That is the power of testimonials and social media reviews and user generated contents like comments!

That is the power of testimonials and social media reviews and user generated contents like comments!

In fact Facebook is still the social network par excellence, because almost everyone has a Facebook account, and therefore already a registered name & surname, as well as a profile photo. It is the best way to get the pulse of people that matters to your ecommerce website.

Collecting the testimonials and hardening your credibility!

• Getting you fan page setup for testimonials is great, but it must be filled with information relevant to your target audience.
• Get your best foot forward!
• Do a mass mailing on your database or contact them separately via Facebook to invite them to leave a message on the page. It is clear that in some areas people do not want to post a message (especially if you sell for adult) your customers do not necessarily want to have their identity publicly disclosed
• Moderate the comments! Be available to your fans as much as possible!

What if there is a negative feedback?

That is a really good problem. A lot of merchants do not support negative feedback, but this one I know, negative feedbacks are sometimes the best elements that will make your testimonial page credible. In comparison to YouTUBE, even a very good videos have about 10% negative feedback! So a page of only positive testimonials can also confuse your visitors and a little suspect! The secret and simplest method is certainly to answer every testimony and review in the page, it will affirm your presence and increase the level of your credibility.

In conclusion:

Social Media testimonial and reviews have now become an integral part of doing business online. There is just no going around it. Ours is a social media driven ecommerce world! Either you swim with it or sink! Use it to drive your ecommerce business credibiity further up and in so doing increases your revenue and expand your business!

See full article at That is the power of testimonials and social media reviews and user generated contents

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How to Solve the 5 Common Drop Shipping Problems every drop shippers face!

Drop shipping has become a buzz in the ecommerce world these days and for good reasons, ecommerce merchants and internet marketers are exploring it.

You just need to check out reddit to confirm it. Drop shipping is easily one of the hottest topics that generates a lot of comments and reactions. And I don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel telling me it is going to subside soon.

Why Drop Shipping is a hot topic for ecommerce merchants?

The biggest reason why drop shipping is a hot topic for ecommerce merchants is that, drop shipping appears to be an ideal way to start an ecommerce store and it seems so easy to do too for many. Let’s take a look first at the advantages and disadvantages of running a drop shipping ecommerce store.

Advantages of drop shipping at a glance.

• You don’t have to hold any stock.
• Your financial involvement is minimal. Hell, you can start a drop shipping eCommerce store for almost nothing.
• You don’t have to worry about fulfilling orders and, a thing that attracts so many to this form of eCommerce,
• You can run it practically from anywhere. You can be sipping your coffee in the hot Rio morning while your running a drop shipping store from the US.

Major disadvantages of drop shipping you might need to know.

• When you run a drop ship business, you are ultimately giving away the control of a massive portion of your business to someone else.
• It is not you but a producer or a drop shipper that process your orders.
• You have very little influence over when that’s going to happen. You might be on top or at the bottom of a queue but you simply don’t know.
• You can’t control the packaging and what goes into the pack and all that is just the tip of the iceberg.

In short, after you have passed on the order, your control over what happens with it ends. And this is where most drop shipping problems starts to crop up.

Read full post 5 Common Drop Shipping Problems!

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Discover the power of layered navigation module

A good e-commerce site must be able to offer an easy and better search options for customers to facilitate access to products and that will lead to a faster decision to buy, this can be done with  the power of Layered Navigation module.

Today, we are going to be learning What the layered navigation module does? How to set up filters with attributes and features and discover the many possibilities this module can offer for your ecommerce website development.

What does Layered Navigation do for your prestashop-thirtybees ecommerce?

Layered Navigation module hooks to category page, and basically, allows you to choose between many search options and gives users the ability to fine tune their product search, and filter it as much as they want. Your users and customers can filter their search by the categories they want or by attribute and features they are looking for. There are filters for exclusivity and availability, and many more. You can also do filter search by manufacturer, and filter by the product condition – if it is new or second hand, or perhaps by product color search. Lots and lots of good stuff you can do with layered navigation that is impossible to do with out it.

Why do you need a layered navigation module in your product category page?

When you have a few products or say 50 products this question will not arise, but when you have thousands of references the layered navigation module comes in very handy, helping users to squeeze the results out to find the right product they are looking for in your website. This module uses product properties such as attributes and  features to refine the search. See the left column on the image below of a  product filter options. It comes really handy when searching for a particular item among tens and hundreds of items in an ecommerce store.

Read full post at discover the power of layered navigation module

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Separate ecommerce website development versus Multi-store website development.

Separate ecommerce website development versus Multi-store website development.

Each has its merits and demerits. For our part, we have had customers who asks us if it is cheaper to do multi-store than another separate website. Our answer is No, not necessarily cheaper or better. As far as speed of development, yes, actually we save time in the beginning because we will just be cloning the original shop, but once we are caught up in the configuration that must be done again and again: re-testing processes, integrating the theme, etc. According to our experience, in the end having a multi-store is more complicated than to build a new independent and separate ecommerce website.

Advantages and disadvantages of Multi-store ecommerce website

• Multi-store’s biggest advantage is of course, is its ability to manage all your ecommerce websites in one single administration area. You do not have to login to another interface every time you need to do admin stuff for your particular store. The other advantages are listed below:
• Essential in keeping track of your orders and stock supplies right under one admin console.
• Save valuable time in adding of products and categories. You can easily manage which product or categories are being shown in which stores. If you are using same products for all of them, you only have to add them once instead of doing so separately for each store.
• Your stores can still be made to look different and have different domain names.

Read full post at: Shoptech Media

What can you do to better protect your Prestashop-thirtybees ecommerce website from chargeback?

What can you do to better protect your Prestashop-thirtybees ecommerce website from chargeback?

• First off, get your refund policy as detailed as possible. Exhaustive as possible.
• Secondly, check the customer’s billing and shipping address everytime. If billing and shipping don’t match, beware on anything over a couple hundred bucks. If billing is a PO Box and shipping is a physical, it might be fine, but it’s still a red flag. If billing and shipping are two distinct physical addresses, unless one is a business, bigger red flag.
• As a seller you will always bump into people who will cheat you out your money. People who provided their real info, are usually what we call “friendly” fraud. Also, any type of chargeback insurance is not really solving the problem as this can lead to the fraudster repeatedly taking advantage of your service, which leads to the insurance provider charging you more premium.
• Prevention is your key.  Study and check your orders closely, getting CC numbers and doing BINN lookups to find the issuing banks, and asking their fraud departments to reach out to the cardholders. It takes a lot of work, but fraud losses will go down.

Chargebacks will never go your way, and that’s not just a Shopify thing. Chargeback happens to all Prestashop and thirtybees ecommerce websites, or Magento. Even with signature confirmation on your shipment, the carriers don’t check ID, so the banks always side with the customer. It sucks, but it’s the way it is.

Read full post at shoptech media

What does US Leaving UPU Mean for Your E-commerce Business

What does this mean for Ecommerce website owners and managers?

• The bigger effect of this will most likely be, that shipping 1-10$ gadgets from China won’t be free anymore, or 1$. You can basically say goodbye to this. Currently delivering China gadgets is the biggest loss to all National mail carriers everywhere on the world.
• Shipping fees cost will most likely be similar across continents. Flattening out the playing field.
• European shippers have to say goodbye to free import taxes up to 22€ and no processing fee. So people order China packages on daily basis just to be under 22€ limit. But that will soon change, as post will start charging around 6-7€ processing fee for every single package that is coming from outside European Union. So ordering 10 small packages with low value products and free shipping will soon going to be expensive, as shipping fee could be bigger than value of the order.
• Other shipping companies will have a big opportunity to fill the void left by USPS. The USPS conundrum is going to create opportunities for other carriers like DHL and FedEx to ensure continuity of service, though these options will inevitably be more expensive — possibly double or even triple pre-withdrawal rates.
• Prepare for WW3.. this one is to keep you on you toes. 

Overall this seems like something everyone involved in ecommerce should be aware of. Not a whole lot we can do to prepare since it’s not yet clear exactly how things are going to unfold. Nothing like uncertainty and potential major business disruption in the last quarter of the year.

Let us know what you think? Was US leaving UPU a good move for them? Will this bring better sale and opportunity for your prestashop – thritybees ecommerce website that ships outside US? How about from US?

Read full article at shoptech media

What does US Leaving UPU Mean for Your E-commerce Business

How to Speed Up Your Prestashop and Thirtybees Shop: 5 Tips to Optimize Performance

PrestaShop and its fork, Thirtybees ecommerce are open source platforms that allow anyone to create their own online shop. Written in PHP, PrestaShop and its fork, Thirtybees ecommerce are popular solution for websites of all sizes thanks to its wide selection of add-ons. Check out each of the 5 tips below for advice on how you can speed up your own PrestaShop site.

1. First off You Must Combine, Compress and Cache

This option will condense all of your CSS, JS, and HTML into single lines of code, therefore, getting rid of any white space or unnecessary characters. What this will do is to make your file sizes smaller, and your web pages will load faster. From the top menu bar, look under the Advanced Preferences tab and click on Performance. Then, look for the CCC option.

Choosing a Cache Module
The importance of implementing a cache module cannot be underestimated. On top of reducing page load times by several seconds, in some cases, they can drastically reduce your server load since delivering cached files consumes minimal resources.

However. not all caching modules are created equally. There are free ones out there, but if you are a serious online store owner/manager, you should invest in a premium option like Cache API.

Prestaspeed Cache Module is an API that creates static html files from your prestashop or thirtybees webshop and encrypt the cached pages.

When a page is rendered, php and mysql are used. Therefore, system needs lots and lots of RAM and CPU resources. Imagine if thousands of visitors come into your site all requesting the same content, it’s a good thing, but what these visits does to your system is use lots of RAM and CPU so your page now is rendering like a snail on a freeway.

In this case, you need a cache system not to render page again and again. Guarantee your ecommerce website page load with Prestaspeed Cache API module that generates a static html file, encrypt, and saves it for faster load time of up to less than a second. Incredible!

Read the full post at shoptech Media

what do you think is the most important question to ask when launching an ecommerce website?

In ecommerce website development, people often ask themselves the wrong questions. This is a statement I make regularly, people do not ask the right questions to launch an e-commerce website, we reason almost always in the wrong way.

I get plenty of opportunities to regularly talk to merchants who are embarking on e-commerce and their attention is almost always never in the right place. What comes first in the merchants’ mind is the graphic appearance — the visual aspect.

Perhaps it is how we, humans are really wired up! We always fell for the appearance first and virtue/value second.

Read full post at Shoptech Media the most important question to ask when launching an ecommerce website. 

Rake Up Sales with Holiday Sale Module for Prestashop and thirtybees Website

The holiday season is just around the corner! It is the time to create your sales campaign and rake in profit! Are you ready for the big BANG! Will your ecommerce store take off this holidays?

Online sales are growing each year, and it looks like more people prefer to buy this way rather than standing in line  and fighting in stores for an Xbox. Last year online retailers reported a record-breaking $46.5 billion in revenue for the period of November 1 – December 31 alone!

According to the NRF, with major holidays such as Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Halloween and Christmas just around the corner, an NRF survey revealed that 179 million Americans are expected to spend as much as $9.1 billion—and that’s just for Thanksgiving and Black Friday alone. Spending on costumes is pegged at $3.4 billion, candy at $2.7 billion and decorations at $2.7 billion.

Tony Bianci, a store manager for Halloween Adventure in New York, said that he does 60 percent to 70 percent of his business in September and October. The most in-demand costumes include Wonder Woman, and characters from “Descendants” are popular among kids.

60 percent to 70 percents of business sales are made from September to December!

With all these data, it would be wise to prepare your sales campaign for the holidays NOW!

How might you prepare your Prestashop or thirtybees ecommerce website for the holiday season?

• First thing you do is to NEVER make any major changes to functionality. This season is the time to make sales, this is not the time to make changes! But if you do want to make changes, just a little cosmetics to reflect the holiday season would do.
• Check you server to see if it is flexible enough to handle a spike in traffic?
• Test and retest the strength of you ecommerce website security.  You don’t want hackers to hack into your system at a time where  you are making the most sales, right?
• Double check on you  holiday shipping deadlines.
• Optimize you webiste for the holidays with a Holiday Sale Module.

Rake Up Sales with Holiday Sale Module for Prestashop and thirtybees Website

Learning Prestashop and Thirty bees: Working With Shipping Carriers

Shipping is an integral and crucial part of any ecommerce website! It is an important turning point for your e-commerce website especially this up-coming holidays.

Every country uses or have its own shipping parcel that users and customers prefer. But for the sake of this tutorial, we are gonna be focusing on working with the Shipping module we have available for us on Prestashop or thirtybees ecommerce system.  We are just going to leave the countries behind and learn how the shipping module is being set up from the admin console of your Prestahop or thirtybees ecommerce website.

You can basically create you own shipping table and offer different shipping options for your customers and users. For example, you can offer a a faster delivery alternative to a standard (eg in express) one, depending on how you set your shipping options. Some of the customers agree to pay more for a shorter delivery time. There is also the option of offering a one-day shipping or ship on the same day option. Buyers look very closely at shipping costs, so try to be as fair as possible.

Plenty of choices you can create from the backend of your store with Prestashop and thirtybees ecommerce.

Let’s dive in to learning prestashop and thirtybees properly: working with Shipping module!

In this tutorial we are going to explore the following:

• Creating a Shipping Carrier
• Creating shipping costs
• Adding size, weight and group access
• Remove and enabling handling charges from carrier preferences.

Read full post at Learning Prestashop and Thirty bees: Working With Shipping Carriers

How to Make Sure Your ecommerce Store Is Not Losing Sales

In e-commerce nothing is for certain, ever – because even if your website worked well initially, you can have a lot of unforeseen events that will make you lose buyers and slow down your sales.

Warning:  DO NOT TAKE UNNECESSARY RISKS!

With the fast turn around of software updates and development, as an owner- you can never sit back and let your website run without you. You must have a regular schedule to test it and frequently.

Your ecommerce website must be tested regurlarly!

When our ecommerce website development team make a webshop for clients, we always test it – it is necessary that we test it – first with shoptech Media team and with the client.  WE don NOT release anything without testing. Does this mean that every website we make is perfect? Far from it! Are there any bugs? Of course there is and will be! But we do our best to keep it at the minimum. Even the giants Facebook, Google, and Amazon have bugs on their system comes up from time to time! What is important is the ecommerce website is functioning as it should and robustly tested.

The reality of all things internet- especially ecommerce – are these:

Systems that works today may NOT work the next day – and you can lose sales without you noticing.

Delighted customers help speed up your business sales by sharing their positive experiences with friends and peers, and those word-of-mouth reviews matter most to people who are making purchasing decisions.

Bad website experience drives away potential sales!

It would be too stupid to lose customers due to bad experience while using your website because you have neglected to check on your ecommerce website system, failing to do so can/will cost you $$$$. The funny thing is that –  in my experience, this is all too common around the web. I have seen websites that has not been visited much more checked for 2-3 years.

Read full article How to Make Sure Your ecommerce Store Is Not Losing Sales

Is your ecommerce website maintainable?

One of the big problems ecommerce merchants commonly face is that of being regularly confronted with software updates from the developers of Prestashop or thirty bees, or for that matter, all open-source ecommerce platforms in the world. The challenge is, how to keep pace with these unending new version releases?

Take for example, a giant ecommerce website Magento, it releases new version every year since 2014. And I can say the same with Prestashop and thrity bees.  This goes the same with web programming languages such as PHP, Javascript, etc.

The dreaded “New update available message!”

How do you keep up with these challenge so that your Prestashop Ecommerce Store is Maintainable?

What exactly is the landing page?

A landing page on my ecommerce website? Yes, a landing page! Have you heard of it before? Do you know that landing pages are often the best weapon when you do targeted advertising to convert into sales for your ecommerce website? Landing pages condition the buyer and is able to manipulate his buying behavior.

What exactly is the landing page?

In fact the landing page is the page that serves as an intermediate page before showing the final page of your website or the product page. Landing pages are often associated and used along side a paid advertising campaign. When the user clicks on the sponsored link it is brought first to the landing page which then points to the final page (the product, the offer of the moment etc).

Why put an intermediary page on a Prestashop or thirtybees website? How does it work?

The reason is quite simple, it is necessary that the user understands what is expected of him and for that it is necessary to condition his mind. If the intermediate page says for example “It’s an offer that will never happen again and the offer is valid until tonight …” the sense of urgency increases. This way of doing things is different from just showing a product and its price … through this page we put forward the arguments of “why it’s great” we must excite the desire to buy.

Read full post prestashop landing page thirtybees landing page

How to start a successful ecommerce website?

So, you want to know how to start an ecommerce store selling digital products.

You want to register an Amazon and Clickbank account and ready to offer the products, but also want to have actual products of your own to sell on you own ecommerce store and advertise them on other sites. You have been sniffing around forums to suggestions as to what product to sell. You start wondering whether to do affiliates or build and sell your own products! And you start to ask, what things do you need to prepare to start your own ecommerce store?

There is a lot of things one needs to prepare to start an online ecommerce store or website. The biggest part I think is that, first you need to decide exactly what you are going to sell. This may sound redundant and a little over-emphasizing, but really, a lot of start ups do not even go past this question.

For example, if the digital items that you are wanting to sell are yours then they will need to be prepared and ready to be sold. They needed to be packaged in such a way that they are sell-able. And if you are going to be getting your products from another source, then you will need to get the supply end sorted out.

Read rest of post here: start a successful ecommerce website

Which option is best long term to sell a new product online?

Which option is best long term to sell a new product and what is the easiest way to get there?

Suppose you have a new product you want to sell online. You have your target group penciled in, and figured it does not need much explaining to get people to buy, you will definitely be able to sell it.

Everything about the product is ready for shipping, you have your stock with you ready for sale. Now, you are struggling with the idea of how to get this out to people to sell to. Finding the right keywords and doing a good campaign is tough enough to get traffic, and you are wondering where you should send the prospects to.

You have made you initial research and have been to forums to get ideas from people on the marketing niche and maybe have read something like the following:

I have never sold an item that I promoted with adwords. In those ads I always have exactly the picture of the product, the price and the description. The last one was pointing to ebay and that was obvious. No surprises, if you click on it.

Why does anyone click on an ad to then not buy if it is so obviously clear what you get? Is it all click fraud? Why do people always say that adwords helped them when I don’t have this experience AT ALL.

Overall I have already paid $xxxx for different campaigns with NOTHING in return. Not a single sale.

I am so sick of the low-quality traffic that google sends to me. And I don’t even see options to change it. I looked at the “Placements”. Google put it on pages only retarded people visit. At least then it’s no surprise they are too dumb to comprehend anything. One page was not even found(404) but according to google, it had 400 impressions. Most pages where people alledgedly clicked have horrible design, stuck in the 90ies, enormeous clickbait pages. Only 2 or 3 are good.

Now the struggle is real! Are you going to sell your product on Ebay? Amazon perhaps? Or have my own ecommerce website built? Google Ads have become so negative to you, you are not even mentioning it.

In this post, I am going to present arguments as to what is the best long term option for you to sell your new product online. But first I want to put this thought forward:

Learning Prestashop/thirtybees Properly: Working the Product Catalog

The heart of every ecommerce website is the product catalog! Having a product catalog that is carefully thought-out goes a long way to the success of your online store.

In this tutorial, we will go through the process of the essential criteria to create a complete and well-distributed product catalog together.

There are two important aspect of working with your product catalog list that you have to really go deep and spend time with. I would say, it is the most difficult and time-consuming part of having to own and manage an ecommerce store. One is the product description and the other is the product presentation – taking pictures of the product from different angles. It would be different if you are reselling someone else’s product, which usually come with a product image you can outright use. These are the two points on which you must take the most time.

If your product listing took you 5 minutes to create, there is a problem. Take the time to write and structure a smart product catalog.

This tutorial will not teach you how to make a product description. That is totally separate topic and deserve a full article of itself.

Below are some of the things to consider when writing descriptions.

1. Think about your users and customers
2. Think about search engine optimization.
3. Think about cohesiveness.
4. Think about “call outs”.
5. Think about product benefits.

Hope this helps you learn Prestashop or thirty bees properly!

Stripe Corporate Card for Your Online Business is a Smart Move

Thirtybees comes with Stripe as one of its core modules! So, you don’t have to buy one or hire a developer to integrate it into thirtybees to have Stripe payment system in your online store like most of the other ecommerce platforms.

Stripe is one of the featured partner for thirtybees in 2019. And majority of e-commerce platform open-source or not have extensions, plugins, and addons developed for their particular system.

The Stripe module allows your thirty bees site to easily accept payments from the Stripe payment processing platform. This module supports the latest Stripe API and also ApplePay as well. Let me show you a screenshot of what you have got in your thirtybees install:

But starting today, you can use Stripe for corporate credit cards — complete with your own shiny logo.

Yes, you heard that right. A personalized corporate credit cards from Stripe!

This is going to be really really big if your company who runs a remote team, your employees encounter incidental costs all the time – such as an Uber to the airport, coffee with a client, replacing a broken power cord, etc. So, your company can issue every person on the team a corporate card as soon as they join. That way, they never have to take money out from their pocket for the company while they wait for an expense report to process. Not to mention the hassle of filing for reimbursement.

Read full article Stripe Corporate Card for Your Online Business is a Smart Move

Thirtybees Review, Ecommerce Software that Empowers Merchants to Increase Sales

shoptech Media Thirtybees Reviews?

There are three criteria that we have always maintained with our clients regarding development of ecommerce websites:

1. Is my website going to load fast and display well on all devices?
2. Is my website ecommerce comparatively easy to use from the admin panel?
3. Will my ecommerce website run without me paying for addons like Blog, good payment system, and an email management?

The above three questions are really crucial in our development of ecommerce website because they are questions from our clients. Thirty bees checked in a BIG “YES” on those three quite well. So, we are happy with it.

In the two years that we have been developing ecommerce website with thirtybees platform, we have not seen any issue that would affect our impression of it negatively. Yes, there are issues and features that needs to be better, but so with all of the major ecommerce platform out there.

Our rating is a 5 start and excellent review for thirtybees! Truly an ecommerce platform that works!

Don’t take our words for it! Check it out for yourself!

Will Your Online Store Take Off on Black Friday?

Why is it important to run a sales campaign for black friday now?

Reason #1. People are Scouring the internet for hot deals this early.  They are looking out for items they need that may be on sale, such as appliances like televisions, etc. This is now the best time to run an ad campaign like google adwords, social media ads, etc.

Reason #2. People are Using social media websites to locate Black Friday sales. Advertise your deals online through social media. Create Facebook pages or Twitter feeds of your ecommerce website, and do a social media ads campaign that includes the keywords “Black Friday” to target specific searchers

Reason #3. People are checking their emails for email campaign deals! Send out email sales campaign  that showcase your Black Friday deals before it happens. Take advantage of how open people are going to read and click email campaigns that says “30% or 50% off on all product this black friday!”

Read full article on Will Your Online Store Take Off on Black Friday?

Learning Prestashop/thirtybees Properly: Working the Home and Footer Blocks

In this series episode on Learning Prestahop/thirtybees properly, we are going to be learning about the Home and footer blocks. I mentioned the last lesson series Working with Banners effectively, that we are gonna be working on blocks, and we did! The slider module is actually nested on a block, as well as the navigation menu module which the Block Top Menu module. In this episode, we are going to expand our knowledge of Prestashop/thirtybees even further.

This time we will finalize the homepage together by adjusting the content of the different blocks and removing unnecessary content. You will see it done in 30 minutes, pretty simple enough, that anyone can follow and configure Prestashop modules in no time!

This is the 6th lesson in this series, Learning Prestashop or thirtybees properly.

A standard Prestashop and thirtybees homepage is already quite complete in it’s default configuration. Which is good for starting merchants that often starts small. You got everything you need at your finger tips with this ecommerce platform, especially thirtybees. In fact, the functionality we can find being loaded at default install is quite too much actually, we can definitely disable some of them if we want to. And I always recommend people to disable the elements that are not essential to get a clearer implementation and also easier to maintain content that is lighter on the server.

As we move deeper into this lesson, we are going to touch on the footer block. Footers are an important part of an ecommerce website or any website for that matter. It is where we tell people about resources of the business, links to see the experience of the business in this particular field, an accessible phone number, a real address and a email address. It is in the footer that you show your customers you exist in real life to remove whatever doubt they may have about you and your business.

In this series episode, we are going to learn a lot of things. I have listed them below for you to see and check later as you progress in this tutorial:

Read full article learning prestashop