Ecommerce Web Design Blog
Why you need ecommerce
Published in shopping carts, shopping cart, ecommerce websites, ecommerce cart, ecommerce by oscworks |A unique product is sometimes not enough to make your business a success. Customers today are more demanding than ever and seek to buy your products and services online, right there and then. Your customers don't want to print off forms, email you to ask questions or wait until Monday to call you. If you don't have an ecommerce facility and won't let them buy it now, you will miss out on sales. Having an instant electronic payment facility can make all the difference for customers purchasing something at the last minute or in a hurry to buy what they want.
Fortunately, having your own online shopping cart does not require the kind of financial outlay that setting up a new physical store does and has very low overheads once it is up and running. At Osc Works, we have a payment plan available to help even further with managing your cash flow while you're investing in gaining customers.
Your business will also benefit from the opportunities that ecommerce creates: through cross sales, special offers, gift vouchers and product up-selling all available on the spot.
For example, if you're selling flowers your website your customers could also offer balloons at checkout time, offer customers an exchange rate calculator, give them the opportunity to enter a discount coupon from a promotion you're running or give certain customers a special discount for being loyal to you. In your physical store you could do this too, but many sellers do not have time to look up a customer's sales history every time someone comes through the checkout and many customers feel such overt cross-selling in a physical store is invasive.
New opportunities are also created through ecommerce:
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You could sell online advertising space to other businesses
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You could set up an affiliate programme or reseller programme where others obtain a fee or commission when customers buy after coming from another website
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You can reduce the effort and costs of processing orders - your site handles the checkout process and informs you of orders after they're made
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You can continually update content on your site for no additional costs - whereas updating brochures or flyers will cost you money to reprint them
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Your website becomes a 24/7 salesperson for your business, open tirelessly for your potential customers
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Business-to-business sellers (B2B) can benefit from having the ability to offer group or special discounts and impose business rules such as minimum order amounts and shipping regions automatically
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Check out our Ecommerce Xmas Ideas too.
Paypal or Payment Gateway?
Published in SSL, shopping carts, shopping cart, ecommerce websites, ecommerce by oscworks |If you are opening an online store, one of the big questions you will need to answer is how are you going to get paid. Should you use a third party payment provider like Paymate, Paypal or Paymex, or instead should you use a payment gateway like eWay?
What's the difference between them and what are the benefits? Here's how they work.
Third party payment providers like Paypal, Paymate etc
- When customers go to make a payment they are redirected from your store to the Paypal site to accept payment.
- Your customers either need an account with the or can enter their details manually as they go through checkout.
- Once customers pay they redirect back to your store to finish the order.
- The benefit to you is that you don't need to be as concerned about credit card security: the collection of credit card details and processing of them is handled by the Paypal website.
- The downside is that customers need to click 'return to your store' after they make a payment for your order information to be updated. If they just close Paypal you will receive the money but not know what has been ordered. You will then have to try and contact the customer or wait for them to contact you.
Payment gateways like eWay
- When customers go to make a payment they stay within your site. Your site collects their credit card details and passes them securely to your payment gateway provider, like eWay. The payment gateway provider processes the payment and contacts your merchant provider (your bank) to deposit the money in your account.
- The benefit to you is that your customers don't need to be redirected - they stay within your site.
- You will need an SSL Certificate on your website in order to encrypt credit card information when it is sent to the payment gateway provider and you will also need to ensure that your web hosting provider has a PCI DSS Compliant server environment if you are to meet the requirements of Visa and MasterCard. For example, Osc Works ecommerce package are hosted on high performance ecommerce-optimised servers that are maintained in a PCI DSS compliant environment and tested for compliance on a daily basis by McAfee Secure.
Waiting to launch: how do you hide pages from search engines?
Published in website design, shopping carts, shopping cart, html, ecommerce websites, ecommerce, content by oscworks |A support ticket recently came into the team from a customer wanting to know how they could block Google. With no other information, the tech support staff member thought this was an unusual request as it would be an exceptionally bold and baffling move to block the world's biggest search engine from visiting your site. When looking into the request, it turned out that the customer wanted to prevent Google from indexing their site before they had finished loading all of their products and getting things set up the way they want.
ozCart from Osc Works has a built-in maitenance mode to do this for you, but what if your website doesn't? How do you stop the search engines from finding and indexing every last crevice of your new website before you are ready to receive them?
Fortunately, the answer is simple. You can use the 'robots' tag in your HTML to prevent a search engine from indexing a page and searching for any other links in that page (and following them).
To add a robots tag into your site, go into the HTML and look for a section that starts . Somewhere between this and the end of the header section (where the HTML tag appears, insert the following line:
You need to insert this into every page that you don't want indexed just in case Google finds a page deep in your site and starts indexing from there.
When you are ready to launch, you remove this line from the code in your site and submit your site to the search engines. You're then live and can start building traffic and links.
What are your legal rights as an online store owner?
Published in web design, shopping cart, marketing, ecommerce websites, ecommerce, content, business by oscworks |Wherever you do business, you can never escape the law. If you're an Australian or New Zealand business selling online where can you go to find out what your legal rights and obligations are?
Naturally there is your business solicitor, but if you are looking to do some reading yourself, here are some useful resources you can consider:
- The ACCC website. The ACCC administer Australia's main fair trading law, The Trade Practices Act 1974, which applies no matter whether you are an online or offline business. Their website contains useful PDF downloads of fact-sheets and does have content on online store owners as well.
- The NZ equivalent of the ACCC is the Commerce Commission.
- WebLaw online. WebLaw is a website containing a range of legal resources for offline and online businesses. It has been developed by the legal department at Monash University. They have a whole section of their site devoted to Australian ecommerce law at the federal and state level too. Includes information on court rulings as well as information on the laws themselves.
- ozNetLaw website. ozNetLaw is a site designed specifically to help businesses understand their legal obligations when trading online. It has been sponsored by the Australian Attorney General's office and two leading private law firms. It has a huge range of fact sheets covering legal issues encountered with respect to email privacy, advertising, marketing and more.
- Other resources. NZ customers will be subject to different ecommerce laws so should consider resources such as WashLaw NZ Legal Rsources Site. Unfortunately, NZs Ministry of Economic Development decided to discontinue their site about ecommerce news so the information on their site will grow out of date with time.
Template or custom design?
Published in website design, web design, shopping carts, shopping cart, graphic design, ecommerce websites, ecommerce cart, ecommerce by oscworks |Without a memorable design, your ecommerce ideas run the risk of being missed by your target customers. You need something striking and relevant to the people you want to buy from you. Starting up a business usually means you are on a strict budget too, so you will not want to spend a fortune on a website that is fully built from scratch. But how do you trade off an off-the-shelf design versus a fully custom one?
To make your decision, think about the pros and cons of a template design versus a fully blank canvas. Some of these include:
Custom design
- Everything and anything can be changed. The designers and developers must reflect every aspect of your brand and change anything you are not completely happy with
- Sideboxes and images can be moved around to suit you
- The downside is the price. Most designers work on an hourly rate, and so do developers. Shopping Cart Software is not like HTML - code is required behind each element of the page to tell the cart what that component does. Making changes to the design layout often means rewriting code - which can be expensive. Expect to pay thousands of dollars for a fully custom design.
Template Design
- Benefit from bug fixes and the learnings of the designers from others who have used those designs before
- Benefit from customisations to those designs. For example, Osc Works ecommerce carts start with a collection of base template designs, but we employ graphic designers to customise the headers and colours of those templates to suit the business of the customer who chooses them.
- They are an easy way for even a beginner to build a professional looking ecommerce website quickly and painlessly.
- They are fast. Because you are building from a base design, you can get your website up and running very quickly compared to building something from scratch.
