Ecommerce Web Design Blog

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 photos, the more you will reduce the likelihood of returns or unhappy customers.  Realistic, clear photos that include close-ups where appropriate can help sell your products. In ecommerce, a picture really can be worth a thousand dollars.

The good news is that you don't need a professional photographic studio to get good product images for your shopping cart.  Even with a good point-and-shoot digital camera and the right lighting you can show off your products in a way to help them really stand out.

Here are some things we suggest you do when thinking about taking good photographs of your product images:

• Try to use the same or similar backgrounds, or a consistent theme for all of your product photos.
  
• If you are taking photos of small items like jewellery, make sure you have a digital camera with macro mode. The closer it can get to your products without taking over-exposed or blurred photos, the better. For small products like these, it will usually also be essential to invest in a light box. This is a rectangular box, usually made from fabric, that helps even out the light that shines on your product. Used with special fluroscent lights it mimics the light achieved through natural daylight.
• Check your photos to see if they give an accurate colour representation. If they don't you will probably need to adjust your camera's "white balance" settings. If you are photographing clothing, getting the colour right can be essential.
  
• If you can afford a top-end camera, look for one that is great with macro photography. The number of megapixels and optical zoom is not as important as its macro capabilities when it comes to taking photos of small products.
  

However unique your product or service mix, chances are that you will have some sort of competitors either already strong in the market or emerging. Ensuring your website business is as successful as possible means 'benchmarking' against them to work out whether customers are likely to buy from them or from you. 

Mystery shopping, visiting your competitors and observing what they do can all be useful tools in improving your own online performance. 

We do NOT mean you should copy off your competitors as this is not original and customers will see through it. What's more it is a fast way for your shopping cart software provider to close you down for breach of copyright - or even worse be in front of the ACCC or Commerce Commission for unfair trading or 'passing off'.

But you can learn a lot from your competitors without copying them and use that information to improve and refine your own product offering. Here is a quick checklist:

1.  Do a search on Google for the key words that are used in your industry. Note if you see any results for their business and if they have any 'sponsored link' advertisements pointing to your competitors. This will give you an idea of where and how they are promoting their website.
   
2. Visit their website - keep a spreadsheet every month with your key competitors and what promotions they are running (along with your comments about them). Over time you can review this spreadsheet to draw some conclusions about their marketing strategy and promotional success (or lack of it)
3. Read their product descriptions
4. If your products are not specialised and expensive put in an order to your competitors. See how they treat you, how they package their products, whether they keep you informed about your order and the quality of their products. 
5. Time how long it takes to load pages on their website. Do they have lots of high resolution product images or ones that are more suited to websites. What would your customers think of this?
6. What is missing from their product offering? If you were them what would you be unhappy about? Can you provide it?
7. Ask your web ecommerce company for a competitor report. They may be able to tell you more about who links to them and how they are performing on the keywords that are important to you
8. ... and so on.
   

This is just a list to get you started. You can see the technique that is being employed: look at what they are doing and use that information to improve your own offering.

But remember: Don't waste too much of your time worrying about what your competitors are doing. You need to devote as much time as possible to your own products and service. Competitor reviews are intended as a complement to your activities to help you refine your strategy - they should not be an end in themselves or else you will not have the time to get on with your own business.

Just like major clothing brands are often subject to cheap manufacturers producing look-alike copies of their products complete with logos, there are a number of people who are determined to copy the most successful businesses online without any respect for their intellectual property.

Don't let this put you off opening an online shop. You have plenty of options when it comes to dealing with competitors trying to steal your products, website content and images. Here are just some of the things you can do.

1. Ban their IP from your site or server. Look up their IP address and ask your hosting provider to block them. You can get their IP address from a tool like 'whos online' in the admin section of your site, or a third party tracking tool like your chat or real time tracking. Also ensure that 'hotlink' protection has been enabled by your hosting provider. This stops competitors from linking to your images within their own sites.
   
2. Join a programme like Copyscape. Copyscape scans the Internet for copies of any of your webpages. It will send you an email telling you the exact URL of the pages who have copied you.  You can verify the copying and then write to their hosting provider to force them to remove the content or have the site banned. You can also write to the copiers to order them to cease and desist their copying of your site. If they do not heed your warning you can take legal action.
3. Keep ahead of them. Competitors who spend too much time fixated on what you are doing with your shopping cart today are competing with the past. If you keep doing new things, adding things and improving you will stay ahead. Be a leader not a copier. Work on the search optimisation of your site while they work on what you were doing yesterday.

In case your competitors or copiers don't listen to your warnings you have the ACCC, your legal team and your external solicitors at your disposal if necessary. A friendly 'prompt' from  your legal team or external solicitors is ususally enough to help your copiers see the errors of their ways.  If not your lawyers will know what to do.

Writing for your website is not the same as writing for a print publication. Online you have very limited time to make an impression on your audience. Only writing that is clear, interesting and easy-to-read will get the attention of your potential customers. You also have to be mindful of search engines - you need to ensure that you have the right density of keywords otherwise your page will appear either unimportant or spam to Google. Getting the mix just right is essential.

So how do you choose a good copywriter for your shopping cart website?

The first step in the process is to evaluate the websites of the people or businesses on your shortlist.  Does their website sound like it was written by Australians for the Australian market or by somone with poor language skills? If they can't write for themselves and promote their own business, how can they promote yours? Be careful of sites that do not make sense or appear to use the same word over and over and over for effect. These are the kinds of sites that will eventually get hammered by the search engines for 'keyword stuffing' so stay clear of them or your site could suffer when they come crashing down.

Hiring a professional website copywriter for your shopping cart website can help your website stand out from the crowd, which can be essential in a market that is highly competitive and crowded with competitors selling similar products.  There are plenty of people and international companies claiming to be professional copywriters on the freelance job boards, but if they can really write quality copy, expect to pay top dollar. 

As an experiment for this blog we have hired some freelance copywriters from job boards with a theoretical copywriting exercise for our own website. We will report back in another post when the results are in.

Lessons: What to look for the following when you hire a web copywriter

• Do their writing samples seem interesting an inviting? Would you buy from them?
• Is the writing actually useful to the target audience or does it appear to have been written for search engines rather than people?
• How much do they charge? Is it per-word, per-dollar, or per-article?
  

Osc Works offers website copywriting service for current customers or non-customers alike.

 

How do you go about writing easy-to-read content for your website?

How do you go about writing easy-to-read content for your website? How can you keep your visitors coming back? Here are some tips that could help you.

1. Write for the customer, not for you

You're passionate about telling everything about your product. But your customers might find knowing everything a bit overwhelming. Put yourself in your customer's shoes: what are the main benefits of your product.

2. Assume your customer's don't have much time

Get to the point. It will be well received by your customers. Keep it short, simple and focussed on the benefits. This will increase your chances of holding your customer's attention and keeping them on your site. Don't try to put your existing brochure online.

3. Be interactive

Take advantage of features like forums and directories to involve your customers. Include forms on your site. Encourage customers to provide you with feedback and information about their preferences, and gain their permission to send them newsletters. You can use newsletters to get them to come back to your site.

4. Keep your content current

if you are regularly update pages, search engines will keep coming back and indexing your site. Your customers will also keep coming back if there is a lot of valuable content. So if you are running a parenting resource for example, keep adding new articles. If you are running a forum about motor racing, comment on the latest motor racing trends, cars, techniques and meets.

5. Create a community

Develop a club with exclusive benefits or something similar to build loyalty. Give them access to special features or content. Give away something special for the people who keep coming back. If you have a forum, reward those who post often. Email your members with valuable information, teasers etc. If you are running a mortgage broking site, have a daily email with interest rates and comments when the Reserve Bank changes the Official Cash Rate is updated. Have a column written by an expert relevant to your industry in your blog or newsletter (e.g. child psychologist, lawyer, chef, economist etc) as this will add credibility to your site.

6. Measure your reading ease

Above all else, keep your writing style simple and easy to read. Use short sentences if you can. Search for 'Reading Ease tools' in Google. Visit one of those sites that measure the readability of your site. These sites give you a score out of 100 about how easy your content is to read. 100 is extremely easy, 65 is plain english, 30 is difficult with long sentences. 0 is extremely difficult language that is very hard to read. Most guides on reading ease say to aim your site 60.

This article has a Flesch Reading Ease score of 65.