Tag Archives: dress

How to Create an Ecommerce Return Policy That Makes Customers Happy

The post How to Create an Ecommerce Return Policy That Makes Customers Happy appeared first on HostGator Blog . One of the least glamorous aspects of online commerce is the one that can make or break your business: returns. That’s because e-commerce return rates are a lot higher than return rates for purchases at brick-and-mortar stores. And thanks to the standards set by mega-retailers like Amazon, Nordstrom, and Zappos, customers expect to be able to return their purchases for free. How can your online store offer a competitive return policy without losing money on returns? To create a return policy that works for you and your customers, it helps to understand why online shoppers return so much merch, which types of returns you can reduce, and which returns are just part of the cost of doing business. Why Do Customers Expect Free Returns? Customers look for free returns in part because they can . Online and multichannel retailers like Amazon, Nordstrom, and Zappos have had free return policies for years, so many customers have come to expect it. A UPS report found that 88 percent of online shoppers look at stores’ return policies , so make sure yours is on par with or better than your competitors’. What to do: We all know that “free shipping” isn’t really free because smart retailers build shipping costs into their overall pricing. The same is true for free returns. Factor in your expected return rate and costs when you price your merchandise. Customers also look for free returns because there’s no way to for them to handle the merchandise before they buy. A free return policy reduces the risk that comes with buying a product they haven’t sampled, tried on, or held in their hands. What to do: Put your store’s shipping and return policy on every page of your site. Use clear language and keep it simple. Nordstrom sets the standard: “Free shipping. Free returns. All the time.” They include a link to the full policy for anyone who wants to know more, but that simple message on each page lets shoppers know that buying and returning will be hassle-free. Who Offers Free Returns Now? Any retailer or reseller who wants to stay competitive offers some sort of customer-friendly return policy, and the most ambitious small stores offer free returns to compete with bigger players. Even people who flip estate-sale and thrift-shop items on eBay often provide free returns to stand out from other sellers. What to do: Offer free returns. You can still set rules on how long customers have to return items, whether tags can be removed, etc.   Why Do Customers Return Online Purchases? There are three basic reasons customers return items. The product description didn’t include enough information, the customer ordered items that didn’t work for them, and return fraud.   1. To overcome the fact that customers can’t interact with online products before they buy, savvy sellers include lots of product information, like dimensions, weight, reviews, warranty, colors, photos, and videos. Without these details, customers are more likely to buy the wrong item and need to return it. These details can also cut down on the number of customers who order the same item in different sizes with the intention of sending back the ones that don’t fit. What to do: If you’re getting returns from customers who say the item wasn’t what they expected, it’s probably time to improve your product descriptions. You’ll have happier customers and fewer returns.   2. However, you’re selling to humans. Even if you include every possible product detail, busy or distracted customers may miss that information. To justify my thrift-store browsing habit, I resell some of my finds on eBay. Last week a customer bought a dress that had several photos and detailed measurements. However, she overlooked the measurements and the dress didn’t fit. It happens. And sometimes people just change their minds. What to do: In these cases, gracious acknowledgment that we’re all human can go a long way. Take the return if it meets your criteria and let everyone move on.   3. And then there’s fraud. The fear of return fraud, especially customers using or wearing items and then returning them for a refund, is the reason some store owners hesitate on free returns. It’s true that an estimated one percent of returns are fraudulent, but most customers are simply busy people who don’t want to return something unless it doesn’t work for them. What to do: To head off return fraud, you can require that items must be in their original packaging or  have tags attached to qualify for free returns. Stickers that cover package seams and large garment tags can make it harder for fraudsters to use your merchandise and send it back. You may also choose to charge a restocking fee if the item shipped was the correct item and wasn’t defective. If you go the restocking fee route, make sure that’s clear from your shipping policies. Another option, adopted by retailers like Sephora, Best Buy, Home Depot, and Victoria’s Secret, is to use a third-party agency to track customers’ returns and flag their accounts if their return habits seem excessive. These customers may have their returns declined for a year. Small online sellers can do something similar by tracking customer returns so you can ban or limit returns from those whose behavior seems fraudulent. However, expect to lose those customers and see them complain on social media. Another option might be to simply decline new orders from those customers. Once you’ve improved your product descriptions, made your return policy clear, and come up with a way to watch for fraud, there’s one more thing you’ll want to do. Choose a shipper that can handle your returns with tracking, so you can verify when your customers have send the items back to you. That also gives your customers peace of mind because they can be sure you received their returns. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading

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What’s the Best URL Structure for SEO?

The post What’s the Best URL Structure for SEO? appeared first on HostGator Blog . SEO 101: What’s the Best URL Structure for SEO? Many of your visitors will come to your website by clicking on a link, so you may wonder if it really matters what’s in the actual URL of a specific page. It may surprise you to know that when it comes to on-site SEO, what your URLs look like is actually really important. What is URL Structure? Your website URL works as your address on the web. It’s the most direct way for someone to visit a page on your website. If you’re not familiar with the term, the URL is the thing that starts with either www or http. In the early stages of starting a website, you want to sit down and figure out a standard structure for your website URLs. (If your website is already established and growing, it’s not too late to do this now, it just might require more work.) Your URLs always start with the root domain for your website (e.g. www.yourwebsitename.com ), so what you want to define is what follows for individual pages. Your URL structure will directly relate to your larger site architecture. You want your URLs to both reference what’s on the specific page, as well as help situate the website visitor to where this page belongs on the larger website.  For example, the URL for a post on your blog should look something like this: www.yourwebsitename.com/blog/nameofyourblogpost   At a glance to the URL, any visitor who reached the post through an outside link would quickly be able to see that they’re on a blog, as well some basic information about the specific blog post on the page.   Why Does URL Structure Matter? Your URL structure matters for a few key reasons. First, for Google to consistently deliver relevant results to searchers, it has to know what each page in its index is about. The URL is one of the most important parts of the page Google looks at to determine what a page is about. Next, an intuitive URL structure makes your site easier to navigate for users . If someone browsing a retail website for clothes finds themselves on the page www.clothesretailer.com/womens/dresses/nameofspecificdress , they know the page belongs in the two categories that precede the final part of the html: women’s clothes and dresses. Savvy web users also know they can delete the last couple of parts of the URL (dresses/nameofspecificdress) to get back to the larger selection of women’s clothes. And lastly, the same thing that makes a good URL structure intuitive for users is good for search engines too. The search engine crawler can more easily make the relevant connections between different pages on your website  – it can see that a particular item belongs in the same category as other dresses (even if “dress” isn’t in the product name), which belong in the larger category of women’s clothes on the site – information that helps the crawler better understand what different sections of the website are about and how they relate to each other. As an added benefit, having those extra categories precede the specific keyword or product name in your URL adds in some extra relevant keywords without creating a URL that’s spammy.  That gives Google just a little bit more information to make sure it understands what’s on the page and knows what keywords the page should show up in search for.   7 Tips for Creating a Good URL Structure The URL is a pretty basic part of on-site optimization, but one that it’s important to get right.  Here are a few good ways to make sure you use your URLs wisely.   1. Always edit a page’s URL to be relevant. A surprising number of websites will still use automatically generated URLs that look like a string of gibberish. That’s skipping a big SEO opportunity, while also creating a more confusing experience for your visitors. The first and most important thing you need to do for your website’s URLs is to simply commit to customizing each one based on what’s on the web page .   2. Follow a standard URL structure. As discussed above, this will relate to your website’s overall organization and is an important rule to follow. Determine what categories and subcategories you’ll be using and how you’ll portray them in the URLs of web pages that belong in each category. Be careful not to let things get too complicated here – too many categories will bog down your URLs and make them confusing rather than helpful: www.clothesretailer.com/womens/dresses/nameofspecificdress is an intuitive URL structure,  while  www.clothesretailer.com/womens/dresses/short-sleeves/purple/floral/knee-length/nameofspecificdress is taking things too far. Stick to the main categories that are important for making your website more intuitive in its organization, and be as consistent as possible in the URL structure you use across the site.   3. Keep it short and simple. Good URLs are short and to the point. Make sure you aren’t filling yours with any unnecessary words or characters, and avoid keyword stuffing . Having the same keyword in your URL more than once won’t do you any good. While most of your visitors will use links or bookmarks to access specific pages of your website rather than going to the URL directly, you want it to at least be plausible that someone could remember a specific URL if they wanted to.   4. Use your primary keyword. For every page on your website, you should have a primary target keyword in mind that you want it to rank for in the search engines. Obviously this should be something that specifically describes what’s on the web page, while also being a common term used by people looking for what’s on the page. Make sure your primary keyword is part of the page’s URL. It may work to simply use the keyword as the part of the URL specific to your page (e.g. www.yourwebsitename.com/relevant-category/primary-keyword ). If the web page is for an article or blog post, the main words in the article’s headline can usually be pulled out to make a strong headline that includes the primary keyword and clearly describes what’s on the page. For example, a post called 10 Tips to Find the Perfect Summer Dress that has the target keyword “summer dress”, could become the URL   www.clothesretailer.com/blog/find-perfect-summer-dress   5. Use hyphens to separate words. You can’t include spaces in a URL, so SEO best practice is to use hyphens to separate words. This will signal to Google where the breaks between words are, and make it easier for your visitors to understand URLs than if the words all ran together.   6. Remove stop words. You want URLs to be short and simple, which means you never need things like pronouns and articles. So when translating a page title into a URL structure, drop any common stop words in the title, such as: a, the, and, or, but, an, of, etc .   7. Use canonical tags where needed. This part’s a little more technical, but still important. You don’t want Google registering different versions of the same page on your website as distinct pages. So if you have the same web page that’s tied to more than one URL for any reason, you’re diluting its SEO value. The most common version of this is when you have web pages for both http://yourwebsite.com and www.yourwebsite.com , or if you have a secure version of a page at https://yourwebsite.com along with the two versions mentioned above. Whatever the reason, you want each URL for the same page to be consolidated in the eyes of Google so that a link back to one of them counts for all versions. You can communicate that to Google by using the canonical tag on every variation of the page that clarifies which URL should be considered the main URL to represent all versions.   Setting Your URL Structure Getting a standard URL structure into place can take some time and planning, but once you have your main structure defined, picking the right URL for each web page on your site can be one of the easiest parts of on-site SEO. Make sure you customize your URLs for best results every time. It’s an easy way to improve your SEO and create a better visitor experience in a small way. Don’t miss the rest of our SEO 101 series! How Do Search Engines Work? How to Write Compelling Title Tags How to Write the Best Meta Descriptions Best Practices for Website Architecture Give your site a boost with HostGator’s expert SEO services. Learn more here. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading

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QR QuickResponse Barcode+BV

I read an article about “QR” and I am wondering how I would do this for my websites in Blue Voda. Thanks “You may have noticed those square barcodes (looks like lots of squiggly unrelated lines) popping up on business cards,magazines or elsewhere, so you may already know that they are a hot trend for 2011 Continue reading

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