7 Tips and Confessions of CoE E-Commerce

CoE E-Commerce, our CoE event focused on the E-Commerce sector, concluded yesterday after a second day jam-packed with "Wamdat" talks and panels addressing the biggest issues facing e-commerce today. 

At your e-commerce startups, you might now want to: 

1) Negotiate for lower payment gateway fees.

In the first panel, "Show me the Money, Part 1: Is Online Payment a Solved Issue?" panelists addressed the region's struggles with payment gateways.

The GCC is a $5 billion industry for online transactions, said Stephen Leeds of Visa. According to a survey by Souq, 90% of customers in the UAE according to survey feel comfortable buying online, said Ronaldo, CEO of Souq.com. But most of them prefer cash on delivery to credit cards or prepaid credit card solutions like those that CashU offers. 

2) Target the Jordanian market.

Before announcing Iyad Kamal handed out some great statistics on e-commerce that build upon data:

Why Pinterest is important ?

 It will explore various technical issues involved in starting up and running an e-commerce site.

Social networks are all over the internet, but why pay close attention to a small social networking website like Pinterest?

Pinterest has proven its ability to attract referrals to eCommerce websites. According to Shareaholic’s report earlier this year, Pinterest attracts more referrals to your website more than YouTube, Google+, and LinkedIn all together.

A list of review sites on the Internet

 A list of review sites on the Internet 

Before purchasing a particular product, many customers want to inform you on the Internet. For this they use review sites. There can describe their experiences with the consumer contract, buying or building houses. They share their experiences with other users as they share is so over the products.

Here is a list of the best review sites include:

SEO vs. PPC

search engine optimization X Pay per click 

First PPC is Pay per click (PPC) (also called Cost per click) is an Internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, where advertisers pay the publisher (typically a website owner) when the ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market.
Read more about PPC HERE

&

Seo is Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a websiteor a web page in search engines' "natural," or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic"), search results.

Read more about SEO HERE

Let us go to our topic

SEO vs. PPC

You can pay for traffic using the PPC advertising programs provided by Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and others. They enable you to display ads in the sponsored results section of each search engine's results page. Then, you pay a fee -- based on how competitive your chosen keyword is -- whenever a viewer clicks through from your ad to your website.

Alternatively, you can build traffic for free by achieving high rankings in the natural search results -- the listings displayed next to the sponsored results. You will need to follow SEO best practices to try to get your site displayed on these pages more prominently and more often. It may take time to reach the top of the natural results, but the free, targeted traffic will probably prove to be well worth the investment.

But which approach is better?
You must ask yourself if you are willing to pay for it and if your budget can cover this !! 

Here are three questions to consider 
1. How large is your website advertising budget?
In choosing between SEO and PPC, you first need to decide what size advertising budget your business can support. I see it will be good idea to start with a minimum of $5 to $10 a day.
If you have no money to commit to advertising, you'll need to stick with free SEO methods.


2. Faster testing. Websites should focus on achieving conversion, whether it's selling products, signing up email newsletter subscribers or some other action. That means actively testing website variables to improve conversion rates. These tests, however, require traffic to generate data, so you might want to purchase traffic through PPC advertising to get faster results.

3. Protection from SEO algorithm updates. One major weakness of SEO is that algorithms change from time to time. When that happens, sites that have been optimized in one way can lose rankings -- and profits -- practically overnight. But when you pay for traffic, you're assured a steady stream of visitors, no matter what changes Google and the other search engines make.