinions on how your industry can create a greater impact.

8. Create Engagement: Fun engagement opportunities can bring tons of traffic to your blog if done right. For instance, run a photo or a caption contest on your blog. Announce the contest, provide all the rules and guidelines, keep updating the page throughout the duration of the contest and announce the winners of the contest on your blog. Use other social media networks like Facebook and emails to promote such contests. Watch as traffic increases and your brand awareness builds.

9. Follow Relevant Blogs for Ideas: Look for the market leaders and thought leaders in your industry and follow their blogs. Of course, you never want to plagiarize their content, but you can easily find out what the industry is talking about, concerned with, aspiring to, etc. and use these ideas as a starting place for your own blog post.

10. Entertain: Use your blog as a space to provide relevant entertainment to your target audience. If you find a comic strip, a funny video or a quirky experience with regards to your product, brand or industry, post in on your blog so you and your target audience can share a laugh together and bond over it.

Now, you have the secret to creating the best possible content for your business blog. Once you get going on your blog, you’ll get better at knowing what works and what doesn’t, and it’ll come as second nature to think of new post ideas.  So go ahead and blog, and you’ll be interacting with your target audience in ways that were not possible before! 

Note: PowerStores customers, go here to read about how to add a blog to your PowerStore today!

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Top 10 Reasons Why Your Online Store Needs a Blog

Do you have an online store? Then, you need a blog! Blogging is one of the most critical channels available to your business to attract new audiences, engage them, retain them, create brand loyalty, and in the long run, make your business profitable and successful.

If you were looking for one good reason to start a blog for your online store, we give you 10!

1. No-Pressure Communication: Your website needs to sell your products your ads need to drive traffic, your Facebook posts need to go viral, but your blog offers respite from these pressures and allows you to communicate whatever it is that you think might interest your target audience- news, updates, industry information, tips, company values and philosophy, tutorials, guidelines, the people behind the scenes, history and tradition associated with your products and services…. And the list goes on & on!

2. Two-Way Channel: A blog offers a platform for your target audience to engage in a meaningful conversation with you that goes beyond a ‘like’, a ‘re-tweet’ or a ‘re-pin’. A blog with a comments section offers a place to share ideas and have discussions with people who matter the most to you – your existing and potential customers.

3. Fuel for SEO: Regular updates, relevant & original content and additional tags are all things that get search engine algorithms to rank your website higher on relevant searches. Blogs also generate a lot of inbound links when they get shared- another plus for SEO.

4. Content for Social Media Marketing: The content you generate on your blog is the perfect material to share on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Newsletters, etc. These links will further help your SEO efforts.

5. Long Term Results: Most blog posts continue to produce results for years, as long as the information you have provided is original and relevant. Research shows that unlike news, blog posts are often read and referred to months, even years after they have been posted.

6. Establish Credibility and Expertise: A blog is a great way for you to establish your credibility and expertise as a thought leader in your industry. The more this perception increases, the easier it will be for your target audience to trust you and give you their business.

7. Build a Brand: Blogs go a long way in building a brand because they provide the perfect platform to share the story behind the brand. Human beings love stories and can relate to a company better if they have insight into the brand that runs deeper than just the products and services they provide.

8. Create Symbiotic Relationships: Blogs are a great way of building mutually beneficial relationships with other complementary brands and thought leaders. For example, if you sell cookware, you should easily exchange links with a recipe website and blog. This is beneficial to everyone involved - both for the brands as well as for the readers of both blogs.

9. Get Insight: While the blog provides your readers insight into your brand, it also provides you an insight into your target audience. By analyzing popular topics, clicks, shares, comments, etc. on your blog, you can gain deep insights into the needs, likes, preferences, etc. of your readers. This can go a long way in strengthening your overall marketing strategy.

10. It’s Easy! If you already run an online store, managing a blog is likely to be a breeze for you! You need no technical expertise to create and maintain a good-looking, easy-to-navigate blog. All you really need is just good content and appealing pictures to go with it.

Note: PowerStores customers, go here to read about how to add a blog to your PowerStore today!

Today PowerStores is launching one more valuable feature on our Ecommerce Platform - Blogs! You can now host your own blog on your PowerStore!

Now, you no longer need to host a blog on a third party vendor like WordPress or Blogger and link it to your website. You can now create a blog on the PowerStores platform itself, which allows you to host your blog on your own website/online store.

Here are the top 5 ways you'll benefit by having your blog reside on your own website and URL:

Benefit #1: Updating your blog with fresh content on a regular basis helps keep your website dynamic and search engine web crawlers busy - helping you increase your search engine Page Rank.

Benefit #2: Tags, keywords and fresh blog content will help reinforce the topic of your website and bring more relevant traffic to your site.

Benefit #3: People coming to your blog for content will have easy access to your website, giving you an advantage over your competition.

Benefit #4: Blog traffic will increase your overall website traffic, helping you increase your search engine Page Rank.

Benefit #5: The blog will allow you to expand the scope of interaction you have with your target audience, helping you create engagement and brand loyalty with your customers. Watch this space for more on this!

In fact, we are soon going to post a bunch of useful blog posts on the potential of blogging and how it can impact your business. We will also talk about how best to utilize this potential of your blog, what kind of content to post, how best to engage your target audience, how to market your blog to the right set of viewers, etc.

In the meantime, check out how to create your own blog on your PowerStore by watching the video above or reading the support article here.

Happy Blogging! 

So, you have set up your online store. And you are keen to spread the word and have more and more people find out about your online store. Apart from online advertising and marketing, is there anything else you can do to promote your online store? Of course!

Here are the top 5 ways you can promote your online store offline:

1. Printed Stationary

Add your online store URL on all your printed materials. Like visiting cards, your letterhead,and envelopes, invoices, receipts, packing, and labeling. Ensure that your website URL is always present when your brand name, logo or contact details appear in print.

2. Your Physical Store

If you have a brick-and-mortar store, then you already have an excellent venue to promote your online store. For most of your existing customers, an online store will be an added convenience and they are likely to take to it enthusiastically. Add your online store URL to all your signage - outside your store, window dressing, direction boards, announcement boards, etc. If your business requires your employees to wear a uniform or ID badge, add your online store’s web address on the uniform or badge. And put the URL on the shopping bags!

3. Outdoor Signage

On the other hand, if you do not have an actual store, you can still find ways to post signage for your online store.  Make use of signposts and other locations where signs are required. You can piggyback on signs for existing landmarks, by offering to pay for painting the sign and adding your brand name and URL in return.

4. Promotional Items

Many businesses invest in creating and gifting promotional items to their customers, vendors, investors, shareholders and potential customers on various occasions like festivals, anniversaries, etc. If you are one of those businesses, you now have one more vehicle to promote your online store! Add your online store URL to all promotional items and watch more and more people find out about your online business.

5. Pass out Leaflets

This is another great way to promote your store offline. Make brochures, leaflets, posters, catalogues, etc. for distribution and pass them out at locations where your target audience is likely to be found in large numbers, like the shopping mall, or the multiplex. This will be especially useful if your business is local and you cater to customers in a fixed geographical location.

So, now you have some great, cost-effective methods of promoting your online store in the offline world. Go out and try them all, then focus on the one that gives you the best results. All the best!

Marketing Analytics? What it is? Why do you need to pay any attention to it? It’s not as if online sellers are not already bombarded with enough jargon to make their heads spin!

Simply put, Marketing Analytics is analyzing the results of your marketing campaigns. You may be marketing your online store through various online channels like Facebook marketing, Google advertising, blogging, email marketing, etc. Marketing Analytics helps you analyze the results of each so that you can ensure that you are getting the best value, or the highest Return on Investment (ROI) for the time, effort and money you are spending on various marketing initiatives. Here are top 5 reasons why Marketing Analytics is critical to your success.

1. Identifying what Works:

Not all channels produce the same results. Some may bring in a lot of traffic, others may lead to higher sales, while other channels may not be adding much value to you at all. By employing Marketing Analytics, you can easily identify which channel works best for each goal.

2. Streamlining your Marketing Goals:

What is more important to you right now? Is yours a new online store that requires brand awareness and high traffic, irrespective of sales? Or do you want to focus on sales, and you’re not really concerned with many new people discover your website? Marketing Analytics will help you streamline your goals based on the kind of results each of your marketing channels is capable of producing.

3. Making the Right Investments

Most new online businesses have limited resources, so it’s extremely valuable to know how to invest those resources to get the maximum value. Once you have streamlined your goals and identified the strengths and weaknesses of all your marketing channels, you will find it a lot easier to decide which marketing channels to invest your time, effort and money into.

4. Save Money & Avoid Unnecessary Costs

If you have figured out which channels are most important to you, you can either completely stop or dramatically reduce your other marketing channels. This way, you can ensure that your resources and budget are not being wasted on initiatives that don’t contribute to the goals you are pursuing.

5. Have a Ready Toolkit

Once you have associated every channel with the type of results they are capable of producing, you have at your fingertips a ready toolkit for the future. Now going forward, no matter what short-term or long-term goal you want to achieve, you will always have ready knowledge of which marketing channel to employ to meet that specific goal.

Important Note:

It is important to also understand that online marketing is a highly dynamic field which is affected by a number of factors like seasonality, industry trends, new technology, quality of content, marketing expertise, etc. You will need to factor in these changes, trends and updates into your Marketing Analytics to ensure that you have an accurate understanding of all your marketing channels and their ability to produce specific results.

Watch this blog for more posts on this topic, including more specifics on how exactly to gather and analyze the data you have access to, for the most insightful Marketing Analytics for your business.

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If you have an online business and are like most, you’ve also set up a Facebook Page to promote your business on social media. Setting up the Page is easy, but knowing what to post there is the hard part. 

Do you see posts “go viral” on Facebook and want to know what to post on your own Page that can get the same level of exposure? Do you see other Pages get hundreds of ‘Likes’ for each and every post and wonder what their secret is? Exactly how do you determine what is the right kind of content you should be posting?!

Fret not! Here are some tips to guide you in choosing the right blend of content for your Facebook Page.

Remember these 5 things and you’ll be on your way to great posts with lots of likes:

1. It’s a Brand Page

First things first - your Facebook Page is your Brand Page. It should only contain content that is relevant to your company and your brand. This is not the place to post personal posts, opinions, rants, etc.

2. A Brand is Different from Products

While products form a very important aspect of Brand Identity, there are other elements to consider as well, like brand philosophy, vision, influences, accomplishments, press coverage, etc. Of course, you will need to post about your products, sales, news arrivals, etc., but your Facebook Page should also encompass all these aspects of your Brand Identity and not just be a catalogue of products that your company sells.

3. A Brand Belongs to an Industry

Your brand also belongs to a larger fraternity - your industry. Including news, trends, changes, etc. about your industry on your Page is a great way to be a part of the bigger picture and keep your fans informed of the larger factors that affect your industry, as well as news that your fans are likely to find interesting. For instance, if you sell organic products, posting news that a well-liked celebrity has endorsed an organic lifestyle can give you great mileage.

4. Know Your Target Audience

Just like in Advertising, the most important thing to keep in mind is your target audience. It is important to understand all sections of your target audience and know what they like. If you are selling sarees to women, think about the various activities and occasions where women like to dress up, and tailor your posts accordingly. If you are selling tees to the youth, think of their various influences – music, celebrities, etc. - and post about them. If you are selling electronic gadgets to young employees, talk about how your gadgets will help save time, improve productivity, increase efficiency, help them stay connected, etc.

5. Images Get Attention

In this age of information overload, you have very little time to connect with your target audience. Web users on social networks do not typically spend more than a few seconds on a post on their Facebook News Feed before moving on to the next one.  If your post has only text, chances are people will not take the time to read it. On the other hand, if you post a great picture of something that your Target Audience is likely to be attracted to, chances are that it will attract their attention immediately.

Here you go! Follow these 5 Basic Tips to find the right blend of content to post on your Brand’s Facebook Page and see how many likes and shares each of your posts is able to generate! 

Meet Radhika, Jagriti & Deepika. They are young, talented and passionate about what they do - providing luxury skin care. In fact, they are so passionate about it, they decided to get into business together and take their passion to the world audience. 

What they needed was an online store to launch their business. They acknowledged that technical skills were not their strong suit and were on the lookout for an easy solution to create their online store. They did not come to PowerStores first, however. They chose a different service provider who offered a similar service as PowerStores. However, there was one big drawback…

“While they did have some cool features, the biggest issue with them was efficiency and weak customer support,” says Jagriti. “I often had to talk to multiple people on the same phone call to explain what I wanted. Even the smallest queries often took days and many, many phone calls to get resolved.”

The problem, as Jagriti explains, is that it took up too much of their time and their limited resources. “This is a new business and we are only the 3 of us managing it. Spending so much time just to get our website done was simply not working out for us. We needed to spend that time getting our business up and running” she rues. 

That is when they made an executive decision to simply look for another service provider rather than continue to spend more and more time to get the website completed with their existing ecommerce platform.This is where PowerStores came in and this is the website that got created for SkinYoga.in.

“You guys have an excellent customer support team,” gushes Jagriti. “Not only did we get all the support we needed in a timely and efficient manner, your customer support Guru also provided us with a lot of insight on user experience and how to make our website better and more effective. They gave us the benefit of their extensive knowledge of how ecommerce works to ensure that our customers had the best possible experience on our site.”

However, the thing that Jagriti is most thankful for is that neither she nor her partners had to waste any time or effort in the process of setting up the website. “We would not be where we are today in the short span of time since we launched our website if we wasted all our time on the website instead of focusing on our business.”

Thanks, Jagriti! We wish you and your partners good luck in tending to and growing your business by leaps and bounds! 

So you’ve created a Facebook Page for your business, and now what? You might be thinking, how does this translate into getting more sales on my website? What do I do with this page? How can I get more “likes” and more engagement with my “fans”?

Facebook offers some great tools to help you get more out of your page.  By just putting a fraction of your marketing budget towards the following actions, you should see some exciting results. Let’s take a quick look.

1. Boost Your Posts

When you post something on your page,  not all your Facebook Page fans are going to see it every time. You can see this in the notification you get under the post, with regards to how many people were reached. You need to “boost” your post to ensure that it reaches all your fans. The good news is that this also exposes your post to the friends of your fans, who are likely to become your new fans, given that friends often have many shared interests.

So, how to Boost your Facebook Page Posts?

1. Every time you post an update on your Facebook Page, you’ll see the option ‘Boost Post’ under the post.
   


2. Clicking this button will allow you to choose the amount of money and the number of days you want to boost your post for.


3. The number of people who will see your boosted post will depend upon your chosen budget. The approximate number of viewers is provided to you when you select the budget.

2. Promote Your Page

Given the very social and casual atmosphere of Facebook, many brands (depending upon the products they sell) try to first attract their target audience to their Facebook Page to give them a taste of the culture their brand promotes. Instead of directly trying to sell products while people are busy socializing, brands often attempt to create desirability of the brand and products before attempting to get them to go to their website to make a purchase.

So, how do you get your target audience to your Facebook Page? By Using ‘Promote Page’ option! Here’s how:

1. At the top right corner of your Page, you will see a drop down menu under Build Audience. One of the options is “Promote Page”.
   


2. When you click on “Promote Page”, a dialogue box opens which allows you to choose the defining characteristics of your target audience like: Target country, Interests, Age, Gender, etc.  


3. Choose these options based on the profile of your target audience as well as the reach of your brand. For example: If you sell formal women’s clothing in India, you will choose “India” as target country, gender as “women”, age as “22+” and interests such as “fashion”, “clothing”, “formal wear”, etc.

3. Advertise on Facebook

Facebook also offers an advertising platform called “Ads Manager”. This feature provides you with far more detailed targeting options.

Here’s how to use Facebook’s Ads Manager:

1. At the top right corner of your Page, you will see a drop down menu under “Build Audience”. One of the options is “Use Ads Manager”.
   


2. Start a new ad campaign by clicking on “Create Ad”.
   


3. You will get a variety of campaign type options to choose from, eg: Page Likes, Clicks to Website, Website Conversion, etc. Make your choices based on the results you wish your campaign to produce. If this is your first Facebook ad campaign and you don’t have too many “likes” on your page yet, we recommend starting off with “Page Likes” option. This will help attract more people to your brand and help make your Page more vibrant and dynamic.
   


4. After this, you will get the opportunity to add photos, add a tag line to the image as well as write an ad text.


5. Once you have created your ad, you will get detailed targeting options including country, age, education, preference, etc. of your target audience. Make your choices based on the kind of people you think are most likely to be interested in buying your products. We recommend you limit your geographic focus to India, so that you can get more with your budget.


6. Finally, choose the budget as well as the duration of your ad campaign.


7. Then click “Submit” and your campaign will start!


8.  To follow the performance of your campaign once it starts, go to the Ads Manager and click on the campaign name.

So there! Now you know all the techniques required to promote your brand on Facebook! So, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and try these techniques to attract your target audience to your brand and watch your sales grow!

In an upcoming post, we will offer tips on what kind of content to post on your Facebook Page and how to keep your audience engaged. Be sure to look out for that blog post coming soon!

UPDATE 8/8/2014: Our post on creating the right kind of content for your Facebook Page is now up, read it here!

John Pollard, widely acknowledged as the pioneer of White Water Rafting in South India, has 5 successful projects under his belt. Starting with Dandeli in 1999 and including 2 in Coorg and 1 in Maharastra in the subsequent years, John is now plying his trade in 2 locations in Goa, a spectacular addition to the myriad attractions that this beach-side state has to offer to its tourists.

John has been extremely successful in transforming sleepy, river-side locations into thriving tourist areas, creating a host of prosperous local tourism-related businesses in his wake. However, he has had to deal with one major setback in all locations until Goa.

“My business always depended heavily on third-party promoters. Whether it was the state government or travel companies and agencies who offer tourist packages, the people who came for river rafting were always their customers, not ours,” laments John.

The main reason for this was that he had no real channel to reach out to his target audience directly. “We always had a website, but we were also always dependent on the site developer to maintain it and update it. It was not possible to use the website as a marketing channel because of the heavy reliance we had on the site developers(who were often unreliable) to keep the website vibrant, dynamic and up-to-date,” remarks John. “As a result, we were never really able to use our website to build a relationship with our existing clientele, or to promote the business to attract new customers on our own.”

So, what changed in Goa? “PowerStores,” offers John quickly. John claims that with the help of PowerStores, he was able to create a website that was exactly as he had envisaged, without making compromises. But more importantly, he now has complete control of the website and is no longer dependant on developers or designers to maintain it.

“PowerStores platform is so easy to use that I am able to make any and all changes to the website on my own. So whether it is changing the dates and timings of the tours or adding the latest pictures or engaging the customers with social media, I am in full control of the site.”

So, how has this impacted the business?

“I have a lot more control over my business. Now that I can actually use the website as a marketing channel, I am able to reach my target audience directly and attract new customers on my own. This means I am no longer at the mercy of third-party vendors for business. I also have a more meaningful relationship with my existing clientele.”

So, John used PowerStores to transform his role from that of a service provider to a being the owner of a thriving business.

All the best, John! Here’s wishing you many years of driving a successful business!

You’ve probably heard before that in the online world, ‘images are far more effective than text to capture the attention of the viewer’. This is definitely true when posting on Social Media like Facebook, where many different bits of information are vying for the viewer’s attention at the same time. But when it comes to a website or online store, high quality content is key to its success.

Given the increasing use of images online, we find that often web designers focus more on images than text in their page designs, simply because images can look stunningly beautiful and highly impactful when using responsive designs. However, it is important to not forget that the text you include on your site plays a very important role in how your website is indexed and ranked in search engine results.

Let’s look at some of the most important roles played by website content (in other words, the text) in the world of Search Engines:

1. Relevance

Search engines, especially Google, focus on returning search results that are as relevant to the search term as possible. This means that sites that offer relevant text-based information about that search term are likely to get listed at the top. This is why your website should have high quality content that is relevant to your most important keywords.

2. Content Crawling

Search Engine crawlers go through the content of the website to identify the theme of the website, or to put it simply, to figure out what the website is about. They do this by identifying the groups of words and phrases that occur most often on the website. Then they use this info to decide how and where to list your site in their search results.

A word of warning though: if keywords seem to be unnaturally stuffed into the web page to increase their relevance, the site is likely to get blacklisted and will never show up on search results.

So while it’s important that your top priority keywords are used on your website, they should be used naturally and fluidly. When you include quality content on every page of your site, Search Engine crawlers will better understand the purpose of your site and you’re more likely to appear on search results.

3. Meta Descriptions

You probably have meta descriptions for every page of your site, to provide easy reference to search engine crawlers. (If your site pages don’t have meta descriptions, you should add them.) It is usually this carefully crafted meta description that shows up below the website link in search engine results.

However, if the meta description does not match the content that is displayed on the page, the search engine may ignore it. For instance, Google reserves the right to display excerpts of the page content instead of the meta-description if they do not seem to match.

If your website does not have sufficient content on its pages, it would be impossible to create meta-descriptions that will match the page’s content, and you risk being at the whim of the search engine bots as to what is displayed next to your page on search results.

As you can see, content plays a very important role in the performance of a website on search engine results. Without high quality, relevant and original content on the pages of your website, your site will never reach the top ranks of search engine results.

Introducing a breakthrough new feature which will change the way you manage your online store – our responsive Workspace!

What this means: Now, the same easy-to-use web-based Workspace that PowerStores merchants use to manage their stores, can now be used on your mobile or tablet just as easily as on your computer.

Think of the ways you can make use of this:

• Login to your Workspace dashboard from anywhere – such as your stock room, your warehouse, your factory, or your car - using your mobile browser.
• Process orders, update product pricing, and email customers while on the go.
• You can even BUILD your site right from your mobile, adding product images straight from your phone’s camera!

Give it a try today!  Log into your Workspace from your mobile or tablet, or if you’re not a PowerStores customer, start a free trial today!

Here’s an important fact for all website owners to be aware of. Aside from the actual content of a website page, the title tag of that page is its most important element. So, let’s talk a bit about what is a title tag and why it’s important.

What is a Title Tag?

As the name implies, the title tag sets the title for each page on your website or online store. You’ll see it within the

fields of the HTML. Its most important purpose is to provide an accurate description of what the page is all about.

What is it used for?

Let’s look at all the places it gets displayed:

1. Browser: Depending on which browser you use, you’ll see the page title appear in the top of the window, on the tab header.

2. Search Engine Results: When your website shows up in search results, the title tag of the page will show up as the first line of the search result. 

3. External Websites: When another site links to your site, such as when someone shares a link on Facebook, the title tag of that page will show up as the headline of that link. 

4. URL: Depending on the browser you use, the title tag of your home page will show up when the user is typing your URL in the address bar.

5. Bookmarks: Depending on the browser, the title tag will show up when a user bookmarks your website.

How can your title tag help improve the performance of your website?

Now that you know where the title tag gets displayed, let’s look at what role it plays in the performance of your website, i.e. in creating brand awareness, getting more clicks to your website and in helping with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your website.

1. It tells people what the page is about. Especially when it comes up in search engine results, this information can be the deciding factor as to whether or not someone clicks the link and visits your website.

2. When you include your most relevant keyword(s) in the page title, that helps Google’s search engine algorithm to index the page accurately, so that your page is more likely to show up when that keyword is searched.

3. It enables you to create brand awareness by including your brand name with the right keyword.

Where to Put Title Tags in your PowerStore

For PowerStores customers, here’s how to add page titles in your store’s pages:

1. Go to your Workspace by logging into your store.
2. Go to Website > Site Pages
3. Open any page or add a new page, and look for the “Title” field in the form.

That’s it! If you haven’t done so already, please go now and ensure that each and every page in your website has a title tag, and you may see a difference in your SEO results!

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Related Articles

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Related PowerStores Support Topics

An Overview of SEO

Adding SEO Meta Tags to Your PowerStore

Meet Nadia Gunardisurya. She is a professional photographer living in the tropical paradise of beach-side Goa. When asked how she came about creating a website to showcase her portfolio, this is what she had to say:

“I used to visit websites of many renowned photographers to browse and to learn. I was well-aware of the importance of having a portfolio website, but I never considered making one for myself. To begin with, it seemed that it was something where people who had ‘made it’ in photography had such websites. I hadn’t quite ‘made it’ yet,” she laughs.

For Nadia, the second biggest hurdle to overcome was undertaking the project of building a website. “I was thoroughly overwhelmed! The project of making a website seemed large and unwieldy and I wasn’t sure if I was up to it.

“Thirdly,” she says, “it was very difficult to identify who to work with. Goa attracts all sorts of people and I had no idea who was trustworthy, reliable and capable of delivering the kind of website I had begun to envision for myself.”

That is when she came across PowerStores.

The first impression she had of PowerStores was “Wow! This is a bona-fide office with a number of people working in different departments and there is a structure and process for everything!” PowerStores had won her trust!

The second thing she remarked upon was the sheer willingness of the staff to help her realise her vision. What she wanted required customization, and she was impressed with the PowerStores team’s effort to create exactly what she wanted. “Even when there was no ready solution at hand, they would work out a way to make the elements I wanted possible!”

Most importantly, Nadia came to see how really effortless it was to work with PowerStores to create her online portfolio. Instead of the dread she had anticipated, she felt enthusiasm for the website that was taking shape.

Finally, Nadia says, “I haven’t quite ‘made it’ in the photography industry here in Goa, but PowerStores helped me realise that I could use a website to get there!”

Thank you, Nadia! PowerStores believes you will definitely ‘get there’! Wishing you best of luck!

So you have decided to set up an online store! Congratulations and welcome to the world of ecommerce! Have you stopped to think about how you will personalize your online store to reflect your business? In other words, have you considered the importance of creating a brand identity?

Why does Brand Identity Matter?

In today’s world, where comparison-shopping is a norm and consumers are likely to look any many different online stores before they make a purchase, it has become more important than ever to have a distinct brand identity. With a strong brand identity, you will stand out from your competition. This is what will ensure not only top-of-mind brand recall by online shoppers, but will also eventually lead to brand loyalty.

What constitutes Brand Identity in an Online Store?

Let’s first look at all the elements that constitute Brand Identity when it comes to a website. What are the things that distinguish your ecommerce store from that of your competitors, apart from your specific inventory?  The answer would be: 1. Logo 2. Banner 3. Colours 4. Look and Feel 5. Site Architecture Now let’s look at why each of these elements is important and how it contributes to your Brand Identity.  We'll use the website of Zeus Motorcycle Gear, a PowerStores customer, to illustrate our points.

1. Logo

Your company’s logo of is a visual representation of your identity. It offers a glimpse into the values and philosophy of your company as well as its aspirations. Your logo is a represenation ofs the standard of products or services your company offers. It also helps distinguish one company from another, in much the same way that a face helps distinguish one person from another. That is why it is important that you put in substantial effort to create a smart, professional logo that will actually be able to represent your company and its ideology in full, with an eye-catching and professional-looking image that you display on every page of your online store.

2. Homepage Banner

First off, we want to stress that your home page banner image (or images) are changeable and, in fact, should be changed often to promote different  products and promotions, and to keep your home page fresh and interesting for returning customers. So in general, here are some tips on the types of images you should use in your banner space. It is important to remember that:

• images make a deeper impression on people than text, and
• your banner image is going to be the first, and most likely, the largest image a visitor is going to see when they land on your online store home page.

For these reasons, it is important that ALL your banner images are consistently able to wow your site visitors. They should be original, unique and highly representative of the company’s standards in terms of quality as well as values. Don't just use the default images that come with your theme. You should really take time and effort (and hire outside designers if necessary) to personalise your online store with exciting and beautiful banners.

3. Colours

This is perhaps the easiest and one of the most effective methods of distinguishing your online store and creating a "personality" for your brand. If you choose distinct colours for your brand and use them consistently across all your communications like your website, visiting cards, letterheads, invoices, labelling, packaging, etc., your customers as well as any visitors who land on your website will come to associate those colours with your brand. Such brand associations can become very valuable both in the short and the long term. So it's important that you choose your brand colours with care, and that you use these colours consistently on your online store as well as your offline mediums.

4. Look and Feel

The ‘Look and Feel’ of your e-commerce website represents the essence and quality of your brand and products. In the case of Zeus Motorcycle, their website has a look and feel that reflects their brand -- masculine and action-packed. On the other hand, if you are selling traditional sarees for example, you’ll likely want your website to have a more vintage, authoritative and artistic look. Aside from colours, the elements that contribute the most to the look and feel of your online store are:

• Most importantly, your website template (or “theme”)
• Fonts, font sizing and spacing
• Images and image sizes
• Image-to-text ratio

It is important that you create a look and feel for your store that is right for your brand and your product catalog, because this is the background against which your products are being showcased, and they should complement each other.

5. Site Architecture

This one seems like an unusual entry into a list about personalising your online store to create a brand identity. In fact, it is a very critical element. Your site architecture determines how easy and effortless it is for the visitor to browse your site and find the products they are looking for. A visitor’s experience while visiting your online store is going to play a large role in how they perceive your brand. In today’s day and age when people are shopping online more and more, people tend to remember and frequent those online stores that make their shopping experience easy and hassle-free. A good e-commerce site should have:

• Easy-to-navigate product categories
• Products grouped in logical categories (think about how your customers would browse in a real-world store)
• Use of sub-categories if there are many products (ie Men/Women/Children, then each of these would have Shirts/Pants/Shoes subcategories)
• A product search bar

Ensuring that your online store has the right site architecture goes a long way in creating brand loyalty because your site visitors will have a positive shopping experience.

Now you try it!

When you set up your online store, be sure to personalise your website with a logo, colours, fonts, and banner images that reflect your brand. From the start, when choosing your theme, always keep your brand in mind. Even if you haven’t thought in terms of brand identity before, the fact is that these elements will make a big difference in how people perceive your company and products, and it will affect whether or not they choose to do business with you. So, take the time and effort to make the right choices, always keeping in mind how you want customers to think and feel about your brand and your business. And here’s wishing you all the success in the world!

Since our release of PowerStores 2 in February, we’ve gotten so much great positive feedback on our new platform. We’ve also received requests for even more features from our customers, and we’re listening!

Our team of developers are hard at work improving our platform and adding features.  Here are some new features that we’ve recently implemented.

Photo Uploader Enhancements

Now it’s easy to upload beautiful photos to your PowerStore, even from your mobile phone!  We have two great improvements to our photo uploader that make the process simple and the outcome stunning.

1) Upload your image from anywhere. When you’re uploading a photo, you can now grab your photos from anywhere, including Dropbox, Instagram and more, and easily import them to your online store. Have a great pic on your mobile phone or on Facebook that you want to use? No problem!

2) And edit your photo right there. Once you’ve uploaded your snap, you can make it look beautiful in seconds with stunning filters, frames, stickers, touch-up tools and more from Aviary.  Edit your image right there -- including cropping, resizing, and special effects – and your image will be updated automatically.

More Currencies Supported

We’ve added support for two new currencies, the Singapore dollar and Hong Kong dollar.  As we’re expanding our customer base across the world, we will continue to add support for more and more currencies.

We now support all of these currencies for purchases on PowerStores online stores:

• Canadian Dollar (CAD)
• Euro (EUR)
• Hong Kong Dollar (HKD)
• Indian Rupee (INR)
• Russian Ruble (RUB)
• Singapore Dollar (SGD)
• US Dollar (USD)
• United Kingdom Pound (GBP)

New Themes

We have three new responsive themes: Sushi Delight, Contemporary, and Fashionist.  Each of these themes is mobile-responsive, so your online store will look great on all devices and screen sizes. We’re continuing to add new themes every month!

PowerStores customers, it’s easy to change your store’s theme. For complete instructions, read our support article on Changing Your Theme.

Automatic Upgrades

As always, all software upgrades are done seamlessly and automatically and do not require any action on the part of our merchants. It’s all part of why PowerStores is so great!

Our #1 priority is to help our customers create successful online businesses.  We hope that these new features help you to get there.  And thanks for your support!

What is the best way to ensure that the bottom line of your online store goes from strength to strength? Why, make sure that you build customer loyalty! If a solid chunk of your revenues comes from the same customers giving you repeat business over and over again, then all the new customers you add over time only help in increasing your profits!

Let’s look at how you can ensure brand loyalty by using one simple tool: Customer Registration on your Online Store.

1. Use their contact info to contact them: The first and the most obvious advantage of customer registration is that customers give you  their contact info. This gives you the means to contact them every time you have exciting news for them, e.g. New Arrivals, End of Season Sale, Special Discounts, etc. Statistics show that emailers continue to be highly effective (check out our blog post that talks about this in detail.) So, not only do you help cause immediate sales, you also create top-of-the-mind brand recall amongst your customers who get your emailers regularly.

2. Make their experience easy and hassle-free: When customers register on your online store, one of the biggest advantages is that they only need to save all their details like contact info, shipping address, etc. one time. The next time they log in and make a purchase, this information gets auto-filled. This may not seem like a big thing, but habits of online users are changing and people are beginning to shop online more and more often. Even something simple as this removes the hassle of entering the same information over and over again and adds to a positive customer experience.

3. Create a database of their order history for them: What do you have to do if you want to tally your credit card statement with the purchases you have made online? Most likely, search and look through records of these transactions in your email, right? Make this process effortless for them by providing your customers with their order history at your online store. This will help them keep tabs on their purchases and make it easy to cross-reference them at any time.

4. Create Loyalty using a Loyalty Program: All credit cards and most major online stores got this right a long time back. Reward your customers for spending and give them incentive to spend more and more with you. Offer your customers reward points for every purchase they make based on the value of the purchase and make these points redeemable. Your customers now have a solid incentive to spend at your online store and accumulate these reward points so that they can get a large discount on a highly-priced item. You are not only getting them to spend more, you are likely up-selling your inventory, too! Read more on loyalty programs in this blog post.

5. Pamper them with Exclusive Privileges: A fun member benefit you can offer is to make pages of your website accessible to ‘Members Only’. On these pages, you can give your registered customers a highly exclusive preview of your hottest new arrivals with an opportunity to buy them before everyone else does! This works particularly well when you offer items that are limited in number. You can also offer your members exclusive discounts on these ‘Members Only’ pages, giving them further incentive to shop at your online store.

It may seem daunting at first, but really it is not very difficult to create brand loyalty. We are all creatures of habit and once we get used to something like a certain web store, it is just a lot easier to return there than to find one’s way through a whole new website.

Of course there will be people who will look for the cheapest possible deal for each and every purchase. But for most regular online shoppers, familiarity, ease of use, and small savings on time and effort go a long way in building brand loyalty.

And when you add exclusive discounts, exclusive privileges and rewards points to the mix (as benefits of being a registered customer), you can make your online store tantalisingly tempting to your customer base!

If you’ve already started your online store, you have probably learned that it takes some effort and money to acquire a new customer. So how does one KEEP a customer, get him or her to return often, and even better, spread the word about your store to others?

Needless to say, a customer’s experience with your store, the products you have on offer and your pricing are big factors in driving repeat purchase. But there is one more important business tactic you should have – a Customer Rewards Program.

Here are some tips on how you can implement a points-based Loyalty Rewards Program and how to make it truly effective, especially for small retailers.

1. Make it worthwhile to collect points

The points have to be redeemed for the customer to enjoy her rewards. So make it possible for her to earn enough points from two or three average value purchases to get a tangible saving on the third or fourth purchase. For a low value item 10% savings don’t work, it should be at least 20%. But for a Rs. 1000 item, a saving of Rs. 100 is sweet.

2. Make it easy to figure out the value of points earned

Keep the maths simple. Each point is worth Rs. 10, or 10 points are worth Rs. 1. Don’t have complicated formulas.

3. Offer starter points for customer registration

You want customers to register for your store for many reasons – that allows you to add them to your email mailing list, collect data on their purchases and track repeat visits.  So you can encourage them to register by offering points on registration.  It also gives them a nice balance of points right from the beginning, which will excite them to return to your site to earn more points and to redeem their points.

4. Play with the points values to drive purchases of specific products

If you want to specifically promote select merchandise, give a higher number of points as compared to similarly priced products. And don’t forget to advertise the offer, alongside the promoted product or even on your homepage.

5. Reward customers for helping promote your store

Customers who like your Facebook page or recommend your store to others are friends you don’t want to lose. So reward them for every friendly action with bonus points.

6. Have seasons or days when you run Points Multipliers

Instead of giving discounts away, give points away on special days and festivals. For example, earn 50% more points on Women’s Day and for the fortnight leading up to Deepawali.

7. Give away bonus points on special occasions

Present a customer with some bonus points on her birthday, or even on your store’s birthday. Send her a nice email on that day to announce it. The unexpectedness of such a gift usually works well to build a special bond which can lead to a repeat purchase.

8. Give your points a name that links to your store

Suppose your store is called The Baby Store and sells things for babies. You can call your points Baby Steps. So when a momma earns 10 points for her purchase she gets a message saying "Congratulations, you earned 10 Baby Steps for your last purchase!" It helps in standing out from the many loyalty programs that are running.

9. Talk about your rewards program!

Remember, the sense of reward is felt when the points are redeemed. So remind your customers that the points are there!  Notify customers who have a certain number of points by sending them reminder emails, and suggest purchases they can make using their points. Communicate when points are earned. Build it into the invoice and the confirmation email you send. Display “points earned” and “points required to purchase” on your product pages.

Using a points-based Loyalty Program is a great way to keep customers coming back to your store and to encourage behaviours you want, like member registration and more.  Think of all the places where you’re enrolled in Loyalty Programs – airlines, credit cards, supermarkets, the local coffee shop – and how it influences your purchase decisions.  If you could make your online store a place where people want to keep coming back, why wouldn’t you?

Cory York, CEO PowerStores tell his inspiring story of ambition, determination and success against all odds. Read and be inspired!

http://yourstory.com/2013/06/from-ice-hockey-in-canda-to-selling-books-door-to-door-in-india-to-setting-up-a-mini-incubator-goa-based-entrepreneur-cory-york/

In one of our earlier posts in the Quick Results Marketing series, we talked about how you can place your ads right in front of potential customers when they are searching on Google. In this post, we talk about reaching your target audience while they’re browsing the web and visiting other websites that may be relevant to your products or service. The combination of the right audience, the right website, and a powerful advertising message can be a powerful combination, leading to lots of click-thru’s to your ecommerce site.

Google has partnered with literally millions of sites to create the Google Display Network (GDN), a one-stop-shop advertising network to place your ads all across the World Wide Web.. Sites include well known ones like Gmail and YouTube as well as relatively obscure ones, but in all cases your ad will appear right next to content that is relevant to your product (how does this work?). GDN covers over 80% of all Internet users, so you are not missing out on any major audience segment by placing all your online advertising on this network.

Here are the reasons why you should be using the Google Display Network.

Reason #1: Context-Specific Advertising

Find your needle in the massive Internet haystack.

The ability to zero in on a very specific audience in terms of their demographics, their interests, and the content they are consuming when shown your ad is what makes the GDN the powerful marketing tool that it is.

Google Display Network works just like Google AdWords. When you set up your campaign, you select your keywords and ad groups, and then Google identifies sites that have content relevant to your selected keywords. Google then displays your ads on those relevant sites.

Here’s an example of contextually relevant advertising:

Reason #2: More engaging ads

Wow them with visuals.

Another feature of GDN is the ability to place ads in different formats – Text ads, Image ads of various sizes, Rich Media ads, Video ads, and even Mobile ads.

The ability to have ads with visuals, animation and video is what makes the GDN different from the text-only ads that appear on search result pages.

Reason #3: Remarketing

Hi, it’s me again.

A third exciting and extremely valuable feature of GDN is “remarketing”. Remarketing is the practice of serving up your ads to people who have previously visited your website. Once a person has visited your online store once, if you’ve got a remarketing campaign set up, when he visits other sites on the GDN he is shown your ads. Remarketing has the effect of a multi-pronged campaign directed at your target audience. It can be used by etailers for specific tactical objectives, such as addressing all people who added an item to your shopping cart but didn’t complete a transaction, or more commonly, creating top-of-the-mind brand recall to get an edge over your competition.

Accessed through your Google AdWords account, the Google Display Network is a powerful yet easy to use tool that allows you to set up a hybrid campaign that combines context-based ads in various formats to create brand awareness, visibility and website traffic and remarketing ads to increase conversions, thereby impacting your ROI.

So first off, DO create an email marketing campaign! It can have a big impact on return visits and growing your user base.  Here are the steps to get started. 

Step 1: Build Your List

All raring to go? You can’t do any e-mail marketing without a list of relevant e-mail IDs. So if you are just starting out with your e-commerce business, put some effort into building your list. You need to develop, grow and maintain your e-mail database and make sure that it is yours and yours alone. Some of the ways you can build your list are:

• Invite site visitors to register with you for your newsletter or your blog
• Allow visitors who make purchases to become registered customers for your online store, by incentivizing them with loyalty programs or to receive special offers
• Collect e-mail IDs of your customers, even customers at your physical stores (if you have any)
• Pull out your old visiting card stacks and create a customer list with all the email addresses

Step 2: Choose an Email Marketing Application

Once you have your email list, do not send mails just from your regular email client by putting addresses in BCC field. You should use an email marketing application like one of these: Free options:

Affordable options:

Professional options:

The advantage of using these tools is that it is easy to set up mail blasts, handle responses, and analyse the results, such as Bounces, Opens, Clicks, Unsubscribes, and Actions. This will help you progressively improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your email marketing activities.

Step 3: Create Your Campaign

Now that you have an e-mail marketing tool, it’s time to put it to use. Here are some best practices to improve the results from your marketing e-mails.

• DO write quality content – provide information that is relevant and valuable to your customers
  • Be clear and concise
  • Include a clear call to action with a link, or better yet, a big button
  • Create a sense of urgency
  • Keep the design clean and uncluttered
  • Ensure the most relevant messages are at the top above the “fold line”
• DO segment your e-mail list – address the needs of different customers differently. At the very least be sensitive to gender, age, and nature of your relationship. Address a new customer differently than you would an old one.
• DO consider the “From” line:
  • Use a name the recipient will recognize
  • Include your company name or brand
  • Or your own name, if it is well known
  • Shorter is better
  • Be consistent
• DO keep the “Subject” line  short and simple:
  • 30 – 40 characters (5 – 8 words)
  • Be interesting! People are bombarded with emails - give them a reason to read yours.
  • Incorporate a specific benefit
  • Capitalise and punctuate carefully
• DO carefully consider the first sentence. Most email clients like Gmail and Outlook have preview mode and/or alerts that often show the first line of text only.
• DO personalise it by using the recipient’s name. Be sure to also have a fallback for those customers whose first name you don’t know, such as “Hi there”.
• DO design your e-mail and landing page for mobile – nearly 45% of all marketing mails are opened on a mobile device.
• DO experiment! Try different versions of your emails. Send one version to half your customers and another version to the other half.  See which gets better stats, especially conversions.  Many of the email marketing applications like MailChimp have a built-in A/B testing option so you can easily run these tests.

The DON’Ts of E-mail Marketing

And now for what NOT to do.

• DON'T buy e-mail lists. Earn them the legitimate way.
• DON'T use words like “free”, “guarantee”, “spam”, or “credit card” in the “From” field or “Subject” line. This will definitely end you up in the spam folder.
• DON'T send mails at odd hours. This will negatively affect your “open” rate.
• DON'T send e-mails out before testing them
• DON'T bother too much about click-through rates, instead focus on conversions
• DON'T forget to welcome a new subscriber
• DON'T spam! Even if you are in another country, adhere to the US guidelines, ie CAN-SPAM act.

Now go and put it to the test! You may be surprised at how effective email marketing can be!

Today we are thrilled to announce our release of PowerStores 2!

PowerStores 2 is a major update and redesign to your store’s workspace panel. In addition to a new look and feel, we have launched 9 new mobile-responsive FREE themes.  Now with complete access to the HTML and CSS of all theme layouts using our Fluid markup language.  We've also updated our Help Center to give you all the help you need in building your store.  Finally, our corporate website www.powerstores.in is redesigned, including a completely new way to sign up and create a store.

New Workspace

For our current PowerStores customers - don’t worry, your store will look exactly the same to your customers.  Only your back-end workspace has changed. We’ve redesigned the workspace to make it easier to find the places you’ll most want to go to - changing your store’s look and feel, adding products, and processing orders.

Try Out a New Theme

With this new release, we have added 9 new mobile-responsive themes to choose from.

PowerStores customers, if you want to check out our new themes and perhaps change your store over to a new theme, take a look in your Workspace “Themes” section.  For complete instructions, read our support article on Changing Your Theme.

Break Free from Cookie-Cutter Themes. Control your Own Design.

Want to stand out from the pack? Now you can customise 100% of the user experience. Any HTML/CSS developer in the world can create a unique experience for your customers using our Fluid HTML/CSS editor.  With PowerStores 2, you can get right into the code from our new Workspace. 

Learn How with Our New Help Center

We've fully updated our Help Center with more comprehensive articles to help you with all aspects of building a store.

From adding products, to integrating payment gateways, to customising your site's design, it's all there.  Visit our Help Center now.

Pain-Free Upgrade

PowerStores 2 comes at no extra cost to you. It’s all part of why PowerStores is so great. Upgrades come at no cost and no pain.

We hope you enjoy our new look! Let's start selling!

Did you know that coupons also belong to the arsenal of tools you can use to increase traffic to your site at short notice AND generate some quick sales? Think about the wonders that can do to your bottom line!

Here are some tips you can use to make the best use of coupons:

1) Announcing New Products: Use coupons with a 5%-10% discount rate to announce a start-of-the-season or a new collection of products. Apart from giving you quick returns, you will also be able to identify customer favorites for the season and stock your inventory accordingly.

2) Clearances: Similarly, when you want to clear old stock, using coupons to announce the end-of-season sale can help you clear your stock and provide you with the funding you need to acquire new stock.

3) Up-Selling: You can also use coupons to up-sell, i.e. make purchases of larger amounts or quantities. For instance: buy 3 ties and get Rs. 250/- off, or 10% off on purchases over Rs.2000/-. For the second example, a good rule of thumb is to calculate what’s 25% higher than the average total for your store, to decide the right threshold amount (Coupon visual – ”10% off on all orders over Rs. 2000”)

4) Cross-Selling: You can also use coupons to cross-sell, if you have more than one product range. For instance, buy 1 LCD TV + 1 DVD player and get Rs.2000/- off.

5) Festival Time: Use coupons to attract customers during high-competition periods like festive seasons. Most sellers tend to offer festive discounts so as to maintain a competitive edge and make rapid sales.

As you can see, when used properly, coupons can help you create a buzz about your brand, get your target audience talking about you, increase your website traffic dramatically, as well as help you generate lots of revenue in a short span of time.

Here’s wishing you lots of sales with the use of coupons!

This is our first article in the "Quick Results Marketing" series, which, as the name suggests, will cover marketing tools that start delivering results (usually traffic or sales) within a short turnaround time. If you want to jump-start your online business, these are the marketing tactics for you.

Search Engine Marketing with Google AdWords

Whether they’re in the browsing stage or even the buying stage, shoppers use search engines like Google to find web sites where they can source products or read reviews about products. It takes time and effort to get a high ranking in natural search results (see our blog post about SEO), but it is possible to get seen on the search results page by buying advertisements. The Google advertisement service is called AdWords, and you can buy ads as shown in the visual below.

With Google AdWords, you pay only if the shopper sees your ad and shows interest in your web site by clicking on it. So if she sees your ad and doesn't click on it, you don't pay anything. This is called the “pay per click” pricing model, or PPC, in Internet marketing. On AdWords, you can set a daily spend budget and a maximum amount you are willing to pay per click. So you are really in control of your overall ad spending and the amount you spend per visit to your web site.

Step 1: Target Your Audience

The secret to being successful with any kind of advertising plan is to target the right audience. With AdWords, you choose the keywords (see this post on identifying your keywords), so your ad is shown only to people who have searched on those keywords. In other words, your ad only shows up for people who are very likely to be interested in your products or the content of your site. You can also further sharpen your targeting by location, for example you can show your ad only to shoppers within India and UK, or only to shoppers in one particular city.

Step 2: Fine-Tune to Perfection

The secret to being successful with AdWords is to experiment with different tactics. Change keywords and try out different ad copy styles and messages. Observe the effect of different tactics on click-through rates and cost per click. And then drop the ads or keywords that are less effective, and increase your attention and investment in those that do work. The Google AdWords control panel allows you to manage and analyse all aspects of your campaigns, from keywords and ad building to ad placements and finally measuring results. So the whole cycle of testing, measuring, and fine-tuning can be done without any guesswork right from the control panel.

What else does Google offer?

There are other ad placement options that Google offers, including banner image and text ads on millions of partner sites across the web, image ads on Google Search, ads on mobile phones and devices, and ads on YouTube. This is called the Google Display Network. Look out for our post on contextual advertising on the Google Display Network. So what are you waiting for? The best way to learn about AdWords is to try it out. Visit the Google AdWords site for an overview and to get started. Google will even provide you with assistance to set up your first campaign.

In one of our recent blog posts, we talked about how 2013 was the “Year of the Mobile”, how 2014 will see even more growth in mobile commerce, and how important it is to put mobile at the centre of your ecommerce strategy. The sources cited in that blog post show that the number of mobile users and shoppers is going through the roof.  Indians especially are shopping madly using their mobiles, and those that aren’t, want to, while those that are already buying want to buy even more often. So what does this mean for you? The first step towards having a mobile strategy is to build a responsive website.

Responsive web design is fluidity.

The heart of your business is your website, and the first thing to do is to ensure that your website works well across screen sizes – from smartphone to tablet to laptop or desktop. This is what is meant by having a website with “responsive design”. An important part of responsive design is the visual adaptation, or “flow”, of elements to different screen sizes and formats. The illustration below shows how mere resizing of the screen is not the best solution, but that each block of the layout needs to be handled differently.

So if you already have website, try viewing it on different devices – a laptop, a tablet, and a phone. With the handhelds, turn the device around so you can see the site in landscape as well as portrait formats. Is the text readable in all the devices? On smaller screen devices, is the visual area dominating the screen? If the answer is no to any of these questions, your web site is not responsive.

Responsive web design is usability.

Mobile web design has several demands that are unique to handheld devices. The user’s attention span is shorter and hence he wants to get things done fast. Page downloads have to be fast, and importantly, navigation has to be easy. Drop-down menus don’t work well with finger taps. Adjacent links get tapped by mistake if they are too close. And checkouts have to be done in as few steps as possible. That is why handheld devices need site designs that are customized for them. Shoppers today often start a search on one device and complete the transaction on another. It could be either way – large screen to small or vice versa. A responsive website would allow a visitor to move seamlessly between devices, retaining his search history, saved carts, and preferences, and having continuity in look and feel as well as navigation structure.

Responsive web design is engineering.

The big swing towards mobile has created a new wave of website builders and designers who either create new responsive websites or take an existing one and make it responsive. That can be quite a challenge, and a smarter option is to build a new website on an ecommerce platform that is engineered to deliver responsive themes. The newer platforms are slightly ahead of the curve in seeing the mobile trend coming, and have excellent themes that are brilliant on mobile as well as desktop. Once you have adopted responsive design, you can create a marketing strategy that enables you to grab your share of the mcommerce pie. The question is whether or not you will advance with technology or choose to be left behind in this mobile revolution.

Coupons can be a vital element of online store’s marketing plan. Coupons are basically tools which can be used to encourage your customers to behave in a way that is best for your business. And if you make the customer feel that they have been rewarded for their interaction with you, they will not only remember this experience positively, but will likely return to your online store again... and again.

Here are 5 top ways in which you can use coupons to promote your online store and increase revenues.

1. Attract New Customers: Coupons can help you attract new customers to your online store by offering them generous discounts. Use social media networks like Facebook, affiliates like Snapdeal or Groupon, and other marketing channels to distribute your coupons, then sit back and watch them get redeemed!

2. Customer Registration: You can use coupons to entice your store visitors to register at your site. This will help you gather email id’s for your mailing list, which you can then use to email them about attractive offers, discounts, new collections, sales, etc. and bring them back to your store repeatedly.

3. Social Media Word-of-Mouth: You can also use coupons to create brand ambassadors, meaning you can offer discounts to those who share your site or products on their social media networks or refer to your store to their friends. This will help you reach out to your relevant target audience at minimal cost.

4. Reward your New Customers: You can help create a ‘Wow’ experience that will stay with your first-time customers. Surprise them with a discount coupon with their first purchase. Not only will they be happy to receive such a gift, they will likely return to your store to redeem the coupon and give you additional business.

5. Create Loyal Customers: Coupons can also be used to create brand loyalty. If you offer coupons to your registered customers on a regular basis, and perhaps an exclusive basis, not only do you help with top-of-the-mind brand recall, you also encourage customers to stay loyal to you and give you repeat business because you’ve made them feel special.

A big advantage of using coupons over other marketing efforts is that you get to see the results immediately. Most coupons tend to be for limited time only, so you don’t need to wait too long to judge their effectiveness. Coupons also help you identify which social media channels as well as which marketing strategies work best for you. Just ensure that you use different coupons codes for different channels, such as “EMAIL20” and “FACEBOOK20”, so that it becomes easy to identify the source of the coupons redeemed.

One of the other important things to keep in mind is that the back-end of your store needs to work seamlessly in the process of coupon generation and coupon redemption. Coupon marketing is one of those tactics that you need to manage on an everyday basis when running an online store.

Now that you know how coupons can help promote your online store, our next post will cover how coupons can help you generate quick sales!

PowerStores had an end-of-the-year bash to celebrate a year of great achievements and growth for the company! And to let off some steam after all our hard work! Check out some snaps from the party!

The customer comes first! Our CEO Cory taking a customer call during the party.

Showing his skillz – our CTO Indrajit smoking his opponent in a game of beer pong

The girls lining up for a rousing game of Dog and the Bone, against the boys!

The boys’ lineup!

The boys win!  Better luck next time, girls!

Co-founders Cory York and Indrajit Chowdhury offering thanks to the staff and presenting the Employee of the Month award

The PowerStores team.  What a great group! Congrats everyone for a terrific year in 2013!

As we’ve announced here, PowerStores has recently launched an awesome built-in Loyalty and Rewards Program for our merchants.  With this Loyalty Program, your customers can earn points on purchases and then use those points to get deals and discounts.

Points can be used to gain new customers and to keep old ones coming back. And there are many creative ways you can use points.  So, now that your customers are loving points, let's talk about the various ways to distribute them!

Think of it like playing a video game, where there’s more than one way to score points.  You can reward your customers with points not just for buying something, but also for other actions such as “liking” or sharing your site on Facebook, writing a review of one of your products, referring a friend to your site, or many others.  Whatever action you want your customers or site visitors to do, you can encourage them to do it in order to earn more points.

We’ve started with site registration.  This is a commonly sought-after behaviour by our merchants - you want your site visitors to register for your site, so that you can add them to your mailing list and inform them of sales, promotions, or other announcements.

This feature is now available in the PowerStores platform.  PowerStores merchants can now easily set up a trigger that allocates x amount of points to a visitor who creates an account on your shop.  Just head over to your Loyalty and Rewards setup page within the Marketing tab of your Workspace to make it happen.

To see this feature in action, check out our customer Propel Toys, where they give 1000 Points to all new users that sign up for their Flight Club.

This is the first of many event triggers that we have coming in the near future, to award your loyal customers with points.  Check back here for more PowerStores news and announcements coming soon!

Search engines like Google are the primary way in which your web site gets found by customers and interested parties. So, helping search engines find you is absolutely critical to your ability to build traffic to your site. The process of getting search engines to notice your site and report it in the search results is called Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO for short.

SEO is everything to do with managing how well and how high up you appear in the search results when a potential customer types in keywords relevant to your site. People rarely go beyond the first page of results, so your aim is to get into the first twenty search results for your keywords.

To clarify, this is different from being placed in the advertising sections of the search engine results page, ie, the ones in yellow on top, or in the right-hand column, of a search results page on Google. To appear there, you have to pay for a Google AdWords campaign.  That is a separate discussion.  Below the ads are called the “organic” search results, the unpaid ones.  You want to be as high on that list as possible, that is the purpose of SEO.

Since over 85% of searches are done on Google, we will focus on Google in this primer on SEO.  Here are some guidelines to consider.

1. Identify your keywords

This is THE most important step, so we’ll go in depth here.  Think about your business and your site content. What words or phrases are people likely to use when searching for sites like yours? Make a list of these, then go to the Google Keyword Planner and enter your words and phrases into the tool. In order to use the tool you need to create a Google AdWords account which is easy to do and is free.

Type in your preliminary list of keywords, and you will get two important results: search volumes and related searches. The “related searches” results will likely return some keyword options you did not think of, so add a few of those that you think work for you to your short list.

You can also type in the URL of your website in a separate box provided for the same. This allows Google to crawl through your website and identify the most common themes and return a list of keywords that are most likely to be appropriate. (If the results come up with keywords that are not directly related to your business, you may want to re-think the content of your website!)

Competitive vs. Niche Keywords

When you choose the keywords that you wish to optimize for, you can adopt one of two strategies – optimize for competitive keywords or for niche keywords. Some words naturally generate high search volumes and such words usually are of interest to a large number of web sites and hence are highly competitive keywords. For example let’s say you have an online store selling traditional wooden toys from Channapatna, which is a town famous for such toys. The key words “Toys” and “Wooden Toys” have search volumes of 12100 and 590 per month and are labeled as competitive. Now look at the search volumes for the keyword “Channapatna toys”. The volumes are reasonably high at 720 per month and the level of competition is low.

Now you could tune your SEO to the keyword “Toys” and try to get a high ranking and hence a high potential traffic volume from the 12100 searches every month. But you would need to do lots and lots of things better than the other toy web sites in order to earn that high ranking.

If you adopted the niche keyword SEO strategy, you would optimize for “Channapatna toys” and you would stand a good chance of attracting a percentage of the not so high but not so low search volume of 720 per month. In other words, one strategy is to aim for a small share of a large market and the other is to go after a large share of a small market. The choice is yours. Now, let’s explain what to do once you have selected all your keywords.

2. Create titles for each of your website pages

Page titles are what appear at the top of the browser when a page is displayed. It is part of the HTML code for the page. You should include two or three of your keywords which are relevant for that page in the page title. And try to keep the title short, so that it is not cut short by Google in the search results. As a general rule, stick to a max of 65 characters in your titles.

Also, place your keywords early in the title. For example:

"Pure leather handbags, style accessories | Aparna Fashions"

works better than

"Aparna Fashions | Your online store for stylish leather handbags and fashion accessories"

Try to have a unique title that contains some or all of the keywords you have selected for that page. Now do this for all the pages in your site. If you built the site yourself, you should know how to edit and create the page titles. If someone did it for you, give him or her the page titles to enter and upload.

3. Write appropriate Meta Descriptions for each page

Meta descriptions and keywords were originally used by Google as an input into deciding page ranking, but this is no longer the case. Google's various algorithm upgrades, ranging from Panda to Hummingbird in October 2013, have shifted the importance more towards natural content and away from backend manipulation. Meta descriptions however often appear in search results as the snippet below the page title. Because of this, you should think of your meta description as if it’s an ad for the page.

However, search engines are not obliged to use the meta descriptions you have added unless they really do reflect the page’s content correctly. If they don’t, the engines will simply use snippets from the page’s content and this may not always turn out to be in your best interest, depending on which snippet it chooses.

So, make sure that your meta description accurately matches the content of the page it points to. The best way to do this is to ensure that you use the prominent words that actually appear on that page, like your headlines, bullet points, etc. Make sure it is well-crafted and keep within the recommended limit of 150-160 characters to ensure it appears as a full message.

4. Write content that is search engine friendly

Google is smart. It will figure out if your content is of good quality and whether it addresses users’ search queries. So once you have your keywords, go through the copy text on your site and check whether you have used the keywords naturally AND added value and information relating to the keywords. Your content needs to be engaging to visitors, as this helps to build up your page reputation. Google looks at average time spent by visitors to your page, so your content needs to make the visitor want to linger. But if you fill page with irrelevant content, Google will punish you. You need to maintain the relevance by ensuring your keywords are naturally sprinkled throughout the page.

5. Make your images search engine friendly

Search engines cannot “read” images, so you need to associate some text with them to help the engines read the pictures. First of all, give your images descriptive file names. If the image is a picture of a Channapatna wooden toy car, give it the file name “channapatna_wooden_toy_car.jpg” and not some filename auto-generated by the camera.

Secondly, give the image an “Alt Tag”. This is a feature available on the platform you use to build your web site. In event of the image not being displayed, the browser will display the alt tag as text in the space reserved for the image. Also, provide a description of the image. Try to use a relevant keyword in your alt tag and in the description, and keep the description short and accurate.

Finally, keep your image file sizes as low as possible so that page loading time is minimized. Google considers loading time for the page when deciding on your search rank.

6. Carefully build external links to your site

Google measures your web site reputation by the number and quality of external links to your site. But the moment you have a link from a spam site, you risk being taken off the Google directory altogether. Hence it is better to have genuine back links in limited numbers rather than vast numbers of junk links.

So, submit your website for a listing on directories you are familiar with, those pertaining to your industry or trade, perhaps a locality guide, or even wider interest directories. Provide the option for visitors to share your web pages either on social media networks like Twitter or Facebook or to add the URL to social bookmarks like Reddit. In order to earn these shares, you need to have dynamic content on your site such as news feeds, and also have useful content like blogs or white papers that are valuable enough to be shared by visitors.

7. A caveat: do not try to fool Google

There are a bunch of disingenuous techniques called “black hat SEO” which some web sites use to try to get seen as more relevant and reputable than they actually are. NEVER do this, because you stand the risk of being blacklisted completely by Google. For example, do not put keywords into your metatags that are not relevant to the particular page. Do not have gibberish text full of keywords strung together in meaningless sentences. Do not conceal keyword-stuffed text on your site in small size fonts and/or same colour as the background. These are all tricks that Google knows about and will penalise you for.

Now What? Do not expect overnight results

SEO is an extremely important part of marketing your web site. There is no quick SEO solution. Once you start doing SEO, you’ll want to monitor how your site is ranking. You will find the movement sluggish at first. It takes a couple of months for Google to notice what you have done and then move you up the rankings. On your part, keep fine-tuning your SEO and when you do reach Page 1 of search results, do give us a shout by adding a comment below.

The future of SEO

Google is always tweaking or even modifying their search algorithm. The most recent update is called Hummingbird and was rolled out in September 2013. The principles that guide the new update are mobile search, social media, and author reputation. Mobile search will have more speech inputs and hence natural language. Social media and author reputation imply that Google+ will start playing a bigger role in search rankings, and so will the presence of your website and blog on social media networks. But these are the basics of DIY SEO, and they will not change in a hurry.

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Related Articles

How the Right Title Tags Can Improve the Performance of Your Website

Why Content Trumps Images for SEO

Google Announces Important SEO Update

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Related PowerStores Support Topics

An Overview of SEO

Adding SEO Meta Tags to Your PowerStore

The Story:

My Envy Box is a fresh new e-commerce startup focused on luxury cosmetics, based in New Delhi, India. Rishi, Julie and Bharat, the three co-founders, had an idea but no funding; they planned on bootstrapping their business as long as possible before trying to raise funds from outside investors. After resigning from their roles at high paying consulting firms, they set out to build their first startup!

The Challenge:

MyEnvyBox.com’s main focus is to provide a monthly subscription service where each customer receives a custom-tailored box of assorted, sample-sized beauty products. In addition, they wanted to give customers the ability to purchase the products they received in the monthly box while also providing relevant content around best beauty practices.

The Results:

Rishi, Julie and Bharat turned to PowerStores for an all-in-one solution that would get them up and running quickly. By selecting a theme from the PowerStores theme store, they were able to have an affordable and attractive webstore in minutes. PowerStores’ Content Management system and Product Editor helped them add and manage content on their own.

PowerStores’ more advanced features fitted the My Envy Box team’s needs nicely.  The ability to create pages for members only was really helpful to giving MyEnvyBox.com subscribers exclusive content over non-members. They also took advantage of PowerStores’ Loyalty Program management tool, which allows customers to earn and redeem points on every purchase.

Since MyEnvyBox.com went live three months ago, they have sold out of their monthly box subsciptions! They have also seen very strong sales of full size products.

“We would never have got off the ground without the service provided by the PowerStores team,” says Rishi Seth, CEO & Co-Founder of My Envy Box.

Check out Rishi, Julie and Bharat’s amazing PowerStore at www.myenvybox.com!

We’re on a roll here at PowerStores HQ and we’re banging out features faster than you can handle it! :)

Today we’re launching a very useful feature called Product Tags. A product tag is essentially a keyword assigned to a product. They can describe a property of your product which can then be used to sort groups of products into “smart collections”, enable product specific coupons, and more.  It’s pretty awesome!

Using Tags to Create Collections

Collections are groupings of products, it’s how you organize your products to be displayed in your online store.  In your PowerStore, you can create “smart” collections using filters, such as a common product tag.  Just tag all the products with the same tag, like “Hair”, and you can create a smart collection around all products tagged with “Hair”.

Using Tags in Coupons

A Discount Coupon is an effective marketing tactic to generate more sales and move merchandise.  You can create a coupon for your entire store, or If you have a specific product or products you wish to discount, you can use a product tag-based coupon to do this.

Just create a common tag for all the products you wish to include, such as “SummerSale”, and you can create a coupon specifically for products with tag equal to “SummerSale”.

You can add tags to your products when adding or editing a product in your PowerStore’s Admin Workspace.

To learn more about uses for product tags, read our support section articles:

Creating Tag-Based Coupons

Creating a Smart Collection

Start using product tags in your PowerStore today!

Which of these describes you?

• I have an existing small business that I want to take online
• I want to sell products or services online
• I have little or no knowledge about web development
• I am in a hurry to get my online business started
• I have a limited amount of money to invest in building my business
• I want to test the business idea before putting a big investment behind it

If any of the above applies to you, then read on to learn how the new ecommerce platforms are starting a revolution of sorts, putting millions of entrepreneurs and their shops or businesses on the web, quickly and on the cheap. Just so you don’t get confused, here are some of the different terms used to describe this new service.  All of these mean the same thing:

• e-commerce platform
• hosted platform
• online store builder
• DIY e-commerce solution
• ecommerce SaaS application

The Old Way

The old way of setting up an ecommerce site was to go to a web developer and commission them to build a site. But there are issues with that approach, as this illustration shows.

And The New Way

E-commerce platforms are powerful tools which already incorporate the best practices of online selling. So business owners are not just getting a neat tool, they are also getting highly user-friendly, slick-looking stores with most of the necessary services like shipping and payment gateways available through a single point of contact.

Take a closer look at some of the online store builders out there. You can start with PowerStores. We have an easy-to-use service that’s perfect for first timers who want to start light and add features as they go along. And for those who want to build an online store over the weekend.

Loyal customers are the gold standard for recurring sales.  Typically less than 20% of your customer base will be “loyal” customers (in other words, returning again and again to make more purchases), but they can make up more than 50% of your sales.  So clearly it’s in your best interest to target and reward these loyal customers. The most common way to do this in e-commerce is to create what’s called a Loyalty Program.

PowerStores now offers a full-featured Loyalty and Rewards Program which you can make available to your customers on your ecommerce site.  With this program, customers can earn points for every purchase, and can redeem those points on future purchases.

Here’s how it works.

1) A Customer Earns Points

As the administrator of your online store, you will set a point value for each product, just as you would set a selling price.  So, when a customer buys something on your site, they will earn points.

Note that only registered customers will earn points.  So this also encourages shoppers to register on your site, which means that you will now have their contact info and can add them to your email marketing mailing list (provided that they opt in for it).

2) Customer Buys More, to Earn More Points

At any time, a customer can log into your store and view their “My Account” page.  There they will see how many points they have accrued.  They can use their points on their next purchase, or they can buy more products outright to keep growing their number of points.

3) Customer Redeems His Points

The next time he comes to your store, your customer can use all or part of his points towards his next purchase. (When setting the point values for your products, you can also set how much the price can be reduced using points.) He’s happy that he’s saved money, and you’re happy that you’ve got a returning customer!

To learn more about PowerStores Loyalty Program, you can read our support articles on the topic:

Loyalty and Rewards: How it Works

Setting up your Loyalty and Rewards Program

Two of our favorite PowerStores customers, My Envy Box and Propel, are already using this great feature:

The Loyalty Program is one of many features that we’ve included in our PowerStores platform specifically to help you run a successful online business. We at PowerStores see it as our #1 priority to help our customers succeed with their online stores.

And we will continue to release more and more features to help our customers grow and thrive.  Look for new PowerStores announcements here on this blog!

COUPONS! COUPONS! COUPONS! Buyers love them, and as a PowerStores merchant, you should love them too! Coupons are an extremely effective tool to acquire new customers and to reward loyal ones. Over 2.9 billion coupons were redeemed in America last year alone.

So that’s why today, PowerStores is introducing Coupons for PowerStores Merchants.

Here's how it all works:

In the Workspace of your PowerStore, under the Marketing tab, you can create and manage your discount coupons. When your customer checks out, they will have the option to enter a coupon code and take advantage of discounts you've provided.

• You can create coupons to discount individual products or entire orders.

• Your coupons can be based on a dollar amount (or your chosen currency) or a percentage discount.

• From your Workspace, you can manage coupons with a few simple clicks. You can start a coupon, pause it, or delete it.

Our Coupon Program offers these advanced features:

• Tag-based coupon codes for individual products: You can create coupons to discount individual or groups of products. Tags can be added to products, and based on the common tag, a discount code can be created for all products with the same tag. For example if the product tag = “on sale”, a discount code can be set up for all products tagged “on sale”.

• Set start dates and end dates for coupons: You can decide how long to run a promotion by setting start and end dates for the coupon's validity.

• Set number of uses per customer: You can also choose how many times a customer can use a coupon. This limit will apply to each unique customer, based on the customer information they use to login to your store.

Along with our Loyalty Program, this Coupon Program is one of the many features we’re rolling out to help our "
customers build and run a successful online store.  Give it a try and let us know what you think!

Read more about discount coupons with PowerStores:

Offering Discount Coupons

How to Create a Discount Coupon

Managing Your Coupons

Mobile internet is a big trend we are seeing today, especially in Asia where computers are a luxury. PowerStores is taking mobile very seriously! Today we are announcing our first major step towards becoming a mobile-first product company.

A few days ago, our core dev team pushed our mobile upgrade live! This is a hugely important landmark that we’ve been working towards for over a year.

With the newest PowerStores release, here's what went mobile:

1. Three new mobile responsive themes (with more on the way)

A “responsive” website means that the page layout changes as the screen size is changed from narrow to wide and back again. Each of our new themes has been created with a smaller screen size in mind, and the ability to scale to a large screen as well, to ensure a great experience for all.

See how this page has reconfigured itself to 3 different screen sizes: 

Isn’t that cool? For those of you who already have a PowerStore, in order to make your site mobile-ready, you need to upgrade your theme to a responsive theme. Check them out here. It’s very easy to change themes. For a tutorial on this, click here.

This is a totally new framework that we have introduced to enable this awesome feature! For our techie users, you will want to know that we have enabled "Foundation" as the selected technology.

2. The entire checkout (payment) process

When a user is shopping on your responsive theme they will enjoy a completely mobile friendly checkout payment process. This is really important for helping your customers complete a successful transaction right from their mobile device!

3. All standard system pages 

When you create a new page in your PowerStore, you select from a library of page layouts and templates. All of these page layouts are now mobile friendly. Simply change the content as you wish and all changes will reformat for the tablet or mobile experience, as long as you are using one of our responsive themes. We have already seen a few customers quickly convert to the new responsive themes. Check them out with your phones!

Scott Morgan Fine Art - http://www.scottmorganfineart.com/

Tia & Tan - http://www.tia-tan.com/

With our new responsive mobile-ready designs and system pages, you can make your PowerStore available to anyone on any device.

From the home page all the way through to checkout, visitors can now browse and buy products on PowerStores websites with their computers, tablets, or mobile phones.  In this new mobile world, you can have a huge advantage over your competition.  Get started now!

View our Responsive Themes

Sign up for a free trial of PowerStores

Every businessperson knows the importance of marketing. As soon as you put up a signboard or print your visiting cards you have started marketing your business. But what next? And what is the best way for an online store to market itself? Here’s the no-jargon quick guide to online marketing. We’ll get into more depth on each of the marketing channels in future posts.

In the infographic below which we call the “Wheel of Marketing,” we’ve covered all the different marketing channels that most online stores rely on. If you are just starting out, do not try to do all of these at the same time. Start with one or two channels, try different tactics within each channel so you get to understand how they work and eventually where you should put in more of your time and money. Talking of money, when you are starting out, that is the one thing that is usually in short supply. So we are going to talk about the marketing channels in order of increasing spend levels.

Zero-money marketing

Yes it is possible to market your online store for zero or near zero money. Here are some ways to grow traffic to your site without busting the bank.

On your home page, feature the hot selling items. Offer a time-bound discount with a coupon code. Run a festival-specific special deal. Announce these on your home page and change the announcements frequently.

First, start building your mailing list. You can start with your friends and relatives, people you meet at parties, ex-colleagues and classmates. Collect visiting cards and enter the details in a spreadsheet. Ask people visiting your site to register for new product announcements and special deals. Create emails for each group separately so that they do not feel you are spamming them. There are great online services for email marketing such as MailChimp, which can make very professional looking emails.  But don’t overdo mails because everyone is fed up of getting spam email. Once a month is okay. Ensure that everyone you are emailing has opted-in to receive your emails. And always give the person a chance to unsubscribe and stop receiving your mails.

This is a huge and always changing area but the basics are easy. When you build your site, create unique and accurate page titles for all pages, not just the home page. For each page you should have a “description meta tag” which is a few sentences describing the content of the page in more detail than the title. Submit your online store URL to search engines such as Google. You can do that on the Google website “Submit your content” section.

These two go hand in hand. This blog post is an example of content. You can also write a blog or make a video that is related to your store but which has useful information or opinions. For example if you sell masala and spices on your store, your content could be recipes using the same. And the video could show how to make a particular dish. You could even shoot it with your mobile phone camera. Once you have some content to share, you can get social by creating a Facebook page for your online store and tweeting on Twitter. The important thing is to be chatty and social. People have to find you interesting enough to follow you. Talk about your products and how they fit in with peoples’ lives, without blatantly advertising your products at all times.

Little-Money Marketing

It’s like having salesmen who only get paid when they make a sale. In this case, the salesmen are other sites belonging to an affiliate network. You sign up and place an ad on these sites. The ads result in traffic and some of that traffic results in sales. You pay a commission if there is a sale, and if not, you don’t pay anything. Here’s a list and ranking of the top 10 affiliate marketing companies in the US and in Canada.

Little-to-more-money marketing

Results are very good here, but you need to commit and spend some money. You can start with Google AdWords which places your ads next to related search results, or on partner sites where the content is relevant to your ads. The good thing is that you only pay when someone clicks on your ad and therefore visits your site. You can use text ads which show up on both search results and partner websites. Experiment with different ad texts and determine which ones work best for you. Alternatively, you can use image ads, which only show up on partner sites, but here you are able to use an alluring visual along with ad copy. You can also advertise on Facebook to people interested in your product categories or fitting a demographic specification that you provide. These kinds of ads are considered highly targeted and even if they do not result in a store visit, your brand awareness starts building.

It takes a little patience as well as practice to start getting results from any of these tactics. But, once you start getting the hang of it, you will find them working wonders to your bottom line.

So set the “Wheel of Marketing” in motion and increase the movement of traffic to your site! We’d love to hear what your experiences with marketing have been like. And, so would our readers.  

So many people out there have exciting business ideas, but they have one thing in common – they are new to doing business online. And naturally there are a lot of questions about how to get started. So if you have ever thought about going online with your own store but were not sure how to do it, read on.

1.Think about what you want to sell online.

It can be anything. Your business idea could be conventional or unusual ... Maybe your wife makes a very good masala powder for some dish, or you can source T shirts with funky designs real cheap, or you already have an offline business that you want to take online. Whatever your business idea, think about how you are going to source the goods and how you are going to deliver them to your customers.  

2. Give your business a name and register the name for your website.

So if your name is FunkyTees, then you might want to register www.funkytees.in. There aremany companies who do this for you online. Big Rock, net4india, and GoDaddy are some of the popular domain registering firms.  Just ensure that domain name is registered in your name and your email ID is associated with the domain for renewals and cancelations.

3. Build your online store.

This is the fun part. With the right online store builder platform, you can do it in as little as a day. The new e-commerce platforms make it possible for a businessperson with basic computer and internet skills to actually build an online store, stock it with merchandise, and dress it up just like a designer would. You can have sections in the store such as different sections for men, women, and children. Decide which products go into which section. Then upload pictures of the products you want to sell, give them names and short descriptions, decide on the pricing and your store is almost ready. You can play around with themes to change the look of your store until you find one that you really like.

Of course, you can also get a web developer to build you an online store from scratch, but not only will you need to make a large upfront investement, you will also likely to forever be dependent on the developer to make even the smallest changes on your website. An online store builder is not only quicker and easier, it gives you complete control of your online store.

4. Sign up for your payment gateway.

Don't get scared by the big words. You need a payment gateway to be able to accept payment from your customers via credit or debit card or online bank transfer. Your store builder or e-commerce platform will help you get your account set up and walk you through the application process. You will need some standard documents for the “Know Your Customer” (KYC) submission.

5. Sign up with a courier company for delivery of the goods you sell.

Initially you may want to try out a few different courier and delivery services. You can start with Indian Post and send your packages by parcel post. If your customer is in a hurry, then use a courier company like Blue Dart or First Flight. After your business picks up, do a deal to get bulk rates from these couriers.

These are the basics, but that's really all there is to get your feet wet in the fast growing world of e-commerce. You can be in business in as little as one week. After starting your shop, move on to the next stage of business development. Run some marketing campaigns to grow the business, develop new products, analyse who your customers are and serve their needs well.  As the number of people visiting your store builds up, so will your orders.

But the first step is to get started. So what are you waiting for? Get started today!

Hello all! I'm Sara, and I’ve recently joined the PowerStores team.  We’ve built a terrific e-commerce solution here and now we’re ready to present it to the world!

One of my main objectives here at PowerStores is to ensure that we provide our customers with the best possible service and support in their online store setup.  With that goal in mind, I’m extremely proud to announce the unveiling of the new PowerStores “Guru” program!

What is the Guru Program, you ask?

We have assembled a team of the best web developers and graphic designers in the country. Armed with our awesome PowerStores web development tools, our Gurus provide fast, flexible and full service to our customers.  Each customer who signs up for a PowerStore will be assigned a Guru within 24 hours. That Guru will be personally available to you throughout the entire process to:

• Get you started on building your online store
• Assist you with payment gateways and setting up a merchant account
• Help you with registering for your own domain name
• Create a web design for your site that you love, and
• Answer any questions you might have - however technical or basic, ask away!

Whatever your questions or concerns, our Gurus are extremely knowledgeable, and are readily available to you.  And if you want us to build your online store for you, your Guru can do that too!

We know that it can be daunting to start selling online, and that you’re protective of the business you’ve worked so hard to build.  You don’t want just a presence online, you want to wow your customers and create a web store that you can be proud of.  Our Gurus want to help you get there.

Take PinkCow Fashions, our latest customer to go live.  This online store was built by our fabulous Guru Shruthi Gautam (and backed by our whole Guru team).  Shruthi worked closely with Pratima at PinkCow to build a web store she could be proud of – and doesn’t it look great?

We hope we can do the same for you.  Please feel free to reach out to me to learn more.  And when you do get that email or phone call from your Guru, be sure to use them to the fullest.  That’s what they’re here for!