Mohit Tater's Blog, page 616

Top 5 Romantic Ways to Propose

Once you’ve chosen the one you want to spend your life with, most people move on to purchase the ring.  You may have ideas about what ring she’d like best, or it may be a complete surprise.  Purchasing an engagement ring can be overwhelming, with options that range from the classic round engagement ring ( https://ecodiamond.com/tag/round-diamond-engagement-rings ) all the way to the cool and regal emerald cut diamond engagement ring ( https://ecodiamond.com/tag/emerald-cut-shape-diamond-engagement-rings ). Either way, these 2 things may have seemed like the toughest part, but for many, the proposal is the trickiest part of this journey.  Here to inspire you are our top 5 favorite romantic ways to propose.

#1.  Plan your proposal around a trip. The idea of taking time out, away from the normal chaos of work and life’s demands to focus only on each other, is a great opportunity to propose a new beginning. Take her somewhere amazing! Being away from all the day-to-day noise in a place you both want to be, sets the stage for a romantic and memorable proposal that is anything but run of the mill.  It takes some planning and careful thought, but it can set the stage for a memorable proposal that has romance written all over it.

#2. Take a hike – literally.  Go hiking and make your proposal at a high point in your hike.  You’ll have a great view to capture in your minds for this memory and you’ll both feel like you’re on top of the world! This type of proposal plan is only romantic if she loves to hike of course, but if hiking is a hobby you both share a love for, this is a sweet and thoughtful way to propose.  Don’t forget to take pictures!

#3.  Create a romantic evening in.  Making a memory in your home is also sweet and romantic – and you can get pretty elaborate – even at home!   Prepare or order in a favorite meal.  Set up flowers or candles. Set the stage with photographs of yourselves together. Make sure to incorporate her favorite things to build a beautiful moment!  Privacy is an added bonus in this loving gesture.

#4. Pop the question in a favorite restaurant.  Public proposals may not be for everyone, but you know your girl best and can decide if this is something she’d love.  Get help from staff at a favorite restaurant and add special touches ranging from flowers to fancy desserts that lead up to your proposal.  You can completely customize the experience based on your collective comfort level with the involvement of the staff at the restaurant and public display that you’ll create.

#5. Document the occasion. Find a plausible story to explain a photo shoot of the two of you.  You have a friend who’s just starting out as freelance photographer, you won a photography session for free, you want a gift for your parents – you name it!  You’ll be all dressed up and have a perfectly reasonable excuse to visit beautiful places.  Double bonus – your moment will be caught on camera so you can preserve it forever!

Regardless of what you choose for your romantic proposal, always remember that the love and thought that you put into the proposal are what she’ll remember and what matter the most!

The post Top 5 Romantic Ways to Propose appeared first on Entrepreneurship Life.

The Online Casino Way to Build Customer Loyalty

Online casinos are hardly the shining example most entrepreneurs turn to for business advice. However, the enduring and highly successful nature of these businesses is quite noteworthy. There’s a massive demand for gambling over the internet. As a result, there are hundreds of gambling sites competing for customer attention. The most successful of these sites use tactics that other web-based businesses can learn from.

Not all gambling sites resort to shady schemes to attract customers. The best and even moderately successful sites actually use legitimate customer retention and loyalty building strategies to grow and scale. Here are some of those tips for building customer loyalty that entrepreneurs can learn from gambling websites:

Get Customers Onboard a Loyalty Program from the Start

Nearly all online casinos kick off sign up offers with loyalty programs. It’s rare to find a gambling site that doesn’t offer a welcome bonus. Online gambling fans often consider welcome bonus rewards before even signing up for a site. After the sign-up, customers are already enrolled in a host of other bonus offers. So from the get-go, gambling sites have offered new recruits a reason to stay loyal to the site.

Other online businesses can try a similar strategy to offer incentives for new customers not just to sign up, but also to stay signed in. Build loyalty programs from the start, without just targeting customers who make purchases. Being on a loyalty program could convert casual browsers into loyal customers as a result.

Answer Real Concerns on the Blog

More often than not, small businesses use official blogs to promote products or disclose business news that might not necessarily interest customers. High flying gambling websites regularly blog as well. While these blogs do have promotional posts, most actually offer thoughtful advice when responding to genuine customer concerns.

Most online gamblers are concerned about legality and money transfer issues when placing bets. Casino blogs allay these concerns with detailed posts on gambling laws in different countries, laws that affect website gambling, and tips for easy money transfer. Some of these blog posts are based on FAQs.

Businesses that want customers to connect with their blogs can learn a lot from this strategy. Instead of targeting the trending keywords, use your blog posts to address customer concerns. Base blog posts on common questions the customer service department takes. This is a workable strategy that can increase traffic to the blog and also improve how long customers spend there.

Improve Customer Service

Customer service is one of the deciding factors for whether a new client will continue to be loyal to a business or a brand. Good customer service encourages new clients to continue shopping or at least keep using web-based services. Gambling sites know this all too well.

Nearly all online gambling sites are heavily invested in offering quick and convenient customer support services. It’s common to see customer support offered via live chat. Most don’t ignore the traditional methods of email and phone support either. Support services are available 24/7 for most and responses are swift.

Likewise, keep customers loyal with a great customer service infrastructure so they’ll come back. Don’t rely only on a chatbot. Actual human help can optimize existing support services.

Most new online companies can learn a lesson or two from how gambling websites keep customers engaged. Therefore, consider the above suggestions and find ways to improve customer loyalty for your brand as well.

The post The Online Casino Way to Build Customer Loyalty appeared first on Entrepreneurship Life.

3 Tips For Young Professionals Hoping to Immigrate to Canada

For many young professionals across the globe, immigrating to Canada represents an incredible opportunity to move forward in one’s career and life in ways that wouldn’t be possible in their home country. While working with a prominent immigration lawyer in Montreal can go a long way in helping turn this dream into reality, those hoping to settle in a new country will better help themselves by undertaking some key preparations first.

1.    Get a Job Offer

One of the best things you can do to expedite the immigration process is to get a job offer from a Canadian-based company that requires relocation. The Canadian government uses a points-based system to process immigration applications and attempting to enter the country as a skilled citizen will go a long way in speeding up your application.

For example, someone trying to enter the country as a self-employed worker may have to wait up to 95 months to have their application processed. On the other hand, those entering the country as skilled workers (particularly those who have obtained a job offer) only have to wait an average of six to 12 months. If you want to immigrate, start filling out job applications!

2.    Develop Your Language Skills

The ability to speak Canada’s official languages can also improve your chances of getting approved and having your application processed quickly. Be mindful of the primary language of the province you hope to immigrate to — while English and French are both official languages in the country, the two are not equally dominant across all provinces. Take time to improve your skills in the language you’ll need to speak on a daily basis.

3.    Save Money

Immigrating to a new country isn’t cheap. Application fees, work permits, and other documents can cost several hundred dollars for each person attempting to immigrate. You’ll also need to consider the costs of transporting your property to Canada (though companies that are relocating you for work reasons will often assist with these expenses).

Needless to say, moving to a new country isn’t something you should do when your bank account is empty—even if you are immigrating with the promise of better employment. You’ll need to consistently save money in advance to ensure that you’ll have enough to cover your moving expenses.

Parting Thoughts

Immigration isn’t always easy, and the process can often take much longer than you’d like. But as you go through the necessary steps to increase your odds for immigration approval, you’ll be able to set yourself up for lasting success in both your personal and professional life.

The post 3 Tips For Young Professionals Hoping to Immigrate to Canada appeared first on Entrepreneurship Life.

Why Payroll Software is a Must For Your Growing Business

When you first launch your startup, managing employees probably isn’t one of your highest priorities — after all, most small businesses begin with only one or two people working for the entire company! But as your startup grows, you’ll naturally need to bring on additional employees, and that means dealing with payroll and other associated concerns. Those who use payroll software to manage their business put themselves in a much better position to keep their company running smoothly. Here’s why you should consider this tool for your own startup.

Time Savings

Payroll software can go a long way in helping you automate payment processing and tracking hours worked. Rather than collecting and inputting all data manually, a payroll software tool can generate paychecks, manage employee vacation/sick days, and more, all based on user input. For example, employees when employees clock in or out at work, the software will record and store how many hours they worked, then apply this information to their pay slip.

Automated collection and storage of these and other important data points allows you to take a more hands-off approach to payroll concerns. When you don’t have to spend as much time focused on making sure everyone’s salaries have been properly accounted for, you can devote more of your efforts to the essential tasks that will help you grow your business.

Mistake-Free Results

Another valuable advantage of using payroll software is that it will eliminate the costly and time-consuming mistakes that so often occur when manual input is required. Validation procedures, push notifications, and other features help you avoid making mistakes when inputting data. These tools can also alert you to important payroll issues, such as when an employee has used up all their vacation hours.

Perhaps even more importantly, payroll software will ensure your business remains compliant with payroll taxes. Many of these programs even provide notifications when changes to tax law are put into place. This way, you’ll never have to worry about getting subjected to federal or local penalties because of a regulatory change you weren’t aware of.

A Better Tomorrow

Payroll software is designed to grow with your business. You may only have a handful of employees now, but as you start using this software to streamline your payroll concerns, your startup will be better prepared to accurately manage payroll as it grows. As you use payroll software to eliminate errors and give yourself more time for other tasks, you’ll be well equipped to drive growth and profitability — no matter how many employees you decide to hire.

The post Why Payroll Software is a Must For Your Growing Business appeared first on Entrepreneurship Life.

Maximize Profits at your Auto Shop with These Tips

An auto shop in a busy city should have a high turnaround, but sometimes economic conditions contribute to a slowdown in business. It might feel like you’re powerless, especially in places where brand name shops dominate the landscape. The truth is that both you and your staff have a great deal of control over your opportunities to increase profits.

Here are a few ideas you may not have considered, alongside some ideas and tips to help implement them.

Efficient Infrastructure

One of the first places to save both time and money is in the back office. Automotive management software that remembers past customers, and can provide invoicing for parts and labor is invaluable as a time saver.

Infrastructure isn’t the obvious place shop owners look to when considering cost-cutting measures, but the pros outweigh the costs and the effort. Infrastructure hosted off-site takes the pressure off of your staff, which probably isn’t trained in IT. You can easily access customer information and prepare detailed reporting on the fly, cutting the time spent diagnosing a problem. Professional reports give your shop its best face, so customers know they are dealing with a quality business.

Work on Your Phone Skills

Using your newly acquired database, you can start querying some of your past customers for service appointments. Quick mileage estimates will help you determine which customers might be due for service. Do you have direct mail campaigns? Start calling your list to make sure your local customers have received your mailers. Offer them a discount on oil changes, which tend to have fast turnarounds and allow technicians to diagnose other problems. Just be upfront that the diagnosis is free, so no one is surprised if there is a problem uncovered.

Customer service goes a long way in auto repair. Train technicians to take control of a call, asking open-ended questions and listening to the customer’s issues. Listen in on a few calls and designate some service technicians to handle the phones during downtime if they show a proficiency for it.

Reach Out

Local businesses in your area may need fleet technicians, but may not realize your rates or your services exist. Local pizzerias that maintain company cars, rental car companies, and even security companies are just a few of the many markets that would require regular maintenance. Landing such a contract might require that you keep a traveling technician on staff, but the profits would make the efforts worth it.

Regular business from these small and mid-sized companies can sustain your shop when consumer business is slow. Make a few phone calls and send out some emails to see who might need help. Trade shows and auto shows in your community are other good places to reach out to people who likely own more than one car. You can also visit other business owners to pitch your services directly.

Ideas and Final Thoughts

Clean your website a bit, eliminating pages that contain little to no useful information. Post a few YouTube videos that show off your shop, maybe a few basic repair tips, and get yourself a social media presence.

You can also use technology to offer a unique service: photo documentation. Customers will be interested to see the process of swapping out a part, with photographs showing damage the technician notes. Backups can be emailed to the customer, creating an opportunity to market to them via email and direct mail.

Maximizing profits requires a bit of outside the box thinking and a good phone voice. Practice excellent customer service, and make sure your technicians are well trained.

The post Maximize Profits at your Auto Shop with These Tips appeared first on Entrepreneurship Life.

How FedRAMP Compliance Can Give You A Competitive Edge

The federal government has taken a keen interest in cloud computing as evidenced by the security-enhancing amendments of the cloud first policy in 2010. The Management and Budget Office at the White House targets the provision of faster, affordable, and secure cloud computing services. While the users of these services use efficiency, scalability, and on-demand features as the yardstick for the best providers, the federal government has endeavored to address the insecurity and untrustworthy environment that characterize cloud computing. The FedRAMP is crucial in offering a solution to the security challenge.

FedRAMP has developed a framework that will guide the operations of all the cloud service providers. The adherence to their directives is a sure way of maintaining professionalism among the providers which will consequently translate into efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and top-notch security among the users. The key FedRAMP requirements include incident monitoring, assessing for possible dangers, reporting, vulnerability, and logging. While the requirements are complex to meet, you can always use a software that will organize the information and identify organizational gaps that you need to fill before the evaluation.

There are myriad benefits that you’ll acquire by complying with FedRAMP requirements. You should note that the compliance certification is open to both the government agencies and private institutions. While the certification process may be tedious, you should take the initiative to try it out and enjoy the following benefits:

Enhancing your Sales. The government requires that you provide a FedRAMP compliance certificate before engaging in any business with them. As such, you’ve got no option but to comply especially if you’ve been aiming to expand your sales territory to include government institutions. Besides, the compliance will enable you to work with CSPs that uses FedRAMP regulations. Also, you’ll directly benefit from the compliance if you partner with such CSPs whose intention is to bid for government RFP.

 

Improves your Risk Management Abilities. While preparing for FedRAMP certification, you’ll encounter vulnerabilities thus learning the effects they have on your system. Also, it helps you to determine whether your risk ownership is worth it. You’ll realize that the exercise will boost your risk management abilities significantly. During the entire process, you should inform your customers adequately to avoid confusion.

 

Unified Compliance. Acquiring FedRAMP certification requirements matches the standards of other bodies including COBIT, PCI, ISO 27001, HIPAA/HITECH, and GLBA. If you follow the FedRAMP requirements exhaustively, you can have a unified compliance to prevent duplication of the tedious works. Alternatively, you may decide to avoid the compliance exercises if you do not have any interest in the government tenders since the exercise can be tiring and costly! Recently, FedRAMP has developed the “do once, use many” formula aimed at centralizing the compliance which will save you time. However, this privilege will come at significantly higher rates. To avoid the cost, any business entity can have the FedRAMP requirements manual for self-evaluation which will provide a reliable risk assessment. You should, however, note that the self-evaluation exercise does to give the certification and that you’ll need to involve the relevant bodies for a proper certification that will enable you to tender for government projects.

Delegating the Information

As earlier indicated, the FedRAMP compliance process is thorough and you’ll require to invest lots of your time in the exercise. As such, you should delegate the information to trustworthy individuals who will help you to design your security infrastructure. Before engaging the third party, you should ensure that you have all the required data ready to avoid inconveniencing your helpers. If you find this challenging, then FedRAMP has come to your rescue! You can have their checklist to help you prepare exhaustively before seeking help from other quarters. Immediately you confirm the availability of all the FedRAMP requirements using the checklist, you can proceed to invite the third parties to help with the processes below:

Organize your System. The FIPS 199 template comes in handy to help in organizing your system well. Also, the process will help to evaluate whether the effect of your risk is low, moderate, or high.

 

Selecting and Implementing Security Controls. You’ll use the NIST 800-53 to choose the baseline controls that match with the standards of your organization. As such, you should apply them to devise a plan for implementation.

 

Make a System Security Plan. This plan should contain all the information from the two initial stages as well as an outline for the system boundaries. You should ensure high accuracy on this document because it’s the first to be reviewed during the FedRAMP assessment.

While the process of FedRAMP certification is tedious, the eventual benefits that the compliance brings to your business are worth the hassle! You should take your time to prepare all the requirements, and you’ll undoubtedly get the certification thus placing you above your competitors.

Author Bio

Ken Lynch is an enterprise software startup veteran, who has always been fascinated about what drives workers to work and how to make work more engaging. Ken founded Reciprocity to pursue just that. He has propelled Reciprocity’s success with this mission-based goal of engaging employees with the governance, risk, and compliance goals of their company in order to create more socially minded corporate citizens. Ken earned his BS in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from MIT.

The post How FedRAMP Compliance Can Give You A Competitive Edge appeared first on Entrepreneurship Life.

7 Advantages of using a PEO Service for Small Businesses

If you are a small business owner, you are a part of attracting more private-sector jobs than even large companies. According to NAPEO, there are more than 1.1 million businesses in the US having 10 to 99 employees. If you are one of these small businesses, you may be feeling the pressure of hiring more people and keeping up with human resources. It can be difficult to even keep up with the basics of HR which may have you looking for the best PEO companies for small business to help you with your challenges. Let’s go on to look at 7 advantages of using a PEO service for small businesses.

#1 – Businesses Grow Faster

Small businesses that use PEO’s grow faster than those that do not. This is most likely due to the fact that everyone in a position of power is able to focus on what they need to do instead of trying to untangle the mess that becomes human resources when inexperienced people are handling it.

If a leader is not operating where they should be, it is likely that the organization will stumble in their absence. Getting back where you need to be in your small business will enable you to grow faster than if you continued focusing on other administrative tasks like HR.

#2 – Lower Employee Turnover

Employees love to be heard and given the attention that they deserve. When you have a PEO company to take care of their needs and help them whenever a challenge arises, it is less likely they will go somewhere else to seek employment. The better the work environment, the less turnover there will be in your company.

It is inevitable that you will experience turnover, but lowering it by even a little bit will help your business.

#3 – Less Likely to Go Out of Business

If you are working with a PEO company that can help you through complicated processes with payroll, HR and other parts of your business, your business is less likely to fail. Having help from people that specialize in the structure of human resources allows you to focus on keeping your business afloat and continuing its growth to success.

#4 – Access to Better Benefits

When you are a small business, you aren’t able to get access to benefits that Fortune 500 companies have the access to. When you work with a PEO service, you will be able to get those same benefits and options. This can be a drawing card for more talent and set you apart in the job market.

#5 – Increased Access to 401(k)

It is rare that you will be able to offer retirement plans if you are a small business, but when you work with a PEO, it will open up new worlds to you.

#6 – More Services Without Paying More

If you are a small business that is trying to get access to more services, you may experience a wall of challenges and even a higher price tag. When you are working with a PEO, you get access to more services without having to pay that major price tag.

#7 – Understanding Regulations Both State & Federal

It can be difficult to keep up with all of the latest regulations that are coming down, but when you work with a PEO, they help you understand the terms and how they are going to work with your business. If you need to make changes so comply with the regulations, they will help you set up processes and systems to make sure that you are doing the right thing. Some of these regulations can be rather challenging to comply with, but if you have the help of professionals, they can make sure that you have every i dotted and every t crossed.

Choosing the Right PEO for You

If you have decided that you want to move forward on working with a PEO, that means that it is time for you to decide which one is the one for you. You shouldn’t try to pick “the best” since depending on what you need and what they offer, the match could be different from one company to the next.

Ideally, you want to find a company that has worked in your industry with a company that is your size or around your size because you will then know that they understand what your needs are.

Ask for professional references so you can see what their clients think about their work. Don’t simply read words on a page and good reviews. You need to speak with these people and make sure that you feel their conviction about their endorsement. This is an important move for your business so you need to ensure that you are making the right decision about who to work with.

Seeing what affiliations and accreditations the companies you are considering have is also another good idea since this another sign that they are trustworthy.

Conclusion

Now that you understand the benefits of PEO, you can start going through your process of aligning yourself with the right company for you. This is mean to be a long term relationship so there is no need to rush into it. The benefits are numerous when you pick the right match but the challenges are just as numerous if you don’t pick the a good company to work with so take the time to do due diligence.

The post 7 Advantages of using a PEO Service for Small Businesses appeared first on Entrepreneurship Life.

5 Reasons Every Startup Should Invest in Search Engine Marketing

This is a guest post, courtesy of Adam Steele, the founder of Loganix , a popular SEO fulfillment company located in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Search engine marketing (SEM) is an expense that you should consider necessary if you own and plan to expand a startup. The focus of SEM is your presence on search engines — whether and how high up you can be found when customers search for your brand name, your products or your services. Here are five reasons why investing in SEM should be a crucial part of your short and long-term goals.

Search engines are what most people use to purchase

Most sales start online. Most consumers find their next product by searching for information, reviews and competing options online, even if they plan to buy in a store. That means SEM needs to be a basis of your marketing efforts. You’ll still want to focus on some traditional marketing by running ads and generation press, but expect that most people who find you will discover you through a search engine.

People who don’t know what they’re looking for can still find you

Search engines developed into such powerful tools for consumers for a reason: finding a product or service didn’t take knowing its name. Just by searching for associated keywords, consumers find products all over the world that might have a good chance at solving their problems. If you want your startup to be a solution, you need to make sure searchers have the same chance at finding you.

It will help you measure your exposure to the marketplace

Marketing on search engines is a good way to find out how much visibility you have to the rest of the world, and how popular your brand is relative to your competitors. Your position on search engines is roughly correlated to where you stand in the minds of consumers. Changes in your position can tell you if a marketing campaign has been really effective, if a news item really landed or if a promotional event was really worth it.

The data you gather tells you more about the behavior of your consumers

SEM usually starts with a study of keywords. Keywords are no longer simply stuffed in like they were in earlier days, but it’s still important to know which terms consumers associate with certain products. Doing this research for your SEM campaign will help you understand the language you should also use for your packaging, ads and other public-facing content.

It creates a foundation for future marketing and promotion

Once you have a commanding position on search engines, you can use that to empower every other marketing effort that follows — even the ones that aren’t online. Take advantage of a high position to launch new products, cross-promote new businesses and more effectively handle public relations issues.

Start Early

SEM is an expense that you should make sure to invest in as early as you can in the life of your company. It’s not necessary to pay anyone for the early steps. As long as you do the keyword research yourself — and make sure to include the right ones in your content as you develop it — you’ll have a foundation you can build on for years.

About the Author:

  Adam Steele is a builder of things, including agency and link building solution, Loganix, internet marketing agency The Magistrate, and among others, a Referral Spam Cleanup tool. He is always looking for a new hustle, and eager to help others with their marketing and business-related questions.

The post 5 Reasons Every Startup Should Invest in Search Engine Marketing appeared first on Entrepreneurship Life.

5 Tests to Run on Your ECommerce Site Before Launching

As you are learning how to create an online store, it is easy to get excited to learn and sadly come out of the gate prematurely. You only have once for a big launch debut so you want to make sure that everything is going to go smoothly. Yes, it is true that you can do a grand re-opening or some other event to bring more news to your store, but getting it right the first time is the best way to go about things.

If you want to have the most successful opening possible, you need to test your site before it goes live. While this extra step may keep your virtual door closed a couple more days, the annoyance and pain that you save yourself will be worth any loss of sales.

Compatibility & Responsiveness

People are shopping on many different browsers and devices. You are going to have so many combinations that it can be a challenge to make sure that your store looks great on all of the different screens. There are tools that can help you check to make sure that you are giving the best experience when people come to your site.

Remember that people have many different options when they are searching for a product online and you want to be the one that they choose. If they click your site from their phone and see the desktop version of your site, you can be sure that they are going to click back as quickly as they came to your site.

You can use a site like Broswerling to check your site and see how it looks on the different platforms. If it isn’t the way that you want it, this is the perfect time to fix it. You can do some tests for free on this site, but there is a paid version if you want to unlock more.

Content

When we talk about content, I am not only talking about the text that is on your site. We mean anything that your potential customer is going to see whether it is text, an image, a video or anything else that you can come up with. If your customer can see it, you need to make sure that it is perfect.

Check through your entire site for spelling errors, grammar errors, places where you meant to put images and didn’t and especially check for poor product descriptions throughout your site. If your product has a poor description, you are writing its death sentence. Product descriptions should evoke emotions and cause people to get into motion click the add to cart button.

If you are not a good writer, you can hire someone to write top of the line product descriptions for your store. You should not launch your store until you have the best product descriptions possible.

Function

Since your website is interactional, you can’t simply look at your site and figure out if there are any errors. You have to click through your site and see if the buy buttons are operating right, if you can click to go to your cart or click to continue shopping. Each and every function that your customers are going to be using on a daily basis needs to be tested.

Not only should you test them on one computer and browser, but you should test them over multiple devices and browsers to ensure that everything is working properly and no one is going to be turned away from the buy button.

If you do find any challenges with functions, make sure that you have a good web developer on hand to help you through the process. Web developers are coders that understand how to make your site function the way that it needs to.

User Experience

Your user experience (aka UX) is vital when you are selling products online. When your users comes on the site, they need to know exactly where to go and be able to get there easily.

When you are setting up your site, you need to align the images and navigation in a way that is going to allow them to click through the site and preform purchases and research any products that they are interested in.

If you are not a professional website designer but you don’t have the budget to get anyone else to do the work for you, make sure that you have friends and family use the site and give you any feedback they can offer. Since you built the site, you know where  things are going to be, but you want to test and see if the average person is going to be able to navigate the site.

Site Speed

Your site’s speed is important, not only for user experience but for SEO purposes. Search engines like Google know that people want to surf the web fast. If your website operates on the slow side, you are going to find that your search engine rankings are hampered.

You need to identify the problem and fix it quickly. You may be dealing with a slow host and need to upgrade or change your hosting or you might have errors on your site that is causing it to slow down. Figuring out the problem and having a professional remedy it is before launching is important.

Conclusion

Having your own ecommerce store can be a great additional source of income. When you set up your store in a way that it serves the customer and is optimized for sales, you have the ability to do very well.

Was this article helpful and informative? Leave us a comment with your thoughts in the section below.

The post 5 Tests to Run on Your ECommerce Site Before Launching appeared first on Entrepreneurship Life.

5 Ways to Improve Your Customer’s Shopping Experience on Your Website

Your site has great products, but you get too many looky-loos. You want to convert more visits into sales, but how? Often a poor conversion rate on a website is due to a visitor’s poor experience with the site itself and not the products or services offered. Why is this? Shoppers get frustrated with technology that is not responsive to their wants and needs. Most website owners focus solely on improving their inventory and prices in order to compete in the marketplace, but attention must be given to a customer’s UX or user experience.

When customers enjoy a site, they are more likely to fulfill their shopping needs there. When a customer is frustrated, no number of discounts or product quality will convince them to buy. Understanding this is key to improving the efficiency and effectiveness of your online store. Here are five common reasons for shopping cart abandonment. If your website meets any of the criteria, it’s time to improve!

Quick Load Times

Watching a frustration wheel while a site loads is a sure way to create a negative user experience from the start. People now expect sites to load quickly and completely within an instant and not interrupt their browsing with popup ads or misdirected page loads. A few things to keep in mind: optimize your content so that it doesn’t cause unacceptable load times. Also, create an app if you are able as opposed to having your site online. People are now accustomed to using apps instead of browsers on their phones and tablets and it is a prefered way to shop and can give you a competitive advantage.

Navigation and Site Search

Often times visitors to a site come for something specific. By providing easy to use navigation and search options, shoppers can determine if the site has what they want. When the site has their desired product or service and it was easy to find, they will likely buy. The user experience is positive, creating the emotional satisfaction needed to trust the site for their purchase. With navigation, make sure you create easy to understand categories. With each page, make sure there is an easy to find search option (yes, they can control F, but not everyone understands all of the technologies’ functions).

Pictures Are Worth a Thousand Emotions

High resolution, aesthetic, vibrant, colorful photos are always an attraction. Pictures evoke emotion and convey quality to site visitors. Make sure your photos show your products in a positive light as well as display beauty on the site. Some visitors will choose your site simply because it feels good and that is due to the beauty provided by quality photos.

Include Customer Reviews

A major factor in purchasing for many people is trust. They aren’t as concerned with price as they are with satisfaction. Customer reviews allow shoppers to get a sense of what other purchasers experienced. People are often convinced by the experience of others and providing customer reviews on your site is a great way to cultivate confidence. Reviews also tell potential customers that you are confident in what you provide because you are willing to be transparent about people’s experiences.

Make checking out simple – and allow shoppers to save their carts

A confused mind says no. Keeping the shopping experience as simple and easy as possible is a critical way to insure shoppers buy what they are looking at. If the experience becomes too complicated or difficult, shoppers will abort their shopping and abandon their shopping carts. This is the worst-case scenario because you did enough to convince the shopper to buy but failed to get them to finish the transaction. Also, allow customers to save their items in their carts. This will allow shoppers to compare and return and purchase from you without the hassle of gathering their items again. If they must redo their purchases, they will often pull the trigger on the cart that is already full.

It is important to remember that your potential customers are people. They get frustrated, they want to trust their purchase and they enjoy the sense of quality. When you understand the emotions beneath customer shopping and cater to that, you can convert more sales and create more loyal customers. The key is to keep UX (user experience) in mind. Don’t try to trick or confuse your customers. This might work once, but you will lose business in the long run.

Was this article helpful and informative? Leave a comment with your thoughts in the section below.

The post 5 Ways to Improve Your Customer’s Shopping Experience on Your Website appeared first on Entrepreneurship Life.