Mobile is changing the way we shop!

A decade back the mobile world was limited to phone calls, SMS, MMS, basic internet surfing and some audio and video downloads. Today, the scenario is quite different. With invent of Smart phones and Tablets the world has moved into the new layer of Digital Media. Internet has advanced to 3G, 4G and 5G networking systems. New applications and browsing techniques have brought the user to upfront.

As per estimates, by 2018 those 8.2 billion hand-held devices will bring $626 Billion revenue to the E-commerce world.

In 2018 the world population is expected to pass 8 Billion, and it is really fascinating that 8.2 Billion hand held devices (i.e. Mobiles and Tablets) are expected to be ONLINE. And they will be consuming an average of 2.7GB of data per month per device. We all know that today we like to shop, even window-shop online. Recently, we all are witnessing the significant growth of online shops. And these sites have constantly done their bits and pieces to migrate the X-generation to the digital world of shopping and entertainment.

Let’s understand this with a better set of graphs and facts through an Infographic analysis.

This means people will be more active on their Smartphones, tablets and such mobile devices. If you see closer you will know that contact less technologies like NFC and QR Codes are being adopted fast to offer best experience to buyers both online & offline. And fast hosting and storing technologies like Clouds, have started gripping their positions in the digital world. Most of the e-commerce sites have started integrating them into their sites and systems. These are gaining extreme importance as the shoppers prefer Digital Wallets for making payments seamlessly. If you haven’t yet integrated them yet, its a good time look into that now.

The next generation e-commerce sites should be responsive and light-weight sites, which can be operational on all types of devices without any problem with size or server and offer the utmost flexibility to their customers in terms of purchase, deal and exchange. Customers and Companies both are open to sharing and using data that will benefit both by exchanging the information needed to enable seamless experience for buyers online.

Concluding this- I want to share that, Mobile is changing the way we shop! And as an e-commerce owners or solution providers, we need to change as well!

Please share what you’re doing about it?

What do you do when you are given 20 choices from which you need to pick one to buy? You generally review all and leave without buying or you will ask the company to recommend the best one if you’re not able to decide.

If this is not the case then you are definitely the 3% of aggressive window shoppers. But, the remaining 97% of customers have a specific pattern or a system in mind for which they need an exact fill to buy it.
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E-Commerce websites always focus on strategies to increasing web traffic but does it help in sales conversion? The answer is “Yes” but it comes with its own limitation. The actual sales conversion that happens by purely driving traffic to a website is very limited. If you wonder about what is actually needed to increase the conversion rate of a website then you must understand it is nothing but the user engagement model you employ!

But what is user engagement model?

What is User Engagement Model?

Like the term suggest, User Engagement Model, is not really a complex model – but the focus on understanding and analyzing how your website visitors engages your with your online store and then make changes that may help you convert more visitors into buyer. With the help of the same, the e-commerce business can attract a lot more visitors to buy, and buy more from you!

So if you understand how your website visitors engages with your website, you can improve your store’s conversion rate. Yes, that’s Right! I will shortly show you how using the following proven strategies that will help you improve your store’s conversion rate:

1. Use the Right E-Commerce Analytic Tool to understand how your visitors engage with your store

You can’t improve what you can’t measure! Make sure to use a good analytic tool for your e-commerce website.

You need to track how your visitors engages with your website, what pages they visits, how often they visits, how they arrive at your website, what actions they take, what actions they perform on your site, when and why they leave your website. (more…)

Have you ever wondered how Google search works when you are finding something on Google?

Do you know when you are searching on Google, you are not actually searching on web? Instead you are actually searching into Google’s index of the web!

If you don’t know how Google crawls and indexing works, then you should. Why? Because it affects how well your site ranks on Google.

In order to help you understand the same so you can improve your rankings, let me share you a following infographic on How Google crawls and Indexes Web Pages.

Conclusion

If Google can’t efficiently crawl your website, your rankings will tank. By making things easier for the search engine, you’ll increase the likelihood of your pages being crawled and, more importantly, indexed.

Make sure you avoid the 7 mistakes above and check robots.txt files. It’s the little things that can affect your rankings in a negative way.

We are happy to announce the release of latest version for nopAccelerate – Solr integration plugin for nopCommerce; nopAccelerate Search – Advanced Search Plugin for nopCommerce which supports nopCommerce 3.50.

The newer version of nopAccelerate includes several new features enhancements and bug fixes.

What’s New in nopAccelerate?

• Added support for nopCommerce 3.50
• Now nopAccelerate is compatible with Apache Solr 4.10.2
• Enhanced Search – Diacritics character are now supported in search terms
• Enhanced Search – You can now select default search operator (AND / OR) for search query
• Enhanced Search – You can now define Minimum Should Match criteria for search result – Minimun-Should-Match
• Enhanced Search – Added Vendor filter on search result page
• Added Infinite Scrolling for all Catalog Pages (Manufacturer, Category, Tags and Search Result Page)
• Added support for State aware URLs using HTML5 History State API, so filtering now supports deep bookmarking and the browser’s back button
• Added Filters on manufacturer page
• Several Bug fixes

Please read the full release notes here.

It’s time for you to upgrade to the latest version. For those who haven’t yet tried nopAccelerate, start with taking a free trial here. Moreover, we do offer nopAccelerate plugins with full source code under enterprise license.