Trying to sell more online is a tough uphill battle these days. Especially for online business owners who are trying to break out of their stagnant sale plateau.

With so much competition these days from the big players like Amazon, Walmart and now with news of Alibaba's IPO, how will seasoned sellers be able to make more money pushing their products online with the top ecommerce software providers, especially when everyone is comparing prices everywhere?

Unless you're selling very generic products and offering it at a very good price, chances of making lots of sale is slim. If you want to sell something online, make sure that it's unique and can't be easily obtained elsewhere.

Make sure that your site is mobile optimized because lots of people now want to shop with their smartphones and tablets.

Your site needs to be clean with nice product images. Make sure you have an active social media campaign but don't overdo it lest people consider it as spam.

If your own local market is over saturated with too much competition, perhaps you could target the emerging markets by offering your products to them.

Selling is like art and science. Plenty of common sense should prevail. Know what your target customers are looking for and if you can meet their needs and wants, you would have gotten the sale.

The recent top news about Alibaba's IPO seems to be stirring quite a bit for some of the top ecommerce software providers. Many are wondering whether Alibaba will come head on with Amazon and eBay since their number of transactions were able to surpass both companies combined.

But that's the power of the Chinese market. They seem to have more spending power compared to a decade or two ago. And we're talking about a huge population of folks who can spend and splurge.

What i think many of these top ecommerce software providers should do is to reach out to China's population. With that much spending power, their merchants will be able to make quite a sum if their products are appealing to the Chinese market.

I had a look at Alibaba's website recently. It wasn't exactly like Amazon or eBay and obviously most people may not want to buy in bulk unless they are going to sell the stuff.

The top ecommerce software providers should partner with Alibaba and see the latter as a spring board to help them and their merchants get hold of more products to sell in the local and international markets.

Now that would depend on how you define getting better. My definition would be that to get better, you need to introduce easy to use features that are practical for sellers to use.

The type that makes difference to the bottom line of their business. Basically, what sellers out there want are powerful features that makes sense for them to use for their online business.

Don't get carried away with social media and all those videos that you need to create and post everywhere.

Sellers want to know how they can sell more and convert better with their websites. They want to know how to optimize their webstore without having to pay an arm and a leg for it.

And they also want to be able to customize their webstore the way they want to without getting stuck or feeling frustrated with the way some of the ecommerce software works.

So for some of the top ecommerce software companies who are constantly coming up with better features to help their merchants sell more without charging, I would say that they are getting better. As long as the process is easy to complete and implement.

Heard the news that Google is planning to do away with passwords. You may be wondering how you are going to be able to log in to your email accounts and the heaps of other online services that you are subscribed to if this was to take off right? Will, good news is that it's still in the experimenting stage.

When it comes to reality (where all the top ecommerce software companies are following the trend), then we'll have to see just how reliable Google's idea becomes. Well, since everybody jumped on the mobile commerce bandwagon when it started taking off!

Previously if you wanted to buy something online from a store, you would need to have an account created with that particular company. So when you do want to checkout and pay, you'd have to login. Then came the wonderful idea of being able to checkout without having to create an account (one of my favorites!).

Now if you own an online store, you could even sign in using your Facebook account. How neat is that? Provided you have one - like who doesn't? Speaking of which, Facebook's recently launched Facebook Graph Search seems to have fizzled out in the news. At the rate that the company's stocks have lost their value leaving investors fuming (those who got burned so bad when it's value plunged), Facebook had better start introducing more innovative stuff.