If you have never worked with a Google Shopping feed before, there are a few things to think about before getting started. Here are a few tips on how you can use Lengow to improve the feed you place in the Merchant Center.

1. Matching your fields correctly

Field Matching is one of the most important things to do in Lengow, so take some time to create your optimised feeds correctly. Lengow also allows you to match your fields as best possible before sending them to the Merchant Center. You can do this through clicking Feed Management > Field Matching and filling out the necessary fields.

2. Category Mapping

In order for your optimised feed to be accepted in Merchant Center, you will need to map your categories according to the Google Shopping categories. With Lengow you can quickly and easily map categories in the Product Management tab by clicking on the little icon with the green plus sign and then selecting the corresponding category.

In order for you to take advantage of all of the features Lengow is offering, please make sure set your CPC cost in the Product Management part. This will help you create accurate rules and filters based on profitability in order to improve the performance of the products.

3. Mandatory Info

For a feed to be accepted by Google, it must contain 2 of the folowing fields:

• MPN (manufacturer product number)
• GTIN (eg: an EAN code)
• Brand name

Some product categories may require more information, such as books or clothing, for example, where specific attributes are requested. You can find out more about these products in Google Shopping’s Help Center.

4. Create a virtual field

If you do not have at least 2 out of 3 fields for all your products in the feed, use the Identifier_exists field with a false value, otherwise your account might be suspended.

If you do not have this field, you can easily add it in Lengow by creating a virtual field in your product flow via the « Manage Feeds » tab and « RSS Source » section at the bottom of the page.

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The Start Up Assembly is a yearly event where start-ups around France open their doors to the public, allowing them to look around their offices and get more information about the company and its history. The event, created by well known start-upers Marc-Arthur Gauthey and Cedric Giorgi, is expecting over 500 start-ups to participate this year, one of them being Lengow!

Lengow will be opening its door on the 13^th June at 11am until 2.30pm. The meet will kick off with a presentation about Lengow, what we do and our history. Our traffic manager Elina Février will then talk about her daily life at Lengow and what has happened since last year’s edition of the Start Assembly. There will also be a tour of our office and lots of opportunities to speak with different members of our team. Before closing the door at 2.30pm, Lengow will invite all present to a BBQ outside!

If you haven’t signed up yet, you can do so here.

We look forward to meeting you, and remember, Lengow is always on the lookout for new talent!

Last week Lengow attended the second IMRG Connect Conference of 2014, which focused on the customer journey and personalisation. The day was packed with insightful and thought provoking keynotes, panel sessions and presentations. The main take away from the day is that personalisation is fundamental to ecommerce.

Personalisation is key

People buy from people, and the relationship between the buyer and the seller is key to the selling process, and customers now expect relevance at every stage of their customer experience.

This is a real challenge for etailers, who have no face to face contact with their customers. However in the age of new technology and software, we can now intelligently use data to customise the customer’s experience to make it as relevant to them as possible.

Homepage and product pages

Normally the home page is the first point of contact between your customer and your brand. Therefore you need to test the layout in order to provide the optimum design for your visitors. Heat maps can also be used to find out the most viewed areas of the site, which can help you when designing structure. You can personalise the home page with product suggestions via cross selling and upselling. Thanks to Lengow campaign tracking you analyse your communications to see which ones are being clicked and how often (get in touch for more info: ).

Ideally you should be continually testing your product layout, i.e: the variation and combination of options available, to see which layout works best. For example on a fashion ecommerce site visitors should be able to display products that are only available in their size.

Accounts

The more data you collect regarding a customer, the richer and more customised you can make the experience. However, forcing a customer to make an account in order to carry out a purchase may have a detrimental effect on conversion rate. Setting up an account should ideally be an option and you need to give the customer an incentive to give you their details, even if the incentive is something as simple as making future transactions easier. In the below example from Asos, customers are offered the option of having exclusive discounts and style advice when they register.

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A responsive design adapts the content of your ecommerce site to the size of all types of screens, thus, your online store can be viewed on all devices (tablet, smartphone, etc). Responsive design is now essential for any ecommerce store because it provides better visibility of your products/services and improves your conversion rate.

Why choose a responsive design for your online shopping site? What alternatives are available to you if you currently do not have a responsive design?

Growth of m-commerce

Consumers are no longer only shopping from their desktop. In one of our articles last week we reported that the m-commerce market in the UK is the most mature in all of Europe, accounting for 13% of all online sales. According to multi-channel payment solutions company PayPoint, by 2019 mobile will account for 19.6% of online sales. Therefore, online retailers need to embrace this trend and adapt their websites accordingly, as to not miss out on this profitable opportunity.

Multi-channel consumers

With the boom of devices consumers today are spoiled for choice. They can now view and purchase products/services via their computer, tablet or even smartphone. Therefore it is necessary to standardise your content on these three main media through a Responsive Web Design.

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Retargeting (or remarketing) enables you to maximise traffic to your site and increase conversion rate by targeting visitors who leave your online store with customised adverts on other sites, based on their interactions on your site.

Popularised by the French company Criteo, retargeting has quickly established itself as an effective way to increase conversion on ecommerce sites. Founded in 2005 by Jean-Baptiste Rudelle, Franck le Ouay and Romain Nicoli, Criteo is today a world leader in behavioural retargeting

Google is also a major player in this market. During this year’s Lengow Ecommerce Day, Google employees Catherine Boisset and Leo Sei, hosted a workshop dedicated to Google Remarketing, the retargeting solution developed by Google. Whether you want to reach customers and/or prospects who’ve shown some interest in your site, increase the number of customers and customer loyalty, or even re-engage your old customers, retargeting has become an indispensable tool in e-commerce.

Here is a basic recap of what you need to know to start using retargeting

Principle of retargeting

• The visitor goes to your ecommerce site,
• The sections and pages they visit are tracked (via cookies)
• They leave your online shop without buying the product they looked at and continue their internet browsing
• The product is then re-exposed to them while they are on partner websites or ad-exchange platforms,
• Thanks to the personalisation of advertising, the customer clicks on the banner,
• They are they redirected back to your website, where they will hopefully make a purchase.

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Last year Britons spent £38.8 billion online and £4.9 billion of this amount was attributed to goods or services bought through mobile devices. Thus m-commerce accounts for 13% of the UK’s online spend, making the UK the most mature m-commerce market in Europe. Pairing this information with the fact that there are more mobile phones in the world than people, it is clear that m-commerce is too big a trend to ignore.

Simply having a mobile presence is not enough, it has to be optimised. Here are a few tips to help you get the most from this profitable channel.

1. Create a responsive design

A responsive design takes into account the device the site is being viewed on and displays the interface accordingly. Google recommends responsive design as the best way of going mobile and getting the best SEO results.

Rather than designing fixed layouts, responsive design means you can customise the viewing experience depending on the device being use and thus display the information in the optimum way. Furthermore, responsive design lets you use the same domain name, and so by using one URL you eliminate costs for redirecting visitors between mobile and desktop.

2. Speed is critical

However, when using a responsive design there is a risk of increasing the page load time. Keep loading time speedy by resizing images for different screen resolutions, this is the quickest way to improve the speed of your site. New image format WebP allows you to compress images by a further 25-30% compared to tradition formats such as JPEG and PNG, however, it is not supported by all browsers.

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This week saw the 2014 edition of Magento Imagine take place in Las Vegas, Magento‘s annual event. Through various conferences and workshops spread out over four days, the company acquired by eBay in 2011 presented its new features to the community. This year there was a particular focus on improving and guiding partners use of the e-commerce solution, which is employed by over 240,000 e-commerce shops worldwide.

Lengow attended this year’s edition to get closer to the community, get some interesting insights and most importantly to develop its Magento plugins for the e-commerce solution.

An impressive community

Magento is an open source solution with a strong community and this event really confirmed this! As soon as we arrived we were impressed not only by the sheer number of partners present, but also their passion and enthusiasm for improving the ecommerce solution. There was around fifty partners united in the main hall presenting their innovations.

It was fantastic to be part of such a dynamic and interactive atmosphere. We had the opportunity to speak with a large number of partners, which should lead to some great partnerships in the coming months, which will help evolve Lengow and it’s features!

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Email marketing, despite being one of the older e-marketing tools, remains an essential lever for any e-merchant wishing to create a long lasting relationship with their customers or prospects. The majority of Internet users check their emails at least once a day, thus giving e-merchants a great opportunity to communicate with customers and/or prospects at little cost. E-mailing can be used as a strategic tool to highlight current offers and promotions.
Email can also be used to take advantage of periods which punctuate the life of an e-merchant (sale, celebrations, holidays…), which are great occasions to communicate on your product catalogue.

But how can you create a quality e-mailing campaign? Here are six tips to help you do just that.

1°) Qualify your customer database

Nowadays, the validity of data tends to expire quickly. That is why it is important to regularly update your customer database. Thus you will gain time and get the best results. Make sure to remove incorrect e-mail addresses, duplicate addresses, inactive contacts…

If your email database is not very large, competitions are great way to easily obtain email addresses. During this year’s Lengow Ecommerce Day in Paris, Olivier Martineau from the company SpreadButton gave us some tricks for easily organising this type of marketing operation, on a Facebook page for example. It is also possible to buy or rent email files according to your business sector, but we recommend you to proceed to targeted partnerships for your email campaigns to have a better impact. Read the rest of this entry »

Amazon and Twitter have created a partnership to allow Twitter users with an Amazon account to automatically add a product to their shopping cart through simply including the hashtag #AmazonCart in their tweet. Find out more about this new purchase system.

This new service demonstrates Amazon’s belief in Twitter’s potential to generate sales. Amazon, who has more than 200 million customers worldwide, will offer Twitter users the possibility of adding products to their Amazon basket without leaving the social network.  After joining their Twitter and Amazon accounts, a user need only respond to a tweet with the hashtag # AmazonCart for the corresponding product to be automatically added to their Amazon shopping cart.

When can you use #AmazonCart?

Many believe that Amazon Cart will have a limited short-term impact, as there are not many users who tweet about Amazon products. However, Amazon and Twitter hope to change this and encourage e-commerce and social networks to interact more closely in the coming months. For example with the launch of Twitter Product Cards, which allow online merchants to sell their products on Twitter.

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Twitter takes a step closer to ecommerce by launching Product Cards. Product cards allow e-commerce sites to display their products on the microblogging social network and make purchases possible from a single tweet.

Here’s what you need to know about this new format to promote your products and how to use it effectively. The Lengow solution already supports the Twitter Product Cards format.

What are Twitter Product Cards?

Twitter Cards allow you to richly represent your content within Tweets. Several types have been created, some contain a video, images, etc. The Product Cards are a new format which allows you to add the following to a tweet: product description, photograph, availability, size, price, user ratings and a link to the merchant’s website. The Product Cards are particularly suited to e-commerce. Below is an example:

Why sell your products on Twitter?

HubSpot, a U.S. A / B testing provider found that tweets containing an image receive on average 36% more clicks, 41% more retweets and 55% more leads that tweets without an image.

Therefore, it is likely that Tweets adopting the Product Card will have higher engagement rates than normal Tweets. The calculation to quantify the advantage of Product Cards for your business is quite simple: consider the engagement generated by your last 30 posts, multiply by 1.55 and your average conversion rate; this will give you the number of sales you can reasonably expect to receive instantly from Twitter Product Cards.

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