Back-To-School Tips for E-commerce Sellers

May 2nd, 2023 Comments off
Sell more this Back-to-School Season

After the 2020 pandemic forced many students to learn remotely at home, schools are finally reopening for in-person learning. Parents want a fresh start for their kids this fall and will set them up for success by making sure their K through 12 and college students have all the right tools and essentials. With the National Retail Federation expecting around $82.8 billion in back-to-school sales for 2021, sellers need to prepare for a season that will likely exceed pre-pandemic spending.

E-commerce sales for Back-to-School are expected to be 53% higher than 2019, according to a forecast by Mastercard SpendingPulse.

Let’s Look at the Stats
With parents feeling like their kids missed out last year and children excited to reunite with classmates, this year’s back-to-school and college seasons are expected to be the biggest ever. Many retail experts are projecting a sales growth of 6.7% from 2019 and 5.5% from 2020, with online shopping expected to be 53% higher than it was in 2019. Additionally, gone will be the days of wearing pajamas to the virtual classroom. Apparel sales will likely rise a sizable 78% with footwear up 21% from 2020.

Here are three tips for E-Commerce Sellers to Increase Back-to-School Revenue:

Tip #1 – Create a Back-to-School Landing Page:
Customers are looking for an easy way to shop for school supplies. A custom back-to-school landing page with items organized into convenient categories helps them find everything they need. You can categorize items using a variety of demographics such as gender, age, price or best sellers. Get people to return to your landing page by utilizing Google Ads, email lists and social media.

Tip #2 – Demonstrate How Your Products Fit Into People’s School Lives:
Get creative with your displays! You can boost your sales by taking the extra step beyond just showing your merchandise on a shelf or as a standalone item. If you’re selling pens, pencils and paper, arrange them on a school desk. If you’re selling bathroom decor, bedding or other furniture, create a dorm-like setting to stage your wares. Photograph your items in a classroom setting and use them in your marketing collateral.

Tip #3 – Market the Correct Products to the Right People:
When stocking items, think beyond the obvious back-to-school shoppers. There are a variety of people to keep in mind when it comes to going back to the classroom. Parents of younger students are looking for snacks, travel eating utensils, computer and audio equipment, stickers, paper, pens, uniforms and a variety of educational materials. College-aged students will shop for phone cases, bathroom supplies and sportswear while also looking to outfit their dorm rooms with desks, bedding and decor. Don’t forget about teachers! Cleaning products and general school supplies are always a necessity.

Final Back-to-School Thoughts
Besides the Christmas and holiday seasons, back-to-school season is one of the busiest and most profitable times of the year for online retailers. With in-person learning fast approaching, now is the time for retailers to prepare so they can ace this year’s back-to-school rush.

3 Live Chat Extensions for Your WooCommerce Store

May 2nd, 2023 Comments off
Adding Live Chat to your WooCommerce Store

If you’ve added WooCommerce to your WordPress website, you now have a fully functional e-commerce website.

Want to up your game even more? Improve customer experience and increase sales by adding live chat.

Benefits of Adding Live Chat to Your WooCommerce Store

Although online shopping is extremely convenient, it can sometimes be difficult to navigate. A live chat extension makes things easier by allowing customers to message a live chat agent directly for help. They simply need to click a window whenever they need assistance.

This immediate, real-time feedback is crucial to getting customers the information they need to make a purchase. As the site owner, if you don’t create a seamless purchasing process, the potential customer may just click away, go to your competitor’s site, and buy the item there. Live chat keeps them on your site and greatly increases the likelihood that they’ll buy from you.

According to the American Marketing Association, Live Chat on your B2B website will increase conversions by 20% on average!

What Live Chat Extensions Can You Add?

Here are three chat extensions you can add to your WooCommerce store.

#1 LiveChat

This extension is fully customizable, so you can choose a theme, pick a color, add your company logo, and more. The chat widget is attractive and user-friendly. Optional tracking settings allow you to see your customers’ cart details during a chat, including product information, quantity, and previous orders. You can send time-based invitations to hesitant shoppers, as well as motivational messages to those whose carts have reached a certain dollar value.

You can also hold multiple chats simultaneously, send prepared responses to FAQs, tag your chats, and send files through the chat widget. The monthly rate for LiveChat starts at $16.

#2 WhatsApp

With upwards of 2 billion users worldwide, WhatsApp is the world’s most widely used messenger app. Visitors to your site can use the WhatsApp extension to ask questions, and you can enable the WhatsApp Cart feature so customers can add items to the WhatsApp cart and even place orders on WhatsApp. It doesn’t replace your standard cart system; it simply provides customers with another option.

This extension allows you to customize backgrounds and label colors, choose which products and categories show the WhatsApp add-to-cart button, hide prices and the standard add-to-cart button, keep a record of all WhatsApp orders, and more. WhatsApp costs $49 per year.

#3 Woo Bot

This is a simple chatbot that helps visitors search for products. You can configure the welcome message and respond to all unanswered questions. You can also set offers and coupons in the welcome message, enticing visitors to look at products they wouldn’t otherwise consider.

Woo Bot’s features include product search, product thumbnails with a link to the product page, customizable themes and backgrounds, prepared responses to FAQs, email notifications for new questions, chat logs, and more. Woo Bot costs $29 per year.

Improve your website, enhance customer experience, and increase sales with a live chat extension on your WooCommerce store!

Stamps.com connects directly to WooCommerce!

Connect Stamps.com to WooCommerce and easily import, manage, and ship your E-Commerce orders. Here are great features to simplify your WooCommerce Shipping:

  • Import order data directly from WooCommerce
  • Print USPS and UPS shipping labels in one step
  • Automatically send tracking info to your customers
  • Automatically post back order and tracking info to your store
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WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing – A Weird Way to Optimize Conversion Rates

May 2nd, 2023 Comments off
Dynamic product pricing for WooCommerce

Introduction to Dynamic Pricing

If you want your business to scale, you need to stay with the times. Nowadays, consumers are highly aware of the market and do their research on a brand before making a purchase. Thus, it’s important to be aware of the current online retailer trends to stay on top. One such common trend in today’s e-commerce competitive marketplace is dynamic pricing. Strategically adjusting the price of your product to match the current demands is a sure way to gain customers’ attention and make them choose you for their business.

So how does it work? Dynamic pricing curates prices for products by gathering large amounts of data regarding customer demand, competitors, and market conditions. So the prices are always changing depending on the market and time. This is especially beneficial for businesses related to traveling, e-commerce, transportation, etc.

But is it beneficial for consumers? Are there any disadvantages associated with it? And how to implement it? We are going to answer this and much more ahead, so keep on reading.

Dynamic Pricing Strategies

Dynamic pricing is available in multiple forms which you can implement depending on your business and product type:

1.    Time-Based Pricing

In the time-based pricing strategy, businesses can increase or lower the price of products based on their inventory available in their store or warehouse, date of release, and competitor price. Businesses can also use specific hours of a day to increase their sales, such as “happy hours” in a bar or offer same-day delivery with slightly higher prices.  

2.    Market-Based Pricing

Fluctuation in the market is a common thing and recent times have made us more aware of this than ever. Businesses would need to lower their prices if the demand decreases and increase the prices when demand is high.

3.    Segmented Pricing

Segmented pricing refers to setting different prices for the same product. This is done by segmenting the buyer into categories, such as prices that could be higher or lower based on location, delivery time, membership, high-value customers, and much more. You can also set prices for the services provided, such as faster delivery and quality. Through segmented pricing, everyone can afford your product on their terms.

4.    Penetration Pricing

Penetration pricing is perfect for new businesses who want to get noticed immediately. This strategy involves initially pricing the products and services at prices lower than those provided by the competitors. This results in increased visibility which helps startups gain the traffic they desire.

5.    Peak Pricing

Peak pricing is implemented when the demand is high and the competition is low. It is mostly employed during peak hours or seasonal sales where the products are priced dynamically to result in more sales. For example, during the holiday season, travelers buying airplane tickets normally see much higher prices than in non-seasonal time. 

There are many dynamic pricing plugins available that can set up different pricing strategies and analyze results to see which works best for your business.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Dynamic Pricing

Dynamic pricing can easily go sideways if not implemented property and thus along with advantages, it has few disadvantages as well. Let’s see if the pros outweigh the cons in this matter.

Advantages

1.     Increased Profit

By implementing dynamic pricing on your online store, you can benefit from increased sales and revenue. How? Because the machine collecting data to create a specific algorithm for your business makes sure your pricing is right. For example, if your competitor is selling the product for $3 and you sell them for $1. The dynamic pricing strategy will price your product at $2, which will be profitable for your business and also improve customer satisfaction as they believe they are getting a better deal from you.

2.     Knowing Your Competitors

Perfectly implementing a dynamic pricing strategy requires you to know your competitors. It is important to know what your successors have been doing. What are their prices? How do they price their products? When and how do they lower or increase prices? And much more. Once you have a clear view of your competitors, you can improve and implement these strategies seamlessly in your store.

3.     Customer Insight

The better you know your customers, the easier it will be to sell to them. Dynamic pricing provides you insight into your customer behavior, their shopping hours, their willingness to pay a price, their interests, and their demands. This helps you provide an optimum shopping experience to your customers and result in increased sales.

Disadvantages

1.     Increase in Competition

Dynamic pricing can easily get out of hand and start a price war. Now, what’s a price war? If a single business lowers its price to gain customers, similarly another business does the same and soon all other competitors follow which leads to incredibly reduced prices which are gaining no profit for the businesses.

2.     Distrust in Customers

These price wars lead to distrust in customers as well. How? If your loyal customers find out that someone else got the same product at half the price from another vendor, they will feel cheated. And no matter how loyal a customer is, a further reduced price is sure to get them converted to another business. 

To avoid these errors, make sure to have a perfect dynamic strategy in place and stay true to it because overdoing dynamic pricing could result in loss.

How to Implement Dynamic Pricing on your WooCommerce Store

There are many ways you can implement and integrate dynamic pricing into your online store. Setting up dynamic pricing cannot be done overnight. It is a long and laborious process of easing into the market, getting the customers, and increasing profit keeping the demand in view. Below we have mentioned a few strategies that you can implement on your site to properly enable dynamic pricing.

1.    Initial Pricing

As mentioned above, this pricing strategy is employed by new business owners, who introduce products at prices that are considerably lesser than the competitor. How? Because they take little profit at the beginning to gain customers and then once a strong client list has been established, the prices are gradually increased.

2.    Introduce Bundle Pricing

Another effective way to introduce dynamic pricing is by creating bundles. This is great for businesses that deal with clothes, food, sports equipment, etc. For example, an online store that deals with computers and their accessories, can bundle up a complete computer system and sell it for a slightly discounted price. This would help in increasing sales as your customers think they are getting a good offer and also increase the average order value. 

3.    Offer Discounts and Coupons

We all know customers love a good deal. Coupons and discounts are great for attracting the audience’s attention, but too much use of this dynamic pricing strategy could result in less profit, the difficulty of increasing the prices later on, and also makes your product seem cheap. Thus, it is recommended to occasionally and strategically place discounts depending on the need.

Final Thoughts on Dynamic Pricing

Dynamic pricing can be an ideal solution for the competitive e-commerce market, but it can also create customer mistrust in your brand  if misused. Thus, it is important to devise a proper strategy and work accordingly. Overdoing anything will have its consequences, such as running year-long discounts will give your customers the impression that your products are cheap or they won’t purchase when you increase the price. It is a continuous ongoing process and you need to improve and implement it on the way based on the supply and demand.

Stamps.com Connects Directly to WooCommerce!

Stamps.com’s direct integration with WooCommerce allows online retailers to easily import, manage, and ship your e-commerce orders. Benefits include:

  • Import order data directly into Stamps.com from WooCommerce
  • Print USPS and UPS shipping labels in one step
  • Automatically post back order and tracking info to your store

Make your WooCommerce shipping easier today by connecting your store to Stamps.com!

Author’s Bio

Xaviera Khalid is the content writer at WooKeeper.com. She is an avid reader and uses her creativity to write interesting articles about WooCommerce and its related topics. She focuses on SEO-optimized content and provides factual writing.

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Amazon Accelerate Starts September 1

May 4th, 2023 Comments off

Amazon accelerate Sep 1-3

Amazon’s latest virtual conference, Amazon Accelerate, is scheduled for Sept. 1-3 from 9:00 a.m.to 2:30 p.m. Pacific. It’s a great opportunity to meet up with other online retailers and storeowners to learn about how they can adapt to a post-pandemic economy.

What to Expect From the Amazon Accelerate Event

So what’s happening with Amazon Accelerate? Prominent e-commerce experts will be holding speeches, followed by 70 sessions for both new and current sellers to take part in.

New sellers can learn about how to set up shop on Amazon, create attractive product listings, mark up competitive prices, and use the Amazon fulfillment network.

Established sellers will gain a better understanding of the best practices in the industry. Some of these include partnering with sponsors to boost their brand outreach, expanding their product lines overseas, and implementing a brand strategy into their sales funnel. Additionally, sellers will have the option to ask the pros some important questions about running an Amazon store during their FAQ session.

Why Amazon Sellers and E-Commerce Merchants Should Attend

As one of the largest events dedicated to selling on Amazon, it will teach you the tried-and-true methods for growing your business, from promoting your products to navigating a changing market environment. Moreover, there will be key speakers covering topics like branding, consumer trust, customer support, and even Amazon’s outlook on their internal operations.

Amazon Accelerate is the perfect place for you to connect with other merchants. With over 60 sessions, their seminars are sure to touch upon a wide range of topics. It’s also going to have interactive panels, lightning talks, and breakout lessons. 

To get ready for this upcoming event, reserve a spot before Aug. 31 to watch the live session. As an Amazon seller, you can take advantage of these helpful workshops and webinars for small-business owners.

Categories: Ecommerce Shipping Tags:

Need to Self-Fulfill your Amazon FBA Orders? Stamps.com Can Help!

May 4th, 2023 Comments off

Stamps.com lets you easily print USPS® and UPS® shipping labels for your Amazon.com orders.

Need to self-Fulfill your Amazon.com Orders?

Amazon stops fulfilling non-essential products until April 5th

On March 17, Amazon.com announced they would temporarily stop accepting products coming into Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) warehouses with the exception of household staples, medical supplies and other high-demand products through April 5, 2020. This action is being taken in order to help Amazon.com expedite health, safety and other household goods that are being ordered in large quantities due to the coronavirus outbreak throughout the world.

What can you do?

We are happy to see everyone pitching in to help during this crisis, including Amazon.com. But that may leave businesses like yours scrambling to self-fulfill the orders that Amazon can’t. If you are an Amazon Third Party seller and need to start self-fulfillment immediately to keep your orders going out the door, Stamps.com can get you started in minutes!

Stamps.com Automatically imports all your Amazon orders!

Manage and ship all of your orders from all of your stores from a simple dashboard. No matter where you’re selling, we’ll grab your orders through our direct integrations and get them ready to ship instantly. Import from Amazon, eBay, shopping carts, CSV files and more. Simply click, connect and ship. It’s the easiest, fastest way to get orders out the door while keeping customers happy and boosting your seller ratings.

NEW! UPS shipping options with lower rates and most common surcharges removed.

Stamps.com gives you access to pre-negotiated discounts of up to 62% off UPS 2nd Day Air® and up to 48% off UPS® Ground Daily Rates services. And when you create a UPS account within Stamps.com, many common surcharges can be avoided, saving you even more money!

Get the lowest USPS shipping rates!

As a proud partner of the USPS, Stamps.com gives you access to incredible discounts you can’t even get at the Post Office.

Priority Mail Express® – Save up to 16% off Post Office rates on all Priority Mail Express shipments.
Priority Mail® – Save up to 40% off Post Office rates on all Priority Mail shipments, depending on weight and distance.
First Class Package Service – Save up to 30% off Post Office rates on all First Class Parcels.
• International Shipping – Save up to 5% on Priority Mail International shipments, up to 7% for Priority Mail Express International and up to 5% on First Class Package International Service.
• We also offer Commercial Plus and Cubic pricing.

Package tracking instantly available to your customers.

Once you print your shipping label and the tracking number is created, Stamps.com immediately uploads the package tracking number to Amazon.com (or other carts and marketplaces). And we have a detailed Online Reporting Dashboard makes it easy to access package tracking details for any order.

Easy International Shipping.

Stamps.com makes it easy to ship internationally with our powerful Global Advantage Program, which includes these exclusive features:
• Ship merchandise with flats and large envelopes
• Electronic customs – no more forms to print
• Instant shipping refunds
• Free $100 insurance plus we refund the shipping cost
• Free end of Day Pickup (for select cities)

Process orders faster with simple workflow automation tools.

Stamps.com makes processing your orders fast and easy, whether you are shipping five packages or five hundred. We’ve built our software with the powerful automation tools high-volume shippers need to manage hundreds of orders quickly and efficiently including:

• Automatic domestic address cleansing eliminates errors

• Print labels for multiple orders – in one click

• Map the shipping selections in your store (free shipping, etc.) to USPS services

• Use presets to quickly apply shipping preferences to multiple orders

• Automatically add order tags (fragile, etc.) based on products ordered

Try Stamps.com for four-weeks!  Get a free digital scale with sign-up (just pay S&H)

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