In today's guest post, Chris Pontine, owner and publisher at Creating A Website Today shares some tips on how to easily build an online store, and 13 things that should set your mind at ease about the process.

There are a lot of things to consider when building an online store. Sure, there are questions like, "Should I add live chat?" but in my experience these are the 13 most pressing things to consider first.

Without knowing much about a company and what they offer in the way of eCommerce solutions, it can be very difficult to feel confident in your decision to sell your goods online. By determining the answers to your most pressing questions, you, too, will be on your way to eCommerce success.

Let’s look at the 13 most important things to know when building an online store, shall we?

We've talked before about how to effectively automate a live chat greeting, essentially sending visitors a pop up message. Today's guest post comes from Grant Thomas, Marketing Manager for JustUno, who offers 12 more ways for eCommerce businesses to use website pop ups.

This article is a prequel to my eBook, "Persuading Customer Support to Sell." In the book, I share how to get Support to contribute to sales in a non-salesy way. Why should they do this? Because it helps you fight churn, and churn is slowly but surely killing your business.

Customer Support doesn't bring in new sales prospects - they prevent churn. They're talking to customers after the purchase to ensure customers are happy. If they're not, then they work to quickly help or appease them so they're either happy again, or not mad enough to leave. 

When a customer leaves you, this is churn. Churn is people falling out of love with your company. Churn is the biggest problem for the lifetime value of a customer.

February might seem a bit late to reflect on the holiday shopping season, but many SMBs say their holiday season actually ends in January.

Now that we're actually clear of the holiday rush, I checked in again with a few Olark customers who signed up for our Cyber Monday Survival Kits this year. I wanted to know - "What did you learn this holiday shopping season?"

Today's post comes from Johnathan Dane, founder of KlientBoost. His company got some surprising results after experimenting with the Olark Greeter...

If you're like me, you already have a healthy list of 'to dos' you're working through to grow your business  — all the the latest and greatest marketing tips and tricks from across the Internet.

And if you're like me, there just isn't enough time in the day to put all of these new marketing discoveries to use. You want something that will get results, but you're not sure where to start.

Today Richard Protheroe of Veeqo provides a few easy steps to optimize your Shopify store to capitalize on end of year sales.

From Thanksgiving right through to New Year's Eve, ecommerce retailers have as many as 10 big shopping days to prepare their store for. It’s no surprise then that sales for retailers in the months of November and December can equate to up to 40% of overall sales for the year.

Understandably it can be a very stressful time for store owners, but ultimately very rewarding. This is especially true for Shopify users who have a plethora of apps and add ons at their disposal to help increase sales, as well as some general ways to increase traffic and sales over this holiday period.

We may not always use live chat here at Appcues. But it sure has been helpful in onboarding new users throughout the early days of growing our SaaS business. 

Live chat has been an ideal medium to help us garner product feedback and onboard new users, which has been crucital for our growth.

The following is an excerpt from The Cyber Monday Survival Manual.

When Cyber Monday has come and gone, you're going to want to know how well your team did.

One way to tell is to manually count the number of times someone rings the "official" Cyber Monday Sales Cowbell. (If you got our Survival Kits you know what I mean).

Another more accurate and efficient way would be to have Google Analytics keep track of the numbers for you.

Last year, sales on Cyber Monday topped two billion dollars. That was an 8.5 percent increase from 2013 as Cyber Monday was, again, the busiest day of the year for online shopping. We saw it on our network too. Chats for Olark customers went up 40 percent on the Monday after Thanksgiving, and those numbers stayed high for the week following Cyber Monday.

November and December - the holiday shopping season - will account for 20 to 40 percent of annual sales for small and mid-size businesses. 

How are you getting ready? 

Today's guest post from Giles Adam Thomas, CEO at Whole Design Studios, provides a step-by-step tutorial on how his team achieved a 176.33% conversion rate increase by studying chat transcripts and making simple website copy changes.

Photo by Lauren Peng on Unsplash

Many people believe conversion optimization is the same thing as A/B testing. This is incorrect.

Increasing leads, sales, and more importantly profits from your website and your business requires a focus on increasing your conversion rate.