As each E-commerce store is different there is not a “one size fits all” approach and your ideal strategy is based on your companies individual goals.  That said, there are a few overall proven store merchandising tactics that could help you increase your sales on your website.

You are already ahead by choosing Magento as your online store as the software has multiple store layouts, conversion testing and checkout options built right in. And if you partner with Powersurge you have a team of hosting experts to assist you, with servers that are optimized specifically for Magento providing an optimal experience for both you, as a user and for your website visitors.

Merchandising tips:

Offer several product options – Make sure to offer a multitude of colors, sizes, options etc.  Dont lose customers because you do not offer what your competitor does.

Add new items regularly – Your visitors are more apt to return if you are constantly offering new items and keeping your inventory fresh. Become the “Goto” website for your clients when they want to repurchase or get new ideas.

Offer Detailed product information – Add “How to Use”, High Quality Images and if you are using a model in a image list his/her dimensions and size they are wearing in the image. Think like your customers…whatever questions they may have about a product…try to list it on the page. Remember when a customer is in doubt they do not purchase. Consider also adding live chat to address any “in-purchase” questions your customers may have.

Offer product recommendations – Use historical data and apply this information to your customers future shopping experiences. Cross-selling to your customers will no doubt increase the value of each conversion.

Customer reviews – Encourage customer reviews to increase brand loyalty.  You can do this on-site, right after a purchase or you can email them directly after.  Customers are more apt to buy a product that others have commented on…especially if they are first time customer.

Keep testing your strategies – Nothing is ever perfect right out of the gate, so keep tailoring your methods.  As mentioned before with Magento you can easily employ A/B testing and really zero in on what is successful and what is not and adjust accordingly.  Reports like these are a critical component to any successful online store.

Whether its Magento Hosting, WordPress, Dedicated Servers, Cloud or simply a customized solution based on your needs, PowerSurge offers the full spectrum of hosting services.  Let us Power your business today!

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Magento is a moldable platform literally allowing you to create any type of store you want.  This type of platform fits any company or start-up from new smaller businesses to the large corporate entity.

An easier way to manage your website(s)

If you have multiple stores you can manage them all under one administrative panel with Magento’s built in features.  Your growth is never limited with Magento.

Fully responsive mobile

With Magento you can offer a supreme shopping experience to your customers no matter what type of device they are using.

Easy of Use for store displays

Easily display your products with Magento with multiple store layout options.  With an array of conversion modifications you can zero in on what really converts!

Modifications are easily added

Because Magento is a open source software you can easily take your site to the next level by utilizing a developer who can modify the code and add plug-ins for a multitude of enhanced features.

In depth reporting – the key to any online business success

Track your visitors, who they are, where they are coming in from and how long they stay.  Know which campaigns – from social marketing to paid advertising are working for your business and eliminate the ones that are not.

Whether its Magento, WordPress, Dedicated Servers, Cloud or simply a customized solution based on your needs, PowerSurge offers the full spectrum of hosting services.  Let us Power your business today!

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What is Optimized hosting for Magento mean?

A hosting server that includes the below would be a excellent first choice for your Magento website:

• Linux X86, X86-64
• Apache 1.3x and above
• PDO_MySQL
• simplexml
• SOAP
• GD
• hash
• PHP
• MySQL
• SSL
• curl
• iconv
• mcrypt
• No less than 256Mb memory_limit

The simplest way to check if your server meets the requirements is by downloading the Magento-Check file from the Magento website.  You can upzip this file and upload the .php file to Magento directly and this inform you if your current host is capable of running Magento.  It may also be easier to search out and find the right hosting company from the start, one that specializes in Magneto hosting.  At PowerSurge we meet or exceed all needed requirements for a Magneto website.

What are the “Pros” of Magento Hosting?

By doing your research on the right hosting you can expect a number of benefits, such as amazing speed and performance.  Ideally a true Magento website should be on a dedicated server (better security and ability to handle larger traffic volumes) however you can start with shared (optimized for Magento) as long as you have a host that you can grow with and move you to VPS or dedicated if and when that time comes.

Whether its Magento, WordPress, Dedicated Servers, Cloud or simply a customized solution based on your needs, PowerSurge offers the full spectrum of hosting services.  Let us Power your business today!

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Its regularly updated – The last thing you want is to build out your store and find out the software is rarely updated with important fixes and patches.  With Magento, they are constantly updating, correcting any known bugs and launching new and better features. Magento also boasts a huge online community with a huge, ever growing knowledge-base.

Custom –   It has a incredibly rich administrative area, which gives you the options to tailor everything to suit your ever changing needs – such as product features, reviews and categories or content targeted at different customer groups.  Magento Specializes in very detailed conversion options and because its open source… if you need to get even more custom, a web developer can easily assist you in whatever you can possibly think of to further improve your site.

Big Data – Even if you are new to marketing online you most likely know that having a store requires accurate data and lots of it.  No matter what industry you are in, you need to build databases and analyze them for insight.  You need to know who your visitors are, where they came from and what they are doing when they reach your site. Magento offers Enhanced E-commerce as a extension, which allows you to collect huge amounts of detailed data about your customers and their shopping behavior.  You also receive comprehensive reports about the your website performance, what areas you can improve and what is potentially causing failures.

Certainly there are other options out there that are free and simpler to use.  However if you have a very clear business outline and you know exactly what you are selling and who you are selling it to…Magento truly is the most flexible Ecommerce program out there.  A system that allows you to tailor it to your needs, not the other way around.

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I think you already know a slow WordPress site is a terrible situation for anyone online.  Visitors wont spend more than a few seconds waiting and then they will leave…off to your competitors to see if they can find what they were originally looking for. There is also the potential of Google recognizing this pattern in visitor drop off – and deliver a lower search ranking.

So if you find your self with a slow loading website….what do you do?  Fortunately there is a simple solution that shouldn’t require hiring a developer to get the job done.  Today we are going to give some helpful advice to generally optimizing your website as a whole as well as some recommendations for several plugins to solve the most common WordPress slow loading issues.

• To begin, you should test each and every one of your installed plugins, as they alone can be the culprit and are potentially interfering with your site speed.  Some plugins do not work well with others and you may need to find similar replacements.  As you are re-installing each plug-in use a Speed testing tool, such as Google Page Insights to determine the effect on speed (if any) each plugin has.

• Also it is important to do a complete back up of your site before you begin.  That way its extremely simple to restore WordPress back to a earlier version if something goes array.  Check what services your hosting providers offers, some already have automated backups as part of your plan. (We do – check out PowerSurge’s WordPress hosting)

Now lets get onto the tips:

Minification

WordPress uses Javascript and CSS to make your themes more aesthetically appealing.  These files very often contain 1000’s of lines of code, sometimes with bad formatting and too much white space, which can really slow down page speed.

Minification takes these files and condenses them into something that is more manageable.  Most of the time caching plugins (see below) offer this bundled together however if you would like to manage this separately you can try a plugin like Better WordPress Minify

Caching

What is caching?  To keep it simple this is what helps your website load faster by serving up the more easily digestible pages.  For those that want to delve deeper into caching, here is a more in-depth explanation of caching.

In terms of WP Plugin solutions for caching, W3 Total Cache is one very popular WP plugin that will assist you with caching issues as well as minification.  It can also be a more technical set-up, so if you need a more user-friendly option you can look into WP Rocket however it is not free.

There are some hosts that do not allow caching in a shared hosting environment, which isn’t good.  You should consider switching to a host that utilizes its own caching which could be even more effective than any of the above plugin options.

Optimize your images

One could say website images are the single biggest reason for slow website speed.

If your images are not optimized correctly your website becomes almost unnavigable.  Have you ever looked up a product online but weren’t able to scroll down because the image just hung there and never loaded?  If so you know what we mean.

The solution to this critical issue it to optimize each and every image for your website as they are uploaded.  One such tool that is very helpful is WP Smush, which will reduce the image size while keeping intact the image quality.  Another option is EWWW Image Optimizer.
 

Dont overlook something as simple as image optimization for your WordPress site, this one can truly the most value/performance of all of the above!

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So to begin, what exactly IS a conversion rate?

To keep it simple, a conversion is your stores ability to get customers to purchase from it.  It can also mean other customer actions such as signing up for contact/email newsletters, creating a account and saving a wish list or simply starting a trial of your services.  Most of the time conversion reflects how many people came to your site that actually BUY from it.

Your conversion rate is calculated as below:

Number of purchases or goals divided by actual site visits = your conversion rate

Why are Conversion rates important to Ecommerce websites?

There is definitely more to it than just how many actual sales you get.  It is also a measure of well your Magneto Ecommerce website is meeting your customers needs.

Lets look at your website itself:

How fast is your website?

Does it load quickly?

Are you using Magento hosting specifically for Magento websites? It is critically important to look at your website loading speeds.  After all, you are working hard to drive this traffic in and engage your customers, the last thing you want is to lose sales due to not investigating the hosting you have for your Magento site.

Do images take a long time to display?

Is your checkout easy and uncomplicated for a user?

Is your checkout secure?

Do you offer multiple ways to pay?

Lets look at the actual traffic you are getting to your website

Looking at the analytics of your Magento website, how is the quality of the traffic you are getting?

Are people staying on the site awhile or are they immediately bouncing off?

Are these your target clients and where are they coming from?

Are you using SEO, social media and different types of promotions to your full advantage?

Looking deeper into your Magneto website analytics:

As we know there can be many factors as to what influences someone to purchase or not.  That said they are clues within your analytics that will give you an idea of what may be happening:

Are you losing people at checkout?  If you are perhaps you may have security, pricing or payment issues on your website. Or maybe your customers are finding your checkout to difficult or time consuming.

Are you losing people right on your product pages?  Perhaps you aren’t giving your customers enough detail (or the kind of detail they want).

Assist your customers in finding exactly what they want

When a potential customer cant locate a specific item on your site you run the very high risk of them going to a competitors site. There are two ways you can help your customer find exactly what they want quickly and easily.

Search – Improving your Magento website search abilities is one the absolute best things you can do.  Make sure your “Search bar” is easily accessible and very visible on every page of your site.  Allowing “Auto complete” for different search phrases helps minimize typing for your customer and gives them a multitude of search choices.

Faceted search – You can use faceted search options to assist your customers in drilling down their search’s based on product attributes such as item category, color and size.  Also be sure to include common spelling errors and similar type names to increase the correct results.

Make your product pages sell your product:

Once your customer locates a product, now you have the opportunity to sell the item.  Make sure you are doing everything you can to detail product information. This would include clear and informative product description, multiple images, customer reviews, social shares, etc.

Clear and straightforward Call to Actions:

Make sure its easy to “Add this item to cart”, check or “View their cart”, “Keep shopping” or simply “Checkout”.

Mobile Friendly:

Remember mobile devices now represent 65% of all digital media time, with desktops/PC a close second.   If you’re not able to reach your audience through mobile search or display, or you’re not providing a satisfactory mobile experience you will miss out compared to competitors who are.

Pricing your sales and promotions:

Offering discounts and limited time sales are a great opportunity to drive in new traffic, however overusing these tactics can potentially negatively effect the way the customers see your brand. There is much more to brand loyalty than pricing alone you should also focus on stellar customer support, overall business organization and customer satisfaction as well.

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The obvious action would be to have your Ecommerce store as your main point of center for retail but then also expand to other channels.  In the past the problem with this approach has been cumbersome to take on. Managing your sales, inventory and product catalogues over the multitude of different sales venues can leave anyone frustrated and overwhelmed.

How does a retailer manage and reconcile inventory levels and sales when some sales aren’t immediately updated in a central database, leading to potential “Out of stock” situations that could easily damage a retailers reputation?  And how much time would all that really take?  Selling via Multi channel can be a very rewarding option and fortunately for Magento store owners there are now several solutions that help integrate your store with the biggest of Ecommerce channels.

SellBrite

It’s a multi-channel cloud retail platform that includes a Magento integration alongside others that include eBay, Amazon, and Etsy.  It offers many of the multi-channel features you’d expect, including the ability to create and manage listings across all channels, inventory syncing, and order fulfillment. Sellbrite is great if you want to integrate a Magento store with an existing selection of channels or use a cloud service that can control Magento along with other channels.

M2E Pro

M2E Pro gets its name from its original purpose: to form a bridge between Magento and eBay (which owns Magento). Since then its reach has expanded, and M2E Pro is now a full-featured multi-channel eCommerce solution with support for eBay, Amazon, and Rakuten. Unlike other multi-channel solutions, M2E Pro puts Magento front and center, making it an ideal choice for retailers with an existing Magento store who want to expand onto other channels. Product catalogues and inventory are controlled from within Magento’s backend and data is transferred from there to the external channels.

Orders from external channels are fed back into Magento so that each order on eBay, for example, will have a corresponding order automatically created within Magento.

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A large portion of shopping carts are abandoned mid process. Though there are many reasons why this could occur …a complicated or cumbersome check-out process is a major factor.

Your Magento Checkout

If you have a online Magento store, you have no doubt put a lot of time and energy into it.  You have also undoubtedly worked hard to drive to traffic to your website.   If you answered yes, its in your best interest to consider streamlining your checkout process.  Adding Social media logins at checkout is one newer way to accomplish this.  Social media logins are tied to your customers social media accounts online (such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter account).  No long registration forms to fill out, just a “one-click” login. This can truly make a difference in the overall shopping experience, especially for that user who may be ensure of their purchase. By making it so simple and fast, users are not tempted to change their mind or abandon their cart half-way to go check our your competitor.  Social Logins also eliminates the need for the customer to create yet another login to remember for your website, simply “Login with Facebook” …and they are in, which is time saving and encourages repeat sales.

The Mobile Experience

Mobile traffic now accounts for 50.3% of all E-commerce traffic.   That being said, have you every tried to checkout on a mobile device and were forced to fill out lengthy registration forms on a small touch screen?  Most of us have and its not fun.  Social logins will allow your customers on mobile devices to bypass the potentially frustrating experience of checkout on mobile and quickly execute their purchase.  Dont lose your mobile Ecommerce customers due to a complicated checkout!

Marketing

As mentioned above the social logins are tied directly to the users online social accounts, which supplies you with a huge amount of data available for marketing.  You can see who your clients are and market directly to them.  This is incredibly useful when personalization and segmentation come into play. You could always ask your customer to fill out forms to gather this type of data …but isn’t this exactly what puts users off to begin with? With Social logins…all of the information is there for the taking.

Magento Extensions

There are several options for implementing social media logins on an eCommerce store; Magento Social Login and Inchoo’s Social Connect are among the best.

Social logins create a speedy and more secure login process for users, and they provide much needed marketing data for eCommerce retailers. If you don’t offer social media logins on your site, why not?

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As a content management system, WordPress is by far one of the most powerful (and popular) platforms of its type available on the market today. Many people don’t realize, however, that the service itself is not necessarily a means to an end – in many ways, it is only the beginning. It is an important first step on the road to building the perfect website you’ve always wanted, but it is exactly that – a first step. Picking the right WordPress host is just as important, but no two WordPress hosts are created in quite the same way. Only by taking a look at what features a particular host offers, along with how those features align with your own unique goals, will you be able to find success in picking the right one to meet your needs.

Diving Deeper into the Options

When you begin your search for a WordPress host, one of the first choices you’ll have to make involves the TYPE of provider you’re looking for. You have a number of distinct options available to you, all of which service some very unique goals. These options include:

• Free Hosts
• Shared Hosts
• VPS Hosts
• Dedicated Hosts
• Managed Hosts

A free host is exactly that – free. It’ll give you access to the essentials you need to get your site up and running, but most of these deals come with some kind of stipulation regarding your relationship with the hosting provider. Some may require you to put a banner ad for their service on your site, for example. Others may require you to put a text link in the footer of your site to their own company. Under this arrangement, you give up a certain amount of control over the type of ads that run on your site in exchange for that “free” price.

A shared WordPress host is one where you will share space on one large server with a lot of other different sites. Doing this creates something of a “win-win” situation for everyone – the host gets to expand their client base AND they get to drive down costs for users. The biggest thing to consider about this, however, is that the resources you’re allocated are not unlimited – after all, there is only so much server space to go around. Someone who is using the lion’s share of a server’s resources will likely have to pay more than someone who isn’t. One mistake by the hosting provider can also negatively impact all sites in a shared arrangement, as well.

VPS hosting is also referred to as a virtual machine. Even though you’re sharing server space with other websites, you get all of the control you would have if you were running your own dedicated server. The issue here, however, is that this type of provisioning requires a large degree of technical know-how to properly deploy. If you know what you’re doing, VPS hosting is great – if you don’t, it may be more trouble than it’s ultimately worth.

Dedicated server hosting is exactly that – you get a physical server from your host to call your own. This is an ideal option for businesses that are seeing increasing amounts of traffic and want to be able to make sure that their site can handle it all without crashing. This also requires a significant amount of technical expertise in order to properly deploy.

Managed hosting is likely the ideal solution for all medium to large sized businesses who need a large amount of resources but who also do NOT want to have to run everything themselves. Essentially, you’re paying for your host to do all of the “brunt work” when it comes to your server. You pay for the resources and a monthly maintenance cost and the host takes care of things like upgrades, performance issues, maintenance and more. It’s more expensive than other options, but it’s also a great solution for businesses looking for as little hassle as possible.

Other Considerations

There are also a number of other considerations you’ll want to make during your search for the best WordPress host. One of those is speed – you’ll need to know that your host is providing you with adequate RAM, processing power, hard drive space and more to help guarantee smooth performance from your website.

You’ll also want to take a look at their support options. If something goes wrong, how difficult is it to get someone on the phone to fix the problem? This leads directly into the idea of “uptime,” or what percentage of the time your host can guarantee that your site will be online and working properly with no issues whatsoever. This number should be as close to 100% as it can possibly go.

In the end, the most important question to ask yourself when looking for a WordPress host is not “how do I find the best host, period?” Instead, it should be “how do I find the best host that is right for me?” Only by framing your search in that particular way will you be able to find a trusted provider who can give you the features you need and the flexibility you desire, all in an effort to ultimately empower you with the site your business needs when it needs it the most.

For any of the above server options and the Best WordPress web hosting experience check out PowerSurge.net’s multiple plan offerings.  We dont skimp on package sizes, our servers are WordPress optimized and our experienced technical staff is very knowledgeable on WordPress and what you need to get the most from it.  (and we are available 24-7!)

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Shared Hosting: Still our most affordable and flexible option, our shared plans offer Linux or Windows platforms, 100 GB of storage and 1 TB of bandwidth for as low as $8.85 per month.

WordPress Hosting: The perfect plan for the novice small business web user or blogger! This plan comes with WordPress pre-installed, plus 20 themes to choose from, plugins to help your business and beautify your site, 100 GB of storage and 1 TB of bandwidth for as low as $8.85 per month.

Magento Hosting: Ecommerce businesses look no further! Our Magento plan comes with this robust open-source ecommerce platform pre-installed, plus 100 GB of storage and 1 TB of bandwidth for as low as $8.85 per month.

VPS Hosting and Cloud Servers: These 2 plans are perfect for those businesses looking to scale upwards and scale quickly. Choose from 2-6 GB of RAM, 30-75 GB of storage and 1-3 TB of bandwidth, plus unlimited databases and websites for as low as $27.75 per month.

Dedicated Servers: Our most powerful plan for large companies who need the control and flexibility of their very own dedicated server. Get full root access, unlimited databases and websites and 1TB of storage, and choose from 4-16 GB RAM and 1-3 TB of bandwidth for as low as $169 per month.

Compare all six hosting plans and choose the one that meets your needs.