Credit Score for Online Sellers Archives

eRated Launches WordPress and WooCommerce Plugin

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!

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?

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

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.

Starting your own Shop: Your Reputation is your Storefront

Veterans of ecommerce will remember the first 15 years of online trade as being dominated by two parents: eBay and Amazon. In the last five years disruptive, sharing economy platforms like AirBnB and Lyft have led to an explosion of marketplaces for rooms to rent and rides to shares. We’re still at the forefront of this shift to more independent, people-driven eCommerce where thousands of people are being given the freedom to start smaller, local and niche marketplaces. It’s really an exciting time to be in this space!

In just the last year or so, we’ve witnessed the beginning of another trend: A further personalization of eCommerce through the setting up of independent storefronts. Millions of people have dreamed at one point or another about opening up their own store. For most of us, it’s not just about making money, but about sharing their passion with others. If it’s a passion for model cars, Swiss watches, shoes or Belgian chocolate, people want to share it with others through ecommerce. In the real world, setting up a niche shop was often the preserve of the retired banker who could afford the up-front costs. Similar, in eCommerce you needed a friend who could build you a website and maintain it through its lifespan - which is not something we all have access to.

In recent months, thanks to the likes of Shopify and BigCommerce, it’s now possible for literally anyone to setup an online marketplace. Like designing the interior of a house, these providers take you step by step from the conception of your idea through to setting up a payment and feedback system. These guys make it possible to have control over your own storefront. This opportunity is giving longtime sellers in places like eBay and Amazon the ability to leave the confines of these platforms and open up their own shops, without having to pay fees to a large ecommerce provider. It’s a drive toward independence and a way to save money.

So, to continue to save money and gain independence people are packing up their belongings and leaving the old big box online marketplaces to personalize their own storefront and have their own shop. The amount of personal control is liberating - you can design your own layout, rank your own products and connect directly with your own buyers.

It’s great news. However, there can be pitfalls associated with “breaking free” from the big boxes to start your own enterprise. Principally, you don’t have the perceived security of a big brand name behind you anymore. People are more comfortable buying from eBay and Amazon sellers because it’s a name they have come to trust and because they have recourse if something doesn’t turn out as expected. At the end of the day, they just don’t trust you like they did before.

So how can you get the shiny new doors of our storefront to swing open? Carry your old reputation with you. Don’t forget that all those transactions and satisfied customers from other platforms are part of your record, not somebody else’s. All those positive reviews and thumbs up can be transferred from your existing accounts in Amazon and eBay to your new storefront. If you’ve got a 98% aggregate rating from all the platforms you’ve been operating in, why not carry that over to your own storefront? When potential buyers see how well you’ve done elsewhere, they will be much more likely to trust you and buy from you. They may not know your name, but they know you’ve made your name elsewhere.

It’s a bit like a lead singer breaking away from a band to do their own thing. They can do it when they’ve built up enough credibility with the old band to carry it with them solo. If you use a reputation management provider, they can help you carry your reputation over to your own solo storefront.

Check out eRated to find out how you can be the Justin Timberlake of online storefronts.

The Numbers are in and Reputation Matters

Have you ever wondered who the best sellers are in the world’s major online marketplaces? Who’s selling the most in Amazon? Where do they live? What are their ratings like? Heck, what are they eating for breakfast? Online sellers want to know what makes good sellers great and what the difference is between mid-volume sellers and those guys literally making a fortune.

Thanks to WebRetailer, we now know who the giants are. This week, the team over at WebRetailer followed up their 2014 list of top eBay sellers with a list of the top sellers in Amazon.

Not surprisingly the top ten are dominated by sellers in the US and Europe, they’ve all got feedback that’s over 90% positive and they’ve got a track record of hundreds of thousands of reviews. As far as the Amazon popularity contest goes, they’re going to be voted class president for sure.

What else did we learn from the hard-nosed research from WebRetailer? We know that he most successful sellers are those selling across borders, especially in Europe, and that most sellers are selling in multiple across platforms. Great sellers do not restrict themselves to one platform - they take advantage of other markets.

If more reviews and ratings means more sales, imagine how much MORE these guys (and you) could be making if you could bolster your reputation through reviews and ratings you’ve earned in other marketplaces? Well, with eRated, now you can! It’s like compiling your Airmiles with your Aeroplan points and putting them tow work together!

Check out the list and see why reputation matters!

Reputation is the new currency of the 21st century

Rachel Botsman, in her inspiring TED talk, said the following line:

“Reputation is a currency that I believe will become more powerful than our credit history in the 21st century. Reputation will be the currency that says that you can trust me”.

We at eRated couldn’t agree more. As the number of online marketplaces continues to grow and the adoption of e-commerce sellers continues to rise, Reputation online is and will be OUR currency for transactions.