The way people buy products and services has changed dramatically in the last couple of years, thanks to technology. Most people today use the internet to research brands and decide whether they should trust them or not, and more and more switch partially or entirely to online shopping.

And with the pandemic everything that could, including shopping, has moved into the digital world, creating incredible opportunities for entrepreneurs who want to start an eCommerce business.

Build a Superb Online Store

Whether you are just starting a business, moving an existing one online, or trying to grow your eCommerce business, nothing is more important than the condition of your online store. Even though it’s virtual, your store should look beautiful, the buying experience should be impeccable, everything should be easy to find, payment should be secure, all the necessary information available, and putting things in the cart should go smoothly.

First, you should find an eCommerce platform to build an online store for your business. It’s important that you choose one that will make your job as easy as possible. For one, the store builder should be user-friendly, and the platform should enable ordering, paying, and hosting. Furthermore, it should allow you to automate day-to-day tasks. Aesthetics is also crucial and it should be easy to customize the website design so that your online store represents your brand perfectly and matches your business vision.

The fact of the matter is that the better your online store works, the fewer potential buyers will leave your website immediately or abandon the cart. Finally, choose a platform that will be able to accommodate your business as it grows, without compromising the performance, speed, and efficiency of the store, and the overall customer experience.

Choose the Right Shipping Method

Timely delivery is one of the keys to running a successful eCommerce business. Long and frequent delays prompt order cancellations, bad reviews, and unsatisfactory customer experience. All of this can harm your reputation, and consequently, your profit. Good buying experience on the other hand plays a huge role in customer retention.

There are several ways you can go about shipping your products to your customers. Simply put, you can either ship your products by yourself, or you can use a third party. Owning your own stock, however, can be very expensive, especially for small or new businesses. This is why it’s a great idea to use another way of shipping products. When considering third-party shipping options, platforms like Shiply can offer efficient solutions tailored to your eCommerce needs, ensuring timely deliveries and satisfied customers.

One option is to become an Amazon FBA business. This means that you sell your products, while Amazon will ship them. Using Fulfillment by Amazon gives you access to more customers and inspires trust. And not only will it make your work easier but it will also help you run a successful business, and eventually grow and scale it.

Dropshipping is another fulfillment method in which you don’t keep products in stock, but rather purchase it as needed from a wholesaler or manufacturer. You can use one or several dropshipping suppliers and tools. Some businesses also combine FBA and FBM methods.

Focus on Customer Retention

Acquiring new customers is important but successful eCommerce businesses also focus on retaining customers. Powerful tactics to increase customer retention are key for business growth, because returning buyers are loyal customers, and they translate to a good reputation, increased visibility, and, most importantly, increased profit.

There are many tactics you can use to build a strong, lasting, and meaningful relationship with your customers, including creating loyalty programs, offering gifts and discounts, providing quality content on your website and your social media, interacting with customers, asking for feedback on their experience, and staying in touch after they’re done with the purchase.

Take Advantage of Social Media

Most companies nowadays recognize the importance of social media for their success, whether they are eCommerce businesses or not. Major social networks, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, offer many features for businesses to boost sales and even enable shopping through their platforms.

However, this is not the most important benefit of social media for businesses. With more than half of the world’s population using one or more of these platforms constantly, they can provide you with a vast pool of potential buyers. Some of the tactics you can use to reach your ideal customers using social media, include:

• Providing high-quality content to increase engagement rate;
• Inspiring user-generated content;
• Interacting with followers;
• Using paid ads to target the right social media users;
• Collaborating with other brands and/or influencers;
• Cross-promote.

In a Nutshell

There are many successful eCommerce businesses out there, which can be intimidating if you are just starting your online store. However, with the right tools and tactics, you can increase your chances to run a profitable and scalable eCommerce business.

Market Place

MKTPlace is a leading digital and social media platform for traders and investors. MKTPlace offers premiere resources for trading and investing education, digital resources for personal finance, news about IoT, AI, Blockchain, Business, market analysis and education resources and guides.

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

With more than one billion monthly active users, Instagram has caught the attention of business owners and companies of all sizes. From gathering insights to selling products, Instagram provides business owners with the features they need to promote their brands on the platform.

If you still don’t have an Instagram profile, it’s not too late to join. With the right marketing strategy and by making use of some free Instagram tools, you can grow your account, promote your products and services, boost your brand, and increase sales. And these are not all the upsides of using Instagram for business. Here are 5 unexpected ones to consider:

1.   Fuel Your Other Marketing Channels

Did you know that the posts you create on Instagram can easily be shared across all of your social media channels? All you need to do is enable social sharing on Twitter and Facebook within your Instagram Settings. By doing this, your content will be shared automatically every time you post on Instagram.

In addition, the content you create on Instagram can be used in your email marketing campaigns. Research has shown that using Instagram-style photography in emails increases click-through rates by 8% and conversion rates by 25%.

2.   Connect With Your Customers

Did you know that Instagram has one of the most engaged and active user bases? As of January 2022, the average Instagram business profile follower engagement with posts on a page was 1.94%. In fact, research has shown that IG generates 120 times more engagement than Twitter. On average, carousels are the most engaging type of Instagram post with 1.01%.

This makes Instagram the ideal platform to connect with your customers, hear what they have to say about your brand and products, and build strong relationships through conversations.

Some of the most effective ways to boost your Instagram engagement levels include sharing high-quality photos and videos, posting carousels (of course), writing great captions, creating custom stickers and filters, responding to questions and comments, etc. There is even the possibility to Invest in Instagram followers today with Twicsy if you’re looking to expand your follower base quickly to reach a whole new level of visibility and influence.

3.   Reach New Audiences

One of the ways people discover new content on the platform is through hashtags. Like other social sites, when you include a hashtag in an Instagram post, you can view all of the posts that have the same hashtag. You can also use hashtags to proactively find potential customers and start interacting with them.

Hosting giveaways, asking questions, and curating user-generated content are also effective ways to expand your reach on the platform. Another trick is to go live. When you use live video, you’ll appear at the front of the Stories feed. The “LIVE” logo also makes your profile photo more prominent in the IG app.

4.   Better Audience Insight

Getting to know your audience better is a crucial factor in promoting and growing your business. Instagram Audience Insights helps you to better understand who is engaging with your post. It also provides key demographic information including top countries, top cities, top gender, and age ranges, as well as a breakdown by followers and non-followers.

This information will help you create an accurate profile of your consumer and, as a result, you’ll be able to improve your Instagram marketing strategy and grow the number of qualified leads in the long run.

5.   Low-Cost Lead Generation

Speaking of lead generation, did you know you can save up to 80% of your cost related to lead generation with social media advertising? This is because it only costs a fraction of the cost per lead compared to traditional marketing methods such as newspaper, radio, and TV commercials.

Besides the most obvious way to get more leads on Instagram – using lead ads, you can also add action buttons to your Instagram profile. If you like, your profile can include a link to your phone, email, and physical address so that people can get in touch with you. Another place where the platform allows you to embed links is IG Stories. If you have over 10k followers, this is a feature you should use to your advantage. Finally, be sure that your brand content is targeted to the right people who are interested in your business, products or services.

Final Thoughts

Social media platforms like Instagram can be a real business booster, which is exactly why most brands use them to reach new audiences and grow the number of customers. The basic benefits of using Instagram for business are obvious but the platform goes beyond to give you many other privileges. In this post, we discussed five unexpected benefits of utilizing Instagram for business.

Market Place

MKTPlace is a leading digital and social media platform for traders and investors. MKTPlace offers premiere resources for trading and investing education, digital resources for personal finance, news about IoT, AI, Blockchain, Business, market analysis and education resources and guides.

Want to lose money? The internet is full of trading ideas that will help you do just that. What you need is not to be told what to do, but to get advice that will allow you to think for yourself. To meet this end we’ve put together a list of ten resources that you will need to make your own decisions and have a chance of success on the capital markets.

SEC Edgar

We’re sure of one thing. If you don’t spend time on the SEC Edgar platform you’re not doing well in stocks, or you won’t be for much longer. Every single public filing is searchable and downloadable on this database and every company that’s ever gone public is displayed for your analysis. If you don’t read annual reports you’re not investing, you’re gambling.

Investopedia

Billed as a great solution for beginners, Investopedia is so much more than that. Everybody runs into a metric or a strategy they’re not familiar with every now and then even big traders rarely know what’s going on outside of their discipline. Investopedia, augmented by Wikipedia itself, is a great resource for any trader who’s bogged down in jargon and looking for a simple way out.

Yahoo Finance, Google Finance

With a range of simple to use tools and basic charts, the two financial news and information aggregatiors are there to give an all-round look at the way companies are performing. You’re getting the basic package on Google Finance and Yahoo Finance, so don’t expect miracles. Use them to glance at how the markets are doing, but go elsewhere to really get your hands dirty.

Twitter, Feedly

Depending on your tolerance for social interaction you’ll need to choose between these two sites to give you a constant news ticker. Feedly uses RSS feeds from news websites, while Twitter is more adaptable allowing you to add in Carl Icahn’s latest comments, along with those from Justin Bieber.

If you’re trading regularly you’ll need to keep up to date with the latest news, and sticking to a single source just isn’t good enough anymore. Even investors with access to a Bloomberg terminal use a Twitter feed on the side.

Ycharts

Take any two pieces of information and chart them against each other in order to find a relationship. Ycharts is one of the best charting systems out there, and beats many of its rivals by sheer range of indicators and ease of use. It’s a one stop shop for data visualization and comparison, and it’s got a great free trial.

FRED

The Federal Reserve’s collection of financial data is one of the best sources of economic information in the world. We know that the world runs on macroeconomic indicators and you’ll need access to them in order to make good decisions.

Zero Hedge

You won’t want to be basing your decisions off of what you read here, but Zero Hedge is full of challenging contrarian views that will keep you on your toes and test your real knowledge of the financial markets you are betting on.

You may disagree completely with what you read, but if you can’t write an argument to back up your side you’re running on instinct alone, something that will more than likely emaciate your retirement fund.

eTrade, Ameritrade etc.

We’re not going to pick one online broker above all the others here. You know which one is best for you and you should stick to it. There are some interesting options out there, but this isn’t the time or place to list them. Do some research and find out what works for you.

If there’s one piece of advice we could give out: pay attention to the trading costs. You’ll need a suitable online brokerage to drive your investments, so make sure it doesn’t eat your kids college tuition fees.

WhaleWisdom.com

If you’re a hedge fund nut you’re probably aware of the limitations of the 13F filing. The .txt copy published by the SEC is woefully unreadable, and requires manual spreadsheet work to allow comparisons.

Whalewisdom does the work for you on this one and creates an accurate look at how hedge funds have been buying and selling according to their most recent filings. Have a look at the site and see how it can help make hedge fund decisions form a reasonable, readable whole.

SeekingAlpha, Fool.com

For something a little different head to sites like Seeking Alpha and the Motley Fool. While not a thorough learning experience, and certainly not full of information to take at face value, the essays on the platforms will get your creative juices flowing and give you a decent insight into the markets and the way other investors are thinking.

Set yourself up with something from each heading in the above list, and you’ll be able to do most of the basics of analysis and portfolio management by yourself. If we’ve left out anything you love to use, or an up-and-coming darling, be sure to let us know in the comments.

Market Place

MKTPlace is a leading digital and social media platform for traders and investors. MKTPlace offers premiere resources for trading and investing education, digital resources for personal finance, news about IoT, AI, Blockchain, Business, market analysis and education resources and guides.

There is no doubt about the fact that we have now transcended into an era of mass digitization, technology and convenience. There have been some vast improvements in technology if you compare it with the earlier years. These changes, however, have also affected the financial market and communities. There have been numerous successful advances which have led to greatly impacting the financial world in a positive manner and in a manner which has guaranteed the industry’s prosperity in the coming years.

Below is the one of the latest infographics on the growth of Social Media, by Social Recruiter Guide:

And because of the ease of communication between people granted by this technology, it has had a far-reaching implication on how traders communicate in the financial world, especially when you talk about the democratization of equity markets. In simple words, less and less traders now trade from trading floors. Instead, they now use various social media platforms to conduct and discuss their trades with other traders.

The Role of Social Media in the World of Trading

There is no doubt that traders now use different social media platforms to encourage and conduct calculated stock trading, but why is that? The answer is…

The Mass Psychology Factor

It is important to understand that the prices of any stock are influenced in par with the psychology of the people. Social media networks, like Twitter and Facebook, have greatly increased and optimized your ability to talk about trading strategies, exchange opinions and share all the news relevant to any trade. So, as more people tend to join different social media networks like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, the spread of information will increase drastically.

What this would do is make all the relevant information available for traders easy to be shared with all the users of the social network, reducing the time involved in implementing traders’ reactions to changing market trends and conditions. And at the same time, traders will experience a reduction in the time it takes them to respond to an opinion pertaining to any trading situation. For example, if there are rumours around a stock circulating in the financial markets and there is no information that could back this rumour, the social media users will take this rumour as a fact, hence increase the mass psychological factor.

Social Media Platforms Attract High Volume Trading Companies

You’d be surprised to know how many traders are beginning to change the way they think about various market trends. Various social media companies now pay Twitter for access to its vast information hub which comprises of data which can be used to influence the markets. The same social media firms also employ text analysis processes to evaluate and apply that data (which by the way consists of hundreds of millions of tweets).

In light of this, if these trends grow and social media platforms expand, it will most definitely (and they have) attract the attention of high volume trading companies and firms. Trading companies can benefit greatly from the information they get from Twitter and can use it to determine various social trends bouncing in the financial markets. These companies can also use the information to find out whether or not there is considerably volatility in the trading markets. This information is invaluable as they can also use it to confirm their sophisticated algorithms.

A good example can be the recent fall in stock prices when it was revealed that the Twitter feed of the Associated Press became a victim of the notorious “Syrian Electronic Army”. Their feed got hacked and the news caused a 140-point drop in Dow Jones, which in turn caused the market to lose approximately $200 billion.

This could be prevented through the use of algorithm trading and traders won’t have to fear any volatility caused by unwanted activity in the market. If you think about it, the stronger this information stream continues to grow on social media platforms, more people will begin to use the data to start trading without any hesitation.

Filtering billions of messages and tweets everyday would help trading companies to understand what directions the market would end up moving towards in the future. There is no question regarding the fact that billions of people use social media frequently and are growing less reliant on other types of media and because of this massive but productive change in communication, trading in the future will also experience a big change and there is no denying that.

Market Place

MKTPlace is a leading digital and social media platform for traders and investors. MKTPlace offers premiere resources for trading and investing education, digital resources for personal finance, news about IoT, AI, Blockchain, Business, market analysis and education resources and guides.

It is no surprise that social media is expanding exponentially and it’s influencing trading. Just look at how Facebook has turned out since it was created in 2004. It now has over 1.3 billion users worldwide. Twitter generates over 500 million tweets every day and LinkedIn has over 260 million active users, trying to make new connections and to find jobs every day. If you look at social media from a broader perspective, you will see that it has come a long way and has significantly aided people in accomplishing things that otherwise would not have been easily possible. It has become a vital pipeline for thoughts and actions, and words and decisions pertaining to everything.

As a result of such growth, there are some bullet points that might be important for a trader in order to understand the scale of potential information flow:

Looking at it from another point of view, you will notice that social media has become the combined load and barometer of ideas, thoughts, and impulses in regards to the entire world. It has also served to be a combined source of wisdom, observation, and emotional reactions for those in the financial markets, such as asset managers, traders, investors, and equity analysts.

The Extenuating Effect of Social Media on Daily Trading

Social media has allowed traders to conduct trades privately without being influenced by anything. The main difference between social media platforms for trading and a traditional offline social surrounding is that in the latter, you are more exposed to the decisions and the influence of other traders. Social media saves you from conducting misinformed or ‘low information’ trades or from following bad investment advice and decisions. For example, it helps you not to make rash decisions based on what your friends say about a particular stock, and how you should invest in it.

Social networking platforms provide traders with a complete net of streamlined information, which allows you to analytically consider a wider range of possible trading scenarios. For example, while a couple of your friends made money by investing in a certain stock, the majority of your friends and colleagues lost money investing in the very same stock. So it is likely that this information will suppress your immediate emotional response, which is to buy those shares, and instead, you will decide to forgo this opportunity, which is a considerably better option.

High End Investors Seek to Utilize the Benefits of Social Media

According to a study which was a made a couple of years ago by LinkedIn, with the help of the Cogent Research Group, it was identified that various social media platforms were being used by high trading net worth traders of about $5 million belonging to North America. It was discovered that they used social media to help them with make critical trading decisions. It was also realized that those investors have made social media their prime tool for decision making.

Retail Trading: Becoming One with the Global Investors

While using different social media instruments to predict various market trends, retail investors can depend on various resources for accurate information pertaining to the market. The goals of individual retail traders totally differ from those of professional investors and traders. Retail traders thrive by working as a network which helps share and spread market related information and ideas. And, what better platform is there to share and gather ideas than social media? Thus, it makes for a natural breeding place for retail traders to become an integral part of the trading community.

Just look at Facebook’s trading application for potential investors, called Zecco’s Wall. The application is streamlined to allow investors and traders to monitor their stocks and to buy them via the application anytime they want to. The application has made access to a much larger network of information very easy for all traders.

Also, via social media, there are many online traders who can interact with other online traders with similar trading portfolios. This allows them to improve their trading together while participating in collaborative successes.

No trader in this day and age can say that social media has not helped them attain financial prosperity in one way or another. Social media has had an extremely powerful influence on the way traders choose to analyze and assess potential investment opportunities. With that being said, it is important to realize that one has to iron out the disorganized nature of the trading information available on and attained via social media networks carefully. In order to make effective use of it, it has to be diligently filtered because of the massive amount of information present, which can prove to be misleading if not analyzed properly.

Market Place

MKTPlace is a leading digital and social media platform for traders and investors. MKTPlace offers premiere resources for trading and investing education, digital resources for personal finance, news about IoT, AI, Blockchain, Business, market analysis and education resources and guides.