Stealing From Video Game Developers

Video games can teach e-commerce merchants many lessons. Video game developers can teach even more valuable lessons. This Curagami post shares five tips online merchants should steal today including:

• Create Great Products
• Develop Community and then Listen, Learn, and Change
• Give customers chances to collaborate
• Forge badges, banners, and other rewards
• Define how rewards are earned but don’t forget serendipity and surprise

With such great marketing is there any wonder why Blizzard Entertainment has more than thirty million Overwatch players? Doomfist is a new brilliantly named Overwatch character and gamers are talking about little else this summer. Doomfist is more important than Game of Thrones to gamers. 

Stealing the community, gamification, and engagement tips from video game developers will help any online merchant move from "website" to "platform" and from "us" and "them" to we: http://www.curagami.com/e-commerce-lessons-doomfist/ 

9 Actionable E-commerce SEO Tips

We like the straightforward simplicity of this list of e-commerce SEO tips. Writing better product descriptions seems obvious, but you'd be surprised how many online merchants walk by the obvious. 

Nothing in SEO is complicated as these 9 tips show despite their "advanced" claim. Tips such as the create "versus" posts will occur to anyone who sees what controversy does to visits (it increases them). Visiting isn't conversion and many new to-e-commerce make that simple mistake.  

Our advice is not to do that. 

Holiday Shipping Tables
Successful e-commerce is about 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. We use the old cliche for a reason. To win in a crowded world you need to have some cool ideas, but you also need to pay attention to the basics. 

Things like creating an easy to understand Holiday Shipping Calendar is e-commerce gold. Whenever you share a feedback lop you collaborate with visitors who may become customers since you clearly CARE. 

Amazon will beat you on price, but you can beat them on CARING and, unless you sell highly commoditized things, caring matters. This Curagami post shares a tips likely to anger some of our readers and clients, but just because Amazon is a vampire doesn't mean they don't have something for Small to Medium Sized Merchants. See if you don't agree with our contingency and multi-channel ideas. 

http://www.curagami.com/e-commerce-gold-holiday-shipping-tables/ 

Hacking Happens - 5 Security Measures shares the death, taxes & websites get hacked as life's new certainties or maybe not if you do these 5 steps today.

Simple E-commerce Stories - How To Tell Them shares storytelling secrets such as how details create trust & why a little romance in About copy is good.

E-commerce Bounce Rate Calculator
Bounces are frustrating. When a website visitor leaves after viewing a single page (doesn’t have to be your home page) and without engagement (clicking, subscribing or buying) they “bounce” and your SEO goes straight to HELL. 

If you are prepared to feel real pain when you see the sizable website out there in the cloud, the visitors you are bouncing away, strong drink is recommended. We used an example of a $3M website with a 55% bounce rate. For every 20 points recovered the site would gain $1M in sales.

Another way to state that statistic is for every 20 points the site would grow more than 30%. Did you need to create an amazing campaign to grow 30%? Nope, but you do have to change your thinking and that is always the hardest thing to do (lol).  

Attempt to use our calculator without strong drink and we can't be held responsible if you jump off a tall building after seeing the ghost site you could be managing. Just saying :). Marty  

Content Curation is the "new marketing" & this post shares 6 reasons curating content should be your online marketing's elephant.

Finding the need to curate content acute as we develop HackHeadphones on Shopify. Why create new content when everything we need can be curated from sources such branded websites (using videos from Shure.com), Amazon and other "portal" sites.

We are making sure to give credit where it is due and someone might throw a flag, but bet we can negotiate mutually beneficial terms since using content with attribution is closest thing we have to advertising these days.

Holiday Ecommerce 20 Questions
If your Internet marketing team can answer YES to the 20 content marketing, social marketing, email marketing and cause marketing questions then wax up your board and hit the beach. 

Better to SURF now with solid plans in place than even think about time off once the October tsunami hits. This time of year it took 2.4 visits to make a sale when I was an Ecom Director. In October it took 1.3 visits and in November and December a little over one.

Those numbers mean NOW is the time to test and create plans so you don't have to THEN.  Plan now, DO THEN :). 

Great E-Commerce Homepage Design Tips

Three concepts are critical to great e-commerce website design:
* Golden Triangle
* People Sight Lines.

* Calls To Action.

Tis post shares specific examples of each of these Critical Success Factors (CSFs) for great conversion and engagement in ecommerce website design.