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Many times, the benefits of offering store gift cards (or virtual gift cards) are overlooked by merchants. Gift cards are vouchers that holds a certain money value, personalized with the recipients information and can be used as an alternative to payment method.

Businesses that look forward each year for the holiday season boost, gift cards can significantly make a difference in increasing their sales. One of the main advantages of store gift cards is that they can be easily branded, personalized and customized along with giving a full control to the store admins to track the usage in order to understand where the customer likes to spend money via gift cards

According to merchantwarehouse, gift cards eclipsed $118 billion in 2013, an eight percent increase over 2012. While e-gifting fueled a significant portion of the overall growth (increasing from just $300 million in 2012 to an astounding $3 billion in 2013), traditional retailer gift card volume grew as well, rising from $36 billion to $39 billion.

Today, we will discuss some key benefits of offering store gift cards.

These days customers are educated, knows how to do comparison shopping and just a click away from the competitors. In today’s economy when customers are looking for save as much as possible, customer loyalty programs or reward programs are more important than ever. Remember, for any business, it costs more money to get a new customer as compares to getting revenue from your existing customer.

There is no doubt about the fact that every business needs new customers but the easiest way to get more sales/revenue is from your existing loyal customers who knows your company/brand and the products/services that you offer. So, it is quite important to make sure that your loyal customers who are buying from your store instead of going to competitor’s site are being rewarded.

These days’ people prefer to shop online because it is one of the most convenient ways to buy anything from anywhere. Online shopping gives the power to the customer, to quickly compare the prices with other stores and find unique products at lowest prices. An important part of online shopping is the checkout process. Every business owner’s target is to get better conversions, more sales and reduce shopping cart abandonment.

We have discussed earlier that shopping cart abandonment is quite prevalent in an online business and it can be very frustrating for any business owner. One of the main reasons for the shoppers to abandon their online shopping cart is a poor checkout process. A poor or complex checkout process often aggravates online customers and they leave the store site without buying anything.

Today, we will discuss some latest checkout trends that e-Commerce websites should adapt to optimize the checkout process for a better user-experience.

For any online business, one of the easiest ways to increase the order value and revenue is to sell more to the customer. As a business owner, you should never underestimate the importance of an existing customer. Always remember one rule of thumb, it cost more to find a new customer than selling more to your existing one. Your existing customer will always be less sensitive to the price and more loyal to your store as compared to a new customer.

A shipping process is quite intricate when it comes to running an e-Commerce business. You can sell a large number of products on your e-Commerce site but your online business cannot be successful if can’t get those products in customer’s hands safely and at an affordable cost.

Many online customers reconsider their purchase decisions when they realize that shipping and handling charges are quite high. This often leads to shopping cart abandonment that can be quite frustrating for any business owner.

Today, we will discuss some key shipping strategies that can be useful for your e-Commerce store.

Holiday season is indeed one of the most profitable times of the year. It is quite important for online businesses to identify a strategy in order to make sure that their site is ready for the holiday rush. Some retailers focus exclusively on their ability to put together the received order quickly and efficiently while some focus specifically on the performance of their store site so that the website is ready for the heavy online traffic. It might be surprising for some but there are times when many e-Commerce entrepreneurs in their first few years don’t even get time to plan for the holiday season because of their busy day-to-day routine of running an e-Commerce store

The key to taking advantage of holiday traffic is to pay attention to all areas rather than focusing on one single thing. A holiday strategy, if executed correctly, can be a difference between a great successful season and disappointment.

Shopping cart abandonment is quite prevalent in an online business. It can be a quite frustrating for any business owner to see abandoned shopping carts on their online stores. As the customer reaches the finish line of placing an order, something barricades the checkout process that abolishes the potential sale.

A confusing checkout process can easily lead to shopping cart abandonment. It is the business owner’s job to get his/her customer through the checkout process as fast as possible. In order to overcome the rising concerns about incompetence checkout, e-Commerce stores (including nopCommerce) have adapted some new trends like one-page checkout in order to reduce the number of steps in the checkout process. But, technically, a one-page checkout is no different from a multi-page checkout as it requires the same amount of information but in a condensed one page.

For any business owner, choosing the right checkout process for an e-Commerce store is quite crucial. So let us compare one-page checkout with multi-page checkout and how these two processes impact the purchase time and sales.

The web design industry is moving forward at a very fast pace and the trends are changing all the time. As technology evolves, it is easy to fall into the trap of bad designing or following some old trends that might make your website look unprofessional. An ugly layout and cluttered website can easily drive away the potential customers from your online store. Remember, no one wants to shop on an unintuitive or clunky website.

So, the question is – How to make your online store site enticing for the online audience? Here are some tips for improving your e-Commerce site and make it look more professional.

What’s holding you back from writing blog posts for your e-Commerce business? Is it that you don’t have enough ideas?

If you read Part-1 of this series, we went over some points on how a blog plays an important role for the growth of your e-Commerce business. Blog is a great way to have quality content on your website related to your products/services.

But, how do you come up with quality content for your blog posts if you are not a writer? A lot of business professionals (or owners) do not know what to write. Remember, as a business professional (or owner), you deal with many clients or prospects. You understand a potential customer’s needs in your industry and get asked perhaps thousands of questions every month. Most commonly asked questions can be your next blog post.

Today, we will discuss a few ideas that can inspire you as a business professional (or owner) to write quality content for your e-Commerce blog:

For any business, customer feedback is paramount for knowing your customer’s needs and expectations. In order to be successful in your business, you must listen to your customers. The feedback from your customer is very valuable information that can help you improve your product and services. Asking for a feedback from your customer helps you build strong relationships and increase customer satisfaction.

Bill Gates said – “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

At the end of the day, the only reason your business is able to survive in the market is because of your customers. So, you better listen to your customer who pays you for your product and services. Let us discuss some easy ways by which you can gather feedback from your customer: