Insights on Today's E-Commerce

You may have seen an update from Facebook about their recent notification changes. Even if you haven’t, chances are your customers have! Here is what they are seeing:

Nothing’s more exciting than seeing people in a shopping frenzy on your page. The volume of comments promises optimistic figures and projections for your business. However, that excitement tends to die down after a little while and the reality sets in that most of those customers may never actually pay for what they threw into their cart in the heat of the moment.  An average of 69% of online carts are being abandoned by users. What can you do to mitigate this?

One of eCommerce's biggest hurdles is to keep customers from abandoning carts. It turns out that quite a lot of us are actually window shoppers that are simply dreaming of owning those carted items until we get to the exchange of money. Whether it be sticker shock or merely procrastination, offering free shipping incentives within an hour of carting helps markedly with this problem. CommentSold has a feature that can detect if your customers have paid in this time frame and automatically calculate free shipping for their order. The team whipped up some fun freebies for those using it to entice their customers into quick checkouts. Simply right click and save. Enjoy!

Technology allows the streamlining of every process from procurement through marketing, sales and fulfillment. So why are some businesses still using their precious resources on manually reporting, billing, and chasing payments? We think it’s high time to ditch manual invoicing. Here are 6 good reasons why you should get this process automated or get left behind:

What’s tedious, time-consuming, and costs you money? This isn’t a riddle. It’s manual invoicing and it’s the cold, hard truth. It’s nobody’s favorite, but it must be done. Every time goods or services are sold, an invoice must be created. Proper invoicing is absolutely critical to good customer relationships, record keeping (for both parties), and your businesses’ cash flow.

So how do you handle this? You have two choices- automate or grind. There are so many reasons to choose automated invoicing. It is absolutely worth skipping the grind for your sanity, your wallet, and for your customers. Here’s why.

CommentSold is an amazing tool for your Group or your Facebook Page during your sales, but you’ll want to keep the fun alive for your customers to still want to see your posts well after. The first thing you can do to ensure that your customers see your posts is to do a little contest (reward a free item, or an exclusive coupon) and ask them to adjust their settings to turn on notifications & to follow you! That way when you post, whether an engagement post or a comment selling post, they will be notified of your postings!

Engagement is key! People love to feel as though they belong! When you can make your customers feel like they belong to your community, they will naturally be more interactive in your group, with you, your employees, and with your other fans! You can increase engagement as simply as responding to questions, chiming in on posts, and involving yourself in customer conversations in your group! There are many other ways to increase this as well.

Facebook naturally shows videos before regular posts. That doesn’t mean to try and cheat the system and post an image in a video format! (Facebook is smarter than that, and will push those to the bottom of the priority list!) Videos should be fun and give them a reason to want to stick through and watch it. You don’t always have to sell items in your videos either. Consider giving them a reason to stick around and watch until the end. Example: Mention that you’re going to release the next sale or upcoming promotion at the end of the video, before you announce it in a post.

Increasing engagement comes in so many different forms! Ask your group questions, show genuine interest in what they say, respond to their comments, and interact with them. Here are just a few ideas you could recreate and use in your group!

People like watching videos. And evidently they love watching live video. With people interacting 6x more with live video vs pre recorded, livestreaming has proven itself to be a super powerful marketing tool. And, with Facebook being one of the most used social network sites, Facebook Live seems to be the most effective way of maximizing your reach and converting more viewers to loyal followers and customers. So what's the secret to success with this tool? We put together a to-do list to get the most of your Facebook Live broadcasts. 

There's a lot of buzz over Facebook Live sales right now. There’s also a lot of equipment out there to help create exceptional live videos. Lately we’ve been daydreaming about a sweet little set up for this endeavor. As such, we put together the top 3 items for our luxury livestream studio wishlist. Check out our picks and why we love them!

While some might believe that technology has been a hindrance to human connection, others have used it to connect to their audiences in new and unique ways. Since the integration of live video streaming technology into Facebook, businesses such as LipSense, Younique, and Paparazzi have quickly learned how effective it is in connecting with their audience and increasing their sales .