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OneStepCheckout is a shopping cart optimization for Magento stores – and Tanki Online is a MMOG that currently has over 5 million players worldwide.

Check out our friends over at Tanki Online. They are running some nice promotions for crystals if paid through Gate2Shop.
You can find more information here.

Shopping cart abandon rate is undoubtedly a great indicator of whether we are doing the things right or not in our online store.

Having an optimized after shopping cart abandonment management process to handle the situation and re-inviting customers to complete the purchase has proven to increase conversion rates. You can start with these five simple tips:

1. Simplicity: Conversion rate is affected directly by the complexity of the buying process. Both, the buying and the checkout process must be as short as possible to avoid abandonment. We have mentioned in previous posts that every online shop should allow customer to buy without registration.

2. Collect data: Although you must allow customers to buy without registering, you should collect email address (and possibly also the phone number) in the first step of your checkout process so you will be able to contact them if they do not complete the process. Consumers would not mind providing their names and emails, above all, because they appreciate receiving a ‘purchase confirmation email’.

3. Immediacy: Send a reminder email to a customer who has abandoned the shopping cart within 24 hours. If you do not contact this prospective client soon, it will be less likely that she/he remembers why she/he started the buying process in the first place.

In this message, include a link that will take the customer back to the abandoned cart with the item or items already added and as much information pre-populated in the order form as possible.

4. Show interest: Price is not always the reason why a customer leaves the shopping cart. Therefore, when contacting a client that just abandon the shopping cart, express concern about whether a technical error in your system prevented her/him to convert. Other usual reasons that drive online shoppers to abandon the purchase process can also be: uncomfortable buying process, lack of different payment options or not having time enough in that moment.

5. Offer incentives: Prepare a second reminder email including an offer or incentive to encourage the customer to come back to the shopping cart and finalize the purchase.

You have to remain positive despite the fact that an abandoned shopping cart often occurs; – it is also a strong indicator of interest on your products. Study the reasons why customers leave the cart and keep in mind that the sales process is not finished at that point. With a good shopping cart abandon management, you can recover many ‘lost’ sales. Use this opportunity to highlight an additional competitive advantage: good customer service.

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If you haven’t noticed the new video on our homepage, then please take a look.  In just a little over two minutes it highlights some of the cool things about our services.

Enjoy, and don’t forget to comment.

The Internet is undoubtedly the best channel to sell games online for its convenience, immediacy and global reach. Nonetheless, it is also a very competitive sector. Therefore, when selling games, software or digital products, you should bear in mind that an online store does not sell by itself.

If you are determined to start selling your games online, you should consider some key elements in order to succeed:

1. First, you need to choose the right ecommerce software that best suits your needs. Not every ecommerce solution is specifically designed for the gaming industry and not all of them support, for example casual game or Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games.

2. Make different versions οf уουr game аnd mаke thеm available for different operating systems as well. Besides, provide your customers with satisfactory information about the game, build great product sales pages: attractive and describing all the benefits and main advantages over other games.

3. Offer a free version of the game or offer just some features and for a limited period of time after which players will need to pay. This way, players will learn more about your product and they will have an incentive to keep playing and pay for it.

4. Create a Marketing plan to promote the game that includes different online marketing tactics and, if possible, publicity аnd advertisement. Consider joining an affiliate networks that can help you to sell your games online easier and faster.

Although you are selling a digital product via the Internet, act like you have a physical store. Remember that behind every conversion there is a person so try to improve their experience using your online store and dedicate time to lead nurturing.

5. Finally, without collection there is no shop. Nowadays, offering a great range of payment options is necessary to avoid losing sales and be able to succeed. Yου need tο find a reliable payment service provider which will allow уου to accept the greater range of payments options.

When selling games online, especially Social Networks and Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO or MMOG), you need a provider that offers micropayment solutions and Flash Payments option which allow gamers to remain in the game while making a purchase.

At the end of the day, all you need is to build an attractive and effective website technically compatible with your game and ready to accept payments online.  Note that there are full-service providers that can help to throughout the entire process to success.

Attractive and, above all, efficient websites is the great challenge for every online merchant. Being efficient means to sell more and improving the user experience will definitely help. In this post, we will give some keys points to improve customer experience for software, digital goods and games online merchants. The main peculiarity of the digital product industry selling online is that there is no physical products so certain parameters that are important to the retailing sector, such as stock availability, shipping charges or payment on delivery, do not need to be considered. Nevertheless, the tips listed below can and should be applied to any online store:

1. Optimize your website. Optimize the more technical aspects of the site: Improve accessibility, site-speed and create a simple, attractive and well-organized website structure. Bear in mind that clear and clean navigation is critical.

2. User oriented design. Keep it simple! Online consumers like simple and short processes. Users do not want to learn to use your site; they want your site to be adapted to their mental structure. Add clarity to simplicity and do not make the mistake of, for instance, labelling call-to-action buttons with confusing words like “submit” if what you mean is “buy now.”

3. Product display and information. Accurate, complete and clear information about your products is essential. You cannot allow your users to find the information needed to finalize the purchase elsewhere. Create your own product descriptions and never just copy the description given by the manufacturer. When selling digital products online, you do not really need to include 360-degree view of the products, but be imaginative and include, for example, a demo or an explanatory video of your digital goods.

4. Social Shopping. People like to know what other people have bought, which the best-sellers are or what the online community thinks on a given item. Bear in mind that personal recommendations are a major influence on purchase decisions and build trust. So include the options to rate products, post comments, and show these references to future buyers and you will improve significantly the user experience. Additionally, combine users-ratings with cross-selling options, which will be very effective if you display “Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed…”

Do not forget to include social media sharing buttons to every product, this will allow your clients to recommend your products, inform their contacts about their latest acquisition or ask for advice to their network.

5. Price policy. Price is one of the first things consumers watch and one of the main reasons to purchase, so display it clearly. Your users will appreciate not having to do extra clicks to find the price and remember that your competitors are also one click away. On the other hand, do not hide additional charges revealed only at the checkout; nobody likes to be taken for a fool.

6. Checkout process. The checkout process MUST be as short and quick as possible. Users will also appreciate if you inform about how many steps the purchasing process is going to take and at which point they are.  Allow checkout without registration. Registration is a useless burden and a major cause of cart abandonment for first time clients (most of the users do not want to reveal personal information when is not really necessary) but also for returning clients, since they might have forgotten their password.

7. Payment options. Provide a great variety of payment options to boost your sales, markets and conversions. Do not assume that everyone has a PayPal account, that everyone has a credit card or that everybody can pay in dollars. It is best to offer the greatest possible number of credit and debit cards from as many countries as possible and to accept payments in different currencies.

8. Keep in touch. Cultivate the relation with your customers. Once customers have finished the purchase, it is time to ask them to subscribe to your newsletter or any other personalized alert system. Find out which are their interests and keep in touch accordingly (e.g. or accumulative points, extra discount for frequent users, etc.)

We take this opportunity to share with you this video about Tesco Homeplus Virtual Subway Store in South Korea. Although we want to focus our post on the virtual goods sector, it is a great example of how to eliminate boundaries and frustration and fascinate consumers:

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Following on from our previous blog posting, we have since added another two payment methods…

AliPay is an immediate authorization eWallet, renowned in Asia, and the most famous and frequently used payment method in China.  Swiff is an offline bank transfer-like payment option available in Canada, with delayed authorization (pending status) and without chargebacks.

Making sure that the most relevant global and local payment methods are integrated into an ecommerce platform is just one piece of the jigsaw, but a very important piece.

We have just integrated two more payment methods into our ever expanding global ecommerce platform, which is good news to vendors who sell where these payment methods are popular.

AstroPay Card is a virtual pre-paid card for use in Brazil, while paysafecard is a pre-paid card for use in Europe. Both offer immediate authorization, without chargebacks.

The two new additions have already processed a number of transactions in the first few days of operation.

Following a comprehensive and successful trial period, we are pleased to announce that our new ‘Active Conversion‘ service is now available to all vendors.  ‘Active Conversion’ is designed to maximize sales revenue by transforming unsuccessful transactions into successful sales.

Failed transactions/declines can occur for a variety of reasons, and unless something is done to prevent them, they will continue to cause lost sales.  Gate2Shop now have the tools and a dedicated team of experts to monitor and act on these problematic transactions, resulting in a significant amount of salvaged sales.

A decline can now have a happy ending, and statistics show conversions up anywhere between 17% and 35% when using the new service.

One of the most important elements for the success of your digital marketing plan are landing pages, especially if you are using paid traffic campaigns such as PPC (Pay Per Click) ads. A Landing Page is a page created for users to carry out a very specific action (an email subscription, a sale, etc.), which –well designed- helps to greatly increase your conversion rate.

Designing a landing page is pretty much as designing an ad. And to design landing pages that convert is your responsibility. Here you have the opportunity to tell your customers why your product is awesome and why they must convert.

There are some key elements that will help you to design killing landing pages as a Marketing or Ad expert:

1. Unique call to action: Make sure the landing page does not have competing call-to-actions. Focus your landing page in a single and clear action on the top of the page –avoid scrolling down-. Keep it simple for customer and drive them to take the action you want without overwhelming them trying to sell many things at the same time. This is not the moment to confuse customers with too much information. Communicate clearly what you want them to do and why.

2. Give the customer an enticing reason to convert, now: Incorporate a unique and convincing selling proposition (USP) that clearly communicates why the customer must convert.

3. Avoid links that may distract the customer: You are bringing traffic to the landing page with a very clear objective. Do not distract your customer with links that might drive them to other sites. Not even to your home site. Although the visitor might not be familiar with your brand and/or products, you have to design the landing page ready to convince the visitor to convert in a single shot.

4. Consistent message. The selling proposition message of the landing page must match the text of the PPC, ad, tweet, email or wherever is the traffic source from which visitors will come from. What you say in your ad must match what customers see in the landing page. So if you ad is offering “Save up to 10% on every antivirus software”, make sure that your customers will land in a page with the same offer. In the case you have different campaigns or offers running at the same time, create a unique landing page for each of them.

5. Reinforce trust. Include elements that communicate and reinforce trust and safety to consumers. In this sense, it is strongly recommended to incorporate trust buttons like Verified by Visa logo, BBB badge, antivirus logos or any other industry certifications or awards near the conversion form. Build even more trust by including customers’ testimonials and reviews. Genuine testimonials from respected people in your industry can boost your conversion rate.

Trust buttons

6. Don’t forget SEO: Create unique landing pages only accessible from its coming PPC ad or email campaign and include a custom and descriptive URL using your hottest keywords.

7. Plan a tracking method and test. We always insist on the importance of testing all your digital marketing actions. You must test your landing pages specially those coming for a PPC campaign. You are creating landing pages because you want them to convert plus you are paying for this traffic. As you create custom and individual URLs for each landing page inaccessible from your main site, you can easily track its efficiency in terms of views and conversions. Google Analytics and Google AdWords give you valuable data about consumer behaviour that you can use to modify and adjust your campaigns. If you are not sure about which design or selling proposition will convert the most, create different landing pages for the same campaign and modify texts, pictures, composition, colours, etc.; Google will tell you which model is selling more.

A/B test

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