Today I chatted with associate Marty Fahncke, who is a consultant and electronic marketing expert who I’ve known for a few years. We talk about the “web biz” and Marty provides some excellent tips and strategies he uses to be successful for himself and his clients.

One really neat thing is that Marty has been working with famous artist Thomas Kinkade to help him sell his works online.

Our discussion revolves around retail online sales and why people buy or don’t buy. We also talk about how to use social media channels to promote a brand for sales. Lastly, we discuss Twitter some more and how we both use it.

With over 18 years of experience in sales & marketing, Marty has been involved in campaigns responsible for nearly $1 BILLION in revenue. With experience in direct sales, sales management, marketing, product acquisition, infomercials, e-commerce, and international marketing, you are assured of receiving high quality, professional services that will grow your business.

Nina Frye had an idea one day to create an ecommerce store (LTDChix.com).

The problem was, she was a mom who had never done it before and had zero idea how to get it done. Fast forward now to years later and now Nina has a fully-functional, successful store. So, how did she get there? What lessons did she learn along the way?

If you’ve ever thought about starting up your own online store, you MUST listen to this podcast of me talking to LTDChix.com. Nina gives all of her lessons and advice on how she got started, as well as mistakes made and tips. She dishes it all. GREAT interview and you will learn a lot. Please leave feedback in the comments.

Here are the show notes:

The story of how we got started. Moms overwhelmed!
Target a niche!
How did you start the site? Steep learning curve.
Worked with Score. Did a test market first. Found local place to print, spent $2500. Took to a local fair and test marketed to moms. Sold out!
Sent out press release to local newspaper. Simple news release.
Signed up to mom blogs and pitched them. Giveaways work! 2 or 3 or month.
It’s expensive to run a website. Find a good local web guy/gal who you can trust.
Startupnation.com helped a lot. Gave me media lists, help me find a pr person. Got on MSN.com through contest.
Go to retail stores. Promote that on your site. Cold call them. Looked to see where your competitors are, and called the stores they are at one by one.
Setup a wholesale price. Setup a sales sheet, not your website, an order sheet they can fill out and send back.
Use coupon codes. Make shopping cart easy to buy. Use authorize.net for merchant account.
Google Adwords and converting at 60% sometimes.
Learned how to be an ecommerce expert by reading.
Cafepress.com is a great place to try out custom artwork sales.
Going to license artwork for overseas sales. Mom humor on all kinds of products.
We went to show in NYC and found licensing companies to approach. Pitched them. Got a lot of no’s.
What would you do differently now two years later? Spent too much doing website the wrong way first time.
We copyrighted the images using us trademark government.

Ecommerce is a tough business. Some people think you just throw a site up there and your stuff sells. Very wrong. John from StickerGiant.com has been running a successful ecommerce site for years and years now. So I though it would be fun to hear from him about his business. Check out his laptop stickers, pretty cool.

About John Fischer:
John Fischer is began collecting and selling bumper stickers in 2000 after the Bush-Gore Election. His passion these days is printing custom stickers for cool people and companies all over the world. John lives with his beautiful wife Xan and his three delightful children on the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains in rural Colorado.

MarketingSherpa’s 2007 Ecommerce Study was published today and distributed via email with a pdf download. There are, of course, some pretty interesting results included in the report. I’ve detailed a few of my favorites that will hopefully help you out.

Click here to buy the full report.

If you’re in the business of affiliate marketing, as either an affiliate or merchant, this benchmark guide should be of particular interest to you.

Shopping Cart Abandonment Rates Dropped 7.7% From 2006 To 2007

That’s a drop from an abandonment rate of 59.8% to 52.1%. According to the report, the tremendous shift came about because of marketers taking over cart design from the tech team. Why you would let your tech team design your shopping cart, I have no idea.

Tip: Mix Your Promotional Offers In Your Transactional & Receipt Emails

The report tells that “consumers are far more likely to open transactional emails from you, like shipping and receipts”. So why not start adding your promotional items and cross-sells into those emails? Just be carefule and don’t push too hard.

Consumers Prefer Sites With Reviews

58% of consumers “strongly” prefer sites that have customer reviews. Think about it, don’t you like to read more about the product you want to buy? Don’t you want to hear what others have to say as long as you feel they are reputable? So what’s stopping your ecom site from adding reviews?

I demo’d a neat review product last fall at a trade show called ProductReviews. It might be worth a look.

What Do Consumers Do When They First Visit Your Ecommerce Site?

According to the report, 27% go straight for the search box and type a product name in, while 23% go directly to click on a product category link on the home page. What does that tell you? Get those search boxes up high and label your categories well.

I know, I know, it’s stupid to leave my 5-year-old with a live Internet connection on her little game pc setup in my office. But to my defense, I am always in the same room when she’s on the computer, and I usually have the wireless disconnected so she can’t surf the big bad web.

However, the other day I found myself watching in amazement as my 5-year-old was surfing through the games at Disney.com, and how the Disney website successfully integrated products directly into their web interface.

The result? My daughter ended up adding 2 items she wanted to buy into her shopping cart, then proceeded to tell me that “she was ready to buy”. She doesn’t even read yet.

Yep, my 5-year-old had her first online shopping experience, courtesy of Cinderella. And shortly after, I had $23.00 less on my credit card after ordering it for her.

Now that’s how you build an ecommerce website.

Want To Be As Good As Disney? Copy Them!

Look, the reason Disney can charge so much for a waffle at Disneyworld is because they know they can, and, because they’ve researched it. If they didn’t think they could get away with it, they wouldn’t, and that’s why they constantly test.

The point is, when looking to improve on something, always, always go look at the big players. These gigantic brands have spent millions and millions of dollars testing things like shopping carts, web navigation and everything else. So I say, go and copy them. It’s obvious they know what they’re doing.

What, you have a few million laying around to run your own shopping cart usability tests?