Mobile Commerce Platforms – Facts to Consider

With mobile commerce becoming advanced each day, retailers are becoming eager to branch out into the mobile web scenario. To make their products and services more reachable, new mobile commerce platforms need to be developed. There are numerous players in the market who provide platforms like Magneto, ATG, Marketlive, Escalate Retail, and Demandware. Platforms are being offered within the app through the mobile web combining browser detection and CSS, through services that allow mobile app usage, and through partnerships with third parties.

However, there are some factors that need to be kept in mind while retailers are looking to provide this mobile ecommerce solution:
Attention must be paid to the cost. Although the forum is expanding, the ROI will be significantly less due to lack of direct mobile transactions. M-commerce will surely be beneficial to the multichannel customer experience, but there is no parameter against which we can measure the benefits.
The management of the mobile site has to be integrated into the management tools and existing site merchandising. Adequate support must be available for content management, product content, category management, and order management.
Any mobile website needs to be maintained on a regular basis. The inventory, price, and production information must be up-to-date, but it also needs to include brand assets, product data, and assortment taxonomy. A constant synchronization needs to be maintained with the platform provider. Agencies and firms are cashing in on marketplace feeds or retailers affiliate to power the mobile websites but this has a drawback too. The feeds are often a part of the total assortment and may not have catalog management features.
The payment options must be made extremely easy. Users should be able to conduct transactions quickly using secure and PCI compliant webservices. That is why Apple has tasted success with their iPhone or iPod Touches.
The foundation of the operating systems of phones frequently undergoes changes with OS versions, new devices, and ecosystems. The management needs to be done pro-actively and the providers must help their customers to navigate easily.
Order management and customer care needs to be effectively coordinated. If this is not done, then the rate of customer satisfaction will start to drop and they will be roped in by the other players. Ideally, a constant and portable cart should be present that allows customers to shop via mobile and web and to be able to access via the other channel makes the entire procedure simple and easy for them. With the help of a consistent customer authentication capability, the multichannel effect of mobile commerce can be easily measured.

Mobile commerce platforms
have been developed and tested successfully but they still have a long way to go in terms of performance. Industry experts say that the current infrastructure of m-commerce platforms is not suitable to keep up with the demands that are increasing each day. A lot of evaluation and upgrading needs to be done immediately so that the implementation can be done in the proper way.

Top Three Mistakes Companies Make with ecommerce Website Design

Many companies are turning to website design that incorporates ecommerce functionality. It seems like it should be fairly simple. All they need to do is decide which products to sell and put up a few pictures and then they can sit back and watch the revenues come in. Unfortunately, this has led to the failure of many ecommerce sites. Here are some of the top mistakes that companies make when it comes to ecommerce website design.

They do not make their site easy to navigate
Many companies make it very difficult for customers to find their products. They either do not have a functioning menu that allows customers to find specific products or they make that menu very difficult to find. If customers do not have a clear path to the items that they are looking for they are unlikely to spend a lot of time looking for them. This means that you will end up losing potential customers to your competition and this can lead to the failure of an ecommerce site much more rapidly than you may think possible.

One possible fix for this problem is to include a search feature in your website design. By providing a way for customers to get directly to specific items you will make your website design much more efficient and this can help you get the kind of revenue you have been hoping for.

They do not have a fully functioning shopping cart or payment solution
When trying to entice customers to purchase goods online your website design has to include a fully functional shopping cart and payment solution. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to select products and finding it impossible to do so. It can cause you to lose customers very quickly and again, this can cause an ecommerce website to fail. You also need to make sure that once the customers have found the products they are looking for that they can check out and pay as quickly as possible.

If you ensure that your shopping cart and payment areas are easy to find, simple to use and functioning properly you can quickly increase the amount of revenue that your site is bringing in.

Customers cannot get a clear idea of what the items look like
Customers want to be able to tell what they are purchasing before they are willing to pay for it. You need to make sure that you are using a combination of clear, crisp photographs and descriptions that give your customers a clear idea of what they will be paying for. Be sure to include measurements and any options that a customer can choose from. Consider grouping like items together to make them easy for customers to compare.

In the past, when digital photography was just getting established it was more acceptable for the images to look grainy or unclear. This has changed. Digital photography has progressed so far that there is no reason why an ecommerce website design cannot include high quality photographs.

By addressing these three top mistakes relating to ecommerce website design it becomes much more likely that your site will be a success and generate the kind of revenue you have been looking for.

When Will The Fed Increase Interest Rates

Palos Verdes, CA. There is an old German saying “postponed but not nullified”. This is true for the Feds decision to keep its central bank rates unchanged in September and October. The Feds vote against hiking rates surprised everyone less than did the reasons why.

It seems the bench line of the unemployment rate has been downgraded in favor of actual inflation. This approach has caused some uncertainty in the real estate markets for the following reasons:

1) The Fed always runs the risk of getting it wrong, as it might constitute either too early or too late a move. To minimize any adverse impact, they create frameworks with policy objectives that are linked to intermediate targets. This does not eliminate uncertainty, but it at least reduces it as to how the Fed will react to future events. This reaction function cannot, and should not be, cast in stone, as the links from intermediate targets to policy goals are themselves uncertain and subject to change.

2) The Feds mandate is to create maximum employment with stable prices, which they define as 2% inflation. Fed officials have argued that they cant wait for actual inflation to breach the 2% level, given the long and variable lags from policy to prices. As a result, they have often indicated that they will look out for signals of future inflation, the first being the unemployment rate, and use this as the intermediate target for setting rates.

According to economist Robert Stammers, interest rates, especially the rates on interbank exchanges have a profound effect on the value of income-producing real estate. Because the influence of interest rates on an individual’s ability to purchase residential properties is so profound, many people incorrectly assume that the only deciding factor is in the mortgage rate. However, mortgage rates are a major factor for influencing property values. Because interest rates also affect capital flows, the supply and demand for capital and investors’ required rates of return on investment, interest rates will drive property prices in a variety of ways.

Economist Stammers go on to say to understand how government-influenced interest rates, capital flows and financing rates affect property values, you should have a basic understanding of the income approach to real estate values. The income approach provided by appraisers of income rental properties is the discounted cash flow analysis.
In simple terms, the valuation starts by forecasting property income, which takes the form of anticipated rental income. Then, by taking all property-level costs, including the financing cost, the analyst arrives at the net operating income (NOI), or cash flow remaining after all operating expenses.
By subtracting all capital costs, as well as any investment capital to maintain or repair the property and other non-property-specific expenses from NOI, the result is the net cash flow available to investors. By discounting the cash flow stream for a given investment period, the property value is determined.
Demand for real estate is related to changes in affordability. The fewer people able to purchase homes, the greater the demand for rentals and vice versa. Another important factor affecting supply and demand is the availability and cost of mortgage money. Interest rates play an important role in determining demand.

In the final analysis, w still believe that Fed action will take place during the coming winter season.

Steve Clayton Explains How To Use IMeye To Build Ecommerce Sites

How about building e-commerce sites, how can IMeye help?

Let’s say you want to build an e-commerce site and drive traffic through SEO. We know and we have seen a ton of profitable e-commerce sites because of NichBlueprintand the one thing they all have in common is the fact that none of them sold things that have never been sold online before the sites were developed, they just had an in, a way to get traffic to something that we already knew was profitable online, so can imeye find those, the answer is yes.

The way you would do that using imeye is by starting with the monthly searches, set this to a minimum of fifteen thousand, which is about five hundred a day.

When looking for an ecommerce opportunity you need to be able to compete quickly so you need to set the competing pages to a maximum of two hundred and fifty thousand. Also in addition to the competing pages you need to make sure the in title completion is reasonable so you need to set this at twenty five thousand.

Now tell imeye to search for ecommerce keyword only, the ones that people are selling commercial goods on because it is pretty rare that you will build an profitable ecommerce site around a product that has never been sold online before, so let’s just take the guess work out of it and only look at keywords that people are already successfully selling stuff online.

Next is the keyword length, let’s go long tail. This is not absolute but typically the longer the keyword phrase the more targeted it is, so you only want to look at keyword phrases with at least four words.

Imeye will return pages and pages of opportunities; the next thing to do is sort the results by the highest volumes first. If you have watched the video that accompanies this article you will know that we blacked out the actual results because it would not be fair on the people who are paying to use imeye but I will reveal one of the keyword phrases for you now, it is “finding toys battery powered” the monthly searches for this very targeted keyword phrase is 165 thousand, that’s about 5 thousand searches a day, the competing pages is only 17 thousand 9 hundred and the in title competition results are shockingly low. People are already selling products online for this keyword phrase and what is even better is the fact that Amazon are not involved so you don’t have to compete with them.

I would like to add that on a scale of 1 to 10 on as far as how easy these are to compete with, these keywords are way down there in the lower scale, these are your 0 to 4 on how hard they are to compete for, maybe even 0 to 2, especially when you see competing pages at less than 250 thousand and in title results less than 25 thousand, these are some of the easiest keywords to compete with on an SEO perspective.

Now you can imagine how addictive and fun it is to have IMeye continuously spit out these great e-commerce opportunities and as you can imagine I have spent many hours doing exactly that.

Helpful Tips for Making a Good E-Commerce Website

E-Commerce is the buying and selling of goods and services over the electronic medium like Internet. This is not just all but it has involved so many other major tasks like supply chain management, electronic fund transfer, Internet marketing etc. Having an e commerce web site is not enough these days, but a good, comfortable and amazingly functional website is required. It should appeal to the potential customers only then they would come to the website and make purchases. If even once you fail to provide them good user experience, you will lose the business. As there are hundred of websites available on Internet. There are plenty of choices available to the customers to select the best suitable for themselves. Following are few tips so that you can make your e commerce website a success:

Let the users to explore and do not ask for registration first: Asking the readers to register first and then providing them with the facility of adding items in their cart is probably the major step where you can lose your customers. Allow the readers to explore all the information which he wants to have. Like by adding items, he might be checking the total amount or the transportation fee etc.

Informing the readers where they are: There should be proper headings, sub headings so that if the readers is exploring in the store in more than one sub level of navigation, he can easily come back to his previous position through some kinds of indication like (Home> one category> another category> product etc. )

Do not show unnecessary details unless asked: Simple things are always easy to perceive in the human mind where as we confuse ourselves and even others by giving out unnecessary long details about the product So, the tip is to keep the short basic information about the product as the standard feature of the product and there should always be an option for “looking into more details” if users want to go into.

Give the best visual experience of the product to the readers: The Audio visual aids work many times more than the simple text about the product. Since the readers are not able to touch the product or experience its functionality. So, keeping this in mind provide them with the best of images or any video (if required) so that the readers can have a prior idea about the product before he actually makes a purchase. The images shown should be of high quality and the videos should be clear and audible.

Search options and refinement benefits: When the search has been performed, keep the search bar in front having query in it with the search results so that users can modify their query. Also give your readers the advanced options like to select prices, colors, models etc. facilitating them to make a purchase on the spot.

Customer support: The customers buying online need instant support. The provision of live chat support on every page is a great help that you can provide them with.

Use a prior tested software: You have to check the functionality at every level like browsing, payment options, cart functions etc. so as to give your customers an enjoyable and comfortable experience.

All the very successful e commerce websites like eBay, Amazon.com, are not by chance, but they have provided their users with all the options that makes the shopping experience just superb.!!!