Small Business Blog

Payvment is quietly attempting to revolutionize online shopping with a new take on the shopping cart. The Web-based cart is pitched on two main features: easy installation and the ability to reduce cart abandonment. Those two features alone can snag the attention of any online retailer, but Payvment still has much work to do before it’s ready to compete globally.

The good

Cost. The Payvment cart is free to use. While there are other free shopping cart scripts out there, none install with a single snippet of code. This aspect of the Payvment solution is likely to appeal to smaller online merchants who don’t have an in-house or on-call webmaster.

Facebook integration. Payvment makes a Facebook storefront app, which can be integrated with its Web-based shopping cart. With the Facebook app, merchants can quickly install a storefront on their Facebook page; this provides maximum visibility for the products and an easy shopping experience for potential customers. The Facebook storefront can also be used on a standalone basis, which may appeal to online retailers who already have another cart system installed on their site.

Design-friendly. The cart can be installed to an existing Web site without making major changes to the site’s design. Visually speaking, the primary changes would be the addition of “add to cart” buttons next to the products. The shopping cart itself remains hidden until a customer clicks on an “add to cart” button; at that point, a pop-up appears to show the customer what items are in the cart. The customer can click a check-out button on the pop-up whenever he’s ready to complete the transaction. (continue reading…)

Small business owners and entrepreneurs are increasingly attracted to Web marketing and, in particular, social media marketing. The appeal of online media is their low respective costs. When you own and operate a small, brick-and-mortar business, you face the marketing dilemma constantly: affordable options often lack scale. But the options with sizeable reach aren’t affordable and may be touching consumers who aren’t even viable targets. On top of that, successful ad campaigns these days often take repetition to make an impact. And repetition is expensive.

As an entrepreneur, you may weigh the costs of running print ads in your local newspaper and decide you’d rather take your chances with Twitter and Facebook–options which are free as long you have the available manpower. This decision may make sense from a financial perspective, but don’t make it lightly. Shifting all of your ad dollars to one medium is a mistake, unless you know for certain that that medium can reach all of your existing and target customers. Here’s some food for thought: in 2009, a poll on CNN.com indicated that 94 percent of CNN’s audience wasn’t using Twitter.

Now I know what you’re thinking…if you’ve read some of my previous posts, you know I’m a proponent of Twitter. But I’m not a proponent of putting all your eggs in the Twitter basket, the Facebook basket, or any other ad basket. Even if it may seem like all the world’s gone a-Twitter, there’s still a place for print, for cable, for radio. And actually, one of the most effective ways to use repetition in your advertising is by reaching the same customers through different media.

Of course, these days, you have to be creative with the dollars you direct towards traditional media. Here are some ideas to get you started.

Direct Mail: Find a vendor that does postcard printing and mailing. Print up some loyalty postcards to encourage repeat purchases and send them out. Consider putting a time limit on the card, such as, “make X number of purchases within X number of weeks” or something like that. Use what you know about your customers to set the number and time limit. For example, if you know that your typical customer makes three purchases from you every eight weeks, offer a discount or reward to those who make four purchases within eight weeks. (continue reading…)

A report by Econsultancy and Online Marketing Summit attempts to understand how companies are quantifying the value of social media. Admittedly, we did not buy the report, but we did read the 24-page “free sample.” Two statistics jump out:

• 61 percent of companies have tinkered with social media, without jumping in, full board, to a social media strategy
• 13 percent of companies are not doing anything at all

Do these numbers imply that the social media landscape is less competitive than, say, your local phone book or local search results? To answer that question, we’d have to know similar usage data on those other forms of media. One thing’s for sure, the popularity of social media is growing. Facebook traffic, for example, is exploding to the point where this site is the second most popular on the Web. And this means social media is poised to get more competitive over time.

Understanding this, do you think there’s a closing window of opportunity for your small business to secure a position in social media before Twitter, Facebook and others become bogged down with endless clutter, the way search engine results are currently? Could be. Remember when businesses first started launching Web sites? Those who got in early swooped up the domain names and ushered in fundamental changes to entire industries (travel and banking sectors come to mind). It was a lot easier to establish first-page ranking when you weren’t competing with the whole world, right? Those who came on to the Web scene later in the game have struggled to build and maintain visibility under generic key phrases. Could the same thing happen with social media (or has it already)? (continue reading…)