Every seller’s dream is to have as much traffic that generates buys, as possible. However, achieving this is not as easy as it seems. A lot of people spent enormous amounts of money on advertising, all in order to bring more customers to their website. Why is it then, that the average rate of e-commerce conversion is somewhere between 1-5%? What are store owners doing wrong?
Hashtags are a great social media marketing tool that many businesses dismiss simply because it reminds them of something that teenage girls use on Instagram. The truth is, hashtags are an underappreciated marketing campaign tool. Using them the right way can bring in traffic and new customers to any business.
As a seller, you’ve got a wide range of products or services. They are of excellent quality. So why would your potential customers be struggling with the final decision? The answer is simple: there are thousands of sellers like you out there and you need to make sure to stand out so that these potential buyers become your customers. For the sake of this article, let’s just call them customers.
Here are some good practices to incorporate into your business in order to convince your customers to buy from you: …
As you might already know, we have recently released a new API here at PayLane. The reason we’ve done that we wanted our API to be accessible in any way possible – no matter which programming language or platform you would use to integrate with us. How have we achieved that?
We started to be more RESTful :)
In plain English, REST is an API design standard and technology that standardizes how API should be made and how it should work. But what is more important – the basic principles of REST say that your interfaces should not be tied/connected to any specific technology or language. Also, you really should focus on keeping your API as simple as possible in terms of its usage – you are giving access to your application to your future customers – do not let them down! RESTful APIs take a good use of what’s already there – the HTTP protocol. If we want to be more specific, they use basic Internet protocols to communicate with the outside world – and that’s pretty much all you need to know about it.
When you decide to run a global business it is only natural to create your product and promotion in English. It’s the most universal language, especially on the e-business markets. But it’s almost certain that your product develops and gains popularity in specific domestic markets. This would be the moment you start considering whether to translate your service, promotional materials and even to provide customer support in the local language.
Providing business (even online business) in the language of every possible customer can be difficult, extremely costly and absorb human resources. And, if your solution is sold all over the world, it might be even impossible. But if you launch your product in particular markets, prepare promotion actions or start partnerships with local companies, institutions or suppliers, you’ll need to be ready for an increased number of queries, clients and partners from that region. And that’s what you expect. But it might happen that your clients want to talk and write to you in their mother tongue.
MOTO (Mail Order/Telephone Order) is one of the order taking ways offered by PayLane. It basically stands for accepting credit and debit cards by phone or via e-mail order. What are the benefits? What type of businesses is it tailored to?
January 26th marks not only Australia Day, but also PayLane’s birthday! That’s right, we are 8, which is quite hard to believe, as it feels like we have just had our 7-year run!
To celebrate it, we have just launched a brand new site and we’ve made an infographic summing up the past year – we spent it laughing, crying, celebrating and, above all, working hard to provide the best service. We set up 305 new accounts and launched 27 new services and products, including PayLane for Startups, DevZone, eCommerce plugins and single-click payments.
In these past 12 months we also released 40 press releases and expanded to 4 new countries- Ireland, Germany, Poland and the UK, which resulted in an increase in the number of clients by 135% and newsletter subscription by…800%!
Now, on our 8th birthday, we can proudly say we offer European businesses accepting online payments via 39 payment methods in 167 transaction currencies! And we’re doing a pretty good job judging by how many fans we have on our social media profiles – 5159!
Thanks a lot for being with PayLane for these 8 years. Here’s to great things still ahead of us!
Back in October we introduced wire transfers in Polish banks, which are crucial when running business in Poland. For many of you it had no significance as your business operates only in the UK, France, the Netherlands or Portugal, and you have no plans to try new markets. However, the latest Polish eCommerce report will no doubt make you reconsider your expansion plans – let us present to you some of the most interesting and impressive facts about this market from recent years and the expected figures for the near future.
Forget about meetings. They are toxic. Don’t plan too much. Don’t hire people based on resume. This is only a few examples of unusual advice from 37signals owners – creators of Basecamp (project management tool), Ruby on Rails (online framework for programming), Highrise (contact managing tool) and many others.
They have created a great company and earned a lot of money on software in cloud. The book written by them is called “REWORK” and it helps you see the business world in a slightly different way.
After months of preparations, countless hours spent working and analysing, you finally create your product. It has taken a lot of effort to get it done and you want to market it in the best possible way. The question is – should you keep your product the same for all countries or should you adjust it to specific markets?
Take PayLane for example. As you probably know, we offer online payments. Most people associate it with credit cards and they’re right. But (there’s always a but!) if you run an e-shop, you know very well that accepting just credit card payments is not enough, especially if you have multinational customers from around the world. And since, as cliché as it may sound, we really do want to help out our clients boost their business, we do everything to make it happen. That’s why we adjust our services according to the market’s needs.