Ecommerce Web Design Blog

If you're selling on auction websites, one benefit is that the auction sites spend a lot of money promoting themselves to get traffic to your site.  Traffic is essential to sales, but auction sites can have some huge downsides: in whatever category you sell in, you are always right beside your competitors. This can severely limit your chances to build customer loyalty because every time you sell there is always pressure  on you to drop your prices to compete.   Auction sites encourage your customers to look for the cheapest price.

Opening your own online shop can help you avoid this situation because you are in control of the products that you list, the specials that you run, the banners that you show and the prices that you charge.  And your competitors are nowhere to be seen.

Running your own site means you must be committed to building your loyal customer traffic coming to you because traffic will not appear overnight. This means you must be serious about putting in time promoting your store both online and offline to build traffic.

A key part of building traffic is building backlinks from other related sites to your own. Internet shops are like a big popularity contest as search engines use backlinks from quality related websites as 'votes' for your site. When customers enter terms into search engines, the results (or 'SERPs' as they are called in search-engine-marketing terminology) that are shown depend on the relevancy of the content of the page returned as well as the popularity of that site.  A high traffic quality site that will link to you (e.g. a government department or large corporation) will be weighted more heavily than a link from a page of unrelated paid-links.

Other key parts of helping your site rank well and build traffic is writing additional content that is relevant to the products you sell (using the key words and phrases that your customers might search for). You must also ensure the categories and products you offer match what your customers are looking for and that your cart is friendly and inviting. Keeping the customers happy that do buy will pay off for you in the long run.

Advertising offline will also be important to building traffic. 

If you are selling on auction sites, opening your own online store does not need to be the end of your auction site. You can use the two together taking advantage of the strengths and weaknesses of each. Use auction sites to get first time visitors buying your 'special products' that you are willing to compete on price for - the hot items that customers search for.  When they buy something send them a flyer with the product that includes information about your new website. This way your own website can build loyalty and create repeat buyers, and you are building off your auction listings.

When you are creating a new website, which is more important: a beautiful design or many powerful features? The answer to this question is that both are important and getting the balance right can make the difference between a successful and unsuccessful online shopping website.

Finding balance is important, as you will probably have seen many sites that are either too far in one direction of the other: sites either overloaded with flashy graphics or cluttered with hard-to-read or confusing content.

Go too far in either direction and the result can be a disaster for your online shop. Beautiful eye candy and animations may look fantastic to you in printouts when you are building your website, but can lead to extremely slow load times. Cluttered text can seem unprofessional or overpowering text can bore your customers and put them off buying from you.

If your website's purpose is to sell products, what is the point in making your buyer wait five minutes while your page's intricately designed flash animations on your home page load? Will your customers appreciate seeing the same animation load over and over on every page they look at in your cart? You want a cart that fits with the brand values and the look and feel of your business, but one that also has features to make it easy for your customers to buy from you, and easy for you to manage.

ozCart ecommerce websites are designed to balance form and function by providing you with a number of professionally designed base layouts which we then customise the graphics and colours in them for free. Functions like a progress bar in checkout, wishlists, easy-to-use carts and being hosted on ecommerce-optimised servers, make for an online shop that is friendly and inviting.

Behind the scenes our ozCart shopping carts are also packed with a number of powerful features . Like the ability to set stock levels for individual variations of your products (eg. blue t shirts and red t shirts can have different stock levels), having your own affiliates promoting your website in return for sales commissions, batch order management, advertising banner management, dropshippers management, bulk product management and built-in gift vouchers to name just a few. All managed by you from a secure web-based control panel. 

You can use as few or as many of the features as you need, so your store can grow with your business. Or purchase add-ons from our ecommerce add-ons  store.

We design our ozCart ecommerce websites to suit your business and balance stylish designs with powerful features. Whether you buy ozCart or some other online shop software, make sure that your shopping cart website has the right balance of features and design for you.

Sooner or later, all businesses face some type of customer complaint. The way you deal with a complaint and resolve the situation when it arises is often what makes the difference between a successful and unsuccessful business. You need the attitude: if they have a problem, you're going to fix it.

Here are some strategies for dealing with customer complaints.

• Take customer complaints seriously. When a customer complains don't brush off their concerns and ignore them even if you feel they are completely without foundation. Instead, acknowledge you have received their request and are actually investigating their complaint. If you have employees assign a specific employee to deal with that complaint. Tell the customer who it is who is dealing with them so they have one point of contact and can see someone is taking ownership of their problem.
• Get Information before responding. Collect as much information as you can about why the customer feels the way they do about your service. A lot of customer complaints come down to a communication breakdown rather than any major service failure, but lack of information during a complaint can make the customer feel even more isolated.
• Repair or replace instead of refunding. Some customers, especially with clothing products, will deliberately order products they never intend keeping to use your online shop as a virtual changing room. By having a policy that you will not refund defective products and instead replace or repair them you can reduce this behaviour, and many complaints too.
• The customer is always right (once). Most customers are honest and genuinely feel wronged when they complain. But as there are some customers who will deliberately purchase products with the intention of returning them and complaining that the product does not work, a good strategy to put in place is to generally give the customer the benefit of the doubt the first time they make a complaint but if they continue to complain about order after order, be much more suspicious and question their motivations for complaining.
• If you are in the wrong, put it right. The home products company from New Zealand whose tag line is 'its the putting right that counts' couldn't be more right. If there is a problem and you put it right and exceed the customer's expectations, you can not only make that customer satisfied, you can make them an advocate for your products. Because it is harder for online shops to be trusted by customers (simply because they usually have no physical presence), word of mouth can be an even more powerful sales influence than for physical shops. This applies both positively and negatively.
  
• If you have a physical store, allow complaints about your online business there as well. Some businesses separate their online and offline operations completely. But integrating them could bring you benefits by giving your online more of a 'human face' and building both trust and loyalty.
• Build loyalty. If you spend time and energy building a loyal base of customers, they will be a lot more forgiving of you when things go wrong. Give your customers great customer service by replying to them promptly after they order, communicating frequently and clearly and following up after sales to build loyalty. Creating a community through a forum on your site or through newsletters and personalised offers can also create loyalty that will benefit you hugely when something goes wrong and customers feel like they need to complain.

What costs do you need to consider when opening an online store? What should a shopping cart website cost? We often get asked this question, so here is a quick guide.

When you are setting up an online store you will usually have to balance up-front costs, the ongoing costs and most importantly the costs of your time. Plus your regular business expenses.

One factor that will significantly influence what your overall costs are and where they are spent is whether you are buying shopping cart software outright and managing it yourself on a hosting plan, or whether you are paying for a hosted solution on a monthly basis.

Do it yourself (DIY) ecommerce websites like free carts:

• Have a low up-front cost as you usually do not have to buy an up-front license. 
• Require a lot of hands-on time to manage. First you have to find a hosting provider that is compatible, install the software yourself, configure all of the options you want (often having to choose from many different or similar variations), apply security patches as they are required yourself and fix bugs. 
• Usually require a strong level of technical expertise to deal with problems when things go wrong and you are left searching the forums of the various components that make up your software looking for other people who have encountered those problems and the required solutions. What if you have a unique combination of components or a never-seen-before problem? What if your hosting provider makes a server change that affects the performance of your site? Your customers won't be as tolerant as you are of issues.
• If you wish to customise the design of your store, you will either need graphic design skills or need to pay a freelance designer by the hour. This could cost up to $200 or more if you are making considerable changes.
• Put you at the mercy of third party developers to develop security fixes, add-ons, bug fixes and new versions of your software. You may need to pay for security and bug fixes yourself if they are not publicly available. Would you know how to remove a cross-site-scripting vulnerability if it was in your store software?
• Your hosting provider will charge you a monthly fee
• If you are using a security scanner for PCI compliance you will need to pay a third-party to scan your website for vulnerabilities and certify you for your bank.  This can cost $500+. Daily scanning through highly recognised security providers like McAfee Secure can cost upwards of $1,300US per annum.

 Hosted ecommerce solutions:

• Have a setup cost and monthly fee. These range considerably as the top ecommerce solutions have one-off setup costs of between approx $100-$700  and monthly fees of between $30-$300 per month. At Osc Works, we understand the costs of setting your online business can be considerable so we offer a setup costs of $199-$399 for our ecommerce packages (depending on the level of features you have). But since every business is different, we also offer three affordable ozCart ecommerce packages to reflect varying levels of features that you may need. At time of writing, these range in price from $34.95 to $49.95 to $109.95 per month (incl gst).
• Provide you support for your ecommerce website. When you have errors in store, can't find something, or what to know what's possible, help is at hand. You can also request custom development.
• Take care of server management, security and performance issues without your intervention.  You'll know that the ecommerce solution you are running works on that server because the server is optimised for it and monitored. You won't be paying per hour costs for security patches to the server.
• Give you an ecommerce provider at-hand to ask for help and tips, upgrades provide additional information about payment gateways and additional services like Marketing and SEO .
  

If you are accepting credit cards and looking to gain PCI compliance, hosted solutions will generally be more convenient to you, less time consuming and possibly cheaper too.

 What are the other costs?

On top of the costs of setting up your website and managing it, you should also consider the following when running an online shop:

• A domain name - Australian domain names are $49.95 for two years when purchased from Osc Works. Other companies have different .com.au domain name prices.  If you already have a domain name you may wish to transfer it, or keep it with your current provider and 'point' it at the server your ecommerce provider is using
• Merchant, gateway or Paypal costs (if you are accepting credit cards) - the payment provider you use will charge fees to accept credit cards regardless of who you use. Live transaction processing through your store will mean you will need to sign up with a payment gateway provider like eWay or Camtech as well as a merchant account at a bank. Alternatively, live processing through Paypal or Paymate will require an account through these providers. Each have their own fee structures.
• Business expenses - GST, income tax, business registration (e.g. ABN or company) and other business costs
• Production and Stock costs - you will usually on charge these to your customers
• Shipping costs - you will usually on charge these to your customers. If you dropship your cost structure will be different than if you hold stock and send it out as orders are received.
• Storage costs - if you have a warehouse or storage facility for your stock, you will need to take into account these costs too.
• SSL Encryption - if you are accepting credit cards directly in your store you will need to purchase a SSL Certificate for your store from a recognised third party provider to enable your store to process orders securely.