Ecommerce is a tough world. As an e-merchant you will probably never meet a single customer in person and barely speak to a few of them (only true if your quality of service is good enough). On the other side, Ecommerce is an exponentially growing sector, there is just a few that offer such a sustainable growth rate year after year at a global scale.

UK is the 1st e-commerce market with 96€ billion above Germany (50b€) and France (45b€). And some emerging countries like Ukraine, Greece or Turkey have astonishing market growth rates, generally over 40% per year.

However, last year the average basket amount decreased (again) in Western Europe countries. As an example, the average transaction in France went down by 3.5% versus 2012, at 84,5€ per transaction. On average, european shoppers spend a little more than £1.000 online. But shopping cart abandonment rate stays very high, around 80 to 90% in Europe.

What makes people quit transactions when they already committed to your site by adding a product to the basket? What are the quickest alternatives?

Expensive shipping ?

Shipping fees are never a good surprise, never. Unless there are free of charge. When visitors consider shipping costs too expensive, they tend to reject the whole transaction including, the product and your website. Usually they will leave rapidly and never come back. In all countries across Europe, expensive shipping cost tend to reduce conversion rates. The solution : You can either absorb a small part of the shipping costs to stay competitive or work on the clarity of the information. What visitors hate most is the feeling of being fooled. If the same shipping amount is announced in advance, people will be more aware of it and not feeling like they felt in a trap. Ideally, you’ll want to do both. (Lire la suite…)

As the winter sales are now on track for most e-merchants across Europe, all the Lengow team members wish you a Happy New Year.

As always, your dedicated Account Manager as well as all the Support team will be available for any enquiry you might have throughout 2014.

Best wishes for the upcoming year

 

We have recently met with Themah Wilson, who is Team Leader Shop Business UK at Become Europe and she told us a bit more about how Become Network helps merchant to sell more online. Become Europe specializes in providing target group oriented shopping solutions for portal providers as well as online shops. They place merchants’ products on their price comparison website as well as on the price comparison websites of their partners.

The network consists of about 400 portal partners worldwide with millions of product data provided by more than 30.000 merchants. Here are a few question we asked to Themah recently

What are the merchant benefits when listing with Become?

Themah Wilson (T.W.): The merchant advantage is the global reach of the Become Network. With just one contract a merchant is entitled to listing on an entire network of price comparison portals. In addition to the UK the following countries are also available: Germany, Italy, France, USA and Japan.

What is Become Europe business model?

T.W. : At Become, offering shop solutions is our core business. We offer our merchants listings on over 400 portal partner sites worldwide and provide millions of offers, which can be integrated on their website to expand their range. To ensure our merchant satisfaction we are always striving to ensure qualified traffic. In return, we require qualified traffic on a CPC which is category based. The optional cost free installation of our sales tracking allows Become to make continuous optimisations and improve conversion rate.

(Lire la suite…)

When you sell on comparison shopping sites, or other supports such as affiliate platforms and marketplaces, it is necessary to assess the number of clicks and sales generated by your different partners.

Lengow has its own tracking solution which allows to track all data and to bring out a ROI, conversion rates, but also a lot of others collectors.
In addition to those collectors, Lengow now offers you to evaluate the number of display of all your products and to generate a CTR.

In practical terms, Lengow calculates each time the product is displayed by an Internet user. This way, the information is taken in the e-commerce tracking solution.

Thanks to this new features, the Lengow team gives you the opportunity to increase your profitability analysis and will offer you a lot of surprises.

This exciting news was announced this morning during the LeWeb 2011 event in Paris. We are delighted to announce that Lengow is strengthening its partnership with the eBay group by joining its X.commerce application platform, under the section « product catalogue management » for e-marketing campaigns. There are also several other new partners joining eBay’s global ecosystem this morning: read X.commerce’s press release here.

 

 

Officially launched by eBay last October, X.commerce is an application development platform for online retailers and developers. The platform assembles tools and features of various sites and products within the eBay group, including the eBay marketplace, the PayPal payment system, the Magento e-commerce platform and other partners.

The X.commerce platform gives retailers and developers access to a complete library of electronic commerce-related technologies, such as shopping carts, payment services and inventory management. The idea is to provide a wide variety of e-commerce applications which respond to the evolving needs of online merchants, and which are notably marked by interactions with social networks, the development of mobile commerce, etc.

In order to increase its panel of tools, X.commerce has added several new partners to its platform, and has chosen Lengow for the management of product catalogue feeds on the multiple online distribution channels we offer. The platform has also announced partnerships with the following companies: FreeAgent, Kaabage, Kenshoo, La Poste/So Collissimo, Locayta, Postcode Anywhere, Shipwire, Synolia and Tradebox.

We are very proud to join the X.commerce ecosystem; this is a real opportunity for us and notably for our international development!

A new adventure for Lengow starts today!

Lengow allows all online retailers to reference and sell their products on the main European & worldwide marketplaces.

For merchants, marketplaces offer a huge opportunity to sell their products outside of their e-commerce stores. One of the major challenges of selling on marketplaces, aside from the strict product catalogue structure, is inventory management.

Precise inventory management is paramount to ensuring perfect product availability on every targeted marketplace.

In order to help e-tailers to better centralize and manage their stock levels, Lengow has launched an inventory management algorithm within its solution. This allows for updates on every marketplace as well as other distribution channels whenever a sale is made on one of these channels.

Concretely, once an order is placed on a distribution channel, Lengow decreases the merchant’s stock level according to the product(s) sold on all channels, even comparison shopping sites.

Thanks to this system, the merchant is guaranteed that his inventory will be updated on all channels once a sale is made.

You no longer have to worry about overselling products, due to a sale being made on one channel and your stock not being updated on the others!

This inventory management system, launched today in Beta, will be available for all of our merchants in the coming days, and for no additional cost!

Create your M-commerce boutique thanks to your product catalogue!

More than 40 million mobile phones are in use today in the UK, many of them Smartphones. One in two mobile phone users are able to surf the Web, with the majority of users having unlimited plans.

Nearly 4 million people, a quarter of Smartphone owners, have already made a purchase via their mobile!

Wanting to help merchants conquer this new era in e-commerce and realizing how complicated it can be to adapt an online store to different telephone formats, Lengow has launched its quick and easy M-commerce store creation directly from a merchant’s product catalogue!

Lengow adapts and transforms your product catalogue to create a real extension of your online store tailored to each Tablet & Mobile phone.

The creation of the M-commerce store in Lengow takes only a few minutes and is available via a distinct URL in the following format:  (an example of the French store Michenaud.com).

 

This new innovation is now available for all online retailers using Lengow!

Don’t hesitate to request an M-commerce feed via your client interface!

 

Your mobile boutique is available thanks to your product catalogue!

 

Create a mobile version of your online store quickly and easily thanks to your product catalogue.

Lengow adapts your categories and products to the different Mobile Web standards on the market and to all mobile brands (Apple, Nokia, HTC, Blackberry, Samsung, etc.).

 

Easy management directly from Lengow!

As with all Lengow feeds, you can manage the display and product information of your mobile application from your Lengow account!

The internet user can also choose to view certain products on his or her mobile phone in real time!

 

Add a payment method to your product pages!

The new application has pre-integrated the PayPal payment system. Online merchants can offer the purchase of their products directly on their M-commerce store thanks to PayPal.

The tracker TagCapsule measures visits to your M-store!

Lengow’s tracking tool, TagCapsule, is automatically installed on your Mobile WebApp to track the visitors to your M-commerce store.

Quickly and easily activate the visit trackers Xiti or Google Analytics!