Blog Entries

Crisis Management and the Media: What to do when something goes wrong

sales@oscworks.com.au — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100

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, asse [...]

Convert your clicks to sales

sales@oscworks.com.au — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100

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:

Make sure you are receiving the right trafficEnsure 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 [...]

Lorem Ipsum: Why is my Australian website in a foreign language?

sales@oscworks.com.au — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed mi est, congue pharet....

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 [...]

Web design for your customers, not for you

sales@oscworks.com.au — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100

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 [...]

Domain name tips when the domain name you want is taken

sales@oscworks.com.au — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

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 lig [...]

Australian Domains: Should you choose a .com.au or .com for your store?

sales@oscworks.com.au — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

If you're doing business in Australia, an Australian domain name with a .com.au extension (e.g. oscworks.com.au) is an invaluable asset. It tells visitors to you are an Australian business which can give them confidence and trust in buying from you.

That's because:

you need an Australian Business Number or Australian Trademark to register one
your domain name must be relevant to your business.
Search engines like Google Australia and Yahoo! Australia can often g [...]

Ecommerce Support: Don't pay too much

sales@oscworks.com.au — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

One of the biggest factors that people don't take into account when buying shopping cart software is the cost of support . There are many 'free' ecommerce solutions in the marketplace, but when something goes wrong with them, what do you do? You could post in the forums relevant to the free shopping cart you are using, but if you don't get a reply or the solution posted doesn't work, where do you turn?What if you are getting a unique error message?

Unless the proble [...]

Shopping carts can expand your business

sales@oscworks.com.au — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Shopping carts help you reach out to new customers when economic times are tougher and the business expenses of running a physical shop put a squeeze on your margins. A shopping cart website that is well promoted can lower your cost of product distribution and widen your reach of customers.

If you want to get a shopping cart up and running quickly to complement your physical shop, here are five tips to get you started:

Promote your website, heavily. One of the biggest mistakes [...]

Fonts for your content pages

sales@oscworks.com.au — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

What are the best fonts to use for content pages on the Internet? This is an important question for web design as well as writing content pages for ecommerce websites.

Fonts do not download with HTML pages. This means that when a web browser goes to display an HTML page, the fonts used to draw that page come only from the visitor's own computer. If you use a font that your visitors don't have installed, then your pages will not appear as you intended them to look.

It is im [...]

25 great business ideas you could start online

sales@oscworks.com.au — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

As shopping cart software providers we see a large number of online businesses start up. If you're thinking of starting an online business and want something you can get started quickly, here are some great ideas to get you started.

We haven't written anything about these and they are in no particular order, so you will have to go on to Google to decide how competitive they are, how hard they would be for you to start, and if they are right for you. These are just ideas we have [...]

Avoid temptation: Keep your web designs simple

sales@oscworks.com.au — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Think about the ecommerce websites you have visited and purchased from. Were they the ones that looked beautiful but took forever to load and were hard to check-out with? Chances are that the sites you bought from were not cluttered, had simple but well-thought out features and were easy to use and checkout with.

Keeping it simple is a design principle that comes out time and again in all forms of design and is advice that sits behind the website customisation philosophy that our graph [...]

Your website backup is not enough. Backup your PC!

sales@oscworks.com.au — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

If you have an ozCart website, your website's data gets backed up automatically every day by the server. But your ozCart website only holds part of your business: what about everything else to do with your business? Copies of your business correspondence, your GST spreadsheets, product images you have downloaded from your camera, product specificications, emails from your suppliers, the list goes on.

The lack of a comprehensive backup of the a firm's electronic data is one of [...]

5 top tips for free website marketing

sales@oscworks.com.au — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Marketing your website takes a lot of hard work on top of all the built-in help that ecommerce features like search-engine-friendly (SEF) URLs can give you. As with most marketing, the results you get out of it depend on your determination and the speed you can gain results often depends on your budget. If you're running a small business you don't need to be too demoralised yet because there are a lot of things you can do to promote your site for free.

Here is a collection of t [...]

Ambition for 2009: Grow your online business

sales@oscworks.com.au — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

A few hours ago Australian time, Barack Obama was sworn in as the new US president promising "new energy for America". The world's economy is responding - online even Amazon.com opened an Inaguration store selling items for those who would be attending the historic event. Barack Obama's ambition and focus is what has taken him to be the world's first black US president. What can you learn from him for your ecommerce store? Setting and achieving goals.

Your customer [...]

Give it your best shot: Great product images help you sell

sales@oscworks.com.au — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Having a powerful, fully featured shopping cart with a striking web design is just the first part of creating a successful online business. How you present your products to your customers is also absolutely critical. Investing in good product images can make the difference between average and outstanding ecommerce sales. Product images matter.

Remember, your product photos are the closest your buyer will get to seeing your product before they buy it. The better you can make your product [...]

Build confidence to boost your ecommerce sales

sales@oscworks.com.au — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Something as simple as ensuring you have your correct contact details on your website could help your ecommerce sales soar.

More customers than ever are buying online, but they are wary and savvy too because online they can't see you or your store or physically look at your merchandise before they buy. So they often look for other indicators of credibility. For example, does the website have a secure checkout? Is there a clearly defined returns policy? Are the site's terms and [...]

SEO: What are Sitelinks and how do you get them?

sales@oscworks.com.au — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

How many times have you entered a search term into Google, and the first result that comes up has some predefined sublinks underneath? For example putting oscworks into your browser reveals the sitelinks currently defined for our website:

You can see we currently have links to our Shopping Carts, Features and Layouts page for o [...]

SEO: What is social bookmarking and how can it help me?

sales@oscworks.com.au — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

When you visit a website on the Internet that you want to come back to, most browsers will let you mark it as a favourite or bookmark. But what if you want to share your list of bookmarks with other people? This is where the practice of social bookmarking comes in. Social bookmark websites allow people to keep lists of favourite sites on publicly available lists on the Internet and tag them with keywords. This makes them useful to share with other people or come back to themselves later.

[...]

Get $100 free cash with Osc Works

sales@oscworks.com.au — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Do you know someone who needs an ecommerce website? Are you a webmaster providing information websites who has customers who also need shopping carts? If so you could earn yourself up to a massive $100 just by referring customers to Osc Works!

At Osc Works we have just increased the payouts on our affiliate programme for ozCart shopping carts so that referrals for our Platinum package can earn $100 per sale, $50 for our Advanced package and $25 for the Starter package .

We [...]

How to research your competition

sales@oscworks.com.au — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Whatever business you are in, competition is part of doing business. Knowing who your competition is the first step in being able to ensure your pricing structure is appropriate for your market, and knowing who else your potential customers may be buying from.

There are a number of strategies you can use to identify and research what your competition are doing. Here are just some of them:

Online

Google is your friend. Search for your industry by name or any of the [...]