E-commerce Marketing & Distribution of your Product

After reading all of the features of our e-commerce software platform you will hopefully now have an idea of the thought, effort and time that has gone into developing our e-commerce software. So, once we have uploaded your products to our e-commerce platform it’s time to get your potential customers viewing your products and we can help you there too.

Any complete e-commerce marketing campaign must start with the basics and that is the construction of the site. Our software will distribute your products to many marketplaces and if they are the right price and/or you are the right brand then you will get click throughs but there’s even more to it that that, read on:

Construction – before you start yawning, most of our clients’ income is derived from natural search (ie. inbound traffic that they don’t have to pay for because they are well indexed in the search engines) because of the construction of the site (and of course the content). This can only be attained by excellent construction techniques. When you build data from a database and build the URLs you have to make sure they can be read and understood by search engines, indexed easily and then of course viewed at any browser size. It’s expert-level, and that front end code is not for the faint hearted!

SEO Marketing – obviously natural search is a critical form of marketing but the tools embedded in the software enable you to set your meta tags and titles or they are auto-generated but in a logical way to ensure that each page whether it’s a home, category or product page will be properly indexed in the search engines.

PPC – It’s a basic requirement for any marketing campaign and Google is the usual place to start because frankly it has the biggest market share for the UK shopper. However there are other search engines for this for PPC and you need to be visible here too to receive that extra bit of turnover/margin.

Obviously you can set up a campaign in Google anytime you wish and we would urge that you are involved, but entering a few key-phrases and leaving it to run is not enough. Basic campaigns that we set up have approx 3,500 keywords and many targeted ads. Your campaigns need to be set up properly, plus regularly maintained and optimised to get the very best conversion rates, otherwise the opportunity will be squandered and you may be paying for wasted clicks.

Channels to Sale (or Feeds) – we’ve made some mention of being able to distribute your product into different sales channels. This is an essential task for e-commerce software and really shows that you are working at a different level when your e-commerce software is working to distribute your 10’s, 100’s or 1000’s of products to be viewed my millions of potential buyers around the UK and the World. We make it easy by enabling these sales channels so that you can turn them on/off as required as well as being able to pick and choose which products are advertised. In this way you can protect your margin by omitting certain products or even putting up prices to manage it better.

Here are some of the places we can distribute your product to from our software: Kelkoo, Pricerunner, Pricegrabber, Froogle (not only UK), Amazon, Ebay, MSN shopping, Shopzilla, Nextag(UK), Dealtime, Shopping.com, Bizrate UK, Ciao, Shop.com, Egg, AOL, Buyers guide, Overture, Yahoo

MarketPlaces (EBay) – By far the biggest marketplace where you can sell your goods in the UK is EBay (second is Amazon) with its 15 million registered users and its boast that over 40% of the UK population visited it last year - now that is a marketplace!

It’s a complex marketplace but it is maturing into one of the best places for you to get new customers and is no longer the place where your brand suffers.

It is not enough just to use the tools afforded by the EBay seller, you have to know what you are doing, where to position your product and how long to sell it for. Often you can simply be too busy to deal with the ‘management’ of this unique channel – this is where Motive Technology and its partners come in.

Affiliate Marketing (an example is Trade Doubler but it’s not the only one!) - Some of our clients derive 25% from this marketing method and it’s absolutely essential to an e-commerce marketing plan, but have you the tools to distribute it to the correct one? We have.

Promotional Marketing – another essential component of your marketing mix – this is where you approach other non-competitive businesses to work together sharing each others traffic for mutual gain or customer reward (e.g. via vouchers). Similarly you can simply pay these promoters as an affiliate but the agreement in place is much more complex.

Link Strategy – a vital component of your web strategy. Your web site will index well with our help but will it rank well (i.e. get into those magical 1 or 2 pages at the top of the search engines)? The main way to get ranking is to ensure your SEO and construction is spot on and then boost your inbound traffic by reciprocal links. All the above will help (affiliate/promotional, etc.) but you are going to need more than that to score in the top spots. It takes time and patience but is well worth the effort.

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Directory Marketing – If you are launching a new brand then this you need to tell a few directories out on the internet that you actually exist and why, this helps kick start your natural search campaign but you will need to know where to go.

To answer your last question, yes – we can do all this!