The main goal of any eCommerce site is to increase traffic, and funnel that traffic into conversions that result in sales and revenue. There are many strategies that can be employed to increase traffic, as well as many dollars that are spent trying to get customers into the funnel. What if you could grab a share of Amazon and Google’s traffic? This is possible with a Consumer Shopping Engine (CSE).

“Consumer Shopping Engines are product marketing websites that display aggregated product offerings across multiple retailers.” Some of the most popular CSE’s are Amazon, Google, Shopzilla.com and PriceGrabber.com. These are all popular sites with high page ranks and high traffic volumes. Customers at all stages in the buying cycle visit these sites, but most of them are comparing and searching for the best price.

Internet Retailer released a study last month that will have you drooling over the numbers and shows how CSE’s help in exceeding sales goals. “The study covered more than 4 million clicks that resulted in $1.16 million in advertising spend, and nearly 83,000 online orders that generated $7.87 million in sales for the advertisers. “ For Google this resulted in a 2.78% conversion rate and for Amazon a 1.60% conversion rate. A clothing retailer recently implemented a CSE and after a month saw a sales increase of 216%. Take a moment and think about how these numbers would sound when referring to your business.

Many eCommerce sites currently have large budgets for CPC campaigns – even if your business didn’t want to fully commit to a CSE, you could transfer some of your CPC budget and see what sort of ROI you receive.

Google and Amazon are the highest rated CSE’s with the best conversion rates. Integrating a CSE can help you increase sales, but it can also help increase traffic to your actual site and build your reputation in the marketplace.

Magic Logix and Magento partner together to provide customized eCommerce solutions and we can provide you with an integrated CSE and eCommerce site that will pull customers through your funnel to increase your sales and revenue.

Basic Configuration

Log in to your store admin panel and from the top navigation menu choose Catalog->Manage Products.

Click the button “Add Product” which will take you to the New Product page.

Leave the dropdowns as they are since we are creating a simple product, and hit “Continue”

Fill out the required Fields. There are several required fields that must be filled out in order to save the product. They are:

• Name – The name that will be in the hyperlink to the product)
• Description – a long description of the product to be shown on the product’s detail page
• Short Description – a brief description of the product
• SKU – can be anything but needs to be unique for each product
• weight – self-explanatory, used for shipping calculations
• status – you will want to select “enabled” for the product to show up

For the new e-Commerce website there is a need to choose products that are safe, secure and well maintained. That means choosing a shopping cart that will make the customers feel safe and secure when they place orders from your website. Anyone can add a shopping cart, but if you choose Magento you know your customers will feel secure and have no hesitation about returning to your website later. This is the key to return business—a safe and secure shopping experience. If you have tried another product and been unhappy you will certainly have a different experience with the Magento shopping cart program.

Aren’t all shopping cart programs the same? While the concept is the same there is certainly an enormous difference between different shopping carts—if there wasn’t there would be no need for different e-Commerce products to be in existence. Magento would not need to fulfill your needs if any shopping cart product would fill the needs of every e-Commerce site. The reality is that e-Commerce merchants want a choice, and they want to provide the highest quality service not only in the products they sell but in the checkout process as well.

When you are looking for a quality shopping cart for your e-Commerce business you need to check several different products including Magento. The more information you have in front of you the better the chances are that you will make the right decision for your business and for your customers. It’s never a good idea to make a decision without conducting some research first—the same holds true for anything connected to your e-Commerce website. The more quality you can put into the finished product the more customers you will be able to bring in and retain—retention is just as important if not more so than bringing in new customers.