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Recently, we’ve had a corporate restructure and would like to keep you updated. Please see the official press release which will give you all the necessary details about it:

‘Everything eBusiness’ Company Offers Wide Range of eCommerce, eMarketing and ePayments Solutions for Online Sellers

INNSBRUCK, Austria; SOFIA, Bulgaria; and NICOSIA, Cyprus, January 31, 2012 – Market.com (www.market.com) debuts today as a new name for a broad range of highly experienced and successful global ecommerce infrastructure brands, which provide start-to-finish solutions for online businesses.

Market.com, unveiled internally in July 2011, serves as a new corporate umbrella for solutions already familiar to thousands of online sellers around the world including SafeCharge, xt:Commerce®, MarketNetwork, InstallSmart and Ginyas. The company’s consumer-oriented brands – MessengerPlus! and Plus! Network – boast hundreds of millions of downloads and tens of millions of users worldwide.

The new corporate structure of market.com is in response to feedback from clients who indicated their preference to work with a single trusted provider offering a broader range of services. With that goal in mind, SafeCharge, a prominent and respected online payment provider, made several acquisitions in recent years to round out the company’s service portfolio and simplify the way it serves its clients.  SafeCharge remains a key brand within the ePayments division of the newly formed market.com.

Market.com offers solutions both for merchants selling physical products that must be stored, managed and shipped to purchasers, as well as digital products such as software and other downloadable offerings.  The company has over 12 years’ experience in providing services to a broad range of online industries including retail, digital goods and services, casual and massively multiplayer online games, gambling, dating, forex and more.

Market.com services and products are used by prominent companies including Volkswagen, Aeria Games, IncrediMail, Osram and Markets.com. The company has over 200 employees in company locations in Austria, Bulgaria, Canada, Cyprus, Germany, Israel and Serbia.

“The new market.com has been working hard to deliver on our vision of creating the best online payments, ecommerce and Internet marketing solutions for our clients,” said Alon Shamir, director, market.com. “Our many brands offer a full range of high quality services – from driving traffic and conversion, to creating online shops and accepting payments. We offer these services to our clients in a streamlined manner so they can focus on their businesses and spend less effort on dealing with the services they need to run their business.”

The company’s slogan, “Everything eBusiness,” succinctly describes its vertically integrated business model and key value proposition.

eCommerce

Market.com’s eCommerce division offers its leading ecommerce shop solution, xt:Commerce. It is an innovative and easy-to-use system for building single shop and multi-shop online stores. The system includes straight forward administration tools and back office, built-in search engine optimization features and a range of templates and add-ons that contribute to the success of the shops. Its modular design allows for the easy plug-in of new features and services.

xt:Commerce is the most popular shopping cart platform in Germany with more than 150,000 downloads and approximately 200 new shops each day.

eMarketing

The market.com eMarketing division helps companies to drive traffic to their shops and to monetize that traffic to the highest extent possible. Services include proprietary media channel opportunities, traffic monetization solutions and a highly effective affiliate network which drives a massive number of monthly impressions worldwide.

Brands in this group include:

• MarketNetwork, a powerful affiliate network active in 45 countries which promotes and serves affiliates and advertisers with unique in-house offers and exclusive advertising products;
• InstallSmart, an optimization platform providing online companies which offer downloadable software with actionable download analytics.  InstallSmart helps clients to optimize their download and installation processes and to monetize their traffic by offering opt-in downloads during installation; and
• Ginyas, an online coupon marketing platform and unique marketing tool that offers geo-targeted contextual promotions based on user behavior and serves as a monetization platform for site and software owners.

ePayments

The ePayments division is a highly successful part of the group’s offerings. Market.com offers clients a range of payment solutions to fit the requirements of all ecommerce sites – from small to large and those offering tangible or intangible goods. The solutions include a PCI-certified gateway (since 2005), well established banking relationships, maximum global, local and alternative payment methods and billions of dollars in transactions processed annually.  The company’s ePayments solutions include one of the strongest risk management and fraud protection programs in the industry. Brands in this group include:

• SafeCharge, a well-known and respected payment solution for large online businesses with more than a decade of experience;
• SafeCharge Connect, the company’s gateway-only service connecting clients to its network of acquiring banks;
• Gate2Shop, a strategic partner providing a secure online ecommerce platform for online businesses specializing on digital services, games and products; and
• xt:Commerce Payments, an internet payment service provider for online businesses selling tangible goods.

“Conduit has partnered with several of market.com’s individual solutions and we believe a good part of our online success is directly attributable to the superior technology and human support we have received over the years,” said Brock Kaye, Conduit VP of Business Development.

“As an innovative, web-based auction site, Ziinga has benefited greatly from market.com‘s eMarketing services,” said Masih Nikdar, director of Ziinga. “We have seen significant traffic increase to our site leading to increased sales.”

For more information about market.com and its service offerings, visit www.market.com or contact marketing at info@market.com.

About market.com

Market.com (www.market.com) is a prominent and experienced provider of ebusiness infrastructure and services to online companies throughout the world. The company provides a full range of ecommerce, emarketing and epayments solutions to thousands of companies in a wide range of industries.

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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Unless you are constantly innovating and upgrading your products, it is difficult to sell the same products to the same customer several times. Besides, the more a client buys from a vendor, the higher the switching cost is.

The goal for every merchant is to sell more, and we know this is a difficult task. In order to improve your online conversion and client loyalty rates, you must implement many different promotional strategies. Recently we discussed How to Structure an Online Coupon Profitably, and today we will focus on cross-selling techniques.

Cross selling is a merchandising tool consisting of offering similar or complementary products to what the shopper is looking at. Cross selling allows vendors to bundle products, or offer any combinable accessory enhancing the value of the purchase. It gives the vendor the ability to suggest to the buyer more products at the right time. While in the offline world this could sounds rather obvious, this technique can really make a difference for online merchants because cross selling will allow them to imitate a sales person or a personal shopper assistant.

The main objectives of cross-selling are to enhance order completion as well as increase average sale spend due to customers adding accessories or extra products to their original selection. Moreover, many merchants use cross selling capabilities to promote popular items, target high margin products, show to the customers a wider range of goods and as a result trigger impulse purchases.

The benefits of putting in practice cross-selling techniques are clear:

1. You can substantially increase your revenue by selling complimentary products in addition to the initial purchase,
2. You can increase the lifetime value as well as the average order size,
3. You can guide customers throughout your e-store adding value to their purchase,
4. You increase your customers’ purchase experience

Suggest to the buyer the right product at the right time.

There are many places in your website to displays cross-selling options: home page, product page, shopping cart view, checkout page or even after the order is done. There are also many different forms to do it: under the product page, in a side banner, as a pop-up, in an extra page before/after the check-out. The best placement will depend on your website design the length of the product page and your customers’ behavior.

Some customers really enjoy cross-selling options because they feel a personal shopper is helping them. However, these techniques –above all the use of pop-ups or forcing your customers to view the cross selling suggestions- can be perceived as an obstacle to finalize the buying process.

Make your add-ons valuable for the customer by:

-          Showing relevant products

-          Providing enough information (picture, price and description)

-          Keeping customers in the shopping path

-          Using direct and emotional language

-          Not cluttering the page

See an example here:

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