One lesson I've learned as a consultant is to prequalify potential clients before I invest a lot of time with them. There are specific things I've noticed in my best clients that I look for with new clients. If someone doesn't have these qualities or fail the qualification in another...
One question I get from new JSON-LD for SEO customers is, How long until my store's rich snippets show up in Google? I'm not going to get into the math behind the answer for that but I believe the thinking behind this question is important for every store owner to...
I was talking with a friend yesterday and he was asking if I was already doing A/B testing on my sites. I told him that's the wrong thing to do and A/B testing won't help me at the stage I'm at. The problem is, A/B testing won't tell you anything...
Loyalty is such a loaded term in ecommerce. A lot of the advice given to stores is about finding loyal customers. A.k.a., customers who come back and give you money for your products. (Even I write about loyal customers this way too) But loyalty is a two-way street. You want...
The other day I got an email from someone whose email list I'm subscribed to. The subject line looked like: Fwd: bonus business workshop (regularly $495) Since I forward emails from clients and business contacts regularly, I opened it up to see what it was about. I wasn't aware of...
Black Friday, the magical day when you start producing a profit (in theory). But why wait until the 11th month? What if every Friday was Black Friday? Black Friday is so successful because you finally getting buyers into the store. Not just lookie-loos who are just browsing. Actual buyers. With...
A few years ago we used to live close to a local coffee shop. Not a big corporate one or even a franchise. It was one where the owner was at the counter half the time. We'd go about once a week and each time the owner or her two...
Last week I downgraded a service that I use. I only needed it on a higher plan for a short time and didn't feel like paying for the extra capacity. A few days after downgrading I got this email (names omitted to protect the guilty). Hi there, I saw you...
Food carts are a big thing in Portland. They're like miniature restaurants, usually staffed by the owner or their family. The other weekday my wife was off of work so we decided to walk down to our favorite one for lunch. We had a nice conversation along the way, even...
Valentines day. The day we tell people that we love, how much we love and appreciate them. How are you telling your best customers that you appreciate them? What have you done for them this year? It doesn't have to be anything large or a grand gesture. Something simple and...
Each tip includes a way to improve your store: customer analysis, analytics, customer acquisition, CRO... plus plenty of puns and amazing alliterations.