LightenWeb Technologies

Today, online shopping is in boom. The reason is that you don’t have to go in sun, rain, cold, or snow if you want to shop anything for you. You feel like buying something for you or your dear ones, you can go through wide range of products from the comfort of your home and purchase the desirable product in just one click.

This has been made possible and easy due to the e-commerce websites. These websites offer wide range of products and fantastic shopping experience through their online marketing services There are numerous e-commerce websites available online that offer various options to the customers. Customers just have to go through the products and select the best one and purchase it in just one click. Just wait for 3-4 days and you will get your product at your doorstep. Sounds so amazing, isn’t it? This is the reason why customers prefer online shopping nowadays.

This is also an opportunity for them who want to start their own business. You just need a robust work ethic and a craving to succeed. Still not convinced? Don’t worry! I have top reasons why you should start an e-commerce business with the help of best digital marketing services. I am sure you will get excited to start your own e-commerce business once you find out these reasons.

Reasons to start an E-commerce Business

1. Growth and development in Ecommerce

You can see the growth and development in e-commerce in the last few years. People are purchasing more and more online and enjoying these purchases. It is estimated that e-commerce will grow rapidly in the upcoming years.

When you want to select a business model, it is all the time vital to evaluate the trends in the business and to enter the growth markets. Statistics support the idea that e-commerce business is going to grow leaps and bounds. So, it is a best choice for those who are looking to initiate their own startups or those who are interested in expanding. In order to enter the e-commerce business, any time is the best time as there are growing opportunities every day.

2. Ability to earn more

For e-commerce business, you don’t need a location to set up a store. You can set up an online store and sell your products worldwide. You don’t need to open multiple branches across the whole world. You can reach your target customers across world through your online store.

Now the trend of e-commerce business has been changed as some e-commerce merchants are meeting their customers in person to make them aware about their products and services. E-commerce has convinced reactive appeal to it and therefore you can earn more through this business through the static responsive website.

3. Easy to start an ecommerce business

If you want to start an e-commerce business, it is quite easy. All you need is just the passion to start your own business and succeed in it. Today, numerous e-commerce tools are available that make this business more easy than earlier.

The selling platforms, marketing automation and SEO tools make it easy for the online sellers to sell their products and easy for the customers to purchase them at the comfort of their homes. You can also get the payment for your products through various payment options.

You don’t need to show the customers each and every product and pitch about it. Customers go through your wide range of products, select the one they want and purchase it. It sounds so simple, isn’t it?

4. Increasing online purchasers

You can see today more and more people are buying products online since it is easy. They can get wide range of products and purchase among them sitting at their homes and get the delivery of the products at their homes through the online marketing services. So, they definitely prefer online shopping. This is the reason why online purchasers are increasing leaps and bounds.

This is a good reason for you to start an e-commerce business. The only thing you have to do is start an e-commerce website and offer variety of products to your customers. Along with it, it is also important to build trust and credibility of your business with customers. You can earn their trust by creating an appealing and easily navigable website and create unique informative content for them. If you can do this, you will earn several loyal customers.

5. Increase Selling ratio

Almost every e-commerce business knows that decreased friction is particularly significant to sell more. Rejected shopping carts are a widespread problem and you must have an enthusiasm to pinch and optimize your focus to ensure highest conversion.

You can sell more down the line through your e-commerce site by an effective way of content marketing. Develop unique, relevant, informative content for your readers, detain them as email subscribers, and then tell them about sales, discounts and promotions that you offer. With the help of these tactics, you can sell more and earn more. Selling more is another good reason for you to start e-commerce business.

Thus, the above-mentioned are why you should start your own business. I am sure now you are convinced and pretty excited to start it as soon as possible, aren’t you? Then, what are you waiting for? Just go and start your own e-commerce business and fly above the sky.

While designing an app or a website, designers focus on the most important goal which is the User interface and user experience of it. Both are related to users, however, have different meanings. UI or user interface is basically the look of the app or the website service. UI involves the layout, visual designs and branding. UI encompasses all the attributes related to the design of the product. On the other hand, UX or user experience is all about the usability of the product. Just like the name suggests it is about the experience of the user after using the product.

UI and UX: Know the difference:-

We are well aware of the fact that how at an increased speed the developments in mobile apps are occurring. More the variations in different mobiles, greater are the mobile apps designed for it. You might have noticed yourself discussing the UI and UX of a new app which you just downloaded on your mobile. Building a successful mobile application involves a process of enhancing the customer satisfaction. Creating a design with an awesome UI and giving out amazing user experience matters a lot to the business.

Role of UI and UX in mobile apps:-

As you can see above, UI is the framework of positioning the different items on the screen. How to design the layout of the app, what to add and what not to is planned while building the UI. UI designers work on how the data flow will be carried out easily and efficiently. Wire-frames are created to have a foundation for the end product. UI design is focused on making the app user-friendly to the maximum extent.

What lies behind UI and UX:-

An innovative thought process and designing of the same is necessary to create a great UI of the app. UI also includes placing different functionality, keeping in mind not to unnecessarily stuff the app with a lot of it. UX is the user experience of using the app. Having a great UI is not enough to please customers. Keeping it simple and accessible has the crucial role in giving a good user experience to the customers.

Importance of good user experience:-

Good user experience is simply the users’ likability towards your app. Providing your customers with a great user experience is essential for the success and growth of your product. It is quite obvious, if one customer likes using your app, he will share his feedback to many sources which include the digital company who build it, other users who are currently using the same app. They, in turn, will pass on the good word for your app to furthermore customers.

Happy customers mean happy business:-

All the positive reviews help the company to understand the customer needs. Understanding the customer results in the improvised app. Achieving the targeted amount of customers or simply to attract more customers towards your app leads to higher conversion rates and also results in generating potential leads.

How UI and UX contribute to the success of mobile apps?

In the crazy world of mobile apps, keeping a strategic approach towards building and designing a great mobile app with exact understanding and analysis of the customer needs plays a pivotal role in successfully launching of your product. Each one of us is a customer of some or other app that we use on a daily basis. If we ask ourselves what is it, that makes an app great, we realize that it is the ease of using it, it is the cool web designing of it which makes us habitual to use it more and more. For most of us, it is the first impression of the app which makes it more appealing to the customer ultimately resulting in them using it.

Innovative UI and ease of UX contribute in the success of the app:-

UI and UX go hand in hand with the contribution of a successful mobile app. It is needless to say that more the demand for your app in the market, more are the possibilities to increase your customer count. Knowing about how the app is benefiting your customers and also about its areas of improvement helps to renovate the app as per the needs and molding it likewise is a leap towards good customer ratings and feedback, generating prospective users of your app.

Launching and managing an e-commerce website can be overwhelming. With so many details to consider, it’s easy to overlook important aspects that are critical to the success of your site. Similar to a physical store, there are certain expectations that customers have when shopping online. If these needs are not met, your customers may not want to return to your site, or even worse, they could tell others about the poor experience they had. Here are 5 features to help keep your customers coming back for more.

1. Creating an appealing design and layout.

Nobody likes to walk into a messy store. It ruins the customer’s experience. The same concept applies to online stores. Customers want to be able to navigate their way through an attractive website that allows them to find things easily. Investing time and money into a well-designed website will pay off with customers coming back regularly.

2. Making sure it’s full speed ahead!

Seconds can seem like an eternity to customers when they are navigating through a site. It’s hard to believe, but something as simple as the speed of your site can have an effect on your sales. If your site is just one second too slow, you could be losing money. According to this KISSmetrics infographic, if an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1-second page delay could be costing $2.5 million in lost sales per year. If the speed of your site needs improvement, consider investing in a content delivery network (CDN), which will increase the availability and performance of the content you deliver to your customers.

3. Balancing between too few and too many products.

Having a vast selection of products may do more harm than good. There should be a balance between having the products your customers want and having too much so that they can’t find what they are looking for quickly. Make it as easy as possible for your customers to find products by having a search bar with great search capabilities that provide a fast return of results.

4. Treating your product page like a sales pitch.

Customers want to know product details immediately. Making good use of visuals such as pictures and videos also helps to capture the attention of your customers. Think of your product pages as being a sales pitch. You only have your customer’s attention for a very short period of time. You need to grab their attention right from the beginning and keep them interested.

5. Checking out the right way.

You’ve completed the above steps and your customer is ready to checkout. Don’t breathe a sigh of relief just yet! To avoid abandonment at the final stages of the purchase process, make sure to outline shipping costs on your homepage or the product page. There is nothing worse for a customer than learning upon checkout that they will be paying more in shipping costs than the products they are buying. Also, customers like sites that accept a variety of payment methods as well as sites that don’t require them to create accounts until after they have placed their order.

As you can see, maintaining an e-commerce site is hard work. By following these steps, you can make your site grow into a successful business and see that hard work pay off.

Every E-commerce owner has to occasionally make this choice. It's a question whether to prioritize social marketing or search marketing. This decision would be reflected in website coding, marketing expenditure, used images, website architecture etc.Although there is no cookie-cutter answer, the search clearly trumps the social for SMB industries.

Predictable Traffic: - The search engine traffic comes through definite search engine positions or SERP. It always follows a stable predictable pattern regarding incoming visitors and conversion ratios. According to these, you can streamline your product availability and pricing. But the social traffic is inherently characterized by unpredictability; The social traffic is based on a number of varying parameters such as fluctuating user interests, current trending topics, post exposure time etc…

Reach Target Audience; In the search optimization the website keywords dictates the search traffic, Here the target audience uses these keywords to find your website, exhibiting genuine product-interest and better buyer-intent. But the social visitors are genuinely sporadic. It always has a high bounce rate and low conversion ratio.

Search Marketing has Better Reputation; The search engines have a better reputation than social; As the search engine positions are based on trustworthy algorithmic principles, they reflect the real product-value hierarchy. But the social optimization relies on Facebook likes and random tweets which can be easily manipulated.

Social is dependent on Search; The better social marketing strategies involves random people finding and sharing your website at their social profiles. By definition, this means that achieving good search traffic is critical towards maintaining open social traffic channels.

At a purely ROI-basis, the search goes well beyond social in the pecking order for small business. If your experience or viewpoints differ, air your opinions in the comment section below.

The number of computers reported infected by a global ransomware attack in India has over 48,000 ransomware attack attempts in India, with West Bengal witnessing the most incidents, a central cybersecurity official said, adding that steps taken by the government have helped limit its spread.

Small Indian businesses and individuals continue to report being hit by the cyber-extortion campaign that began on Friday and has affected computers around the world, disrupting essential services and forcing some to meet the unidentified hackers' ransom demands.

The hackers targeted the “low hanging fruit” in an attempt to take advantage of website and computers owners who were lax in their approach to security.

Needless to say, no one likes to have their website hacked or computer hacked. It wastes your time restoring your site; you can lose business; and you can endanger other sites and organizations if your site gets used in further attacks.

While there are many sophisticated protections, we’ll focus some of the most basic precautions that can help keep you from becoming the next “low hanging fruit.”

1. Backup, Backup, Backup

Always, always, always backup your system and keep several versions. If you are hacked, those backups may be critical in getting your site up and running again as quickly as possible. It is very possible that you may not realize for weeks or even months that you were hacked. So your best protection then is to have a number of older versions that you can retrieve that can provide a clean base from which to work.

Note: you should also test your backups from time to time to make sure they work. Imagine finding out at a critical moment that all of those backups you have been so careful to make are not working. In the world of technology nothing is a given. So it is better to be safe than sorry.

2. Keep your site patched with the latest security updates

No software is 100% secure. As any software system is developed, security vulnerabilities will be found and software “patches” created to fix those vulnerabilities. Therefore, it is absolutely critical to keep your site up-to-date with the latest security patches. Your out-of-date website is much more likely to be hacked.

The good news is that newer versions of Joomla and WordPress have easy-to-update systems with one-click updates. Just backup the site, run the update, and then test to make sure everything updated and is running properly. Ideally, you should run the updates in a staging or testing area and then move those changes to production once you’ve tested and make sure that everything works.

You should also monitor the extensions you are using on your site. They can have vulnerabilities as well and need to be kept up-to-date.

3. Don’t use “admin” or other common usernames

Logging into a site typically requires two pieces of information: the username and the password. If you use a simple to guess username such as ‘admin’ or your first name, the hacker has 50% of his job done and needs only one more piece of information to accomplish his goal.

Older versions of WordPress don’t allow you to change the default admin username. However, with newer versions of WordPress as well as with Joomla, you can set the administrator’s login name when the site is first installed. You also change it again later. If you still have a username of ‘admin’ on your site, change it to something difficult to guess. I’ll wait here for you until you get back. Got it changed? Good. Let’s keep rolling.

4. Use a secure password

Believe it or not, there are lists of the most commonly used passwords. You would be shocked at the number of people who use passwords like ‘password,’ ‘123456,’ ‘abc123,’ ‘letmein,’ or ‘iloveyou’. Hackers take advantage of these simple-to-guess passwords, because it makes their job really, really easy.

So, what is a secure password?

A ‘secure’ password is one that is really difficult for a computer to guess. For example, your password should be at least 8 characters and preferably 12 or more characters long. It should contain a mixture of upper-case and lower-case letters along with numbers and special characters such as *, !, -, and &. And, you should avoid using your family member’s or pet’s names or other common words that might be found in a dictionary.

Suggestions on Creating and Storing Passwords

One option for creating your passwords is to use a password management application like KeePass (or KeePassX for the Mac). KeePass will store the different passwords for each site or application you use. (Oh, and you are using different usernames and passwords for each site aren’t you?) KeePass also includes a random password generator that will generate – you guessed it - random passwords, which are generally more secure.

Another approach to creating secure passwords is to use memorable phrases such as a favorite saying, a line from a song, or a favorite Bible verse. Take the first letter from each word of the phrase and add some numbers and special characters and you have an easy (or at least easier) password to remember but one that is still more secure.

One last thought on passwords. Don’t write down your password and leave it on a sticky note on your monitor. Sometimes hackers are coming from inside your company. It could be another employee or it could be someone on the janitorial crew coming by your desk at night.

5. Deactivate old users and remove unused extensions

Oftentimes, we’ll see sites where numerous extensions were installed to experiment and test that are no longer in use. These can be prime targets for hackers mainly because website owners will often forget to update the extensions as new versions come out.

Likewise, if you have any users that no longer need to access your site – especially if they have administrative access – it is wise to deactivate their accounts so that those old accounts likewise don’t become targets for hackers.

Conclusion

I hope you’ve gotten a clear picture that any website or computer is a target for hackers. Whether they want to steal credit card numbers, use your system for their own plans of mischief, or just obtain world domination, it is vitally important to take basic security precautions.

In summary, remember to:

Backup, backup, backup
Keep your system up-to-date
Use a hard-to-guess username
Use a secure password
Uninstall / remove unused extensions and inactive users

If you aren’t technically oriented, it is often best to have a maintenance agreement with an outside web development agency with the proper technology skills to keep your system up-to-date and backed up.

Ensuring that your website is well designed is essential. Think about it – websites are a visual medium. People enjoy looking at things that look nice, not sloppy and messy. The design of your website is just as important as the content you put on it. Consider the points below about web design to ensure your visitors don’t leave your site too quickly.

1. Style and Professional Design

The key point to think about when choosing a style for your website is to determine what message you want to convey. The style you choose should reflect your message. Also consider who your target audience is and how you want your website to look and feel. The style of your website sets the tone for your business. Keep in mind to stay consistent and have the same style across your site. Having a professional design also helps build credibility with your visitors. You don’t want to look like an amateur!

2. Layout and Navigation

We’ve all visited a website that had a horrible layout and wasn’t fun to navigate. What tends to happen? You get frustrated because you can’t find what you’re looking for, causing you to abandon the site. You don’t want users to experience this on your site so make sure they can easily find what they need. Take into consideration where to place graphics and where your navigation bar should be located.

3. Speed

Nowadays, nobody has time to wait around for a site to load. This is especially true for mobile versions of your site. We’ve all experienced trying to view a site that’s taking too long. We all end up closing it and moving on to other sites because we don’t want to wait anymore. More content, graphics, and data will lead to slow loading times. Try to take the less is more approach. Keep your pages simple by going easy on the graphics and content. Your visitors will definitely notice the difference.

4. Search Engine Friendly

A site that is not optimized for search engines may not appear in the results for any keyword query. You don’t want this to happen because that means the site that you’ve been working so hard on isn’t being viewed as much as it should be. Making your site search engine friendly involves many aspects including quick page loading times, validating your HTML code, and making sure that your site is compatible with all web browsers as well as mobile devices. This will help give you good rankings with search engines so that people are able to find your site easily. It does take time so be patient. Don’t expect to be on the first page of search engine results right away. But if you keep working at it, making your site search engine friendly will attract more visitors and keep them coming back.

5. Avoid Clutter

Putting as much information as you can into a little space will not entice your customers to keep coming back to your site. Try not to clutter your site with too much information and graphics. If your visitors don’t have time to wait for a page to load (as we mentioned above), then they definitely don’t have time to read a lot of content. We all skim when it comes to reading content on the web, so it should be simple and easy to read. Also, be careful not to overwhelm visitors right from the beginning with your homepage. Keep the content simple and direct users to different parts of your site for additional information.

These are only some of the many web design tips to consider when creating a website or updating your current site. Are there any tips and tricks that you have? Post them below in the comments. We’d love to hear them!

You have an amazing idea. You think it could grow into a full-fledged business. But, you don’t want to waste money and time unnecessarily. If you’re dreaming of the solopreneur lifestyle but want to see if your idea has merit, there’s no shortage of digital marketing freelance services on Lightenweb to help you affordably test and validate your business idea. Let’s check out the top 10:

1. Keyword Research

To test your business idea it’s good practice to start with an in-depth keyword research and analysis as it will tell you:

Which keywords are the most popular within your particular niche
How competitive they are in terms of pay-per-click ads (more on that below)
But that’s not all!
Having a keyword research done by a search engine marketing expert will help you understand your target audience problems, which is essential knowledge to have so you can adapt all future online marketing strategies to specifically respond and resolve your audience’s difficulties.

2. Competitive Analysis

Studying the competition is critical for success. Through competitive analysis you can learn what keywords or demographics your competition is targeting, the type of content they’re publishing, and discover links they may have coming to their site from well-known influencers in your particular market.

A competitive analysis often includes the aforementioned keyword analysis as well, so you can get the best of both worlds with an all-in-one service that gives you a solid strategy on the best way to proceed without breaking your budget.

3. Domain Research

With keyword research and competitive analysis done, your next step in creating a successful online business is through your domain name. While .com still reigns supreme, the availability of good names can be lukewarm at best. That’s why many enterprising young start-ups have taken to extensions like .io and .ly to create a brand that’s as unique as they are.

Hiring a professional to help you brainstorm and check the availability (and brand-ability) of a domain name is a great first step toward seeing if your target audience responds favorably to your idea.

4. Landing Page

Once you’ve selected a domain name, it’s time to build your online presence. It’s no secret that web design can be expensive, which is why many entrepreneurs elect to have a landing page designed first.

A landing page, quite simply, is the page where all your website traffic will land. It generally encourages users to sign up for your email list to get more information on your services, or to contact you for custom work or a free quote. A landing page is an affordable way to get early conversion rate figures and to help validate your business idea without the need for a full-fledged website.

5. Web Traffic

Once you’ve got your domain name secured and your landing page built, you may think the bulk of the work is behind you, but the real work has just begun! Now it’s time to drive visitors to your landing page and see how they’ll react..or don’t.

Getting the right kind of website traffic will help you discover if your business idea has merit. If visitors engage with your landing page, you’ll know to move full steam ahead. If not, you’ll know it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

How can you drive traffic?

Either you buy 100% real human targeted website traffic from reputable sellers, or you can leverage some digital marketing strategies such as Adwords campaigns, social media advertising, email marketing or influencer marketing. Each one of these strategies is a microcosm of tactics and potential opportunities within itself.

Let’s dig into each

6. Adword Campaigns

One of the most efficient ways to drive traffic and test your keywords potential is through Adwords campaigns. You’ve seen this type of search engine advertising at work if you’ve noticed ads at the top of Google search engine result pages (SERPs).

There are professionals available who can not only help create your pay-per-click ads, but can also manage them for you by selecting the best keywords while keeping a close eye on your bidding budget so as to not go overboard or target the wrong kind of traffic.

The best Adwords management and marketing strategy balances your bid per click with engaged, ready-to-act visitors who are interested in what you have to offer, which is why it’s so important to have a well-made landing page with clear call to actions!

7. Social Media Advertising

Social media advertising through sites like Facebook or Twitter is also a very valuable strategy to help you validate your business idea.

There’s simply no better way to attract a multitude of people who have already expressed interest in your product or service than by going to the places where they hang out online.

Hiring a professional to help you with your social media marketing is about more than just having someone create a few ads for you on Facebook and Twitter, it’s about helping you narrow down your audience, tailor the right message, and schedule your ads so that they’re seen at the prime time when your customer base is online.

8. Email Marketing

Emails are a very easy and affordable solution to help you drive target traffic to your landing page. Obviously before sending emails you have to collect email addresses. The question is, how?

Luckily, you have different solutions at your disposal:

Leverage your personal network
Add an email subscription call to action within your social network bios
Join Linkedin groups
Answer questions on QUORA
If the subject is of your interest, there is this beautiful article written by Sarah Peterson and Sean Bestor on how to build an email list.

You certainly won’t be able to respond to all your emails, so the best solution here it’s to hire a freelance email autoresponder specialist on Lightenweb who will help you gain time and money, while you focus on growing your business.

9. Influencer Marketing

So far, we’ve talked about AdWord, social media advertising and email marketing as ways to drive traffic and validate your new business idea. But what if you could reach out to a key figure, an influencer within your niche market and share your business idea with an audience you already know loves your type of product or service?

I agree, guest blogging is an option but not the easiest or the most affordable in this case, therefore it’s much convenient and efficient to reach out to a social influencer and leverage the power of word-of-mouth marketing. With a simple click your product or service idea is shared with thousand of people who can then simply visit your landing page and react.

10. Web Analytics

Now that your landing page drives traffic, it’s time to get into the numbers and make sure that the strategies you choose to validate your business idea are paying off. There’s no sense in throwing money at a particular traffic channel and hoping some of it sticks. In the digital world, you have to know with absolute certainty.

That’s where web analytics comes in. Using your existing website traffic, a Google analytics expert can look at certain details to tell you where people are coming from, how long they’re staying on your pages, how many ultimately subscribed to your list or submit a preorder, and so on. You may learn, for example, that your best avenue for email subscribers is social media, but your best source of customers is coming from your AdWord campaigns.

Every business is different, so there is no one size fits all approach. Hiring a freelance web analytics professional can help you understand which strategies work best for validating your business idea by leveraging only those channels that bring you more target visitors with the best conversion rate.

You should to know why every body start an E-Commerce Business