Three useful tips for online business from PeSA 2013 | Digital ...

At the end of May this year, the Digital Business team attended the annual Professional eBay Sellers Association Internet Conference.

The conference covered all things online retail but with a focus on eBay stores. There were plenty of great tips at the conference this year, but check out our favourites below.

Competitive advantage

?The big question is ?What is your competitive advantage?? online tech retailer Ruslan Kogan said at PeSA 2013. According to Ruslan, if you can?t answer that question, your online business won?t succeed.

?A competitive advantage is 90 per cent of the business,? Ruslan said. ?Being online isn?t enough.? He went on to explain that, in his view, digital tools like A/B testing and SEO can contribute to your business? success online, but even the best website won?t grant success to a flawed business model.

So how do you find that advantage? Ruslan suggests that it all comes down to your business plan, and constantly iterating on that plan until you?ve found the reasons people will buy from you rather than someone else, whether that reason is price, delivery times, the confidence your site creates in the visitor, the quality or exclusiveness of your goods, or some other reason.

For some tips on how to plan your online ventures, check out these pages on the Digital Business website:

Using data to tailor offers to your customers

Of course, even if you?ve got your competitive advantage mastered, there may be benefits to be gained from tweaking your site and your advertising strategy.

Vinomofo?s Andre Eikmeier presented his 10 most valuable lessons to the crowd at PeSA 2013. His lesson number six was about relevance in email marketing.

Andre explained that Vinomofo ? a specialty online wine retailer ? had previously sent the same email offers to all their customers, regardless of whether they like Pinot, Cabernet or Semillon.

After months of untargeted campaigns involving up to a dozen emails per week, Vinomofo realised this approach was contributing to their high rate of unsubscribe requests. So Andre and his team decided to start targeting their email offers based on their customers? buying histories and the results of interactions with customers about what they liked.

Andre said that the results were ?excellent? ? explaining that since Vinomofo moved to targeted offers, conversions have tripled and unsubscribe requests have dropped dramatically. This proved to an effective way of making better use of existing data.

What to track when it comes to social commerce

Keynote speaker John Lawson had some helpful advice for retailers experimenting with social commerce. Perhaps the most important was tracking your efforts.

He identified eight key social commerce KPIs you can track to help make sure you?re on top of what?s happening around your online shop.

They are:

1. Unique visitors. How many people are coming past?
2. Page views. How many pages are they looking at?
3. Transaction value. What?s the spend per visitor?
4. Cart abandonment? How many people give up before they hand over the money?
5. Opens, clicks and likes. Tracking how many people follow your links in emails and social media may help you judge how cost-effective your social media efforts are.
6. Sales.
7. Time on site. Where are people spending the most time? On your product pages, or figuring out how to complete your order form?
8. User generated content, such as reviews. If you give customers the chance, some will tell you exactly what they think of your products or your business ? keep an eye out for this on your website and elsewhere.

By tracking these measures, you can build a picture of how your social commerce efforts are going. For tips about how you can collect data like this, check out the measuring success online page on the Digital Business website.

Were you also at this year?s PeSA Internet Conference? What top tip did you get about doing business online?

By Nick, DBCDE.

Source: http://www.digitalbusiness.gov.au/2013/06/25/three-useful-tips-for-online-business-from-pesa-2013/

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