Ecommerce Web Design Blog

Whatever business you are in there will be times when something major goes wrong (e.g. you need to do a product recall). The bigger you are and more significant your products are to the market, the more attention there will be on you.  A recent example of a crisis was Google's blunder which led to every website on the Internet being labelled as malware.

The most important thing to remember in managing a public crisis is to communicate with the public via the media quickly, assertively and truthfully. There will often be tremendous pressure to explain what went wrong and why and it is tempting to say anything just to "get the media off your back".  You will be judged on how you are coping by what you say and do in the first few hours of a crisis so it is absolutely crucial to be fast, thorough, truthful and accurate. Your business reputation depends on it.

But what you need to do is stay calm and if you don't know say so.  Don't think about talking with the journalist, think about talking to the people at home reading their newspapers, visiting their favourite online news website or watching TV. You are communicating with them.

Here are some tips:

•  Never Speculate. If you don't know the cause don't say you do. Google did this well initially in their crisis by acknowledging that they knew something was wrong and that they were looking into it when they said to initial BBC enquiries "There is a fault. We are not sure what the nature of the fault is yet. We are looking into it."
• Tell people how they will find out more. Google also did this well by telling the public that they would be making a statement on their official blog as soon as they were ready.
• Inform your key staff about the problem so they can report on it if contacted.  If you have a call centre or live chat operators tell them what is going on and how they should respond. Prepare a FAQ document for them to reply to enquiries. Be fast! fast! fast! Google ensured their key media staff and public personas (e.g. their search engine public face Matt Cutts) were informed and could confirm when and how Google would communicate with the public
  
• When you do communicate show empathy to those inconvenienced or harmed. If customers were frustrated by you acknowledge that you understand it must have been frustrating for them.
• If you can't comment, give a reason. Don't just say "no comment". If you can't comment say why. For example, "I can't comment becasue there is an official investigation into this."
• Take responsibility if it is your fault. Don't blame others. Google made a blunder in their malware meltdown by stating in their official statement that their malware URLs were obtained from a non-profit third party called StopBadware.org and that there was a human error in this list.  It turned out that this was not exactly true - StopBadware.org provided lists of bad urls and criteria that were then entered by Google into their system. The error was Google's but their initial statement seemed to blame their partner. This flooded their partner with enquiries and inflamed the problem somewhat. Some more checking before issuing the media statement would have helped there as they had to later update their official statment to correct this inaccuracy.
• Threats are opportunities too. If you handle this crisis professionally and carefully there is the opportunity to prove your business is sound under pressure and win over critics and even gain new customers. 

Overall, Google handled their issue well. They identified and fixed the problem in under an hour, informed their staff and issued a statement promptly. They made a mistake in not fact-checking their statement thoroughly but resolved and apologised for it quickly. They have said they are putting in place procedures to ensure this doesn't happen again. Let's hope they live up to their promise. If they do, this is a good example of how to handle an online crisis.

You have done all the hard work promoting your website to get traffic. How do you make sure that once you get traffic it turns into sales?

There are two key parts to the answer to this question:

1. Make sure you are receiving the right traffic
2. Ensure that you maximise your chances to get sales once you have the right people on your site
   

Getting the right people to your website
It is easy to add content pages to your website about very popular topics or write ads that generate considerable numbers of clicks to your site. But if they are not from target customers looking to buy your products, then they are wasted traffic.

Ensuring your website is optimised for the search terms that your customers will search for, and that you have relevant links from websites in your industry is therefore an absolutely essential part of sales conversion.

Here are some things you can be doing:

• ensuring you have set the meta tags and descriptions for your products and services in your shopping cart software or information website. This tells the search engines what your pages are about and gives you a better chance of your pages coming up for the right things.
• think about your customers: where do they go online? When they come on search engines what do they search for? Those are the places you should be advertising. Those are the key words you should make sure your product descriptions and content pages are relevant to
• building links on sites and directories relevant to your industry. For example, if you are a scrapbooking site make sure you are listed on the top scrapbooking directories as that's where people looking for scrapbooking supplies will often go to
• use price comparison/data feed websites to drive people directly to the product pages for your products. Examples in Australia are myshopping.com.au and Getprice.com.au. ozCart stores offer add-ons you can purchase for your store to produce compatible xml data-feeds for these services
• collect email addresses from customers and potential customers and write newsletters that contain special offers. This will help drive positive sales leads to your site.

Making the right people buy

Once they are on your website, you need to ensure you maximise the chancesthat they will buy. Use things like featuring highly popular products to get them looking at them, use side banners to promote offers and specials and write appealing category and product descriptions. Make a big deal about your site security as it will help your customers feel reassured about purchasing from you.

When customers check out and buy something from you, make their experience so appealing that they want to come back and buy again. That includes keeping them informed about their order and delivering it well packaged and on-time.

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Have you ever seen a website where the product descriptions, introductory text and about us pages all have text in it that looks like this? If so, don't despair. Your web designer has not created your site in a foreign language. Lorem Ipsum is a defined standard of fake text that is used in websites, publishing, graphic designs and in the printing industry to fill up space and show customers what a page would look like once the customer has added their actual wording.

Because Lorem Ipsum text approximates the character distribution of letters in the English language it is a good way of filling a page up when real text is not available.  When we build a website at Osc Works, we put lorem text into the product descriptions, about us pages, shipping information pages, contact us pages and more. Our customers can then change it to suit their business.

Lorem Ipsum text originated from a Latin passage in a book called De finibus bonorum et malorum but the words and sentences are jumbled so do not have actual translations. It came about after a printer in the 1500s took some Latin text and scrambled it up to make a sample font book. Lorem Ipsum became popular in the 1960s and has been added to as the original Latin text did not have some of the letters of the alphabet that are now in use. 

When creating a web design for yourself or briefing your web design professional on the site you would like to have, it is very tempting to request to include swishy coloured boxes, an old logo that your brother designed in WordArt 3 years ago that you've used on all your promotional material since and your favourite pictures, colours and images. Unless you are an exact match for the types of customers you are targeting, you may need to think twice about this strategy. You may love it but your customers may not.

Creating an inviting web experience is absolutely critical in showcasing your business or selling online. An easy-to-use, secure and fully functional shopping cart will only get you part of the way. To get your customers over the line and buying from you, you also need to create the most professional and appealing buying environment you can. 

This means you need to put yourself in your customers shoes every time you create a design. It's very similar to designing a storefront that is inviting and makes your customers walk through the door. Always ask yourself:

• What do my customers expect to see?
• What would my customers consider inviting?
• Does my design look as professional as possible?
• Are my product and header images clear and crisp?
  
• Just like in interior design you need to think about the colours used. Ask does my colour palette work well together?
  
• Is my web design too cluttered?
  
• Is my web design too bland?
• Would your most fussy and frustrating customer find your site appealing and buy from you?
  

If you are unsure, let your web designers guide you. After all, it's their job to understand your customers and make your site look as appealing as possible. But they can only work with what you give them and within your instructions.

You're ready to open your online store. While you get your suppliers and prices set and take product photos you decide to take the step of registering your domain name so that is all ready to go before you buy your shopping cart software. But the domain name you want is taken. What do you do?

Here are some ways you can generate other domain names that you could use for your business.

• Use your product name in your domain name. If your business is called Elvis Ltd and you sell lighting, the domain name elvis.com.au might be taken but elvislights.com.au might not.
• Create a brand name and register that. If in the above example, elvis.com.au and elvislights.com.au were both taken you could create a brand name of your own called something like 'Lotsa-Light' and register a domain like lotsalight.com.au
• Try hyphens or change the order of the words.
• Add localisation information. Add your country or state to the domain names to help find something unique.

Whatever you register, make sure that when you come to running your store you promote your domain name heavily - in your brochures, in your physical store if you have one, in business cards, trade fairs and at every opportunity you get. This plus building links having an search-engine-friendly shopping cart website on your domain name will help you make your online shop a success.