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Using Online Services to Sell Your Product Outside the UK

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Looking to expand your customer base abroad? New clients await worldwide and with the internet and online services that come with it, it’s now easier than ever to connect with these foreign target audiences. Time to branch out your UK based business! The world can become your oyster with a bit of research and investment.

“Ready Made” Online Shops

You don’t necessarily have to invest a lot of money in developing an international ecommerce website. There are existing services or online “marketplaces” which users can sign up for. These are simple and effective ecommerce sites where transactions are managed by the marketplace operator, but products and their descriptions are provided by third party retailers: individuals like yourself.

Sites like Etsy, ASOS and Amazon are available for all to use for a small fee. You can personalise the look of your online shop with informative descriptions, logos and product imagery.

Making Your Shop Stand Out

There are various factors which can affect consumer trust in your shop and product offering. Two of these are visuals and copy so it’s absolutely vital to get these just right.

Make sure your images directly reflect the way the product looks in reality. Take photos from various angles in natural light without any interference from the flash and resulting reflections.

For added professionalism, ensure the background is always the same. If you can, enrol the help of a photographer.

Copy is a very powerful medium with which to attract customers. Shop owners often underestimate the importance of this so don’t make the same mistake.

Be descriptive but creative in your copywriting. Avoid excessive adjectives which lack coherent meaning. Highlight the features of each product.

Postage and Packaging

In the UK, you have the choice of using Royal Mail services or specialist parcel delivery companies such as Parcel Force and Parcel Monkey. Do some research on who does the best deals on worldwide parcel delivery. Some companies may be specialised in European deliveries while others will deliver further afield.

Instead of sending the item wrapped in bubblewrap and stuck into a generic parcel, do a little something more interesting to leave an impression on your customers.

At the very least print your logo on your packaging. If you can afford to, it’s also nice to give customers a little extra to say thanks for their custom. Personally signed thank you cards are a nice gesture and don’t cost a lot. Vintage postcards also work a treat, but pick something that goes well with the product.

Spreading the Word

Although you can expect some traffic to land on your page through users searching for specific products, if you’re looking to really get a name for yourself abroad, you’ll need to do some advertising and public relations.

Use social media to your advantage. This is free after all! Create shop profiles on popular social networks and actively engage with people, and give them reasons to buy from you. Competitions work well online. Give winners a special discount code to enter at checkout, for example.

For more ways of spreading the word, be it through social media or local media in the countries of interest, enlist the help of creative agencies specialising in a range of services from PR Scotland to advertising in China. Knowledge of search engine marketing would also be very beneficial.

Counterfeit Mobile Accessories Increasing in Number

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Jakarta, AVTnesia The government of AVTnesia has admitted to have loopholes in its security. The demographic location of the country makes it hard for the authority to seal and guard more than 17,000 islands from fraudsters who are illegally transporting fake products in and out of the country. Counterfeit medicines, illegal drugs and gadgets have the highest number of fakes. The latter of which have been too dominant and mainstream that it can be found in the streets of the suburbs of the capital, lined side by side on the pavement, with policemen seemingly oblivious of the haggle of the vendors and passersby. It has already been an accepted fact in the country to have those kinds of products scattered around and the authorities neither tolerate nor discourage the people anymore.

Warnings continue to be carried on, though, by international organizations. Along with legitimate manufacturing companies, raids are being operated and thousands of fraudsters have been caught red handed.

The Peterson Group, a Taiwan-based company which distribute mobile phone accessories and laptop accessories across Asia noted that the international commerce sector has tightened their licensing programs and inspection process to carry out more operations and jail few more thousands fraudsters.

In Singapore, two men were arrested last August 21 for their suspected involvement in the wholesale distribution of counterfeit mobile phone accessories. The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) has arrested men aged 24 and 53 who refused to give their names in the media. In total, about 76,200 pieces of trademark-infringing accessories such as phone casings, batteries, power banks, screen protectors, headphones, Bluetooth receivers, speakers and power adapters – with an estimated street value of about S$941,000 – were seized.

The authorities are considering taking serious views on intellectual property rights for the infringement and will not hesitate in punishing the two if found guilty. The problem though is that both of them do not want to divulge the other members of their party who deal with them in selling counterfeited accessories. Investigations are still ongoing.

A key way of ensuring safety and quality is to only buy mobile phone accessories from a registered manufacturer and trusted retailer and having confidence that those accessories are genuine and have been tested to ensure they are safe for users, which includes testing to ensure they meet national and international standards.

Consumers are advised to be more cautious of buying these products as it can be harmful and dangerous after few times of usage.

A bitter taste in the mouth

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We’ve had our first ‘negative’ experience since starting www.LensLocker.co.uk. Not one, but two of our orders did not came back! Obviously we have had a few occasions where parcels have turned up late, nonetheless, in such cases a quick call to the customer has confirmed that the lens or camera has been returned and the delay is with the courier.

Not this time around…..despite all of our efforts we have been not able to contact the customer on the phone, email or letter, and we now have recognized that we’re highly unlikely to retrieve our photography gear.

We’ve spent a couple of days feeling hopeful (maybe they will arrive!), frustrated, disappointed, angry and then very angry! I am now feeling resigned that this type of thing happens and hopeful the police, which are now involved, will have the ability to allow us to resolve this case.

As the whole experience leaves very bitter taste the only factor that we’re certain of is the fact that we must learn from this experience. What will we do in order to minimise the danger without deterring customers from using our services? So what can we provide when it comes to delivery and collection which supplies added assurance our equipment is going to be sent back? What further inspections are we able to do ahead of time to flag potential risks? These are things that have now been pushed very rapidly towards the top of my ‘to do’ list!

Despite this slight setback we still love our business and helping our customers. We’re ongoing to further develop the business and we our expanding our selection of equipment and our stock levels. We take great pride within the service we provide and we’re getting receiving great customer feedback. We are starting new and exciting offers, we are keeping our website fresh with new ad banners and pages and we are working with our designers to ensure we are getting the most from our stock and our website.

And also the best little bit of news now….we hit number two for several key phrases around the search engines like Google – pretty good for a company which is not even 6 months old.

SEO secrets for E-commerce Websites

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As the industry is changing as rapidly as Google tweaks their algorithm, it is hard to decide what the most important factors are. The On-site and off-site are the two major factors in SEO which is necessary for every type of website. Normally, most of the webmasters starts with the on-site SEO, because your aim is to get your website recognize by Google. If they dont, then how are you ever going to rank for a keyword?

The search engine spiders that crawl your E-commerce website will be looking at several different attributes on every page to determine where it needs to go and how relevant it is to specific searches done at Google search engine.

Another factor worth mentioning is a Keyword. What is a Keyword?

A keyword is basically an elaborate name for what people might search for when trying to find your E-commerce website. I am using a Bodhost.co.uk website as an example. People could search for “Web Hosting”, but they might also search for “Cheap Web Hosting”, “VPS Web Hosting” and “UK Web Hosting Service”. All of these would be keywords, or probably more properly could be said to be key phrases.

However, they are generally all referred to simply as keywords. Note that almost all On-site SEO has to do with is placing high-quality keywords throughout your E-commerce website content where search engine robots, spiders, or software might be able to decide what your website is about. 6 On-Site SEO Factors That Can Influence Your SERP Ranking:

* The Title of the Page * The keywords used in the text on your website * The keywords are used in H1 Tags * Keywords used in your domain name * Keywords used in the URL of a webpage * Meta Keywords

3 Major Off-Site SEO Factors That Can Improve Your Search Engine Ranking:

Backlinks to Your E-commerce Website

This is without a doubt one of the keys to having your website listed in the search engines results page for specific keywords. Google likes to look at what others are saying about your website to determine what it is about. For example, if someone is a huge fan of a UK Web Hosting, and you provide that service, they may link to your website with “UK Web Hosting” as the text that people would click on to get to your website. This text is called anchor text and Google will see that link as a simple “vote” for your website to appear higher than others for that keyword. In short, these are commonly referred to as backlinks.

Quality of the Websites linking to your Website

Those linking to your website should also have some form of importance. For example, there are many websites with loads of outgoing links to many websites. Google does not want to give these websites as much weight in their “vote” in comparison to a link from Bodhosts official website or something along those lines.

The Age of Your E-commerce Website

The reason I listed this as an off-site related issue, because it really doesnt fit in either category. This is a simple issue that the search engines will evaluate. This is not to say that it is the most important factor, but many older websites will naturally rank higher than new websites that have more backlinks.

I am not sure why this occurs, but many would say that it does. As compare to Google, Yahoo definitely puts more weight on this.

Now Its Possible To Import Store Data From Ubercart To Magento

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The modern options of Magento shopping cart has brought a rise within the variety of on-line store operators wishing to migrate to Magento. One of the predominant benefits that come from using Magento is its ease of use. This has made it highly appealing to prospects and with such a bonus; it might be straightforward for an entrepreneur to increase gross sales and subsequently, the profit margin of the business. The move to Magento shopping cart also will avail a enterprise proprietor to Magento Store Manager Providers that make the working of the on-line store so much simpler and extra effective.

There is an automatic migration service supplied on-line to facilitate a easy transfer of all shopping cart data from Ubercart to Magento. This provision is made out there so as to ensure that this transition doesn’t devour an excessive amount of time like it could if the method was to be carried out manually. It additionally ensures that there are no errors associated with the transfer and enterprise operations continue as traditional after making the change.

All that is required is for the shop owner to pay an reasonably priced sum and let the swap course of begin. In order to get a clue on how lots the move to Magento will worth, there is a migration estimator provided for you free of charge. This operate uses details about the character of the transfer (in this case from Ubercart to Magento) and the number of entities being moved to offer a mean estimation of the overall cost. You’ll have the choice of performing the migration course of by your self or getting skilled assist to that finish as a approach to make sure that nothing goes wrong. If in any respect you want to do it yourself, then chances are high you’ll wish to view a demo migration that gives a preview as to what it’s best to anticipate from the method involved inside the transfer to Magento.

The following step is to impress the precise transferring course of by deciding on the entities that you simply need to transfer from Ubercart to Magento. These embrace the products and product choices, buyer particulars, producers, categories and orders. There will likely be a wizard to guide you thru all of the steps and by following the directions, it is best to deal with to move to Magento in a short time at all!

Nonetheless, though many on-line shop operators are desirous to migrate to Magento shopping cart as a result of its numerous advantages, some have been just a little hesitant, fearful of the risks involved in such a task. Essentially essentially the most frequent dangers that would come up from utilizing the mistaken process within the migration process embody lack of info, double entry of sure particulars, and different factors that may affect the functioning of the enterprise enterprise. However these are all successfully averted by choosing the right shopping cart migration service provider to facilitate your move to Magento.

Choosing a very good migratory service provider entails making a consideration of their options and the procedures they may use to allow you to make that transition from Ubercart to Magento problem-free.