Business Framework Blog

While retailers have their presence on social networking sites managed for customer interactivity, most of them haven’t used social networking for ecommerce. That is why it has been quite a common opinion that social media is a just a fad for businesses. 1-800-Flowers have dispelled this misconception. 

Social media optimization is becoming more than the method of brand awareness increase. The combination of online store and social networking is no longer a fancy. This is what we all were talking about: social networking is ushering in a new era for businesses.

1-800-Flowers is now the first (and not the last) online store on a social networking website. On their group on Facebook 1-800-Flowers offer to shop “without ever having stray from your Facebook account”. Online shopping process is the same as if customers were making purchases from an ordinary online store: customers can browse items, place them into shopping cart, select a delivery date and send. 1-800-Flowers embedded their shopping widget into their fan group on Facebook and claim to have commited their first retail transaction on Facebook on July 8, 2009.   

1-800-Flowers has 1,927 fans on Facebook for the moment. Taking into consideration that 1-800-Flowers.com is on the list of top online retailers rate by Hitwise and regarding the growing interest in social media as ecommerce outlet, we can predict a success of this online business experiment.

This transformation from a fan group into the online retail store seems natural: with more than 250 million members Facebook represents an irresistible outlet for customer acquisition. There are nearly 300 thousand companies’ fan groups on Facebook, from Coca-Cola to McDonald’s. I will not be surprised if they follow the example of 1-800-Flowers shortly. 

There’s a ton of talk that the authorities of many respectable newspapers are about to implement the ideas to make their online news paid. It makes no surprise actually when analyzing the state of today’s publishing industry. According to the words of Financial Times editor-in-chief, Lionel Barber, Internet users will have to pay for the access to the news online in 2010. Public opinion does matter so it is quite hard to imagine that people will feel comfortable of paying for something that used to be free.   

Even though the crisis is predicted to come to the end, this is hardly possible that we all will be swimming in money just after the end of recession. So it also sounds doubtful that Internet users will be ready to pay for the news available from alternative free online sources. To the regret of newspapers’ editors, blogging and social networking are unstoppable.  

Even if all the online news websites will become paid, this is simply in human nature not to pay for things that used to be free. People just will not be ready for additional expenses.  

Let’s delve a bit deeper into this subject and analyze the advantages of online news comparing to offline editions. Online news is incomparably much more versatile, free and, of course, issuing in much shorter terms. Whether users don’t like the content on one site they can easily search for another interpretation of the required news or subject on another website. Moreover, online news includes multiple types of content including images, photos, audio and video. People are becoming extremely busy these days so it’s no surprise that we want to get the needed information and news right here and right now. Only the payment process alone can frustrate even the most patient and interested of us.

Moreover, as online advertising is cheaper and often free and more accessible, businesses prefer to advertise online. Newspapers are running out of steam not standing management spending loads uncompensated by paid advertising.

Here I would like to post a chart of the most popular news websites. The chart has been compiled following the Hitwise data.

Would these news websites be so extremely popular if being paid? Sounds very dubious.

Sports websites are intended not only to entertain and inform their visitors but also to extract benefits from people’s passion for sports. In this post I would like to outline one of the sports websites on the model of nascar.com and submit for your consideration the chart of most popular US sports websites. 

NASCAR is a business venture that governs various auto racing events. NASCAR sanctions the three largest racing series: the Sprint Cup, Nationwide Series and the Camping World Truck Series. NASCAR is at the forefront of the most viewed professional sports in terms of television ratings in the US surpassed only by professional football. NASCAR broadcasts its races in over 150 countries and holds 17 of the top 20 attended single-day sporting events in the world. NASDAC fans purchase over $3 billion in annual licensed product sales. NASCAR fans are also proved to be the most brand-loyal in all of sports.

NASCAR online presence contributes significantly to its brand awareness, brand loyalty and sales, of course. On October 2000 the Time Warner Company acquired all of NASCAR’s interactive rights and the rights to the domain nascar.com. Since 2001 NASCAR.com is the official website for NASCAR Inc.    

Entering the website you may feel embarrassed a bit by the rich of information that you can’t embrace with first view. There are indeed tons of information and some advertising on the main page which actually doesn’t annoy and makes no obstacles to the needed content. On the website you can get an access to miscellaneous news, race dates and results, video and photos. You can also easily order the ticket for the event you want to visit. 

NASCAR.com also includes e-shop with ability to order directly from the website. Ordering process is simple and is not cluttered with annoying up-selling or cross-selling offers.  However, quality money-off offers make it very tempting for fans to make a purchase of an item with desired logo. “Shop by driver” and “Custom shop” are also great online shopping features available from NASCAR.com.  With custom shop you can design the product you’re about to obtain in your own preferred style.

Moreover, NASCAR, like other sports websites, also contains a social networking feature with chat, forums and blog features. Each member gets a profile and is capable of sharing photos and videos. Visitors also get the availability to play online games and participate in online competitions. All told, the website is full of high-quality informative content and applications to woo its visitors and elevate their satisfaction from navigation through the website.

Here's the chart of the most popular US Sports Websites compliled in accordance with the Hitwise data:

Join the online business race with CORE Framework! With our CORE Framework products you obtain the possibility to create and manage your own online business website at ease. CORE Framework products are already enhanced with the whole gamut of advanced features for effective and comprehensive online business running.

On our CORE blog I will keep on analyzing the ecommerce impact on various industries and online business landscapes. So it is evident that I can’t miss the opportunity to speak of mobile phone web-sites due to the huge influence mobile technologies has on our lifestyles.

In accordance with Lightspeed Research of how consumers use their mobile phones, browsing the Web is the most popular daily activity naturally after voice calls and texting. Internet is obviously the best place to find and exchange mobile phone content such as photos, video and music. That is why mobile phones websites are so extremely popular.

Mobile phones websites are reaping benefits from advertising, selling ringtones, pictures, video and applications. Many of these websites are referred as social networks. Such websites give their members the opportunity not only to find, upload and exchange content for their cell-phones but also to socialize with each other. 

For instance, MocoSpace is a mobile social network that includes chat, forums, instant messaging and photo and video sharing. Moreover, MocoSpace is the largest mobile social network in the US with more than 6 million users. Like many other social networks MocoSpace is based on direct advertisements to users.  MySpace Mobile and Myxer are also extremely popular mobile phones sites on the Web and the leaders in ad-supporting mobile entertainment.

Entering the name of one of these websites from the mobile phone browser a user gets an access to the tons of content and applications for their phones and ability to stay connected with other members.

With millions of mobile users and dozens of million mobile downloads a month such websites are the largest and fastest-growing outlets for mobile content these days. Here I would like to post a chart of the most popular US mobile phones websites. The chart is compiled following the Hitwise data.

Turn your online business idea into the reality with our CORE Framework products! Please visit http://www.core-frameworks.com/ to learn more about our Ecommerce solution, CORE CMS and CORE Social Network.

Extensive knowledge about ecommerce and reliable ecommerce software together are the imperatives for profitable online business. Choosing a reliable and easy to use content management system is a milestone for successful online business start-up.      

CORE CMS from Itransition has been developed with non-technical users in mind that is why our CORE CMS is extremely easy to use. With CORE CMS you can set up and run any type of a website: from a promotional micro-site that consists just of some pages to a large multilingual portal.

Content

With powerful CORE CMS built-in features you can update all the content of the website pages and overall website structure, including pages layout, text fonts and colors, logos, header images and slogans. With our CMS hierarchical website structure logic users are able to navigate through the website faster and easily. You can also add each page created in the administration console directly to the main website navigation bar displayed on the top of any page.    

Navigation

You can easily align the website navigation according to your wishes: vertically

or horizontally

With quick jump navigation module, which can be added to each page, your visitors get instant access to the most essential and popular pages of your web-site. 
You can additionally create Footer navigation panel to provide links to the pages dedicated to Privacy policy or Terms and conditions.

Ready-to-use Modules

CORE CMS is already enhanced with a set of ready-to-use and easy-to-manage modules which enable to give unique look to every page. On your web-site’s pages you can submit latest news block, banners enforced with text, image or flash banners, info blocks and search bar. The search bar can be added to every page to guarantee visitors quick and easy access to the needed content.

CORE CMS gives an administrator a possibility to change completely the visual appearance of individual pages or entire website with just a few clicks with no need to rebuild the entire web-site from scratch.

Site Map and Contact Us Form

Also, CORE CMS provides a built-in site map page, which is easily added to the web-site and automatically updated when adding more pages or editing your existing pages. With CORE CMS you also obtain a pre-built contact form page that conceals your email address from spam and allows visitors to ask questions and send their feedback. 

Administration console

CORE CMS administration console gives website administrators great possibilities to manage website content, overall look and feel of the website with no technical knowledge required!

Versioning

All the created pages’ content is version controlled so as you can easily manage past and existing content, view publishing history and find contributors.

SEO

Taking into consideration that 90% of Internet users start their surfing over the web from search engines we developed our CORE CMS with SEO in mind from the very beginning. That is why
CORE CMS also includes powerful SEO features to guarantee remarkable search engine ranking positions for your website and effective customer acquisition:       

• editorial control of pages’ Meta tags and titles
• clean search engine friendly URLS
• easy to navigate Site map
• Google Analytics integration
• XML site map generation module

Media Library

We understand that a single image, video or flash demo can say more than thousands of words that is why our CORE CMS administration console is upgraded with media library section to help you easily upload media files of all possible existing formats, including images, flash files, PDFs, Word documents, etc. You can also structure and organize uploaded files to your preferences and needs into different categories.

Roles and Permissions

The ability to set up the unlimited number of use roles provides better user experience and improved web-site security. Access permissions to specified areas can assigned to the whole user groups or distributed among individual users. Thus, website administrator can assign at ease permissions to any department or person in charge, ensuring that users obtain access to the tools required for their work and responsibilities.

Email Promotion

With our CORE CMS built-in email campaign tool you can manage you email promotion campaigns in a single click. You can add a newsletter sign up form to your website’s homepage to easily collect your visitors email addresses.

Multiple Website Management and Multilingual Support

We have developed our CORE solution to make your user experience with our content management system as easy and smooth as possible, so as you could entirely focus on your business. With CORE CMS administration console you are able to manage several websites through the same single interface. However, each website can have absolutely independent design, structure and content so you don’t have to install the system several times. CORE CMS multilingual support allows running your website or websites in different languages. Administrator can assign several languages to the website and create different page versions for each used language. With one CMS solution you’re obtaining the possibility to a number of web-sites with different designs and in different languages!

CORE CMS is already enhanced with numerous effective, time-tested and customizable features which means no additional costs to you! To give learn more about all the CORE CMS features please visit http://www.core-frameworks.com/cms-overview/cms-features. To get a clear on how your web-site may look with our CORE CMS and get a better understanding of how you can manage it, please visit http://demo.itransition.com/CoreCMS/ .

To learn more about CORE Framework products please visit http://www.core-frameworks.com/.

From ecommerce perspective, game industry is probably one of the most successful ones. According to the Future Ads recent study 61% of online gamers are spending more time playing games online this year comparing to 2008. This tendency unsurprisingly has its roots in global recession. In this economic downturn all industries are looking forward to migrating to more effective, cheaper and consumer-friendly online business landscapes. Future Ads survey proves this tendency: in 2009 consumers’ spending on console games has decreased sharply while the time spent playing online games is on the remarkable rise. Game industry just like all other industries is shifting numerous of its activities to the Web and it is moving rapidly into an era of revolutionary changes.  

Gamevance survey reveals that roughly 90% of respondents believe that physical consoles will shortly become a thing of the past. This survey also shows that gamers are more likely to play from online portals and hubs (where games are easily accessible) than from numerous web-sites. Here is the chart of most popular US online games websites compiled according to Hitwise data: 

Online gaming covers all audiences, notwithstanding gender and age. More and more age groups these days are becoming involved in online gaming. However, the most targeted audiences are young audience and teens. In compliance with “Teen Advertising Study” conducted by Fuse Marketing and University of Massachusetts Amherst, roughly a half of US teens are considered heavy online users.

While console sales are down, InStat research predicts online gaming subscriptions to grow continuously. As a vast percentage of console players are online players as well, each console provider generates hundreds of millions of dollars of annual revenue from online services subscriptions, content downloads and online advertising. However, even though most popular consoles are enhanced with Internet playing capability, most users still prefer to dedicate more time to playing games offline. 

All this means that online services still have much room to grow and growth possibilities for online retailers are indeed inexhaustible. 

In this fierce competition in ecommerce market e-retailers have to be flexible enough to stay afloat. Up-selling and cross-selling are one of the most powerful marketing techniques that can help boost your sales volume. Of course, it will not help you see your sales sky-rocket incredibly but at least it will help you market your e-shop’s products in a more effective way.

Up-selling is the marketing technique when you recommend adding features or warranties that relate to the product or buying a more expensive model of the same type of a product. Cross-selling is a marketing method to make a customer spend more money by adding the products from other categories than the initial product. Actually, when a customer approves your initial offer, it means he/she trusts you and your offers and they are open to the further interaction. So it’s the right time to offer something interesting for a customer and obtain additional revenue from a single product.       

The top benefits of smart cross-selling and upselling for your online store include:

- Average order value increase
- Conversion rate increase
- Improvement of relationships between online business-holder and customers
- Increase of the awareness of your brand and depth of your offerings

The more upselling and cross-selling are related to the original purchase, the more likely a customer will be interested in adding more items to the order and contributing to your upselling and cross-selling conversion rates. If you provide your customers with smooth buying experience and recommend something really useful for them you will have great possibilities to upsell and cross-sell to them.

As a rule, Internet Marketers implement two basic approaches when upselling/cross-selling: to offer an upsell/cross-sell on the order page and to offer the upsell/cross-sell after the customer has already submitted the order information but before they submit payment information. Here I would like to outline just some simple tips for successful upselling/cross-selling.

1. Let your Upsell or cross-selling make sense to the buyer. If you’re offering the items that are not related to the initial purchase this is hardly possible you will make sales from them.

2. Implement sales incentives. Incentives are a crucial part of your marketing strategy as they encourage customers to purchase extra items at once. For instance, offer a discount on the second item, provide your customers with free shipping on all orders that total in a certain amount of money. Use the words like “one time only” or “limited time offer” that point out the limited number of a product and this will induce the customer to make the purchase now instead of in the future.  Also use the words like “Special offers” and “Great deals”. Then, it will not do harm if you submit top rated offers list on your page – this will help build up the credibility and bolster your customers’ confidence.

There’s also a list of some common label recommendations used as incentives:

- “Recommended products”
- “Our Best Sellers”
- “Related products”
- “Frequently bought together”
- “You may also like”
- “Stuff you may want”
- “More from this category”
- “People like you liked this”

3. Introduce upselling and cross-selling information in “by-the-way” assumptive style. Don’t be too obtrusive with your offers which can actually turn into the obstacles on the customers’ way to your online shopping cart. Very often many ecommerce websites hijack customers off the page they are looking when showing upsells or cross-sells. Don’t clutter your pages with all the offers you have.  In this case you risk not only missing revenue from your suggestive selling but also the entire initial purchase.

4. Make it as easy as possible for customers to return to the product page after your showing a suggested item. Don’t let your customers become confused and lost. Frustrated customers are more likely to turn to your competitors. 

One’s looking forward to running his/her own online business must have two imperatives for successful start-up: extensive knowledge about online business and reliable and comprehensive ecommerce solution. With our CORE Framework Ecommerce solution you obtain a fully customizable and almost automated online shopping cart solution already enhanced with multiple built-in and easy-to-manage features. With CORE Ecommerce you’re bale to sell directly to your customers and stay in complete control over your online store. Moreover, your customers will feel absolutely secure of their payments as our product is integrated only with the latest and most reliable payment technologies.

We are happy to announce that our CORE Framework web-site is now LIVE! The website is now active and we are finally ready to share all our happenings with you. And you are now able to learn how CORE Framework will help you reach the pinnacle of success for your online business and order CORE Framework solution! 

CORE Framework from Itransition represents a result of a decade long experience of developing custom websites, content management systems and enterprise portals. Our solution was developed to be practicable, customizable and easy to manage. These are the imperatives for successful and flexible online presence. Our CORE Framework products were developed with non-technical users in mind but at the same time with the intention to meet the most refined developers’ wishes. 

CORE software was developed to simplify the process of a website or portal launch. With our CORE CMS you can easily set up any type of a public website and create, store, control and publish the content on your web-site. No matter what type of a web-site you’re managing – a promotional micro-site or a large multilingual portal – our CORE CMS guarantees equal convenience and effectiveness for users. Flexible design, multilingual website support, SEO parameters support and other numerous advanced features of multiple website support will help you run your online resource successfully and in accordance with your exact business needs. Starting your own email campaign has never been as easy as with our CMS built-in email campaigns management tool. Multilingual website support and development of different versions for each language applied will help expand your business over new ecommerce markets.

CORE Ecommerce, our second CORE Framework product, is a customizable online shopping cart solution based on a comprehensive and easy-to-manage platform. CORE Ecommerce is upgraded with hundreds of built-in features and represents an almost completely automated online business management tool. CORE Ecommerce is already enhanced with advanced shopping cart, payment transactions monitoring and feedback management system and many other essential features, which means no additional costs to you! No matter what the size of your online business is, with CORE Ecommerce you obtain the power to start and manage your online business and sky-rocket your sales! Sell directly to your customers and stay in complete control over your online business with our CORE Ecommerce solution. Moreover, your customers will feel absolutely secure of their payments as our product is integrated only with the latest and most reliable payment technologies. Watch CORE Ecommerce Flash Demo that will walk you through the essentials of running an online store with CORE Ecommerce.

CORE Social Network represents a strong platform to start and manage your own professional social networking resource easily and effectively. CORE Social Network offers an entire framework which will turn your ideas into reality and make them winning ones! Our online community software is based on scalable and comprehensive architecture that allows to adjust and customize the solution according to your exact business needs. CORE Social Network advanced features can be extended with the services you find essential to add in order to meet your requirements for successful online business. CORE Social Network features assume all essential tools needed to run a full-blown effective social networking website.

For more information please visit http://www.core-frameworks.com/  

According to the ZenithOptimedia study Internet will remain the only growing advertising media in 2009. The spending on TV advertising is predicted to drop by 7% and advertising in newspapers and magazines is foretold to be down 15% and 17% accordingly. Concerning the forecasts for online advertising in Russia, Internet marketing is also feeling better. In compliance with the most optimistic forecasts the growth of online advertising in Russia may reach the point of growth by 12%.

The Russian online advertising market is developing impressively fast. With the remarkable growth of Internet penetration rate online users in Russia are becoming more involved in global ecommerce activities. Here I would like to outline some statistics taken from the report of the Russian Public Opinion Foundation. The report, sponsored by the Russian major search engine Yandex, is based on a nationwide survey of 42,000 respondents conducted in the first quarter of 2009.

Russia’s current Internet penetration rate is 33%, which is not so impressive comparing to the rates in Europe and US. However, with roughly 40 million users (more than all of England’s Internet users) Russia is becoming one of the major ecommerce powerhouses on the continent. Moscow alone possesses 5.4 million online users. Moreover, about 92% of users in Moscow go online at least once a week; 80% of them, which is actually more than 4 million users, are online on the regular everyday basis. During the seven past years the number of Internet users in Moscow doubled from 30% to 60%. During the same seven years the pace of growth for the rest of the country was even faster: the percentage of online users has increased six fold, from 5% to roughly 30%. 

Considering the demographics, in Russia, as elsewhere in the world, well-to-do and young users constitute the basis of the Russian Internet audience. The highest penetration rate of 67% is among the young users (18-24 years). The split between male and female Internet users is 50%. However, the typical Russian blogger is female.

Now let’s analyze this data from ecommerce perspective: more and more Russian people these days prefer to make their purchases online. In accordance with Google experts’ research the most popular phrase containing the key-word “Internet” searched in Google by the Russians over the past three months of spring was “Internet store”. Moreover, Russian Internet users are becoming more interested in how to create a personal online store and the inquiry for the specific key-words has doubled. Then, among the most fast growing Google inquiries in Russia are “Internet advertising“(60% increase) and “Internet Marketing” (50% increase). 

Now let’s turn to social networking: Russia has the world’s most engaged social networking audience. According to the comScore, Inc. study the Russians spend 6.6 hours in social media websites and view nearly 1,300 pages per visitor a month (as on May, 2009). As Russia is geographically the largest country on Earth, social networking represents a great tool connecting people from one corner of the country to the other. Extremely engaged behavior of the Russian social networkers offers irresistible opportunities for marketers and advertisers who are looking forward to reaching these audiences. The most popular social networking web-site in Russia is vkontakte.ru with more than 37 million registered users followed by odnoklassniki.ru.

Here I would like to submit a chart of top 10 highest engagement social networking country audiences as on May 2009 (the chart has been compiled in accordance with comScore data): 

One of the main factors that still prevent millions of potential online customers from shifting their shopping preferences into the Internet is the devotion to traditional payment habits. Then, there is a kind of a common misconception that Internet is not a safe place where one can do shopping and make purchases.   

In accordance with the Webcredible survey online customers are looking not only for price when thinking of online shopping at this or that online store. 28% of the 1300 online shoppers interviewed stated to base their buying decisions on the reputation of an online store’s website followed by 26% who regard the price as the next most important factor for making a purchase. It proves that consumers make purchases from online stores they trust.

With that said, your experience and reliability do matter. As one of the methods of establishing trustful relationships with your customers you can display customer positive feedback on your homepage. Moreover, it will not do harm if you show off media mentions about you and make your online store ratings available. Then, as nearly 90% of users start surfing over the web from search engines, your appearance in the main search engines (Google, for instance) plays its very important role in online customers’ perception of your online business.

Buying our custom CORE framework online ecommerce solution you will obtain the best platform to establish and maintain close business relationships with your customers. Our CORE framework is extremely comprehensive solution in terms of managing, designing and supporting for your ecommerce web-site.  Complete and easy integration with most of popular payment systems and powerful purchase-making functionality will help you satisfy up-to-date demands of growing Internet-savvy audiences. With our custom ecommerce solution you will not only obtain a reliable high-quality online store, but we can also help your website become visible for search engines.