Seriously, I would say that in the last year one in two customers who called me asked this question. How do I ensure that I do not sell products that I do not have in stock?
In store, it’s easy! When a product is no longer on my shelf, then I do not risk selling it!
But online, it’s a lot of management!

I’ll start by telling an anecdote of an online purchase I did a few years ago. I was looking for a juice extractor. The one I found no longer seemed to be available anywhere.

Lucky, I found it on eBay and I bought it. A few days later the salesman contacted me and told me that he had displayed it by mistake and that he no longer had the product. So I bought it on Amazon. Again, 2 days later my order was canceled.

What I do not understand is that these two merchants had before them a customer with his credit card that was actively looking to buy a juicer. Why didn’t they take the opportunity to sell me another? They could have showed me a similar product but they did not and lost the sale.
Do not make this mistake!

If you have trouble managing your inventory on your website, that does not matter. At least take advantage to contact customers and sell them another similar product!

If, by chance, it is still possible for you to order these products again, do not remove them from your ecommerce site! Take advantage of this opportunity to have a wider range of products available and tell the customer that the product might take longer to ship.
You could also take advantage of the opportunity to negotiate with some suppliers for drop-shipping. Meaning that they would ship the products you sell directly to your customers!

Synchronized cash management software

The easiest method on the long term is to have a cash register software connected to your transactional site.
But this method has several restraints.

First, if you do not currently have a cash register software that allows this, you will need to migrate to a new cash register software. Migration means time, money, training and short-term risks.

Then you are somehow obliged to use the same company for your cash register software as for your e-commerce platform. The two giants in this area are Lightspeed and Shopify.

It’s a great checkout software made in Canada and they released their e-commerce solution last year. So it’s a good alternative if you have a store and you are thinking about selling on the internet. Their features are really focused towards traditional stores.

On the other hand, Lightspeed got a lot of funding and I know they are working very hard to improve their eCommerce software to compete with Shopify and the competition.

Shopify is clearly the leader in e-commerce platform. Easy and affordable, it is also a Canadian company that is now on the stock market and has a very large community of developers who make applications.

They launched a few years ago the Shopify POS platform, the cash register software that synchronizes with the e-commerce platform.

As Shopify is primarily an e-commerce platform, everything is oriented towards e-commerce. It’s a good option, if you first started selling online and then decided to open a point of sale with street gates, or if you sell at fairs.

Inventory Synchronization

If you have inventory management software, or other cash register software, or any inventory management software at all, or an inventory management on Excel or paper; You still have a solution.

I always recommend to merchants who ask me which application allows easy and direct management of the inventory.
As everyone has at least a basic knowledge of Excel, it is only natural to use this format. Do you know Google Spreadsheet? This is a kind of Excel, made by Google and it’s free.

First, try to find an application or a plugin that allows you to link a Spreadsheet file to your e-commerce platform. For Shopify, for example, there is StockSync.

How does it works ? It is ultra simple. You install the app that will feed the Google Spreadsheet sheet all your products with the SKU, price and inventory. The changes you make on the sheet will be synchronized to your online trading platform in real time, or almost.

At the end of each day, or every Friday, for example, you will only have to report your sales and adjust the inventory on the sheet. You could even make automated Excel formulas!

See ? It’s not so difficult to manage inventory online. Good sales !

The post How to synchronize your online stock with your in-store inventory? appeared first on Mr eCommerce.

The potential client just started an e-commerce site. Besides, her project is really cool!

The concept: a site where you can buy really unusual camping products.

I thought it was really a good idea!

The first trouble

She said to herself, “Well, it’s going to cost me a lot, I have to take pictures and write descriptions, all that while trying to minimize costs. ”

I gave her some tricks to minimize the costs at first and to try to sell faster too. … Basically, her starting point was to find her pictures on the internet, she started by searching on her supplier’s website to find the pictures. She looked on sites like Alibaba and others, and the pictures were not in a very good resolution. She did not realize it right away. In the end, it took her nearly 6 hours to get her pictures.

And then, the result wasn’t ideal … So she asked if we could photoshop them … However, Photoshopping low resolution pictures is not ideal.

I offered her our services of course, but she could also do business with any photographer.

The common error?

Following my offer, she told me: “For each product, I would like to take a picture of the product packed in its box and the product unpacked. Then I would like to take the front, side, top and back of the product. After, I would like to open the product and say that I have my product in different formats, I would like to take pictures of my products in each size and in each color available, I would like to have a picture for each color. ”

And then I told him, I think you’re going way too far to begin …

How to save on your product photography?

Honestly, what I suggest, if you want to sell on the internet, check out the websites of your competitors, check out Amazon for similar products, what kind of pictures are they taking? You do not need many pictures per product, otherwise it’s going to cost you a lot of money and if you do it yourself, it’s going to take a lot of time. You will see, it is very long to take pictures of products.

There are many situations where only one view per product is sufficient. Even for clothes, when do we need to see the back of the T-shirt? The bottom of the cup? Unless there is something special, but when is it absolutely necessary to have that view? Rarely!

Honestly, what you should do is minimize the number of views per product, it is much longer and much more expensive to take multiple shot …

Usually, the goal is to sell on the internet as fast as possible, at the cheapest price. If you take several pictures, it will take you either time or it will be expensive. Take a picture, maximum two pictures per product and go sell your product on the internet right away!

If you sell millions of copies, it will be worth investing, it will be worth making more photos. But, you do not know if you’re going to sell it, so why invest the maximum amount of money now, perhaps to waste that investment? It is not worth it!

Go step by step!

Start with short descriptions, I think it may not even be worthwhile to translate Shopify e-mails into French, if you take Shopify or whatever platform you are taking.

Once the site is launched

The reality is that if you are not very much good in digital marketing, well you are going to launch your ecommerce site and there will possibly be no visitor. And that’s really sad … Fortunately a few articles in our blog can help you generate traffic on your e-commerce!

On the other hand, if you want to test your product properly, test the pricing, what I suggest you do is go to Ebay or Amazon. It’s still easy to sell on these two platforms.

Put the products you know or you think there is a demand, test them. Test to see if you have the right price, you will immediately sell if it works and you will know that it is worth investing.

When you are going to ship the product to customers, do not forget to put a business card with possibly a discount so that people buy on your website the next time.

In summary

What you want is to sell online as fast as possible and for the cheapest. I suggest you take one or two views per product, maximum.

Start with a shot if you are able, if you absolutely need a second one, then you use it. The fewest pictures and the least text possible and let’s go, you’re selling! When it starts to create trafic, you put more products.

I hope this article will help you save you on your product photography!

The post How to save on your product photography? appeared first on Mr eCommerce.

If you are in a hurry, go down further and you will have instructions on how to make a backup for Shopify,

What does it mean?

Well, we say: the backup, I will do it later and that is not really important …

However, if you delete a product. Let’s say you export your products to update it, you delete them before re-importing them up-to-date. Well, if you do that, your pictures will be gone from your website.

If you have a site like Zoey and you do not renew or you do not put your credit card number to keep the site running, they will delete all your data and it will disappear.

Same thing with Shopify.

E-commerce platforms do not backup your data.

So that’s why I decided to write this blog for you; To explain how to fix this situation!

This is a warning I am sending to you because it happened twice last week and I am convinced that it must happen to quite a few people who have Shopify sites or similar platforms.

Share this article with your friends who sell online because it’s really important: you have to backup your e-commerce platform and unfortunately it’s not automatic yet…

It will take discipline to make backups. You have to get reminders because if you do not, you risk losing everything you’ve done on your e-commerce platform.

How to do a backup with Magento, Prestashop and WooCommerce?

I gather these three platforms of eCommerce, because they are three platforms that you have to download.

To make a backup, nothing more simple:

First, you go on the FTP of your web hosting. Then you download all the files from your website.

Now you have to backup the database. You certainly have access to a app called PHPMyAdmin. Search on your cPanel, Plesk or on the management panel of your web hosting. Often, it’s in the “database” section.

Then click left on the database of your website. If there are more than one, repeat the next step for each one to avoid taking a chance.

At the top of the right part, click “Export” and save the export file somewhere on your computer.

How to make a Shopify backup?

As I said above, these hosted platforms are very practical and will make sure to have a backup of your current site in case their systems fail.

On the other hand, if you make a mistake: delete a product, a picture, forget to renew your package, decide to pause your online store … Well you lose all your data. Indeed, if you temporarily remove a product to export and reimport it, the pictures will be removed from their server without any way of retrieving them.

There are solutions, but they are not ideal.

On the Shopify documentation, you can see examples of backup for Shopify. However, this is not a complete backup.

If you follow their instructions, you will get a backup of products, orders, customers and collections.

On the other hand, you do not have backup of the pictures and configuration of your website. It does not seem a real problem to not have backup pictures, but imagine you have to connect all the photos to each product. It is a very long task.

If you have a few dollars a month to invest on a backup solution for Shopify, go for this application which will also take backup images and your theme.

Otherwise, if you just want to take a free backup for yourself, here’s how to download all the pictures:

1. Export your products to CSV (read the Shopify instructions)
2. Open the CSV file in Excel
3. If Excel does not divide the data correctly, go to “Data” then “Convert” and then choose the semicolon as the separator (or comma)
4. Then take the picture column and copy it into a new Excel sheet in column B
5. In column A of this new sheet, write curl -O followed by a space. Repeat for each line
6. Open a Terminal window (Applications, Utilities, Terminal) Enter this:

7. mkdir ~/Downloads/ShopifyBackup
   cd ~/Downloads/ShopifyBackup

8. Then copy and paste the column A and B in the terminal that you have selected at the same time in Excel so that your content looks like this:

9. curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg

10. Press Enter!
11. All your photos will be downloaded in this folder.
12. Note: If you are on Windows: You will need to install CURL and copy it to your Path directory. The instructions are here.

How often do you do your backups?

The post How to make a backup of your eCommerce! appeared first on Mr eCommerce.