eCommerce Blog

Understanding your customer is one of the most important goals for any business, whether eCommerce or brick-and-mortar. The knowledge of what motivates your customers will help you build a solid strategy for forming good relationships with them. Among other things, you need to know what they like and dislike, why they prefer certain products over others, and why they sometimes return their purchases.

Everyone wants to make more sales. Conversion strategies for eCommerce are endless, but some of the best are easily overlooked. For instance, did you know the way you handle shipping can affect your conversion rate? In some ways it's obvious — a store with overpriced or slow shipping will most likely make fewer sales, but shipping isn't just a potential source of issues. In fact, shipping policies can boost your conversions as well. But how?

These 3 proven methods will help you automatically [...]

Ecommerce is challenging at any level but when retail businesses scale into the millions of dollars in annual sales, problems with an ecommerce platform can be catastrophic.

Toys R Us is, perhaps, one of the best examples of an enterprise retail business that has struggled with ecommerce more than once.

Learn from their experience and avoid potential issues that could cause your business to lose customers and sales because your website is not prepared to handle a spike in traffic and sales.

If you want to accept credit and debit card payments for your business, you’ll need a merchant account. A merchant account is essentially a line of credit that enables the processing of transactions and the deposit of funds into your business’s bank account.

If you run an online store, you're familiar with the fact that customers have varying needs. To provide the best shopping experience possible, it's important to anticipate these needs and have systems in place to support them. If your customers begin requesting a feature you don't have, you should look into it right away and determine what it would cost for you to implement it— if anything— and weigh that against the potential cost of getting a new customer. Remember, customers who feel they're[...]

Business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce may be a huge opportunity, unless, of course, your company is making one of these seven mistakes and killing your chances for success.

Years of eighty hour weeks, lots of sleepless nights and too many family “stay-cations” have paid off. Your retail business has developed a loyal clientele and a reputation for great service and fair dealing. Is it time for you to open an online store?

The growth in e-commerce is certain to continue. The National Retail Federation projects that within five years e-commerce will make up almost 20% of all retail sales, and many feel this estimate is too low. Competition from online sales is now a[...]

Whether you’re the sole employee or have a team of ecommerce wizards at your disposal, digital marketing might be the most time-consuming part of running an online store. Entrepreneurship is all about growth, and marketing is how you grow your online presence.

In the digital marketing realm, SEO often gets a bum wrap. It seems technical, whereas marketing tactics like establishing your social media presence and putting an email marketing plan in place might seem more straightforward. It’s true[...]

Whether you sell business-to-customer (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B), an online store can be a great benefit for your company. But what makes eCommerce so vital for B2B, and how can you better meet the needs of B2B buyers?

Store credits are more than just a substitute for a cash refund. They're a powerful customer service tool that can open up new ways for you to process returns. The way you implement store credits as a customer service strategy should depend on what you sell and what your customer base is like, but if you've been thinking of store credits as a "weak" version of a refund, it's time to reevaluate what they can do for your business. In fact, store credits should be considered a vital component of[...]

Shopping cart abandonment is one of the biggest challenges for an online retailer to overcome. Almost 70% of all online shopping carts are abandoned — the customer places items in their cart, but never completes the order. There are tons of reasons a customer might abandon their cart, but one particular factor stands out above the others: shipping!

Customers love wish lists. They're a license to window-shop, without the restraints of budget or time. Online shoppers build millions of wish lists every day, across countless eCommerce websites, and nothing beats the satisfaction of coming back to finally buy something added to a wish list long ago.

At first, you may underestimate the power wish lists actually have. But did you know that wish lists are very helpful to merchants, too? If you run an online store, you can use customer wish lists[...]

The power of persuasionseparates the successful from everyone else. Persuading others isn’t luck or magic - it’s a science.

Persuasion is important, and well worth learning, for every human being and not just marketers or sales reps. It is a part of our daily lives. From persuading our families to go out to eat, persuading friends to go out for a movie or persuading interviewers in a job interview, it is pervaded in our lives.

During hurricane season, many storms cross the Caribbean, that requires us to keep close watch on its possible impact to South Florida and 3dcart's offices. With this in mind, we want to ensure all our users that our team is prepared for this situations and even in the case we're affected by a storm, our service wouldn't be interrupted. 

The internet is a noisy place. How does your online store stand out from the competition?

We frequently see online stores grapple with the discovery phase of marketing their websites. It can take time for your store to gain enough traction for potential customers to find you. A little patience can go a long way for your store. That and a whole lot of optimization. If you find drawing in customers is taking too long, you might be committing some of the cardinal SEO sins, and you’ll want to take[...]

Anyone into internet advertising has come across conflicting information about the effectiveness of Facebook ads. The great news for marketers everywhere is that Facebook advertising is alive and well, and has vastly improved in its targeting capabilities. Plus, the highly-anticipated 3dcart Version 8 release has a built-in integration for the powerful Facebook Dynamic Ads.

SEO is such an important factor in online marketing today that good SEO features are an absolutely crucial part of any website. When building an online store, you need to be sure that your eCommerce platform supports all the features that will let you implement SEO best practices.

But what makes an eCommerce platform great for SEO? We reached out to several SEO professionals for their input.

Put yourself in the following scenario: you're shopping online for a new shirt. You find one you really like, and check the product information. It doesn't say much, but you know your size and the pictures look good, so you go ahead and order. A few days later, your new shirt arrives and you remove it from the packaging to try it on. It's a little larger than you expected, but maybe it will shrink in the wash. Actually, it doesn't seem to be cotton— it's a little itchy. What blend of fabrics is[...]

You may have heard of Houzz, a platform and community for homeowners, home remodeling, and design. Founded as a means of bringing homeowners and professionals together, Houzz is also a successful platform for merchants selling home décor, furniture, supplies, and more— everything needed for a home.