Reputation Management Archives

FOUR WordPress Plug-In Discounts You Can’t Miss!

September 10, 2015September 10, 2015 Matthew Godwin Leave a comment

If you’re like my grandmother, you’re already planning for Christmas. She starts her Christmas shopping well before the Labour Day weekend and about 120 days before my Dad buys his first stocking stuffer. Online shopowners have a lot in common with my Grandmother when it comes to starting early for Christmas (but hopefully not the fruitcake baking).

To catch those merchants with a longer view of consumer trends, WordPress (WooCommerce) has a whole suite of plug-ins offering big deals, anywhere from 10% to 50% the usual price. But just like Christmas, we’re sure they won’t last long.

As eRated launches its own WP plug-in, we wanted to shoutout three other ecommerce plug-ins offering great deals for merchants in advance of the Holiday shopping season.

Turn One-time customers into a community with OptinMonster: This great plug-in is an attractive, low-friction tool to entice your customers to sign up for your newsletter. Make sure your customers stay in the loop for your Christmas sales and increase your subscriber rate by as much as 600%. 10% off!

Do one more for your blogger (especially if it’s your husband) with Aweber: With this email marketing solution you can target customers by action, location and other characteristics, manage subscribers and track clicks and send email sequences with autoresponder. You can get 95% off your first month!

Get more out of your platform space and use OIO Publisher: Some shops shake their heads at using ads, but if you’re investing a lot into content and creating a real name for yourself in your space (Cotswolds antique chairs?) then use OIO Publisher to maximize revenue, save time and stay in full control of your space. Get $10 off!

We’re thrilled to introduce eRated to WooCommerce! Reputation is everything to independent shopowners - buyers will not make a purchase if they don’t trust you. eRated is your global trust solution. Our plug-in lets you carry your reputation from every other platform your active in (eBay, Amazon, AirBnB) and display it in your shop window. Right now, we’re offering 20% off the product for helping us to spread the word! How does it work? Find out!

Your customers make the most out of discounts, so why shouldn’t you? Don’t wait for Black Friday to get bang for your buck - take advantage of some great offers on WordPress!

eRated Launches WordPress and WooCommerce Plugin

September 3, 2015September 7, 2015 Matthew Godwin Leave a comment

eRated, the leading global trust certification for ecommerce, today announced the launch of its trust plugin in WordPress and Woocommerce, the world’s most popular ecommerce platform powering 30% of ecommerce stores.

“We know that every new shop owner struggles to build a reputation for trustworthy product delivery. Using eRated’s plugin, WordPress and Woocommerce merchants can now import their feedback and reviews from other platforms to their own shop – cutting to a fraction the amount of time it takes for buyers to trust shop owners,” said eRated CEO Boaz Cohen.

eRated offers WordPress and WooCommerce merchants the following features:

An unlimited selection of platforms from which to import feedback
A plugin appearing where shops want it with calibration for excluded pages.
A flexible display to add merchant name, profession and location.
Ability to change the colour and language.

Vintage clothing shop owner Rebecca Gabriel said, “I noticed a difference in sales immediately after I was able to import my Amazon reviews to my shop via eRated. People know the eRated certification and now first-time buyers know they can trust me instantly.”

Increase your sales just like Rebecca and check out the eRated plug-in here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/erated-woocommerce/

Contact:
Boaz Cohen
[email protected]

Top of the Shop: SEO, CRM, OMG!

September 2, 2015 Matthew Godwin Leave a comment

Ecommerce merchants have been absolutely spoiled for choice since Canadian shop-builder Shopify began revolutionizing independent online sales. Their “shop in a can” approach for the not-so-tech-savvy seller has proved remarkably successful, but the amount of help can be almost overwhelming. The gargantuan Shopify app catalogue can sometimes feel like asking for a coffee and being offered 400 choices differing mostly in shades of brown.

At the end of the day however, Shopify is a community of sellers and experts who know the difference a shade of grey can make to the success of an online shop. How intrusive is an app to the flow of your platform? How much added friction is too much before you lose a buyer with all your bells and whistles? Are you trading cash for flash?

As we launch eRated on Shopify, we wanted to offer our two cents on five cool apps that offer support in five key areas every Shopify shop-owner needs to be conscious of: Shipping, SEO, CRM, social media and marketing. Many shop-owners don’t have 24/7 availability, but these apps make it look as though you never sleep.

For Shipping, get heavy using Shippo

They’re integrated with eighteen different carriers from FedEx in North America to Parcelforce in Europe, which is a phenomenal selection menu ensuring you get the best price every time you ship. Whilst being integrated with Canada Post, they don’t appear to offer through Royal Mail just yet - which we’re sure must be keeping Her Majesty up at night. With one click you can also sort your labels. At the lower end you can pay as you ship and for high volume shops they offer rev-share opportunities.

Get on Top with SEO Meta Manager

Most potential buyers are not searching for your shop on Shopify, they probably don’t even know what Shopify is. Odds are their first stop (and last stop) is Google, which is why search engine optimization is so important - get on the top of search results and you’re already halfway there to getting a sale. SEO Meta Manager has almost 400 Shopify reviews and is operating in over 4000 shops. They are cheap (only $50 one-time fee) and they work, tailoring your product labels and descriptions to generate more visitors (and more sales) to your shop.

Get to know your buyers with Nimble

Competitively priced at $15.00 per month, Nimble is one of the most trusted CRM tools available on Shopify. Nurturing customers is even more important online than it is for brick and mortar store as shoppers are fickle with so many options available. With an easy to use platform, Nimble lets you source new customers through social media, compiles calendars, email conversations and social signals ideal for SMEs.

Let Fiverr Fire up your Photos

You can take the time to learn photoshop and its many incarnations, or you can post your photos to Fiverr and let the creatives do the rest. Our friends at Fiverr are one of the world’s favourite freelancer hubs and for just a few dollars you can amp up your photos in your Shopify store with a little help from your Fiverr friends. Many shop-owners will list sharp, crisp product photos as literally the most important feature of their platform and what generates conversions more than anything else. Particularly for early shop-owners juggling so many new products, outsourcing to Fiverr freelancers is a great way to get ahead.

Social in one Place thanks to Sumall

This New York-based company is making a splash in ecommerce for independent shops and SMEs. Sumall manages data, especially social data, all in one place. Along with their sleek dashboard, they also provide excellent weekly metrics and analytics reports so you can stop fumbling around in the dark. They find out what email subject lines convert best, timing, hashtag performance, ideal post length and help you find the places with the most interested readers (and turn them into customers).

eRated is launching in Shopify and we’re offering 20% discounts and free trials for helping us to spread the word!

Brand Management and Reputation Management: What’s the Difference?

August 6, 2015 Matthew Godwin Leave a comment

As every avid LinkedIn user knows, individuals are exercising brand control and reputation management in a way that was traditionally the preserve of companies and corporations in years passed. No longer content to hide behind the brands of big box online platforms, sellers and sharing economy enthusiasts are developing their own, unique identities. It means they can travel across platforms, attract their own buyers and users and ensure product and brand security is dominated by their own decisions - not executives.

So what’s the difference between brand control and reputation management? Brand is how you want the world to see you and your reputation is how the world actually sees you. As far as we’re concerned, brand may get customers and clients to your website or to your product pages, but it’s your reputation that induces them to click through and make a purchase. Brand is the carrot, but getting bites requires you to have a proven track record of sales. Ultimately, it requires people to trust you. Reputation becomes brand when you have a long history of success where your logo, picture and/or name actually create the fuzzy feeling of confidence buyers need to make a purchase.

What IS a brand? In concrete terms, a brand is how people identify you at a glance (or, half a glance nowadays). Scanning through a page of products, companies or platforms, your brand is your logo, name, two line description or the intangible emotion of the viewer. Do they recognize you? Do you interest them?

What IS reputation? Reputation is the impression the viewer or buyer has of you given what they’ve heard or seen before. In many cases, you will have no reputation because they’ve never heard of you. However, all it takes is one bad review for them to have a negative impression and keep on scrolling, no matter how good your brand is. Reputation is what you’ve done, said and these days been before. What you (and your staff) have done in the past influences your reputation. If your product or business has no reputation yet, beginning with what you’ve done before is a great place to start.

Your brand is easier to control than your reputation, because it starts with you. Think carefully about framing before you launch your store, platform or product. Turning your brand around after it’s already out there is like turning a ship away from an iceberg (and we know how that turned out). So what can you do at the design and content stage? A great way to test your brand is to harness the growing community of start-ups providing cheap, instant polling. Why not try Verdict, Voicepolls or Pollfish? These guys let you toss your design around and provide you with quick, actionable feedback. Most of us can’t afford expensive marketing consultants at an early stage, so finding tangible alternatives is critical.

A later installment will deal in-depth with reputation, but for now check out an older piece on reputation dos and don’ts for online sellers.

Brand is the foot you put forward and reputation is the ground you stand on. It’s up to you to make sure you’re doing your utmost to inspire confidence through good design and content. It’s also up to you to make sure your reputation becomes a solid foundation on which to grow, not a mucky pile of quicksand beneath your feet.

Tripda & eRated Global Partner to Certify Trust for Ride Sharing

July 22, 2015 Matthew Godwin 1 Comment

Hitch-hiking the galaxy has never been safer, thanks to today’s partnership announced by eRated and Tripda. Learn more here!

The world’s leading ride sharing platform, Tripda, and eRated, the global trust certification solution announced their partnership integrating eRated’s trust solution in Tripda’s global marketplace. With the partnership, Tripda is the first car sharing marketplace to add a definitive trust and security solution for its users. eRated allows Tripda passengers and drivers to import their social media identities (Facebook, LinkedIn) and their ratings and feedback from other marketplace transactions ( as in AirBnB or eBay) to bolster trust between them.

Tripda is a genuine ride sharing and carpooling platform for long-distance travel. Drivers can offer empty seats in their cars on trips they are already making, and passengers can search and book seats on rides that are already going where they need to go. Both sides have plenty of information available on the platform to select the travel companions they’d like to ride with, they can read reviews that other travellers wrote, see other users’ affiliation with any organization such as a college or a corporation, view their Facebook profile, check if they have any mutual friends or choose to communicate with them directly before the trip.

Far from creating more friction on the journey to find the right rideshare, the eRated integration is simple and gives drivers easy customization abilities. eRated’s intuitive backend has made it simple for Tripda to roll-out the security solution worldwide instantly, removing the heavy efforts previously needed to rebuild the trust and security of potential riders on a new platform. Eduardo Prota, Tripda’s Co-founder asserted, “we selected eRated as our strategic partner to build Tripda as the most safe and secure ride sharing marketplace in the world. Security is of paramount importance to our users and eRated gives us the authoritative, 3rd party trust-certification our riders need to feel comfortable.”

For eRated, Tripda is the 15th marketplace its partnered with. Sellers on marketplaces that have previously partnered with eRated like eBay and Sidelineswap have seen an increase in transactions by 150%. “Our mission is to increase trust in the sharing economy,” said eRated CEO and Co-Founder Boaz Cohen, “our partnership with Tripda is the first step in building a safer experience for drivers and passengers.”

Contact us at [email protected] to learn more about how you can introduce the eRated widget to your marketplace.

Guest Post for Duct Tape Marketing: Turn Window-Shoppers into Buyers

July 6, 2015February 21, 2016 Matthew Godwin Leave a comment

Increasing conversions online is the most important consideration for online sellers, whether they are working from their own platform, from a major online retailer or in one of the hundreds of new collaborative consumption websites. Turning window-shoppers into buyers is about more than making sure signs are polished and windows are clean: It’s about conveying trust.

UK-based WebRetailer has confirmed once again: Online sellers and businesses convert better the more they are trusted by buyers. The top sellers on Amazon as ranked by Internet Retailing all have feedback which is over 90% positive. Additionally, they’ve also got a track record of hundreds of thousands of reviews. Online sales are like a snowball – the more ball rolls the bigger it gets. So how does trust help to get the ball rolling?

It’s the cozy feeling that separates you from the pack. Unless you’re selling homemade products on Etsy or Hbzy, your products and services are likely very similar to your competitors. Whilst marketing and branding are important, reputation is what differentiates merchants as it’s the one thing they earn through responsible practices and good behaviour. Unlike product pictures or prices – reputation is free, but something that can’t be adjusted by you.

It’s the elephant in the room. You’re doing everything else well. Your tag lines are effective, you’re at or near the top of search results and your photos are dead gorgeous. However, 98.5% of all your visitors are bouncing before they bag your products. The problem is likely that you have one too many bad reviews, not enough reviews or not enough positive reviews. It’s proven. By increasing the number of reviews, you can increase your conversions far easier and more cheaply than by spending more on branding or marketing. Reputation management product users with an enhanced reputation are converting up to twofold better than those relying solely on one reputation. Indeed, by importing reputation data from their other identities, new marketplace sellers are getting their first transaction at least three times as quickly through using eRated.

So how can you do this? Reputation management products allow users to import all of their ratings and reviews from all of their online identities and platforms they operate in. If you are a seller in Amazon and want to increase your conversions in eBay, get a reputation management plugin for free and take your reputation from Amazon over to eBay. Recent case studies have shown that sellers using reputation management tools increase their sales by up to 30%. After price, the second most important consideration for any buyer is trust.

Reputation Management in e-commerce isn’t just about SEO optimization and getting seen through expensive branding and marketing campaigns, it’s about getting the most out of what you already own: Your reputation. So who provides these products? Check out eRated, Traity and Trusttribe.

Users are only now beginning to understand that they can actually use their reputation to their benefit. This is a ripe opportunity for savvy online entrepreneurs to get ahead of the pack and start using a reputation management tool to optimize their conversions through increasing trust with buyers.

Coincidence? World’s Top eBay Sellers are Most Trusted

June 10, 2015 Matthew Godwin 1 Comment

Perhaps not as well-known as the Forbes and Telegraph Rich List, the UK’s WebRetailer is quietly keeping track of the world’s top sellers, who they are, where they live and what’s brought them to the pinnacle of their success in a hyper-competitive, ever-changing space.

Hot on the heels of the 2015 top Amazon Sellers, the Webretailer team has yet again broadcast abroad the standard-bearers for Amazon’s Professor Moriarty: The World’s Top eBay Sellers. Following the former’s success, they’ve added additional data, helpful graphics illustrating trends and the product verticals that dominate.

So what’s in the data? The world’s top three sellers are in the UK, but the largest proportion of the top 1000 are in China. China dominates cross-border sales, with more than 50% selling with stores in the United States alone. Australia and Europe are also destinations for Chinese cross-border merchants. With little discrepancy, the top three countries for sellers are China, the United Kingdom and the United States.

As for product verticals, the top three are Clothing, Shoes and accessories, home and garden and phones and accessories - sporting goods, collectibles and health and beauty round out the bottom.

The critical conclusion by way of performance is simple and straight from the horse’s mouth:

What makes these sellers the “top” sellers? Well, they have gained the most positive feedback in the last 6 months, and they are all Premium Store owners (or the international equivalent such as Featured Shops in the UK). Feedback volume is a useful approximation to selling volume.

If you want to know you’re eWorth, it’s not a great leap to base that conclusion on what your reputation metrics are. How much you sell depends on your reputation, which lends credence to the importance of reputation management and optimizing sales through aggregating your platform reputations into one place.

Congratulations again to WebRetailer for leading the way in ecommerce performance reporting!

Drive Safe with Tripda & eRated

June 5, 2015July 9, 2015 Matthew Godwin Leave a comment

One of the most famous car ads of all time was the 1987 Michelin tire ad: Because so much is riding on your tires. It reminded motorists that while cars may have thousands of parts needed to keep them running, only four wheels are responsible for keeping a car safely on the ground. Featuring a baby in the ad, it also made the connection between car safety and family safely - this meant that tires are responsible for family safety and you can only trust Michelin to keep your family safe. It’s not hard to see thousands of American families switching to Michelin after that.

Nearly thirty years later, motorists are still principally concerned with safety when they get into a car. What has changed is that it would have been almost unthinkable for four strangers to get into a car together and take a long drive along a lonely road with only a bit of leather seat to separate them. Cars were for families and single guys drag-racing.

These days, an environmentally conscious generation having families later and opting to spend money on things other than four wheels and time at the pump are leading motorists to find new ways to get the most out of their vehicles.

The advent of online marketplaces has met the need to create platforms that connect motorists with spare seats and passengers looking to get from A - B where public transport fails to make the connection. While Europe’s more communal society has advantaged continental marketplaces, the lack of high-speed rail in the US presents an enticing opportunity for marketplaces like Tripda to lead the way.

Tripda values convenience, environmental responsibility, social engagement and safety. Founded in 2014 and powered by Rocket Internet, the world’s largest platform, Tripda’s New York-based team is growing along with its user-base. Tired of not making connections on older platforms and definitely not keen on cramped, smelly buses American commuters are opting for the convenience of a rideshare. They’re making new friends, saving money and travelling with safety, comfort and convenience.

Like four good tires, eRated helps keep drivers and passengers safe by ensuring everyone filling the seats knows one another as much as possible before they meet up. By providing users with data from AirBnB reviews, eBay ratings or social media connections, eRated lets users get to know one another on a deeper level before they set out on their journey together.

Ridesharing is all about unexpected journeys - eRated and Tripda make sure that journey is a safe one.

The Universe of Performance Dashboards: Let Us Do the Juggling

May 8, 2015July 9, 2015 Matthew Godwin Leave a comment

Is juggling a skill or a pastime? For freelancers, SMEs, and boutique online sellers, it often ends up being more the former than the latter. Why is that? Because most of us are the CEO, CFO, COO, and the guy that cleans the washroom – all rolled up into one. Most of us won’t end up having a boardroom behind us – it will likely end up being a handful of staff (at best), a supportive network, friends, and probably your kids fixing the tech problems. And that’s just fine.

However, where can we get help to keep all the balls in the air? That’s why new, multi-platform maps offer incredible value to today’s independent entrepreneurs. We may not be able to afford staff, let alone high-priced researchers, but we can set aside enough to get the support we need to gain insights, gather trends, and get more out of what we put into our online strategy.

Whether you call them dashboards, multi-channel maps, or just a bird’s-eye-view to your operations, there are many ways you can streamline your operations through using a multi-platform data aggregator providing insights, trends, and a more comprehensive understanding of your business flow. So what’s out there?

Blogging Metrics: What are your most popular posts? Do people prefer your top ten lists or your morning rants? Where does your traffic come from and who’s sharing your material. Having a better idea of your blog trends will allow you to target your message to your most receptive audience and focus your attention on the most responsive channels. Cultivate a relationship with your biggest fans and get them working for you!

Social Media: This is the most obvious and probably the most necessary one. Unlike other distribution channels, you simply can’t afford to only exist in one social media world. Having a perspective on the universe of social media channels is essential to cross-pollinating through your own channels and through other’s. Are people clicking through to your site? Are you building the right type of audience in the right places? Is your content interesting to more than just you?

Ecommerce: The days of eBay and Amazon being the only ecommerce platforms sellers are operating in are long over. There are now over 1000 marketplaces with over 100 million sellers operating within them – and 90% are selling across platforms. Get an ecommerce platform to track your sales through all verticals; find out which platform is best suited to your products; keep track of and manage your reputation to increase sales; and compare yourself against other sellers.

SEO: You don’t need to be a crafty wordsmith to get more people to view your content or make purchases, but you do need to know what people are looking for, how they’re searching, and what trends you can feed into to advance your landing page in search engines. Speaking of landing pages, is your blog where people find you, or is it through a partner’s site? An SEO dashboard can provide a real-time solution to let you keep track.

Email Insights: Do you know which subject lines are most successful for you? Are you sending from the right username? How often are you ending up in trash and non-primary inboxes? If you don’t know the answer to these questions, you probably need a dashboard to manage the content going to your lists.

Most of struggle with two balls in the air, so why are we trying to keep dozens going at one time? SumAll and eRated are just two solutions available to help freelancers, SMEs, and online sellers keep track of their performance and get the most out of online efforts.

Read more: http://blog.sumall.com/journal/universe-performance-dashboards-let-us-juggling.html#ixzz3ZY8b7f2m

Announcing eRated Profile Pages: The HootSuite for eCommerce

April 24, 2015 Matthew Godwin Leave a comment

Unless you’ve been an online seller for a long time and have gotten to know the players, experts and gurus, you probably don’t know how well you’re selling compared with others selling similar products or services. What’s even less likely is that you know how well competitors are doing in other marketplaces. One thing’s for sure, you’re looking to become a better seller, but you’ve read all the top ten lists and don’t know where to go. That’s why eRated has created Profile Pages.

eRated’s Profile Pages are the world’s first multi-platform channel providing sellers a comprehensive dashboard to track performance. What does performance mean? The Profile pages let you view your rolling reviews from all of your platforms together. Spot a problem or bad review - innoculate immediately and get your reputation back to where you want it. Track your reputation across time and across platforms - where are selling best and where do you need to improve?

eRated Profile Pages are the Hootsuite for online sellers.

eRated’s Profile Pages make it easier to manage your reputation. How are you perceived across multiple platforms and in ecommerce generally? eRated is the first company to aggregate all your behavioural and social data to give you your eWorth. This is important because it demonstrates your capacity - and how much more room you have to grow.

The Profile Pages aren’t just a calculator or schedule to keep track of things - the Profile Pages improve your reputation. You can contact your clients and friends to request vouches and recommendations regarding your sales history, reliability and even your friendliness and demeanor. In a social world, people want to buy from friendly sellers.

You can connect all your online identities, from your social media accounts to your marketplace profiles. Best of all, you can search for other sellers! Visit other profiles to start building valuable networks and communities, and of course to keep track of your competition.

As always, you can export your reputation data to all of our partner marketplaces. Improve your sales in eBay by aggregating your reputation data in one place through the eRated widget. It’s also easy for online sellers to use eRated to carry their reputation to their own storefront. Keep track of your sales in your shop, as well as in your shop identities elsewhere. Get the most out of your reputation.

eRated profile pages are fun, easy and convenient. As hundreds more shops and marketplaces pop up online, eRated makes it easy for sellers to keep track, improve and reduce stress.