All the Best in One Place - Top 10 e-Commerce Articles of 2015

Happy New Year! It’s time to bid farewell to 2015 - the year not too nice overall, but extremely eventful for the world of e-Commerce. It brought us PrestаShop Cloud - the first ever free hosted solution, showed the release of Magento 2, world’s most anticipated platform yet, and the revivals of Spаrk Pay (formerly AmeriCommercе) and Aabako (formerly Yаhoo Store!).

Fueled by these grand news, e-Commerce bloggers were super active too. And today we’d like to sum up their precious yearly work - to cherry pick the top 10 e-Commerce articles of 2015.

So, let’s get started!

The story of Tucker Schreiber who’s managed to open a store and make over a thousand bucks in three weeks, is like e-Commererce’s “Eat, pray, love” - inspires thousands from all around the world. It shows that the main thing needed for success is a strong will, and for such reinforcement we put this article on the top of our list.

Magento and WooCommerce are both solid shopping carts, current market leaders, each with a substantial army of admirers. Debates over which one of them is better are endless. It’s like choosing between Michael Jackson and Prince or French wine and Italian - impossible. So, since the question “what’s better?” is subjective, we won’t even attempt to answer it and incline you towards one side. What we will do, though, is show you stats - the most unbiased indicator, and let them speak.

So, which platform is more popular WooCommerce or Magento? Check Cart2Cart’s in-house info to find out.

People are lazy, shallow and unwilling to conduct deep researches. I am, anyways. There is nothing more convincing to us than appearance, whilst inner virtues we’re too bored to look for.

Awful for humanity, such tendency is great for shop owners, who can mask plenty of store imperfections behind the cool looks. But what was “cool” and effective in 2015 in terms of shop design? See “36 E-commerce Homepage Design Best Practices from the Experts” to learn the answer.

Reviews are hugely important for your store’s rep because, unlike adverts and store’s own product descriptions, they convincу people. The sad thing is, however, shoppers are more likely to complain about items, than to leave a positive feedback.

How to go about this problem, make the best out of complains and encourage clients to post good reviews is a topic researched by many and by Neil Patel from Quicksprout in particular. He’s come up with the recipe for getting five stars reviews as often as possible, and we strongly recommend to read it.

Price is a powerful and multipurpose tool, if set up correctly. It can help you beat competitors, bring new customers and gain profits. But it’s not that easy to figure out the right number - plenty of small factors should be included.

So, when should you raise the price and when to lower it? An answer to that, along with much more useful data on the topic is in the brilliant and explicit post from from KissMetrics!

No need for psychics anymore to read people’s minds, or focus groups, shoppers are pretty vocal about their desires and frustrations themselves. All you need to do to monitor tastes of your target audience (and later satisfy them) is pay attention, on Twitter, Instagram, your store’s review section and so on.

So, off you go! But before that, check Kristi Hines’ article to learn how to do it most efficiently.

After a while, tons of motivational quotes flowing from every hole in the web might get tiring, might seem cheesy and unoriginal. But there is a reason there are so many of them - they work. No matter how many times you’ve heard positive affirmations before, they keep motivating you. And there is no way to be successful in business without energy, positive outlook and determination. So, fight your cynicism and get imbued with top sayings prosperous entrepreneurs repeat to themselves while conquering e-Commerce peaks.

All the efforts put in bringing a shopper to an online store, in design development and SEO, could be screwed up in seconds, by an inexperienced sales manager. To prevent such nuisances, Hubspot’s Craig Ellia shows his method of talking to clients. The method, he’s sure, will permit you to sell in 7 seconds.

Personalization, content marketing, videos on product pages, quick delivery options, mobile optimizations and omnichannel integration - these are six commandments e-Commerce members have followed in 2015. Or should have followed, according to a progressive Iventures study - the study Armando Roggio has written a great article about!

Bringing repeat traffic is crucial for online business. But considering how distracting the world is it’s now a real struggle to stick in client’s memory for long. Shop owners should make their presence felt constantly to keep customers retention flowing and there’s no better way to do it than via email newsletters. This article from Cleverbridge will introduce to five best techniques of collecting subscribers. So, learn them, have lots of people subscribed and make your email campaigns efficient!

That’s been a list of articles that taught, entertained and inspired us the most over the last year. We hope sincerely that you’ll enjoy them too.

Cart2Cart Team says “thanks for being with us this year”, we wish you luck and inspiration!

Have a great 2016!