If you could put a price tag on trust, what would you be willing to pay?  Trust plays a leading role in any business, but this is particularly true for e-commerce.  People are connected to your business by the thin filament of the Internet.  Trust is the core of its strength.  Every interaction that you have with your customer, directly or directly, affects their perception of you and your company.  Customer expectations and experiences have changed what we all knew as e-commerce into TRUST-commerce.

This session will talk about things that may not be on your website, but play an important role in building trust such as product reviews, secure shopping icons, clear customer service and return policies and more.

The key to selling nearly anything, no matter the price tag is value. The question is, how do you build value online, on a virtual store where there is no person-to-person selling? How do you create that value when the customer is in control of when they show, where they click, what they see and in what order? How do you get them to stay at your site once you’ve gotten them to visit?

This session will show simple things that business owners can do to create value before, during and after the sale including branding, consistency, special offers, pricing, shipping and other services and after the sale techniques to keep the customers coming back.

Your new store is up and running and the traffic is great, however, you’ve got more lookers than buyers. What’s wrong? You have to get your customers to take that next step, and we know how to do it. Lou and John will guide you through advanced features for your store that makes the shopping experience easier and more reassuring for your customers.

These advanced features include an important opportunity for customer reviews and feedback. How your customers feel about your store can be critical in attracting other shoppers.

It is a fact that items which have product reviews attached to them actually sell better. It’s because shoppers believe other shoppers when they comment on your products and your store, and their opinions can make the difference in a new sale. You can spend all the money you like in advertising, but your customers see advertising as self-promotion, just what you see when you look at advertising. But a customer is seen as non-biased and can say things about your business that register in a way advertising never can.

You’ll also learn about features all designed with one thing in mind, getting customers to buy from you. We’ll show you cross selling, how to display related products and spur sales. We’ll demonstrate multiple add to cart buttons, tabular product info tables, dynamic paging and more.

Each of these features makes it easier for customers to see your products and better understand their options. And the better they feel, the more likely you are to make that sale.

So your online store is finally paying off. You have a well designed site, you’re fully optimized for organic listings and your paid search program is providing healthy returns. How to prevent stagnation? Or, perhaps your business is starting to take off but you don’t have the time or resources for traditional marketing. Where do you turn for growth? Examine Social Media Marketing. Some call it a trend, others call it evolution of the Internet, but either way Social Media is the new home for the masses.

This session will examine the various Social Media sites like Facebook, MySpace and Nexopia and explain what makes each one different and what you can do to take advantage of their audience to increase your business.

Word-of-mouth marketing is a trendy and fast-growing phenomenon online. The new terms for this old way of spreading the advertising word are called “buzz marketing” and “viral marketing.” The basic strategy is to get customers to talk about products with friends and colleagues. But how do you make that happen?

This session will discuss ways your business can turn your customers into sales reps who are active boosters of your business. We’ll also discuss ways you can create your own successful buzz campaign with little money and a lot of imagination.

The E-Commerce Merchants Trade Association's mission is "Improving E-Commerce."  And they do that by working with their members to provide best practices guidelines, technology & infrastructure advice and sourcing and supplies solutions to online merchants around the world.  The ECMTA is managed by a group of small business owners who launched the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance (PeSA) in 2003 and quickly grew it into the largest and most respected trade association of top eBay sellers.

This session will introduce you to the ECMTA and show you how you can tap into their resources to help better run your business.

If you want to be physically fit, go to the gym. If you want your online business to be financially fit, go to the GYM. GYM means Google (G), Yahoo! (Y), and MSN (M), the “Big 3” engines that account for more than 90% of all searches on the web. A study by MarketingSherpa and Prospectiv found 52% of shippers search on the “Big 3”. If you have an e-commerce store it is very important to achieve and maintain organic/natural results on these engines.

This session will answer the questions: What makes them unique? What factors differentiate them? Should you care about all 3? Each engine has pros and cons, and it’s here where you’ll learn how you can leverage each to your benefit.

The web can be a very cold, impersonal place to shop, but with a little creativity (and programming, analysis & strategy) you can turn Siberia into the Bahamas and make your customers feel as if they're an old friend. More and More e-commerce stores are adopting methods to personalize the shopping experience by presenting content based on customers actions. Technology has made it possible to in essence place little walmart greeters throughout your site. These greeters not only say hello to your customers in their native tongue, but also know who the customer is, where they've been and what areas they are having trouble in or what questions they have. This provides for a rich shopping experience for the customer which results in a larger bottom line for you.

This session will examine ways to analyze your store's traffic data to segment your site traffic and then utilize technology available to speak to these segments throughout their interaction with your site.

Before any site is redesigned it is important to make a detailed review of your site statistics to find out where customers are spending most of their time, how they entered and exited, which pages resulted in the most sales and which the least, and how customers navigate around your site.  This session with cover that as well as give advice on how to smoothly transition from your old site into your new design.

Affiliate marketing can be a big money-maker, but it takes care and planning.  It is true that affiliate marketing has exploded in recent years.  Affiliates have evolved from the informal days when sites tried to pick up a little extra cash by posting a link to retail sites and taking a piece of the final sale.  Now affiliates are a force of their own.  They are major shopping destinations with their own marketing, promotions and loyal customer bases.  They can be a valuable asset to your business, depending on the arrangement.  Margins are the key to successful affiliate marketing.  Affiliate marketing is a major force in e-commerce, but as with any major force it must be handled with care.  We’ll teach you how.

This is advanced affiliate analysis.  Solid Cactus will help you:

• Strategic thinking.  We’ll teach you which are the best affiliates for you and how to cultivate and manage those relationships.
• More vs. better.  It is important to strike a balance between the number of affiliates you choose and the sites which work best for you. 
• Protect yourself.  We’ll teach you to handle problems like spyware.  Some affiliates use it; we’ll help you deal with it.
• Get technical.  A key to search engine marketing are the terms affiliates will bid for on your behalf.  These terms are crucial and we are experts.  You’ll learn from the best.

The product development team at Solid Cactus is always on the cutting edge when it comes to features to enhance the customer experience. This session will introduce you to the latest graduates from the “Solid Cactus Features Lab.” All these features are designed with one thing in mind, getting customers to buy from you. We’ll show you different ways to display product without going to product page, demonstrate ways to add a product without leaving the current page, using non-traditional payment method like Bill Me Later on your store, motivate your customers to buy more by displaying free shipping countdown and more.

Each feature introduced during this session makes it easier for customers to see your products and better understand their options. And the better they feel, the more likely you are to make that sale.

There's so much an e-commerce store owner can do to build their business through well-placed and well-thought out marketing.  Where do you begin, and how do you set a dynamic plan that will grow with your business?

Solid Cactus Manager of Marketing Operations, John Dawe, has counseled countless small businesses and non-profits on strategic planning for organizational growth and development.  You'll leave this session with a ton of ideas and a solid framework for making your business bigger, stronger and faster!

Get a sneak peek of Cactus On Demand Order Management. Take a look before our official kick off on June 2nd and see what Cactus On Demand can do for you.

The session will introduce and explain what COD is and how it can automate your business. We will then do a sample integration and use the store from a session attendee to demonstrate the integration process.

All aboard the shuttles as you take the 10 minute drive to Solid Cactus HQ in Shavertown, PA where you'll tour the new Solid Cactus Technology Center (as of May 1, 2008) and meet the entire Solid Cactus team.

An evening of food and entertainment follows.

This is e-commerce forensics, a mix of “CSI” and the Internet. You’ll love it!
 
“People tell me my site is difficult to navigate.” “Why isn’t my site converting?” “Do the animated gif and background music on my website work, or does it turn customers away?”
 
These are just a few of the endless but important questions we answer every day at Solid Cactus. But we won’t be giving a simple “yes” or “no”. We will go further in our analysis. Solid Cactus will supply the all-important why. We'll examine a website and give the store owner a complete site review.
 
Like an investigative reporter looking for that one piece of evidence to answer the questions and solve the case, we'll look into every aspect of a website, right down to the source code. We'll show you what works, what doesn’t and most important, tell you why. These are lessons learned from hard statistics and years of ecommerce success. We'll take it that final step; we will also make recommendations on how to turn the store around.
 
In this session, we'll take a participant’s website and go through the deconstruction process. You can be part of this process, and we hope you will participate. You will have the opportunity to interact with us and other store owners during the deconstruction, making this seminar a truly interactive event.
 
Learning works better when it is interactive. When this session is over, you will be a smarter and more analytical ecommerce operator.

If you're attending and would like your website "de-constructed" during this session, please email scott.sanfilippo@solidcactus.com prior to the event.

In this seminar we will be discussing what e-merchants need to do in order to protect their website from a legal standpoint. We will discuss copyright and trademark law and how they apply to e-commerce. Intellectual property protection has become an increasingly hot topic as more and more business is transacted online; however many e-merchants often fail to adequately protect their IP rights. As you spend significant amounts of time and money in developing your website it is important to protect those interests. This seminar will provide some much needed insight into intellectual property law, how it applies to e-commerce and what an e-merchant can do to protect their website.

Email can still effectively increase e-commerce sales, but only if you do it right.  Customers are increasingly wary and weary from wading through a swamp of spam as well as increasing amounts of legitimate business and personal email.  Email marketing has evolved and e-commerce merchants must change their strategies and tactics to get their message through to their customers.  It’s all about engagement and retention.  We’ll teach you how to get your target audience to open that mail and then act on what they read. 

This will teach you to:

• Personalize.  Effective email says more than “Dear Joe….”  We’ll teach you to personalize so your email feels personal.
• Segment.  Learn to separate your customer e-mail lists according to their web buying behavior, e-mail open rates and conversion rates.
• Is More Better?  It is important to understand how and under what circumstances the frequency of email affects response. 
• Cross-selling/up-selling.  Learn how to use transactional e-mail messages to promote more sales throughout your e-commerce site.
• Email lists.  Learn how to keep your lists current.  Learn to increase your lists without alienating your potential customers.
• What works.  We’ll teach you which web site offers best encourage your customers to sign up for your email. 
• Certified Email?  It had to happen.  We’ll tell you what it is and how to use it to your advantage. 
• Event-triggered marketing.  We’ll show you how to do it so that you actually attract customers for a change.
• Targeting.  We’ll teach you how to combine analytics with email to improve your message marketing.

Blogs are becoming increasingly popular and now wear many hats at retail web sites. They can help to establish a retailer's professional credentials, they can engage shoppers in an informal but seductive way which can turn them into buyers and provide additional keyword-rich material for search engines to identify. But while retailers across the spectrum have started blogs, the most successful ones are those blogs related to a particular topic that has a community of devotees.  Within that community you can shine if you know the territory and you know how to present that knowledge.

In this workshop we will:

• Analyze.   We will examine what makes a successful blog.  We will identify markets and products where blogs are most likely to work and see why certain blogs fail to connect with customers. 
• Demonstrate.  We will teach you the ingredients necessary to create and maintain a blog, how to attract loyal customers based on your product knowledge and market expertise.
• Benefit.  You can add value to your ecommerce site with an effective blog.  We’ll tell you what to expect from your web site blog and how to keep your blog current and relevant to your customers.

With over $20 billion dollars spent on Internet advertising avenues like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) in 2007 (Interactive Advertising Bureau), you need to know what makes SEO and PPC tick. Farukh Shroff, General Manager of Internet Marketing, is an Internet Marketing guru ready to give you insight on the fascinating world of SEO and PPC. In this session, learn about the nuances between SEO and PPC, tips to attain both short term and long term online marketing results, and how they blend into a cohesive marketing strategy.

·     Pros and Cons – Every Internet marketing strategy has its pros and cons. Discover the benefits and negatives of PPC and SEO and how they can impact your site’s revenue.

·     Short Term Results – You want a marketing strategy that sees results quick. If utilized correctly, PPC is an effective marketing tool that gives you results in a short amount of time.

·     Long Term Results – So you want to rank for competitive keyword phrases in major search engines like Google and Yahoo!, but don’t want to pay $5 a click? That’s where SEO comes into play.

The Perfect Blend – PPC and SEO may seem like they come from opposite sides of the fence, but they’re a match made in Internet marketing heaven. Learn how to interact with both and blend them together to maximize your marketing dollars.

Before we wrap things up, join us for this one last session that will detail what lies ahead for Solid Cactus.  Learn about new products not yet released and exciting information on where we're going and how we're going to continue to be your partner in e-commerce success.