Ecommerce Web Design Blog

If you can enhance a customer's online shopping experience you increase the chance they will go all the way through checkout. Here are some tips to get you started.

When your shopping cart is set up by your provider, that's just the start. You have to add your products, set your prices and configure everything to suit the way you do business. Here are some crucial factors that can make the difference between customers arriving at your site and leaving again quickly or going through the shopping cart process and buying your products.

• Keep the number of payment options to a minimum - choose which payment options offer your customers the flexibility they need to choose without overwhelming them with choice and reducing the chances they will buy.
• Use high quality photos of your products - great photos of your products demonstrate professionalism to your potential customers. ozCart automatically thumbnails photos that you upload to your site to ensure they are displayed neatly on your site. Even so, it still pays to optimise your images for the web using Photoshop. This keeps the quality high and the filesizes as low as possible - reducing download time if your users click on any images for an enlargement.
• If you're accepting credit cards in your store, reassure them by encrypting their personal details as they are transmitted to the payment gateway. You can do this by using SSL. For many payment gateways, SSL is now compulsory. Even if you are using a third party payment method, using SSL on your checkout can reassure customers of your commitment to protecting the privacy of their personal information.
• Make it easy for customers to contact you. Tell customers where you are located, and give them a phone number, mailing address or email/fax number to contact you. You could even go further and offer a live chat facility so they can ask questions before they buy. This reassures customers that if something goes wrong that you are accessible and committed to resolving their problem.
• Include an returns authorisation add-on if your shopping cart provider offers one. ozCart customers can purchase this as an additional add on through our add-ons store.
• Create content pages with your privacy policy, returns policy, and conditions of use.
• Include detailed product information about your product, not just the manufacturer's blurb they can read on any site. The more you can tell customers about what your product does, its features, benefits and limitations, the more reassured they will be in going through the checkout process and buying the product online.

Marketing your website is also crucial to get customers to your site. List your products on Australian and New Zealand price comparison sites and any review sites you can find. This helps build links to your store, traffic and, hopefully, sales.

You have decided to set up your own online shop. Where do you start?

So you have decided to set up an online shop. Where do you start? There are a few principal decisions you will need to make:

• Who will be your shopping cart software provider?
• Will you offer credit cards?
• If you are offering credit cards, how will you collect credit card details securely?
• How will you promote and market your website business?

Choosing your shopping cart software provider starts by thinking about your customers. They will want a shopping cart that is inviting to look at, easy to add products to the cart, to navigate and has the right payment options for them - without being overly complex. From your point of view you'll want a site that is easy to manage, reflects the image of your business, is affordable and powerful too.

Osc Works makes it easy to manage your website by offering a hosted ecommerce solution. This means that we take care of the server your website sits on and you take care of your products and your shop. We monitor and manage server performance, install security patches and set up the email accounts you need for you. You load your product images, write your product descriptions, send emails to your customers, promote your website and run specials from a web-based administration section.

If you are accepting credit cards, you'll need to decide whether you will use a third-party provider to collect credit card details like CommWeb, Paypal or Paymate, or collect those credit card details directly in your store. Both approaches have pros and cons. The advantage of collecting credit cards in your store is that customers are not redirected somewhere else which increases the chances they'll still buy from you or for you to lose track of the order if there is an error after the payment has gone through and the customer redirects back to your website. The disadvantage is that you will need to have an Internet Merchant Account and Payment Gateway account with a bank and supported payment gateway provider, and will need to purchase an extra software add on for your store called "SSL" to protect credit card details as they are transmitted to the gateway provider. This can be more costly for you. Some providers offer this for free as part of their package, others do not. It depends on the shopping cart provider.

Support will also be crucial. Does your shopping cart provider have a comprehensive knowledge base that they regularly update? Do they have staff that actually operate in Australia or New Zealand (and not some foreign country of the world where English is not the language of choice)? Support can set apart the great shopping cart providers from the average ones. Does support end at 5pm on Friday and leave you with no one to turn to over the weekend or on holidays? It pays to check what you get for your money.

Whatever option you choose, or if you don't choose to accept credit cards at all, you'll also need to consider the features that will help you communicate with your customers to generate more sales during the sale process or after sale. Things to think about are can you insert banners into your store? Can your customers give you testimonials? Is there a link exchange facility? Can you create content pages to create a blog or provide additional information? Does the cart have search-engine-friendly features to help more of your site get indexed by the major search engines?

And of course, there is price. Is the cart affordable to you on a set up basis and in terms of monthly payments? How much will a domain name cost you? Naturally this same question will need to be asked of your payment gateway provider and merchant (bank).

Good luck in your shopping cart software search. If you would like to ask any questions with no obligation, we would be delighted to hear from you. Please feel free to contact Osc Works today.