Ecommerce Web Design Blog

Make your site the best it can be with ozCart shopping cart add-ons
ozCart is already an ecommerce shopping cart packed with many powerful features relevant to the Australian market. Many of our customers are not aware that we also have an add-ons shop which allows you to purchase additional ecommerce features for your ozCart website. Some are installable components, others are web design and ecommerce services.

Our ozCart add-ons shop includes features that are requested by users but often specialised and may not appeal to everyone.  Some of them allow feature upgrades for older versions of our carts, where they are compatible and we have chosen to offer them (e.g. additonal payment options).

There are four sections of add ons: markting add-ons, admin section add-ons to make your shopping cart easier to manage and more powerful, sideboxes and services (like batch image resizing or Some of the great ecommere features available through the add-ons shop include the following:

• Cross Sell Booster - allowing you to specify other products to be displayed to customers when they view your products. This is not driven based on sales, you define it. This means you can manage the products that are displayed to customers to suit your own business requirements.
• Gift wrapping on checkout options
• Offer a Return Authorisation Form on your stie instead of just asking customers to contact you if they want to return a faulty product
• Lost Sales Manager - if customers come to your site, register with you, put items in their cart and then do not buy from you, how frustrating is that! This add on reports on these situations and allows you to contact these customers to find out why they didn't buy and what you can do to make them buy
• Non customer newsletter subscribers - you can send any of your customers emails directly from your site, but if you want to sign up non customers you need this add-on too. 
• Free clip on capability for the Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics applications
• Size chart creation services
• Live Help for your customers
• Product Data feeds for services like myshopping.com.au and getprice.com.au
  
• Bulk image framing and watermarking 
• Tracking stock by product variation (e.g. keeping separate stock levels for the numbers of green, red and blue t shirts instead of just the total number of t shirts)
  
• And more! For a full list visit our ozCart Add-ons pages.
  

Last month, Google published it's own dos and don'ts guide to optimising your website for the best possible search engine rankings. As this year draws to a close and you start thinking about what you want to do with your website in 2009, we thought it would be a good idea to review some of those dos and don'ts as they offer some useful advice for anyone trying to get better search engine rankings.

•  Content: DO make sure your content is displayed as text (not as part of images) and is free from spelling and gramatical errors. Keep each page focussed on a single topic rather than having a lot of different content all on the same page. This helps search engines like Google get a clear picture of what the page is about when they index your site.
• Meta Content: DO make sure your 'meta tags' that you set up relate to the content on the page so are not too generic, don't duplicate and don't only include search terms like your category names (meta tags are the special, hidden words in your page that are only seen and used by search engines. They help index the content on your page)
  
• Links in your site: DO frequently check your site for broken links and redirect customers who receive 'page not found' errors to somewhere that will help them find what they are looking for. ozCart does this by redirecting page not found errors to your sitemap. DO NOT block Google from finding your 'page not found' pages (also called 404 pages) or offer non helpful descriptions when a page is not found by a website visitor. Also, DO NOT mix www and non www versions of your links. ozCart sites use redirects to always use www in your URL unless you ask us to set your site up otherwise.
• Page titles: DO make sure that every page title is clear, simple and reflects the content of the page. DO NOT have duplicate page titles or try to 'stuff keywords' into your title to cover every possible thing that your website is about.  ozCart generates page titles based on your category name and product name so in most cases you should not get duplicates. It also includes an override system so you can manually edit any of the automatically generated titles yourself.
• URLs: DO use search engine friendly URLs and ensure that you do not have too many subcategories within categories as this makes search engines travel too deeply into your site (they may not go that far).

How to compete against larger competition
When you are in a market competing against much larger competition it can be easy to get demoralised and feel like you are in a David v Goliath battle. Sometimes the larger competitors will be very afraid of smaller competitors entering and taking their margins and resort to 'competition bashing' instead of trying to compete on what they can offer.

Competitive environment: Are your competitors using "FUD" to frighten your potential customers?

If your competitors are using FUD ("Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt") to try to knock smaller competitors out of the market then it's usually safe to assume that those larger competitors have noticed the smaller players like you and they are probably having an impact on their bottom lines. You should always take FUD as a complement.

How do you recognise FUD?  When larger competitors have promotional statments on their website like "Don't buy from small competition - you don't know who you are buying from", "Unlike others in the marketplace we are not a small backyard business", "Who knows what you will get from a home based business", "Buy from an established business like us not a one man band", then you know that you and other smaller competitors in the market have been noticed and are probably having an impact on those businesses' bottom lines.

Even if your competitors are using FUD techniques (it's not common nowadays fortunately but still happens) you can still compete effectively with some lateral thinking and good business instinct.

So how do you compete with larger competitors? Some ideas...

1. Find niches. If you compete head to head with larger competitors who are well established you may struggle with margins and their established product range. But they are probably not covering every corner of the market. Find a profitable segment that is not well represented by your competition and focus on that.
2. Build loyalty. When your customers do buy from you keep them coming back. Make their buying experience excellent and deliver outstanding customer service.
3. Personalised service. Larger businesses find it hard to deliver personalised service especially online. Keep your customers informed of their order and go beyond what they expect if you can. How many times will the owner of a large online business be able to respond directly to customer enquiries for example? This will help you build loyalty (see above point)
4. Use promotional tactics to gain market share. Offer a popular product at a loss for a special promotional period to get customers to your store for example
5. Ensure you are using the best shopping cart possible for your business, that it has an appealing design and have loaded it up with all the marketing add-ons you can afford.

Remember larger competitors were smaller once. How did they grow? Chances are they faced similar challenges as they grew but overcame them by staying focussed. Take a leaf out of their book and stay focussed.

Our final words: As far as we are concerned, it is absolute rubbish to say that a small business can't compete as well as a larger one - especially online.  Online business levels the playing field in terms of competition - a great shopping cart combined with a great offer can help you be just as successful as the offerings of larger competitors if you market your product innovatively to the right market and build traffic. 

Also don't forget that some very large businesses are still owned by just one person - so if you're not registered as a company it doesn't mean that you're not a big player in the market. Customers buy on a number of things so do it better than your competitors and people will keep coming back.  Prove those who doubt you wrong!

It is common practice for your ecommerce website provider to put an acknowledgement of their shopping cart software as a link at the bottom of your website.  One link is fair and enough, but what if your web design or ecommerce provider is filling your footer with spam links?

The link at the bottom of hosted ecommerce websites site is a useful search engine benefit for the shopping cart provider and a fair acknowledgement that they have provided the shopping cart product to you that makes your website a success. But why would they need multiple links all with similar but different names in customer sites? In our opinion this is very poor business practice.

It is therefore a good idea when buying a shopping cart website to visit the portfolio of the ecommerce provider and look at the links they place at the bottom of each site - is there just one or are there a multitude?

Osc Works only puts one shopping cart software or web design provider acknowledgement on each site we produce. Never more.

With margins squeezed and competition fierce, many people in business are under much higher levels of day-to-day stress than they once were. It is very easy in periods of extra stress to get frustrated with your suppliers and be overly demanding when you are ordering something, making an enquiry or when you experience delays in receiving product.

The thing that is often overlooked is that these suppliers are businesses just like you and if you are under stress chances are they are too. After all, in most cases they deal with many stressed out business owners every day - not just you. 

The secret: customer service  is not just about how you deal with your customers. It is about how you behave as customers too.

With this in mind, the way to get what you want from your suppliers is to go back to basics and the more stressed you are the more understanding you should try and be. Particularly at Christmas. Don't just demand, ask politely, and when you get what you want, say thank you. Sounds all too simple? It is, and it is always worthwhile to remember this when dealing with any supplier you are working with. A little humility and understanding helps build long term business relationships not simple one-off supplier/buyer transactions.

Here are just some quick tips to get you thinking. You could try when you are next dealing with your suppliers:

1. After you get your products, write them an email and say thank you. If you are impressed by the products or the packaging or their service, tell them.
2. If you receive a positive comment back from a customer who your supplier has dropshipped to, pass it on. When under stress complements matter. Don't you enjoy receiving them for your business?
   
3. Suggest something useful that could help them run their business even better - great ideas and suggestions are always appreciated by any business.
4. Refer a customer to them or write them a testimonial for their website - no business would ever turn down that!