What is Headless Commerce?

Headless commerce decouples the front end and the back end of an ecommerce application, allowing brands and developers the flexibility on the front end by utilizing robust API of a headless service while still being able to take advantage of powerful administration and management tools on the back end. The end goal is to ensure that companies have the flexibility they need to provide the best customer experience and accomplish the desired business goals.

What are Headless Ecommerce Tools?

There are several ecommerce platforms that advertise themselves under “Headless Commerce” and provide the necessary tools, API, and supporting documentation that gives developers what they need in order to create a robust ecommerce front end.   Several of the most popular are these…

• Shopify’s Plus
• Bigcommerce
• Salesforce Commerce Cloud
• Kibo Commerce
• Magento Commerce
• SAP Commerce Cloud

These platforms give a great foundation for giving companies a powerful ecommerce engine in the back-end while allowing them flexibility on the presentation layer as they integrate those ecommerce capabilities into their online store, social experiences, mobile applications, customer contact experiences, etc.   Although these platforms provide very robust capabilities, they don’t cover every capability that ecommerce merchants would like to cover in their customer experience, so it’s necessary to identify other headless ecommerce tools and services that provide robust API capabilities to fill in the gaps.

Recommended Headless Ecommerce Tools & Services

Below is a list of some essential ecommerce tools and services that have a robust set of developer tools and API in order to compliment your headless commerce experiences.

Shipstation

Shipstation is shipping software for ecommerce fulfillment.  Shipstation’s API and development tools allows ecommerce developers to manage orders, shipments, stores, warehouses, carriers and a number of other elements related to your Shipstation account.  create shipping orders, check on shipping rates, as well as a number of other capablities that are powered through their powerful shipping engine.

Answerbase

Answerbase’s customers include the likes of Pillsbury and Betty Crocker, providing headless ecommerce product question and answer community capabilities to power functionality.  This enables you to power Q&A engagement on your product pages similar to what you see supported on Amazon’s product pages, where customers can ask questions about the product they’re viewing and and then receive answers from your company or other verified purchasers.   It includes a robust set of content and community features to ensure that your visitors can get all of the product information they’re looking for from the most relevant source to drive conversions.

Pimcore

Pimcore is a decoupled, API-driven product information management solution that can handle complicated product and pricing structures and support multiple front-end apps.   It’s ability to manage multiple catalogs, currencies, catalogs, product views and price lists gives developers and marketers what they need from a PIM solution.

We’ll continue compiling the list of these services as we become aware of services and partners that have created a robust foundation for companies and their developers to work with, as we look to enable merchants who adopt headless commerce the best headless ecommerce tools on the market.

The post Headless Tools and Services for your Ecommerce Site appeared first on Answerbase.

This post will help you understand what the top benefits that your product questions and answers should be showing you, so you know what to look and ask for when you’re looking for a product Q&A solution to add to your ecommerce store.

Organic Traffic Results

There are product related questions being asked into Google every day, and many of those questions are ones that you’ve already answered for your existing customer base.  It’s important that you make sure that your answers are published in a way that Google gobbles up and displays favorably in their results.  You want to manage and publish your product Q&A content in a way that results in the content being displayed in Google like this:

Answerbase’s product questions & answers platform spawns landing pages for the Q&A threads which draws those long tail queries to the product Q&A content in order to achieve results like you see in the above example.   It’s important to have Google be able to recognize that there is a content piece specifically addressing the question that is being asked into their search, and marking that content up in a way that Google can easily read and recognize the answers to the questions and display it in featured snippets as seen above.

Some notes on what you should be seeing with your Q&A content:

• Increased Customer Lifetime Value:  We see that the average lifetime value of customers coming into those pages and converting to new sales is up to 2x higher than normal Google traffic.
• Year Over Year Organic Traffic Growth: As you continue to answer customer questions, that content should lead to year over year organic traffic growth that is measurable for your site.  We encourage you to read our Epestsupply Product Questions & Answers Case Study, where Answerbase’s product Q&A doubled their overall traffic and increasedtheir organic traffic by 4x.

Again, not all product Q&A is created equally, you’ll see that many solutions out there only support product questions and answers with a simple JavaScript widget on the product page.  These solutions often lack important features for both users and search engines to see all of the product related information they’d like to.  For example, many times when using some of the standard product Q&A widgets you’ll see that Google doesn’t index Q&A content if there is paging of that content….that’s a problem as your content grows.  As you scale, more sophisticated solutions are necessary to ensure all the hard work you put into answering questions is rewarded with new traffic and conversions…you need to make sure your product question and answer platform is doing that work for you.

Management of Repeated Questions

You’ll notice on many product Q&A solutions, if you type a question into the question form that matches the same exact question that has been asked before…it doesn’t auto-suggest that existing content and lead the user right to the sale. That isn’t good for conversions, and also has your team spending additional time on questions that have already been answered.

What you want is for the solution to recognize when a question has been asked before and let the user know that an answer is available now, similar to what you see here:

You don’t want to make it difficult for them to post their new question if they’d like, but you certainly want to make it clear that they can view an answer immediately if and when it’s available.

It’s essential that you have a solution that does this, and does it well.  Answerbase sees that for mature knowledge bases we can have questions answered up to 83% of the time through existing content, which saves you time and helps you convert them on the spot rather than them jumping to Google to find the product information there….perhaps on one of your competitor’s sites.   Do it well on your site, so they just get the information they need and then convert to a sale.

Increasing Conversions & Tracking Results

You need to make sure that your product question and answer engagement is contributing towards increased conversions on your store and that you’re able to easily track the conversions that it’s assisting with.

As noted in the quote above, Answerbase sees that up to 75% of questions answered by Answerbase convert to a sale (View a Product Q&A Case Study), so you’ll want to make sure the Q&A product that you’re using is focused on conversions and effectively managing the content in order to produce conversion results for you.   You also need to make sure that the solution is tracking and reporting on those results.   It shouldn’t be complicated to do, the solution should offer some kind of tracking script that you can copy from their administration tools and place into your order confirmation page like this:

This will ensure that the solution can monitor all engagement that users are having with the question and answer content and then report back to you on the exact ROI that you’re getting from  that engagement.   Ensure that the solution you select is not only providing the ability to track, but giving you an ROI of multiples of what you’re spending.

In Closing…

There are many other things that product Q&A engagement can do for ecommerce stores in order to ensure you’re getting the most value out of your customer engagement, but the items are listed above are some of the “must have” items you should be looking for.   If you’d like to speak to a specialist about any of the above items or all the additional benefits that product page questions and answers bring to ecommerce merchants, we encourage you to Schedule a Free Consultation with a product Q&A expert who can talk you through.

Hope everybody is well and happy selling!

The post 3 Benefits Product Questions & Answers Must Produce for your Ecommerce Store appeared first on Answerbase.

In this post we will cover some methods that people are using to accomplish the end goal, along with some app suggestions on what apps you may think about adding to your store to help you accomplish those goals in the most efficient manner.

The Obvious Way

The first answer is to of course reference the products WITHIN the post. Based on the topic you’re writing about, there may be some non-spammy ways of referencing a product within the post which enriches the content and also gives an opportunity to lead visitors to a sale. This is obviously the first step that you should take to ensure your blog posts are converting business for you.

The Hard Way

The hard way of accomplishing this goal is to do this manually. You can create calls to action below the post and lead the user to products that you would recommend to readers of the post.

This way is not recommended because its time consuming…and doesn’t adjust dynamically over time based on actual user engagement.

The Easier Way

As with many goals that you’re trying to accomplish with your ecommerce store, there are apps likely available that you can plug into your article pages and they will do the job for you. A good app will read the text and context of your post, and then be able to suggest products to readers based on what they are most likely to purchase.

Surprisingly, we didn’t find a long list of apps which provide for this functionality…..and for some app stores we didn’t find any…but from our research here are a couple that help you accomplish that goal:

Pro Blogger

Pro Blogger is a blogging app for getting the most out of your article content, keeping your browsers engaged and ultimately converting readers to shoppers. Related blog posts, related products, image captions, rich Pinterest support – all in one app! App store links: Shopify

Linkscious

Linkcious is a product recommendation engine that allows e-commerce stores to automatically recommend related products on their pages. Unlike other systems, Linkcious uses artificial intelligence to select related products to show. App store links: Shopify

The reviews on the above tools are mixed, but perhaps they can help in accomplishing your goals.  We’ll look to continue growing this list and updating this post if we’re made available of others (and may consider creating our own widget in case this gap continues).

The Easiest Way

Most posts you read about content strategy and determining what to write about in the first place say much of the same thing, to see what types of questions your customers are currently asking you and starting there.   With ecommerce, we’re luck that (1) those questions are directly related to products or product categories and (2) that content is also valuable for distribution across an ecommerce store and driving conversions through attracting new search engine traffic.

This is why we’ve seen that the easiest way to establishing an effective relationship between content and products that will convert is to let your actual customer questions asked through Answerbase to drive your content strategy, and then with new posts you create from that information you will both understand that the content will convert for you and also know what products are related to that content to best convert.   Answerbase provides content insights based on your current Q&A activity so you can understand what content you can create which will convert, and then will help you associate that content with the most relevant products that will convert to a sale.

Please Contact Us if you know of any that are doing the trick well and optimizing the conversion rate of ecommerce blog posts.

The post Tips on Recommending Relevant Products on your Ecommerce Blog appeared first on Answerbase.

In an effort to make your life easier in managing your content, we’ve released a new feature where you can schedule content reviews.  This allows you to designate a time-frame in which your Q&A and article content should be reviewed, and then your administrators will be assigned content to review and notified when content reviews are due.  These time-frames can be defined on the system level, category level, or even on a specific Q&A thread or article.  These settings make sure that you can focus on the content that requires this kind of attention, and you can allocate your resources and time accordingly.

Global Content Review

If you’d like to set a global content review time-frame, you can do so under your “System Settings > General Settings” where you’ll find a new feature to enable this functionality and define the appropriate frequency of review.

Category Targeted Content Review

If the global setting is a bit much or there are specific types of content that require more frequent review than others, you can also choose specific categories of content that require review and a time-frame relevant to each category.  You’ll find those settings by going to your Category or Tags section of your site, clicking on the appropriate category or tag, and then you’ll see these features under the “Settings” tab as seen below.

Question Specific Review Designation

Finally, if there are specific pieces of content that you’d like to define a review frequency for, which are only relevant to those specific posts, you can do so when reviewing an individual Q&A thread or article in your administration area.  When viewing a post, you can see the new option under the “Settings” tab as seen below.

These new features should be a great help in making sure that all of your content remains fresh and up to date for your visitors, members, and customers.

The post Keep Your Content Up-To-Date with Scheduled Content Reviews appeared first on Answerbase.

1) Make your point with a blog post

When you’re trying to persuade or enlighten an audience, especially about a new idea or a different way of seeing something, words can be the most powerful tools you can wield. And if your idea is compelling enough, you may need no more than a series of well-thought-out paragraphs to catch and keep an audience’s attention. Not sure the idea is enough to carry the post? Modify the format. Turn it into a list, for example. Some complain that “10 Reasons…,” “5 Ways…” and other lists are overused, but they’ve been shown to be deeply appealing. (Their appeal is wide, too; busy executives can quickly scan them for key takeaways while people who want more information can read through all the details.) For added interest, you can also embed visual or graphical elements, such as a short video of an expert commenting on your subject.

2) Show them “how to” with a video

Speaking of videos, there are times when it really is true that a picture is worth a thousand words. If you’re trying to explain how to use a hammer, for example, ten seconds of someone picking up a hammer and whacking a nail with it are worth far more than ten paragraphs of “Grasp the handle with your right hand if you are right-handed (or with the left if you are left-handed) and pick up the tool…” With a video, there’s less risk of ambiguity (grasp it exactly where on the handle?) or misunderstanding. It’s a great choice for showing how a product works or how to use it. Video is also a good choice for content that’s coming from someone with a particularly engaging style of talking or sharing information – such as the expert commenter mentioned in the previous paragraph. For these and many other reasons, video is becoming increasingly popular as a way to present content.

3) Sum it up in an infographic

Infographics are perfect for sharing quantifiable information such as percentages and other statistics. After all, why bury high-impact numbers in sentences and paragraphs when you can display them prominently as graphics? You may want to add a minimal amount of prose to provide context or commentary, but the general idea is to let the data take center stage. Also, posting a well-executed infographic on your own blog and then sharing it through other channels is a great way to get a lot of exposure for your content with relatively little effort.

4) Get the best of all worlds in a slide show

For those times when a post seems too wordy, but a video or infographic doesn’t seem like it’s saying quite enough, the just-right choice may be a slide show. Though they’re visual by nature, slide shows provide the flexibility to judiciously add verbal elements to underscore your message. For example, you can have a slide with a great image of your product, followed by a slide that highlights key data graphically, followed by a slide that displays a testimonial quote from a client. And because slide shows are resources that almost every company uses for presentations and other purposes, there’s a good chance you already have one that you can easily adapt to use as a post – or maybe even one that’s ready to go as is.

5) Combine for the best results

Combining different types of content in the same post can amplify the effectiveness of your communication, especially when the audience includes a variety of people who need to get their information in different ways. Visual learners, for example, will gravitate toward video and slide content, while verbal learners will want to read what you have to say. Anytime you can post something that includes several formats, you stand a better chance of getting your message across to more people. I mentioned earlier that you can add interest to a blog post by embedding a video in it; you can also embed a short series of slides or include an infographic. Try to choose material that’s complementary but that will also get key points across if it’s the only thing someone looks at. Some people simply won’t watch a video when they can read about something instead, while others are just the opposite. Why not appeal to both?

Just think how much time and effort you spend on coming up with the best topics and messages for blog posts and other online content. Why risk having it all go to waste because you didn’t put the message in the most effective format? Next time, when you think about what you’re going to say, plan for the best results by thinking about how you’re going to say it, too.

Learn more about all of our 6 Steps to Achieve Content Strategy and Marketing Success and how they can help you get more from your content marketing efforts.

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The first step is understanding this: Content isn’t pushed by content creators; it is pulled by content consumers.

This motto is the finger on the pulse of the Internet and you need to get on board—consumers now pull the content they actually want as opposed to being force-fed.   It’s the reason why cable stations are going to be replaced by services like Netflix and Google Play. It’s the reason why Top 40 radio stations will be replaced by services like Spotify and Pandora. It’s the reason why need-driven content is going to rule content marketing. The quicker you embrace this, the quicker you can create a strategy that benefits you, your organization, and your customers.

There is a definitive freedom that comes with this knowledge.  You no longer need to guess the kind of content that you should be generating—your visitors are begging to tell you what they want, so…let them!  Chances are your organization already has a foundation in place to start identifying these topics, which brings us to Tip #2….

Tip #2 – Right there, under your nose: that’s where you’ll find topics.

You have access to one of the easiest ways to pull topics, and it’s staring you in the face on a daily basis. Your sales and customer support representatives, along with the tools they use to communicate and store their customer interaction, are treasure troves of information. These sources are on the front lines of what your customers (and potential customers) need, so plan on allocating a large portion of your research time in this area.

Here is where you can discover the most common questions that are repeatedly asked via traditional channels: online chat tools, phone calls, support tickets, and so on.  Use common inquiries to build well-structured and informative blog posts, videos, or whitepapers to whip up content that effectively meets your audience’s needs. Provide the answers to questions. Become the content that is searched for.

Granted, this takes a little legwork on your part, but not to worry: you’re about to let a machine do the work for you in our next and final tip. Onward. . .

Tip #3 – Let technology identify the most relevant topics automatically

Implementing user tools such as a Q&A platform or a forum, which allows your users to post information that other customers and visitors can engage with, is the most effective way of putting the first two tips in action. It engages the primary source of your content marketing topics with the proper tool to give you detailed analytics on what to write about.

Before diving into how these tools effectively identify content topics, understand that tools like Q&A or forums are doing much more than that…they’re creating content for you.  This is content that you don’t need to think about at all, and it is phrased in a way that is not only relatable for your other users, it is likely what they’re searching for when they have similar questions. We’ve seen this with many Answerbase customers who draw consistently growing traffic from search engines, reduce duplicate questions being asked, and monitor what the actual demand is.

Now, back to identifying valuable topics.  Your Q&A software or forum should be tracking and reporting what content is most visited, followed, shared, and leading to the most conversions. This takes away the guessing game away, because you know what content topic is valuable based on real user interaction, and, it creates a pipeline of topics to focus on.  Observe which topics are accomplishing your business goals, and optimize them to satisfy the needs of future visitors with similar interests.

The right tool will have both a system optimized for search engines (this is critical) while also having built-in analytics tools which will allow you to easily see what the most popular questions or topics are. Make sure you have a Q&A platform or forum that either provides this information for you or allows you to integrate the necessary third party analytics tools to accomplish your goals.

In Closing

Well, there you have it: three tips to help you identify the content marketing topics you should be focusing on.  The end goal here is to create a reactive process to identify customer needs, and simply supply that demand.  Unless you have an omnipotent oracle on your team that can accurately predict future needs consistently for years (let’s face it, you don’t), we encourage you to put a process in place, and we’re happy to provide you with the first few steps.

Happy marketing.

The post 3 Tips on Identifying the Best Content Marketing Topics appeared first on Answerbase.

• Answering Questions: When you have questions that have been posted that we recognize as being in high-demand but do not have a quality answer in place to satisfy your visitors we make that clear to you so that you can either create or source a quality answer.  This ensures that all of your visitor’s pain points or interests are effectively managed, giving them a better content experience and improving the usefulness of your online presence.
• Associating Existing Content: We make sure you’re aware of topics that are very popular and have a high demand, and encourage you to associate other blog posts, videos, white papers, etc. that will be of interest to users visiting those popular posts.  This ensures that you can further engage your audience and make sure they have access to all the helpful content you have available.
• Creating New Content: Finally, Answerbase notifies you when content topics are popular enough to consider creating new content in order to fill the content demands of your audience.  If you don’t have existing posts that satisfy the informational needs of your audience, we can give you insights of what those topics are and you can build brand new content around the topics you know are engaging your customers and visitors.

Consider what Answerbase’s Content Insights can do for your business and start taking advantage of using user generated content and activity to help chart out your content strategy, creating high-quality content based on the real demand of your audience.  For a visual on how Answerbase can be used to improve your content strategy and content marketing processes, see our Content Strategy Automation Funnel.

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Hope things are well.  To compliment some of the other features we have in place to combat spam, we’ve recently launched a few new anti-spam tools for you that you’ll want to be aware of.  As your Q&A platforms become more popular and well-trafficked….you’re bound to get hit with a spam attack or two so we’ve enhanced our features to makes sure you have all the necessary tools in place to combat those pesky spammers.

You can find the new tools under your “System Settings” area, and you can see your “Anti-Spam Tools” option there.  A few notes as you take a look and choose what makes the most sense for you.

• Suspicious IP Identification: Answerbase has the ability to identify IPs that are commonly used for spam attacks across the globe, and you have the choice of enabling this feature to either keep any posts from a suspicious IP address unpublished till your review…or if you prefer you can simply just block any posts from those suspicious IPs altogether so you don’t have to take the time to look at them at all.
• Suspicious Keyword Recognition: The IP tool should take care of a large amount of your spam issues, but in case any further activity slips through we also give you the ability to identify terms that the spammers are using which simply don’t match your site’s content and again you can either keep any matching posts unpublished until you review them or you can block those as well.
• Trusted Users: Of course, you don’t want to inhibit any frequent users on your site who are submitting valuable contributions so we’ve also given you the opportunity to identify criteria for “Trusted Members”.  If a user meets your criteria, the anti-spam filters that you have enabled will not apply to the posts of any trusted members and they will be able to post without issue.

The combination of the above tools have had great success with our existing customers, so we’re confident that they should be able to help make sure that your Q&A environment also stays clean of spam.  We’re here to make sure you have the tools that save you time and energy, so if you have any other requests or feedback to make your life easier please contact [email protected] and we’ll make sure you’re taken care of.

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See what’s new:

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To change your language settings, go into your administration area under “System Settings > General Settings” and you can see a dropdown where you can change your language preferences.

If you there are any languages that you need supported that aren’t currently supported, please contact [email protected] and we’ll communicate with you regarding your requirements as we look to make sure your needs are met.

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