Marketing - Spree Commerce

1stdibs marketplace case study: book a demo to start yours

October 26, 2023

1stdibs is an upscale online marketplace known for its vintage and premium furniture, art, and collectibles, linking customers to a carefully curated array of distinctive and high-quality products.

If you’d like to start your own marketplace like 1stdibs, you’re facing a buy vs build decision. So before you decide to build it in-house on top of Spree open-source, consider using Vendo which is a marketplace SaaS. Go live, start selling, iterate

Holidays and events that drive online sales all year round

December 23, 2020

Holidays have always been a golden opportunity for retailers to boost sales and drive more revenue. With the recent events – a worldwide pandemic of Covid-19, the digital transformation trend has accelerated dramatically as more and more consumers prefer to shop from the sofa and avoid crowded stores and malls.

A multi-million dollar Black Friday & Q4 success comes from all year’s work and preparation – an interview with Houtan Fanisalek, CTO of Felix Gray

October 30, 2020

How to survive the Q4 shopping spree and sell a lot of stuff according to a CTO of a successful online business? Let us introduce you to someone who does that for a living and on a significant scale. Houtan Fanisalek is the CTO of Felix Gray, a successful ecommerce eyewear company that is growing exponentially. The brand sells proprietary Blue Light glasses that mitigate the negative effects of looking at your screen. Those glasses are worn in the offices of companies like Apple, Spotify, and Google. Felix Gray uses Spree for its custom ecommerce platform that even handles orders for prescription glasses. Check out Felix Gray’s success story. We have asked Houtan about his ideas and tips on tackling the Holidays and the related shopping madness.

Hemp oil, CBD chemical formula, Cannabis oil in pipette and hemp seeds in a wooden spoon, Medical herb concept ( Hemp oil, CBD chemical formula, Cannabis oil in pipette and hemp seeds in a wooden spoon, Medical herb concept

Selling CBD on Shopify becomes harder as FDA gets stricter on edibles

December 30, 2019

“Can I sell CBD on Shopify?” is a question better asked sooner rather than later. Some CBD E-Commerce merchants invest a lot of time and effort only to become disappointed with the payment processing options available or getting reported as illegal. As 2019 ends, FDA clarifies its strict stance on edible CBD sales. FDA also issued official warnings to 22 CBD merchants offering CBD oil, among other edible products. Some CBD merchants turn to Spree Commerce looking for marketing flexibility as well as cheaper and more versatile payment methods, including recurring payments for subscription sales.

Abandoned cart recovery with Mailchimp Ecommerce

December 4, 2019

Most online stores are losing revenue by leaving orders behind. When a customer adds products to the cart but doesn’t complete the checkout, that order is lost. Mailchimp Ecommerce automates sending out email reminders with the abandoned cart contents and tracks all recovered sales in a dashboard. It also comes with several other automations and email marketing tools.

TL;DR: It’s basically free money with hardly any dev work. Just install it and watch the recovered orders roll in.

promoting a product from your online store effectively

5 proven strategies for promoting a product

February 10, 2016

Email Marketing

Behind organic search, email has proven to be the second-most effective way to gain customers. Building up your SEO and improving your organic search results can take a while, but email can be effective immediately.

You don’t need to dedicate the majority of your time to writing and sending emails to individual customers. Make it easy on yourself and use your transactions to collect a customer database, and contact them all as a group. There are many factors that will play into the effectiveness of your email campaigns, such as frequency and content, but this is a proven strategy that you can begin almost immediately.

Social Media

The impact social media has on e-commerce is growing almost every day. Since it transcends platforms (desktop, mobile, and tablet) most users check in many times per day, it’s easy to see why. And the best part about them? They’re FREE.

With that being said, not taking advantage of Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest (a rapidly-growing force in e-commerce marketing) and more, will cause you to miss out on countless opportunities, opportunities that your competitors will be sure not to ignore.

We strongly recommend you set up various accounts for your business if you haven’t already, and post to them with consistency and relevance. It’s not just a great way to gain new customers, but to have your current ones buying again and again.

Blogging

Maintaining a blog is a proven strategy for driving traffic to your site. It helps with your SEO and keeps your website active in order to capture the attention of shoppers. Certain products may warrant a blog just to announce its arrival, or tell its story. It doesn’t have to be overly wordy or detailed, and not every item needs this special attention, but when well-executed, it will help drive sales.

Being active in blogs doesn’t always mean you have to do it yourself. Whatever your industry, it’s practically guaranteed that someone is writing about it. If your new product is deserving of a wider audience—for example, a new Little League bat that’s been proven to drive the ball 5% further—then reach out to these bloggers, and see if they’d be interested in covering your story.

Use Buy Buttons

The best ways to take advantage of points two and three? Insert a buy button directly into your blog, tweet or post. Promoting your product across all mediums is great; giving them away to buy right then and there is even better. Your e-commerce website provider should give you a way to easily copy buy button code, so you can simply drop it into your third party site/profile.

Use a Contest

Giving shoppers a way for them to win your hot new item is a proven strategy for generating buzz. Plus, contests are easy and affordable. This is where you can get creative, as there are all kinds of contests you can use to create a giveaway.

The contest can be specific to your items/industry, like Eggo’s giveaway for the most creative recipe using Eggo waffles. Just be careful, as there as many “don’ts” for contests as “dos.” Make sure the timeliness, message, and steps to enter or win are clearly thought out and executed.

make the most of your e-commerce marketing budget

How to stretch an Ecommerce marketing budget

February 3, 2016

Take Advantage of Social Media

Count this tip as a double: Social media is key to harnessing today’s shoppers. And the best part about it? Setting up a social media account is completely, 100% free. If you haven’t set up Twitter and/or Facebook accounts for your company, we highly recommend you do so, as Facebook is the number one source amongst social profiles for sending shoppers to websites. Posting to these accounts is a great way to turn customers into a community, and create a legion of brand ambassadors.

Setting up Pinterest and Google Plus won’t hurt either, as Pinterest especially is making a huge impact on e-commerce. If you’ve heard not-such-great things about Google’s foray into social media, well you’re not wrong. However, it will help with your google search engine optimization, so even if you don’t see a lot of action on your Plus page, it’s still worth it to post there regularly.

Improve SEO

Speaking of SEO, there is a multitude of different things you can do to improve this vital aspect of your business. The concept of SEO amounts to where you appear on a list from a search engine, the most common and most important one being google. Do a quick search for terms that should trigger your business’ appearance in the results.

Is it at or near the top of the list? No? Then you’ve got work to do. If you need help identifying these key terms, try a service like Google Adwords. This will show you the terms that you should optimize in order to drive traffic to your site.

You’ll also want to check out your website’s mobile experience by bringing it up on your smartphone and/or tablet. If your site doesn’t look clean (text/images are compressed, links are broken, etc.) then you’re going to get penalized by search engines, and you’ll be pushed further and further down the list of results.

Content Marketing

Playing a huge part in the role of good SEO is content marketing. Make sure you’re updating your website content regularly, as search engines reward sites for fresh information. If you’re having trouble coming up with new products/content to put on your site, try running a blog that will be of interest to your shoppers.

Do it Yourself

You’ll notice pretty much everything we’ve mentioned you can do yourself, and most of it is absolutely free. It’s important to recognize your limits, but there’s plenty that can be done without hiring outside help or paying for expensive services.

If you hit a roadblock, google is just about the best tool out there for finding step by step instructions on the aforementioned services and advice. If you hit a snag, don’t worry, it’s almost guaranteed someone’s been there before and provided instructions for people going through the same thing.

Tips and best practices for creating a logo

January 21, 2016

A logo is a staple of your brand. However, it’s not the end all be all of your company’s success; that’s your products and services. With that being said, if you’ve put off adding a logo to your e-commerce website, or have had a “rebrand” on your to-do list, then follow the advice below to create a simple, effective, one-of-a-kind logo that will resonate with your brand’s identity.

The Importance of a Good Logo

Logos act as the face of your company; it’s likely the first thing customers will remember when they think of you. So it needs to be unique, simple, memorable and enduring, but not overdone. You’ll also need it to be versatile, as it needs to work across a variety of mediums; your online and offline storefronts, social media profiles, etc.

Design

All of the above points play into the design of your logo, but there’s even more that goes into it. For example, the colors you choose for your logo have far more impact on its effectiveness than you’d probably imagine.

Here are some key statistics from logos used by the top 100 brands to think about:

95% use one or two colors
41% use text only
93% are simple enough to be recognizable at the size seen in the above image. (That’s really small!)

Pitfalls to Avoid

You need to make your logo recognizable, but as you can see from the above stats, more complex is not always better. The more complex the logo, the more it negatively impacts the flexibility of the logo when it pertains to different sizes and mediums. On that note, make sure your logo looks good in black and white, as well, since you don’t know where it may pop up.

Resources To Build Your New Logo:

We’ve given you some tips, but what if the time is now to create your new logo? You don’t need to hire a fancy designer and spend an arm and a leg. This is something you can try yourself first. Give these simple and inexpensive resources a try:

5 tips for effective Call to Action

January 13, 2016

What is a Call to Action?

A Call to Action, or CTA, is a link or button designed to catch the shopper’s eye, in an effort to get them to click on it. The action is designed to benefit the site owner and/or the revenue of the business. The most common example of this is a “Buy Now” button.

Here are some tips that will make your CTAs more effective, and will help you increase your revenue.

Use a Button

In this blog, you’ll notice the “link” and “button” used interchangeably. That’s because a button can be a link, but a link is not necessarily a button. A plain text link is not nearly as effective as one that’s in the form of a button. So, be sure to use a Buy Button to close your sale, and use buttons wherever else you’d like to draw customers’ attention.

Create a Sense of Urgency

When customers feel that they only have a limited amount of time to seize an opportunity, they’re often more inclined to make the purchase. For example, if you have certain merchandise that you’re trying to move, a “Buy Now—Sale Runs Until Midnight Only” message will be more effective than the generic “Buy Now” link.

Keep the CTA “Above the Fold”

“The Fold” defines the point of a webpage where a visitor would have to scroll down to look further. Casual shoppers may never scroll down to see more, so you may have the greatest CTA in the world, but it won’t be effective if customers don’t see it, and you’ll lose out on sales. Instead, grab the attention of your shoppers by keeping it above the fold, so it will be seen by all.

Hero Images Make Great CTAs

Hero Images can be used as massive CTAs. A hero image is a large banner image, placed prominently on a webpage. This study shows that the first image seen, often the hero image—assuming the site is designed in this manner—receives 84% of all clicks.

Take advantage of these attention-grabbing images by linking them to a product or category of products within your website.

Try out Different Colors

There’s no single color that works best. That’s because the effects will often depend on how it coincides with the look of your site, and every site is different. So, try different colors, and be sure to record the results. Eventually, you’ll see what color CTAs work best for you, and will be able to capitalize on the increased conversions.

Category Archives: Marketing