What are /r/ecommerce's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Well, it certainly does not help that Amazon sells the same dog pool, with Prime Shipping for $50 that you are trying to sell for $120 and 6 to 8 days delivery

A simple Google search for your product title brought me to the Amazon listing. People aren't stupid.

Why should I buy from a "store" whose only contact information is an email address from a free email service provider instead of one of the many well-known online retailers of pet accessories?

You have no value proposition and you lack credibility.

>Store name / URL

Rocketr
>What products do you sell?

We're a service helping sellers (such as yourselves) sell their digital products online by processing payments for them (we currently process PayPal/Stripe/BTC/ETH/Perfect Money, more on the way) and delivering their products to their buyers automatically.

>What makes you different from other stores?

We allow sellers to also accept BTC and ETH, which most of our competitors don't.

>Which platform do you use?

We are the platform

>What are you currently seeking? (Feedback/Hiring/Help & Advice)

More brand recognition. More sellers using our platform.

GoDaddy sucks. Don’t get scammed by GoDaddy when you have better and cheaper options.

You have 2 solid options I can list.

Option 1;

Get a domain name. Get Vps hosting plan. Install Wordpress & AliDropship Import/Edit Products If you don’t know about how to build a website, order a custom store. Market and start selling $$

Option 2;

Get a domain name Get a Shopify plan Build website on Shopify Market Start Selling $$$

I personally use option 1 because I love Wordpress and ability to have full control of my website.

Hope it helps!

Admittedly I'm a cofounder of Rocketr, so pardon my bias but I'd like to suggest us. We allow accepting of several various currencies (including Bitcoin/Ethereum) and have Stripe and PayPal integration as well.

We have numerous features to help benefit you as a seller and we're very approachable. If you're interested or have any questions please feel free to let me know.

Your site is slow.

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/thecleardiamond.com/vfo6jMYG

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/thecleardiamond.com/iVN25P5e Ask your developer to enable caching, minify the css and js and enable gzip compression. However, this theme is very heavy and your result will not be perfect. Also work on site credibility. Add ask question form(it is easy from admin-theme-settings) and put somewhere in the header your about us and meet the team pages. Also add to these pages some images - the team and any certificates. Under the testimonials you can add also a photo gallery with real people images (there is theme module for this). Be careful - your images have to be optimized to reduce the page load time. Write longer product descriptions.

Ah I see.

1) this landing page is cluttered and likely gets a high bounce rate, specifically there isn't a bold and clear enough call to action of getting someone to buy. compare this to Amazon, where the "add to cart" button is much more prominent and pleasant, especially on mobile: https://www.amazon.com/House-Cards-Season-Kevin-Spacey/dp/B00BC5I6Q2

2) it's not immediately evident you're selling rings and not copies of house of cards, I would call out the rings more strongly

3) reddit ads don't always convert on last click, try retargeting your reddit traffic on Facebook or Instagram with a pixel on your page.

Post history shows dropshipping posts. If you're dropshipping, did you read their terms?

From Stripe's Restricted Business Policy

Full Policy

Don't ask your website visitors for feedback on your website, that instantly kills their trust in your brand.

But, mostly, no I don't think you'll sell anything. I looked up your lighted keyboard, and I could buy it Amazon for $45: https://www.amazon.com/AULA-F2088-Mechanical-Removable-Keyboards/dp/B09DKQWTNC?th=1

Your store gives no reason for a person to buy your product from you because the products are just recycled stuff from Chinese suppliers that can be found on other websites easily, for cheaper.

If you really want to run an e-commerce store, find a product you're passionate about, invest your time in product and market research, and build a website that doesn't look like every other fly-by-night drop-shipper in the world.

If you're serious about it, it should take 3-6 months and about $1000 to get started, otherwise, I'd move on to another venture.

I'm a Magento developer and I love the platform, but I would advise against it if you're building this yourself. The first open source ecommerce apps that come to mind for me in your situation are Open Cart - http://www.opencart.com and PrestaShop - http://www.prestashop.com. Though not as powerful/feature-rich as Magento, they're legit and should be much easier for a non-developer to work with.

There are also hosted ecommerce solutions like Shopify, but I think they suck, as they are an ecommerce developer's sworn enemy.

Shoot me a PM if you have any questions or anything.

Regulate the model shots - some with backgrounds, some not, some head chopped off, some not ... and the quality is low.

As it is, it's a general Shopify site, nothing amazing, nothing too shabby.

Just zoomed in on a few images - awful quality.
If you need to cut the backgrounds, use something better like https://www.remove.bg

Without digging too much into it...its very grey and black. I would add some color.

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The cookies notice/privacy policy pop up doesnt need to come up on every page just the first page people see. It shouldnt keep popping up every time I click a link.

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Should have a double header (see just about any major ecommerce site).

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The call to actions fade into the page - make them a color that will pop.

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Needs much more social proof.

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The Join the Vip Club should be an option in the header - if you are going to use a pop up, do an exit pop and offer a discount.

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The load times are super super slow. See the google insights breakdown for the site:

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https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=swankluv.com

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Definitely needs work but let the data dictate what changes you make. Above is just a cursory review. Also, at that price point without much else to offer people but more rings, I think you will have a difficult time advertising and scaling.

Google analytics will give some data, but really Webmaster Tools or 'Search Console' is your best bet as it also gives breakdown of impressions, CTR and page rankings.

Optimisation manager here for a $200+ million/yr website.

Store optimisation is critical.

You're looking at pages loading at under 3 seconds for your benchmark.

Cloudflare is one of many that have written articles abou the link in conversion and speed: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/learning/performance/more/website-performance-conversion-rates/

As well as conversion, it's also a big indicators for getting your site found on SERPs.

Have a look at Googles Core Web Vitals which is being rolled out now - there are loads of guides on how to improve your site, as well as publicly available free dashboards for tracking progress over time.

Finally, UX is really important to ensure your site is as easy to use as it can be - spend some time on Neilson Norman group to find some quick wins.

Good luck!

Honestly I struggle with Linkedin Groups, I belong to a few but don't really get good value out of them, as they are generally people pushing their own sites or selling something - The eCommerce Network - https://www.linkedin.com/grp/home?gid=45691 is very active, but not sure what you are looking for.

If I'll ever rebuild our shop, it's probably going to be headless as well. But wow, these companies are asking for quite a bit in terms of pricing. I'd be way to stingy for that

Add https://saleor.io/ to your list - it's open source and free.

Joining a large forum, even if it is connected to a cart software, will still be beneficial to you. The discussions on the Forum are not always revolving around the specific software. There are many open discussions about general concepts like design and marketing. I'm Community Manager for PrestaShop and we have a huge forum >600K users. You should check it out

You can create a free USPS business account and schedule pickups.

Scales are cheap. I use a kitchen scale from Walmart but my products are small and light. Probably $20

If you already have a printer, you can use that to print labels and get shipping labels for it like this. THis is what I use.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001AKX59C/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

You can also create a free UPS business account and rent a thermal label printer for $2 per week.

If you want to buy a specific label printer, dymo 450 xl I think is one of the best IMO.

For software, go shipstation. It integrates with seller central and can upload tracking numbers to your order once you've purchased it from shipstation software.

I'd be interested in learning more. I'm an ecommerce marketing guy with a lot of experience. Not an entrepreneur per se, though I'd like to go out on my own someday soon.

My LinkedIn profile is here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marshalljonesaustintexas

• You have 2 <H1> tags and no <H2>
• Price is missing in your Product Schema Markup
• WebSite Schema Markup is missing
• The line Sitemap: https://www.tacfort.co/sitemap.xml is missing in your robots.txt
• also, not to be a dick but a google Reverse Image Search show that Aliexpress have it for $10 shipped to the US

Are you just looking for distribution or are you also looking for marketing ideas?

How are you selling them now? Are you already doing any type of FBA (fulfillment by amazon) ?

Have you considered doing a kickstarter or some other crowdfunding campaign, not because you need money, but because of the 'free-ish' advertising it allows. A 'novel plasma driven lighter' sounds like the perfect product for that type of thing. 'Cool' + 'tech' + 'small' (cheap/easy to ship hopefully).

Have you tried contacting any of the 'oddity' marketplaces?

• Skymall
• Bed Bath and Beyond
• http://www.thisiswhyimbroke.com/
• http://odditymall.com/
• other websites featured on: /r/odditymall

Short term, maximize the number of channels you can offer the product. (should be able to sell at 4 different places without going outside your comfort zone). Don't price them equally for each place - you can intentionally price some higher and people will either pay it, or look around for a cheaper place (which you also control) which should improve the SEO/page rank of your preferred places.

Beyond that, pounding pavement. You (or someone else) can do some research and determine who would be a good fit. Google some keywords that you feel fit your product, find other places selling similar things and contact them. Do some background research on those pages to determine their traffic and volume of sales, etc.

If you have the means to hire someone, I would consider posting to /r/forhire/ that you are looking for someone to help you do some business development / scale your sales.

I used to sell digital goods, most of my clients used bitcoin for the purpose of purchasing, so I used these guys to manage my payments. As for CMS, I'd never trust somene whose site looks like mario brothers game like intacct

Hi Jake!
I would recommend you reading this guide: https://www.x-cart.com/sell-online.html. It has chapters about Amazon, eBay, and Etsy. I hope after reading these posts it'll be easier for you to make this decision.
Wish you all the best!

Just wanted to add that I agree with Jesse's observation that domain names are becoming less relevant.

As an exercise in creating your brand name, grab a notebook or a sheet of paper and write down the verbs and adjectives that you feel describe the emotions that you want your company to generate in a customer. Use thesaurus.com to research similar words.

Sometimes you can spark an unexpected idea from thinking of the problem from a different angle. For example, AirBnB came from the idea of using an air mattress for a part-time bed and breakfast business. Trulioo is another startup that basis its service on "true identity".

Some suggestions that could get you started for dot com names:

lookgr8 beautiyou prettee prettyou kosmetix

etc.

Think outside the box when coming up with new words, but that they should also make you think of the original word and the emotions associated with it.

I use Pingdom to check both SSL and non-SSL pages (to ensure both HTTP and HTTPS are working). I have also used BrowserMob in the past, which is now a product by Neustar. I believe it can still import Selenium scripts (they may have their own scripting language too) for really custom browser-based tests.

To answer your sub-questions...

I rarely find bugs, because we use a shopping cart that is pretty stable and rarely has problems.

Our site has been down once in about 6 months, for a few minutes (in the middle of the night - probably a server reboot after a security patch or something similar).

We are on a self-hosted solution on a pretty beefy VPS.

I can’t share the exact code with you but NextJs recently released an example site and repository for a headless site connected with BigCommerce which is pretty close in implementation and a good starting point to see how they handle the basic store logic such as cart management, dynamic routing, checkout flow etc.

Take a look at this https://nextjs.org/commerce

And here is the example front end repo https://github.com/vercel/commerce

Next is a good choice as you can statically generate the majority of your pages and move a lot of your dynamic integration related stuff into their API folder which generates as lambda functions meaning you can keep a lot of the server side interaction, secrets etc out of the front end app that gets sent to the client

I like how clean and modern it looks but man it's slow! - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fstreetluxe.supply%2F&amp;tab=mobile

You will need to increase the speed for sure!

I'm not really a fan of the font either and the italic text being almost everywhere.

I expected your code and it can defo do with a bit of a clean up.

I wouldn't expect the site to rank well on google either; you will need to do a site audit.

Keep going though as it's a decent site!

She can use WhatsApp business app And have catalog in it. https://www.whatsapp.com/business

Also Facebook and Instagram should do the job for her along with WhatsApp business.

Steps to follow 1. Create Facebook business page 2. Connect WhatsApp messaging 3. Create Instagram and connect to Facebook 4. Create store on Facebook and catalog on WhatsApp bunnies

Everything for free and open for business

Agreed with /u/qverb - more details would help!

If you're looking for tools to create good landing pages, we'd suggest Unbounce or Leadpages. Depending on what platform you're using & what you're advertising, Leadpages could be more helpful. They have a WP integration (Rapidology) which is very easy to use and integrates with your email provider (in our case, Infusionsoft).

Here is some suggestion for your website:

• Website loading time is high.
• Put zoom button as it is an apparel based website.
• Make description part more attractive.
• Add continue shopping button (which redirected to the same page/category) after added one item to cart.
• Add more payment gateways (if possible).
• Secure your checkout page/entire website with the digital certificate.
• Showcase discounted products at home page.
• Put combo offers to attract customers.
• Make the page of your website on social platforms too.
• Also, list your business at good.

If you want to still want to see which other technical errors come on your site then test your site within GTmetrix tool.

This is, unfortunately, one of those things that likely needs to be done by hand. It's a tough, monotonous job. Have you looked into Amazon's Mechanical Turk? If you can template it out, this seems like a prime candidate for that service. Here's a short guide on how Amazon's Mechanical Turk can help eCommerce business.

I keep a running list of inventory management software: https://airtable.com/shrwZNnzxjPbD2kMZ

They're pretty varied in cost & functionality. So it still requires work to get results. But it is a starting point.

My suggestion here takes the form of a community forum as opposed to a newsletter. I loved using BigCommerce in a former job. Their community forums are actually very good. Awesome ideas get generated there, and implemented onto the platform. But you can also learn a shit ton by just skimming through their resources. It’s always important to know that these companies want your store to be successful.

Another good resource to dive into if you’re into e-commerce is MOZ’s beginners guide to SEO. Simply put, if you’re in e-commerce and haven’t read it, you need to

Also, moz has a freaking fantastic blog section. They bring on guest writers who are experts on all sorts of stuff. They do deep dives on super niche, to wide ranging topics regarding SEO and site building. It’s crazy that all the info on that site is free.

Take a half hour each day and skim both those resources and I guarantee you will learn a lot.

Well, our aim with E-Commerce SMBs Group is pretty well defined. Instead of letting all vendors pouring their products/services into the forum, we'll be encouraging e-commerce owners/employees to speak and exchange ideas/challenges etc.

I don't really have favorite blogs but rather favorite people.

Andy Dunn founder of Bonobos is always innovating and his insight on the ecommerce industry is on point.

-https://medium.com/@dunn/e-commerce-is-a-bear-d233f02d52a5

Please note I'm reviewing your website, not your marketing strategy: it's really slow and made by someone who has no idea about web dev. It's a WordPress website built with elementor... I guess you created this by yourself. That's not something really bad if you have no budget but this is definitely not a professional website. Anyway: check this out. It's google tool for testing speed of your website, you need to get higher scores. If I were you I would start with image compression, resizing, and converting to webp format.

For sure. Core web vitals is a group of website performance metrics that Google uses to determine the usability / user-friendlyness of your website.

There are a number of factors that determine an overall score (out of 100) which Google uses in their ranking algo. It isn't the be-all end-all of ranking factors, but it IS a factor, so in order to be competitive site-owners should take these metrics seriously.

You can scan your site with their tool here: Https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

If you use WordPress+page builder you're going to have a bad time.

First, I would recommend choosing the platform where you are going to sell products: your own site, special platforms or marketplaces. Then you need to do niche and product research. It is a good idea to look for big marketplaces like Amazon, with 50% of market share. You can use the Amazon trend report or best sellers category to find trending products. Another good way to check demand is with Google trends. It's important to check your ideas with the help of tools for data analysis (I recommend https://amzscout.net/ ). There are a number of them and some of them have free trials.

Do a search for ‘influencer contract’ and find a free template. They’re relatively basic but not sure you need anything dripping with legalese for this (NAL).

Here are a couple of links i found:

https://www.jotform.com/pdf-templates/influencer-contract-template

https://www.wonder.legal/us/modele/influencer-agreement

+1 to the person who said that Hotjar is a useful tool; I'm absolutely infatuated with their user recordings, I've spent the last 5 hours or so watching 100s of recordings of user web sessions. I now have a list of over 30 ideas for how to better generate sales from my 3,000+ daily visitors, it's amazing the stuff I've let slip through the cracks.

Sorry, haha, this post probably sounds like they're paying me. They're not, I'm just really happy with my Hotjar experience right now. Best thing is that it's lifetime free if you're only collecting data from <2,000 pageviews/day. Link to Hotjar

Thanks, I'll check it out. My platform is actually built on Ruby on Rails as well (that's what I do for a living actually). A buddy of mine turned me on to a new search option called Algolia which appears to be very affordable. I'm looking into not only hooking this up for my site search but investigating on how I might be able to leverage it for cross-sells as well.

Does it need to be hosted? WooCommerce works great, and though the upfront cost may be a bit higher, I'd say in the long run you're going to save quite a bit of money.

The biggest expense with WooCommerce is going to be a developer to implement the design and functionality for you. You can get hosting for $5/mo at DigitalOcean (please use my referral link) and development, assuming the functionality isn't much more than you've described here, should run you between $1000-3000, depending on the level of involvement you're willing to assume.

In the end, you'll come out with a site that does everything you need, is search engine friendly, and will continue to work for long into the future.

If you have your heart set on a hosted solution, I'd say the only two options worth seriously considering are Shopify and BigCommerce. They both work great too, though you'll probably end up needing to buy a couple plugins to achieve the desired functionality.

Feel free to reply or shoot me a PM if you have any additional questions. I'm a developer who focuses primarily on ecommerce solutions, and I've seen many situations like yours. There is definitely light at the end of the tunnel.

We run 24/7 live chat teams for 100+ stores. There are SO many chat software options out there, but the most important features are these ones... make sure whatever you choose has these...

1. Ability to invite visitors to chat automatically based on specific browsing behavior
2. Ability to route chats to agents based on status (online / offline), active chats per agent vs limit per agent, and agent visitor chatted with last time.
3. Ability to push chat data into Google Analytics so you can measure the impact on conversion rate, avg order value, etc.

#1 and #2 are KEY - #3 is important.

We built our entire system on top of LiveChat.com, as it has all these features and is incredibly flexible from an api perspective (front end visitor design, back end agent design, back end movement of data). Tidio is another good platform, but has some limitations if you want to push it hard. They push their bot functionality a lot, but LiveChat has that via ChatBot.com (their own platform).

The software you use is much less important than that tactical way you use it ; )

Hope this helps.

Hi!
You can use a coupon or use UTM.
10-15% is enough as for me.

Also I suggest you reading this blog: https://www.x-cart.com/instagram/influencer-marketing.html. Hope it helps.

If you don't want Shopify then the most likely candidate next is Magento. If you're a node developer and feeling brave, you might want to take a look at reaction Commerce but it's still quite young https://reactioncommerce.com.

I just saw you said WooCommerce was too much overhead, in which case you're going to hate Magento.

https://www.ecwid.com might be a better fit for you in that case.

"If it sounds too good to be true"

https://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/sendle.com

"Sendle has a consumer rating of 1.24 stars from 220 reviews indicating that most customers are generally dissatisfied with their purchases."

What you're describing is Qualaroo.

Combine that with UserTesting and you're golden.

Go further and add Event tracking to every funnel and action on your site, look for bottlenecks.

Don’t get me started with Magento!

There are ways to avoid checkout issues with Magento (and Wordpress too to be fair) by using any payment provider that moves the checkout experience off-site (think Paypal)

Magento has had MAJOR security issues and known bugs (https://magento.com/security) sometimes patches are released and expected to be applied in days.

Magento development is 100x harder than Shopify development. Goto r/magento for some fun talks about the developer experience.

The best advice in this thread is to find a more flexible Shopify theme. Youtube also has a lot of great development tutorials to learn the liquid templating language.

Invest in learning Shopify, it isnt going anywhere

Opencart is open source, and free. You will have to host it, and get a SSL certificate, but it is not too expensive to do that. I use it, but it is not a perfect platform, but then again nothing is. You will have to know some coding, as there are some things you may want to change.

Hey there, I work at Stripe. Declines can happen for a variety of reasons, and oftentimes the bank doesn't pass on the reason for the decline (the cardholder would have to get in touch with their bank). We've documented some steps you can take to reduce the likelihood of declines: https://stripe.com/docs/declines

If you get in touch with us at https://support.stripe.com/email, we'd be happy to take a look.

Depends on the cart you use, but I'd say Stripe is the easiest. https://stripe.com/us/pricing

Stripe's fees are the same as PayPal but they allow you to take payments via credit card directly on your own checkout page (SSL required).

The tipping point between leaving a service such as Stripe (no monthly fee, higher CC processing fee) for a traditional merchant account (higher monthly fee, lower CC processing fee) is ~$6-$7k per month.

Completely agree. You cannot pull more image "quality" out lossless a JPEG image format. You can only increase the file size, by fsck'ing up the settings.

When I'm saying image "quality" I'm talking about I'm talking about Image libraries for programming. They usually have a setting called "quality"

http://www.imagemagick.org/script/command-line-options.php#quality

Example:

$ ls -ltrh QUALITY-60.jpg 365K Mar 7 16:32 QUALITY-60.jpg

$ convert -quality 100 QUALITY-60.jpg QUALITY-100.jpg $ ls -ltrh QUALITY-* 365K Mar 7 16:32 QUALITY-60.jpg 929K Mar 7 23:12 QUALITY-100.jpg

Does the "quality" improve, when I change it from 60 to 100? No. Can't pull more "quality" out of an image. Does the file size increase? Yes. File size increases greatly.

Looks great! The only thing I don't like is due to my OCD..

There are some alignment issues, a few things that aren't centered. First the header, it is centered as a whole including the cart button, but I think it should be centered to have the main logo dead center. Then the large image right below is also off center a little bit. Here's a little video showing the center line: https://www.loom.com/share/f8eddf3e55394b10ac4f62fb7ad69e04

&#x200B;

Again just nitpicking here, overall it looks fantastic!

Not sure if this would be relevant for your type of content, but https://teachable.com/ might be worth looking at. It's fully hosted, and they have different plans/pricing depending on what works for you.

> Kind of like wikipedia.

So why not use a wiki then? https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki <- just install that on your website and be done with it.

Or use Google Sites. Just have the user email you the data (since you want to do it with approval) and copy it over to Google Sites where people can view the page.

If you're hell bent on making it part of Shopify, add a contact us page for submissions, and update a blog post.

We do this via 3PL warehouses in US & Europe r/https://www.aihello.com. However we have not integrated Walmart as none of our sellers have expressed any interest in it. I am happy to chat with you and help your business expand on our platform

disclaimer: I own and operate this site for my own ecommerce cross platform fulfillment.

What are you selling?

> Amazon.com has a total of 398,040,250 Products as on January 4, 2017 https://www.scrapehero.com/how-many-products-are-sold-on-amazon-com-january-2017-report/

So you are going to sell 2.5X the number of products as Amazon? Are you sure about that number, because I wonder if that many distinct products actually exist.

Quick comments:

Site is super slow in the US. It took like 10 seconds to start loading over here. Clicking through pages takes several seconds. First byte time is over 2 seconds, good is considered under 0.3 seconds. https://www.webpagetest.org/result/161116_ZE_BNGB/ It appears that you're on cheap hosting with Godaddy. This might be OK for starters, but if you have more than 1-2 customers on the site at once you'll want to get some legit hosting and set up a CDN like cloudflare. You may also want to pay a developer to tune up the site for speed. If you set up proper caching and such, the speed can really improve on a given hosting plan.

Full disclosure: I work at a hosting company and we do work with sites like yours, but we're in the $300/mo range so we might be a little much for you at this stage. But, the point stands - speed is important to conversion wherever you host.

Potential customers who aren't already committed to buying from you will not wait around for your site to load. This is commonly overlooked in ecommerce until it becomes an extreme problem - if you get more than a few visitors at once, it will be. However, even if the site is a bit slow, you stand to lose those marginal shoppers.

Agree that "welcome home" is not an intuitive top nav. Maybe "about us" or "who we are" or something would be better.

I would consider just making "handbags" and "accessories" top-nav categories instead of "shop".

On my screen when I click through to the e.g. Hobo page, I don't see any product images, just a wall of text. I think what the customer will probably want to see is pictures of hobo bags. Same goes for the other categories. You've made your category description more important than the product! Seems backwards to me.

Otherwise photos and descriptions and layout seem clean and professional so you've got some good material to work with.

Slowness is probably part of the problem, traffic quality is probably the other part.

If people are coming from FB they probably have low purchase intent, i.e. not ready to go straight from browsing articles about Trump's hair and friends' babies to shelling out $5K for a ring.

Find a way to draw them in, collect emails and sell them over time. What is the purchase cycle for a ring? Closer to 10 weeks than 10 seconds or 10 minutes. Use email and social media to work with people over that period of time - which means collecting their info.

Unless you are bargain-basement you can't expect conversion on first visit in this niche.

Regarding speed: TTFB of 0.7s is not great, start render of 7 seconds is horrible. If people have to wait 7 seconds before they see anything, no wonder your bounce rate is so high. I'm guessing you are on a VPS or Shared (more or less the same thing) Bluehost plan <$50, and obviously your environment is not optimized for speed. Talk to your developer about it (if you have a good one) and see what you can do. At my work (eboundhost) we have clients in your niche that have great performance, but it does cost a bit more than that.

Slow load time and it doesn't appear to just be on my end - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgenuine-eyewear.com%2F

The photo of the girl in the sunglasses is a waste of space

Some stuff you can do via actual Google:

Page speed analysis with recommendations for improvement https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

Submit your website as mobile friendly https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

Your competitors most likely use more advance techniques than just sorting by one attribute. Relevance is a search term and can be defined as a combination of all attributes of search results. So for instance if you are searching for a particular brand and you simply typed "sony" in search field, it should preferrably return all the items with a brand name "sony" and not just items that have "sony" in the description. That is accomplished typically by giving "boost" to certain fields. The boost is typically equal to "1" for regular fields and for more specific fields like "brand" can equal to "1.3". The total relevance score is then calculated based on terms found in each field multiplied by a boost. You can read more about how relevance is typically calculated here: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/scoring-theory.html.

In addition to search results, you want to display some relevant results when customer simply browses categories or he/she just arrived to a site. Not counting more advanced personalization like previous orders, browsing behaviour and such you want to sort based on some relevancy field. You would typically create a value for it based on combination (you choose what they are) of other attributes: number of orders + inventory stock + admin entered sort value + price and whatever criteria you feel is most suited for your customer. That field is typically calculated during indexing time and not at runtime and saved with each indexed value. After that, you can easily sort by it, showing more relevant options before others. Capability like that wouldn't most likely be available for cheaper SaaS commerce as it requires quite sofisticated search engine behind.

Hope this helps!

I work on a proprietary platform that's a bit like magento and we keep about 32k products. Going by what others say and my own experience, every platform is terrible at this scale. Shopify might be good, but then you have to deal with their fees.

My advice to you is to find a store that has the features you need and check what platform they use with BuiltWith or email them and ask.

Btw, you can buy a magento theme to change the appearance of it.

Shopify = $240 a year

Woocommerce = Free, require wordpress subscription. bluehost.com does it for 2.95 /m so 34.25 promotional rate and then I think it renews at 84 a year.

Drupal Commerce and Marketplace https://www.drupal.org/project/commerce_marketplace

Never tried it but it looks like it could do the job.

Basically, install Commerce Kickstarter 2. Install taht marketplace module above and you should be on your way.

Yes. Some options like later.com/linkinbio or shop-insta.com offer purchases in 2 or 3 clicks. But if you can reduce the time and don't let time to your client to think a lot. win to win.

Wow man, very forward thinking of you. Here's my advice...

Read MJ Demarco's latest book, its brilliant in my opinion. If you want to find financial freedom your best bet is to find a problem and solve it, then offer that solution to others.

Learn to listen to the language of need and want, start writing down every single idea that comes into your head no matter how odd, and just keep saving up your money, as one day you'll have a great idea.

With something like this, you can get surprisingly great photos, even with a smartphone. I would give that a try, and see if you want to go anywhere from there. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07922MDPG/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_NJQ5CJ0QHAYVBADHKZNC?_encoding=UTF8&amp;psc=1

One of those paired with a decent camera and a bit of light editing can get you very professional looking results. Just remember that photographers aren’t charging that much for nothing. They have equipment, but they also have the shooting and editing skills. If you want to save money by doing it yourself, but you want professional results, be prepared to spend some time learning how to do it right.

Hello all, Premium Label Supply is a provider of all sorts of labels. We can do anything from customized printed product labels to just plain and simple blank shipping labels. We currently have shipping labels for sale on eBay at http://stores.ebay.com/premiumlabelsupply/ or on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N2SLTGV if you need custom labels just inbox me and I will give you the proper email. Thank you and HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL!

I can't speak from a Cosplayer point of view, but just an average shopper.

I like that you include a picture of other skins, but what if I'm looking at Mercy and I see this picture and now I want to look at the green one on the top middle? I have to go manually search for it.

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I also don't feel like the pictures are high enough of a resolution to zoom in with. They seem to get a bit grainy when I mouse over and it doesn't quite reflect the quality I would want in an $80 or $120 piece of clothing. Again, I'm not a cosplayer but if I'm paying $80 for clothing, I would really want to see it. For example, look at an Amazon picture. When I mouse over it, it's just as clear as before.

Other than those two things, I feel like this is a nice website and I like the way it is set up.

I guess a better example would be this Amazon listing.

They have a black dress and a blue dress. Instead of going to find the blue dress, I can just click on the blue dress and purchase it from there.

I'm guessing it'd be for variations? Maybe have a D.Va page and from that one page I can either select the carbon fiber or the blueberry and look be able to look at either one from that page.

Try Ecwid, it's really easy to use, you can start with a free account up to 10 products. £12.50 per month will get you a subscription that will allow you to add up to 100 products and allow both social media integrations and more.

From their website;

"With Ecwid, you can sync and connect your Facebook Shop with your Instagram business profile in a couple of clicks. As a result, you'll have multiple sales channels — your product catalog will appear on your website, Facebook Page and Instagram – and you can manage catalog and orders from one place, your Ecwid admin."

I have started using it recently and an automatic html code was created that I have copied and pasted directly into a page of my custom website too linking all accounts together.. (I am not a coder and the instructions of how to use the different codes for links and buttons were very clear). And it links to dropshippers, Printful etc..

https://support.ecwid.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000629245-Tagging-products-on-Instagram

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ecwid.android

Plus you said you use your phone and they have an app too (subscription only) so you can add products and content, and manage orders with notifications from all 3 direct to your phone in the same app.

☺️ I hope that helps, I have tried many over the past year so it also depends what you want to sell, that one should be best for what you mentioned.

But do also look around, your budget, region and product design/pricing Low-High end can make a big difference so think of that first and what works for you.

• Ecwid to process payments
• Eventbrite, meetup (maybe) to schedule webinars and find them
• KanbanFlow to organize activities and projects
• Protonmail for mail
• ProtonVPN for VPN
• Canva
• Screencastomatic to record videos
• Whereby for video conferencing, sometimes Jitsi
• Amazon Mechanical Turk, We Work Remotely, various collected job board list to find freelance work from actual businesses when desired
• Dropbox for website back ups and file storage
• Great Courses Plus, Udemy for down time / redirect

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Now....why are you asking? Are you trying to find a better way to get something done?

Sorry to say but it's yet another Dropify store.
Bland, repetitive, and vacuous.
Your product - £32 - https://thetechgs.com/products/dura-mobi-speaker-mini-bone-conduction-speaker
Amazon dropshipper - £23 - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Portable-conduction-speaker-wireless-DuraMobi/dp/B0B4WF5TZ7
For dropshipping you can't compete with amazon resellers.
I would use this as an opportunity to learn how the process of building such a website works and try and sell that skill rather than look to make a nice little wedge from the products.

LitExtension is the first and only migration tool I put all of my trust into. I have run the first migration with LitExtension since 2019, and this April was the 6th time we went through the challenge migration task together.

The great service from the customer support team never let me down. They responded to my request 24/7, and if you choose to totally rely on LitExtension with the All-in-One package, field experts will be there to run the entire migration process for you.

However, there exists one annoying weakness - time zone differences: though the sales team is available, you need to wait for the tech team for help.

Just check the reviews on Trustpilot to see what others say: https://www.trustpilot.com/review/litextension.com

OP here.

Basically, this is a preview video of what we're offering.

I'm doing some research into the ecommerce market. Until now, we've been more so focused on making explainer videos for tech startups.

We use templates to create highly affordable videos. The process works by purchasing a video package, customizing it using our online script tool and then having the animation created by our team of animators.

Does this sound like a good process design to you guys? Are there any aspects that we're missing or could improve one?

All videos include a voice over and music.

Price will be around $179.

-- Dean

I've used this one, with some modifications (similar ones are probably fine if you just want a smaller box): https://www.amazon.com/FOSITAN-Backdrops-Brightness-Adjustable-Photography/dp/B07TZT7KYT/ref=sxin_16_pa_sp_search_thematic_sspa

The changes I made:

I use adhesive velcro strips to hold the background sheets up more securely.

I use an extra layer of light diffusing fabric to cover the light source (I just pin it to the included sheet, especially since I don't normally photograph from above). This helps to make the light less harsh on the subject.

I got some black felt to use as a background, since the included black vinyl backing tends to "bend" and have a horizontal light reflection showing. This isn't as much of an issue with lighter backgrounds.

Since the light source is from above, this can make some unintended shadows on the front of your subject (especially if it's small). I solve this with a high-tech fix of... aluminum foil. Particularly the nonstick kind since it's more diffused. I just take some foil and sit it on the "floor" of the box, out of frame, tilted up toward my subject. Reflects the light well.

One other thing that makes a difference is investing in a small tripod, or otherwise making sure your camera is perfectly still when taking photos (like propping it up and using a shutter delay). Blurry photos are less of an issue when using a light box, since your shutter speed will probably be fast anyway, but still good to know.

That is odd, because all it is, is stripe that has been white labeled. Here ya go, http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/12/shopify-debuts-fully-integrated-credit-card-payment-processing-for-its-e-commerce-platform/

> Detroit Comeback Cats Collection | Detroit Michigan Lions MI

https://www.amazon.com/Detroit-Comeback-Collection-Michigan-T-Shirt/dp/B0BHPCYM9G/

This will probably get removed if it starts selling for content violation. Your email will ask if you have permission to sell content related to the NFL and Detroit Lions.

A great book for thinking about conversion is https://www.amazon.co.uk/Influence-Psychology-Robert-Cialdini-PhD/dp/006124189X

Some quick thoughts:

• Increase trust by putting your phone number above the fold. You’ll also get real feedback this way that you can act on.
• Reviews. Get reviews.com set up and get some existing customers to add reviews. This will create social proof and can make a significant difference to conversion.
• LiveChat! Let people ask you questions and again get a faster feedback loop in place.

Good luck. Keep improving and the sales will come.

THANK YOU!!!! That was actually one of the first heat press machines I found on Amazon a couple weeks ago!!! https://www.amazon.com/PowerPress-HPM-1515-BK-Industrial-Quality-Digital-Sublimation/dp/B0773Y1TNX/ref=sr_1_8?crid=10D7M6ZH6PNKF&amp;keywords=16+x+20+power+press+heat+machine&amp;qid=1661570016&amp;sprefix=16+x+20+power+press+heat+machine%2Caps%2C...

Are you just running ads to a cold audience and expecting them to buy? I'm not surprised you don't have sales. Think of it like dating. You're not going to meet a stranger and ask them to marry you right away.

You need to actually build a funnel and market to customers in each phase of the buying process - awareness, consideration, THEN purchase. Read books on marketing strategy. This is a good one to start with: https://www.amazon.com/Ecommerce-Evolved-Essential-Playbook-Successful-ebook/dp/B0711FK99L/ref=sr\_1\_2

I'd stop the ads and save more money - $5 a day just isn't enough data to make decisions on anything.

I'm torn between a dog owner, and an ecommerce owner.. but I was just shopping for a muzzle for my dog (on amazon) and on the product level there were things that really resonated with me vs. things that left me extra confused.

My dog is a mutt, so breed guidelines mean nothing to me. What helped, was instructions on how to measure my dog's features on the product page (as an image). I'd highly recommend putting a standard measurement guide photo on each item. Take a look at this collar on Amazon, it leaves you with almost no questions before purchasing. I particularly like the sizing, video, and story bits, then further down they have the graphic about the features of the collar (which you could easily also make an image). Having an image of what each size means, means I can select my size without having to leave the page. One of your martingale collars has options for nickel or rose gold - is that rose gold colored nickel? I assume it's not actually gold but I have no idea. Also the only collar option is 1" width, so no need for the dropdown option for that item.

You also have a great story and brand concept, but it's not very pronounced, especially on your home page. I would recommend beefing that up with more content and information that isn't products. You also have a section that says check us out in the wild, and I can <3 the image, but does that actually do anything? I think that should just be an instagram feed and try to get me to like your photos on instagram instead. You have huge potential to get USA supporting shoppers to become your advocates and share pictures of their dogs if you bake that into your website and social media.

In my suggestion, sell your products in your own store because it helps you in more ways

• Your customers come for your brand and not for the marketplace.
• Attract your customer to unique product names and offers in your own store, but in the marketplace, there are plenty of similar offers that compete with your product.
• You can get your own sales money and not have to pay commissions to third party marketing companies.
• And most importantly, you know who your customers are and can contact your customers again to become repeat buyers.

If you're a new beginner or are going to try new then a subscription plan will be suitable for you because they already have a readymade online showcase for every business. Sell Online with Mobile App and Website - i.am.retailer is one of the best eCommerce platforms. It gives you everything for your e-commerce store to easily build your own online store.

I use the same label printer. You have to buy either their labels or a knockoff brand called Label Kingdom. The knockoffs are very good quality and work like a charm. Bonus is they are affordable. I’ve used thousands of these in the past couple of years:

Label KINGDOM Compatible Roll Replacement for Brother DK-1241 Die-Cut 4" x 6" Large Shipping White Paper Labels (102 mm x 151 mm) 200/ Roll DK Labels for QL-1110NWB (4 Roll + 1 Detachable Frame) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07KXMHF5P/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_i_010CZV2Y5VXPSTKWD9NH?_encoding=UTF8&amp;psc=1

> A good product should sell itself I would think.

Not exactly. If a tree falls in the middle of the forest where nobody's there: did it make a noise?

How would people know about this product that - supposedly - sell itself?

Markets are conversations, and Marketing is communicating with the product's intended audience to showcase the product itself.

Advertising is a subset of Marketing.

And advertising, when done right, it's not an expense, it's an investment. Let me explain. When done right, for each $1.00 of advertising, you get >$1.05 of increase profit to your bottom line, it's like a money making machine, you put $1.00 in, you get $1.05 out. If you found such a machine, what would be your "budget"?

The answer is: as much as you can get, beg / borrow / steal money and re-invest the proceeds into feeding more and more money into the machine.

> How do you know if you have a dead house that you are beating?

When the company is not making a profit or has no trend of ever becoming profitable.

> Or just not advertising enough ..

It isn't. Like I said before advertising is a subset of marketing.

This is a good book for you https://www.amazon.com/Meatball-Sundae-Your-Marketing-Sync/dp/1591845351

> ... or to the right audience?

uhmm... one would think that between domain expertise, MVP and Customer Development by the time the product/services enters the market, the audience has already been established as the correct one.

Good luck!

This is an interesting product and I've considered purchasing one before. Why should I buy from you though if I can get the same thing for less than half the price with free 1-2 day shipping on Amazon? https://www.amazon.com/Kinetic-Spinning-Anxiety-Optical-Illusion/dp/B07ZG1QTQ9

I do like the video ad, assuming you made that yourself, but you really need to sell this as a premium experience somehow if you want to charge $25 and ask people to wait a full month to receive it. Lots of other good feedback here on the specifics.

This is probably why:

https://www.amazon.com/Mountain-Giant-Decompression-Aluminium-Decoration/dp/B07K46R5VF

$7 less, plus a 7% off coupon, ships free with next day delivery, and it's shipped by a trusted name, Amazon. Your site has no about us, no details, no other products, no brand, and ends in .shop. No way I'd be buying from there for (a) more money, (b) more risk with the 'brand', and (c) having to wait a month.

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BTW this is just another example of why dropshipping stuff from China won't work. Stop watching YouTube gurus.

Start with The Personal MBA by Josh Kauffman. Your first task is to learn BUSINESS, and, as u/FlyingLap mentions, yourself, time management, and a slew of other foundational things.

Then, you can layer on the ecom specifics. Ecommerce Evolved was a good read that should get you the rest of the understanding.

https://www.amazon.com/Ecommerce-Evolved-Essential-Playbook-Successful/dp/1534619348

The main advantage of dropshipping is that you don't have to store your inventory yourself. In this case, you are a middleman between the distributor and the buyer. This model fits those who want to start their own online business without a large investment.
But it's important to know that conventional dropshipping isn’t allowed under Amazon’s terms of service. To legally dropship on Amazon, you will need to use the Amazon FBA program anyway.
One of the cons of this model that you can be stuck with the product if you choose a low-demand product or have overstock.
You can read more about both models here https://amzscout.net/blog/how-to-start-an-amazon-business/

Of course, starting a business on Amazon is much easier than building your own website. Despite this, you still need to understand and research this topic, and you will need to spend time reading articles, watching videos, etc. I recommend reading this article: https://amzscout.net/blog/how-to-start-an-amazon-business/ everything is described in detailed steps, and it will be more clear to you what awaits you if you want to start.

You can search for the same keywords that you are gaining traffic and sales on to find competitors, if you don't know already(even still, it's good to check every so often for new competition). You can sign up for their email subscriptions on a separate email to track their sales, offerings, and sale timing.

For prices specifically, you may be able to set up a google alert for price changes. I haven't looked into the options around google shopping that much.

Here's a link to a description of how to do a competitive analysis fromHubspot(no association).

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You can also use some free SEO tools Moz.com (no association)lets you run free domain analysis to find competitor rankings and keywords. Check out r/SEO for more info and insight into how/why to track stuff like this.

The app isn’t monitoring chargebacks. It’s assigning a fraud risk rating based on lots of factors, then flagging high risk payments so you have the opportunity to reverse them before they become chargebacks.

For example, a payment where the IP address location of the purchaser is very far from the card billing address may be higher risk than a payment where the billing address and IP location match. This is just one of the factors that at be used. Frequency of chargebacks on the card in the network could definitely be a contributing factor as well.

Stripe Radar is the main tool used to do this, you can check it out here to get more detail: https://stripe.com/radar

If you are building the site from scratch (i.e. actually coding it not using a CMS like WordPress or e-commerce platform like Shopify) then you will need to integrate with a payment processor directly. I recommend Stripe and Paypal because they both have payment options that will take the customer off to their websites, which will prevent you from having to deal with PCI compliance which can get really complicated and really expensive. Check out Stripe Checkout for a PCI-compliant integration you can build into your site.

Hey u/fret_me_nought

Congrats on building a passionate audience already! Good luck with the business, wishing you all the best :)

I made a video to go over your questions and give you a few tips:

https://www.loom.com/share/16d230e53cbf4f148afe5c9a39184dae

Hope you'll like it :)

TL;DR:
1) Yes: capitalize on that amazing asset;
2) Not necessary, but can be beneficial in the long run;
3) No, focus on IG content as you're already doing as the primary sales channel;
4) No, your followers will see ads anyway, let it be about your guitars & music-related products :)
5) Assume the worst at first: 2-4x times the average product price to generate a sale. After time, work, optimization and potentially help from professionals, you'll eventually get a Return on ad Spend > 1 which means your business will scale and be tremendously successful.

Happy to discuss more :) Feel free to share your IG and shop address, I'd love to follow!

Would ensure I put a lot of thinking into the operational and technical aspects of the setup.

Operational considerations: Everything from logistics (full value chain) to end delivery at the customer needs to be thought through. Many people just jump straight into the project of setting up a webshop without putting too much thought into the processes of inventory, fulfillment, etc. This eventually end in a bit of a mess with processes that leads to dissatisfied customers, inventory struggles and in general unscaleable set ups

Technical considerations: Your tech stack is you foundational fundament behind your business, but too many businesses nowadays start off with a simple Squarespace, Shopify or Woocommerce shop without realizing that these platforms usually have a scaling limit. Consider using some solutions that give you scaling flexibility on your tech stack e.g. open-source solutions like Medusa, Strapi, etc. that can be easily modified over time

The best one for you is not necessarily the best for me, or others.

The best thing you can do is research all options and decide for yourself:
Shopify
Woocommerce
Big Commerce
Prestashop
...

Start here: https://builtwith.com/ecommerce

You could go with something like Shopify, or Prestashop (hosted) or WordPress.
With Shopify you're basically tied into their platform - so, long term you might find you've hit a wall in terms of exapnding.
If you went with WP, you'll at least have full control over the app itself and can expand as much as needed.

If I was you, I would go with wordpress.com under the ecommerce plan - that way you don't need to worry about security etc, and, when the time comes, you can export to your own wordpress.org platform. This is a bit more expensive to start, but, worth it as a long term investment.

From what I've learned talking with eCommerce clients, there are a lot of things that can crush conversion rate. Every situation is different, but I've talked to enough people and started hearing some repeating themes!

• Site loading time is a big one. People are just really impatient and even tenths of a second can count. Check out GTMetrix and see how long it takes for your site to load. If it takes more than 2-3 seconds to finish the "largest contentful paint" then it's time to start rolling out speed fixes. Caching, image compression, removing unused apps on systems like Shopify - that sort of thing.
• Requiring accounts for checkout is another big one. If people can't checkout as a guest, they just won't check out!
• Surprise shipping costs are another killer. Shipping prices need to be up-front and preferably free over a certain amount like $50, or else conversions are going to go right out the window!

Once you get past the basics, then figuring out how to improve conversion rate is a matter of time and experimentation. You can use tools like Google Optimize to run A/B tests. Sometimes repositioning or recoloring a button can have a dramatic impact on how many sales you make. You just never know until you collect the data in a systematic, careful way!

Hope this helps with putting together the checklist!

Saw this post, immediately knew I had to answer. For context, I'm an eCommerce Consultant with disciplines in CRO and SEO to a number of retailers, startup or established and the in between too.

There's nothing wrong with shopify, however, if I was in your shoes right now, I would NOT be choosing Shopify.

First let me tell you why, then I'll tell you what I would choose.

• Why not shopify? 1) Managing SEO is an absolute nightmare. If SEO isn't your forte, I won't bore you with the specifics. But I've heard of (and worked with) many Shopify stores that have had their organic growth stunted due to how inflexible the platform is from a SEO perspective.

2) Poor site search functionality - I can tell you from experience that internal search is the single biggest maker or breaker of ecommerce sites. If your customers can't find what they want, you've lost at least a sale, most likely an entire customer.

I've spoken about this very topic at a number of major digital conferences and I use a number of household brands as case studies.

You can see my slides here should it help: https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/LukeCarthy/how-to-optimise-the-st-out-of-your-internal-search

Shopify Web search is lack lustre to say the least. There's very little analytics and insights and it handles misspellings terribly.

• If not Shopify, then what? Well, if you want most of the benefits of Shopify but with more flexibility and less limitation, I'd highly recommend WordPress and WooCommerce.

The only drawback here is, it's not quite as simple to get up and running, but it's really not far off.

SEO is completely flexible and to you. The same can be said for the search engine at a later stage.

WooCommerce is like an elasticated waistband. It grows with you and my startup money would be on it 7 days of the week.

Hope that helps!

• The amazon app does that,

• https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rucksack.barcodescannerforebay&amp;hl=en_US&amp;gl=US

• https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.biggu.shopsavvy&amp;hl=en_US&amp;gl=US