Ecommerce Web Design Blog

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 conditions clearly posted and easy to read? Does the website look professional and function easily? Is the site on a fast performing server or is it very, very slow? Online, trust can be a crucial factor to sales success. So what are you doing?

One of the absolute key factors above the ones just listed is whether the website's management is easy to contact. A big customer fear, and a reason why some people shy away from auction sites, is that they fear thy will buy something online, receive it broken and not be able to return it for a replacement. Customer service is absolutely essential in an online world, so if you want to be successful you need to make it easy for customers to contact you and be up front about who you are. So if you're going to publish a telephone number for example, don't make it a mobile phone number. Make it a 1300, 1800 or landline number with an answering system so they can still leave a message and you get back to them if you are not available.

Here are six key tips for your ecommerce website's contact details to help you build consumer confidence and trust:

• Publish your business name and PO Box or address
• Publish your business ABN if you are in Australia or your GST number if you are in New Zealand
• Offer a 1300 or 1800 number instead of a mobile phone number
• Put a link to your terms and conditions clearly on your site. Read them and ensure they do not sound too complex or legalese. You can still write clear, consise and legally binding terms and conditions using sentences with short words and full stops!
• Publish your privacy and returns policy on your website
• Publish your policy about information security - how do you protect customers? Are you PCI DSS compliant? (if you are accepting credit cards this is now mandatory)

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 have also changed our affiliate programme so that our existing customers can choose to earn credits on their account or be paid in cash!

Here's how you could earn:

• Join our affiliate programme - you can do this whether you are a customer or not
  
• Put an Osc Works affiliate banner on your website or an affiliate text link OR give your referral customers the affiliate link to click on when they come to our site to purchase.

 After the sale has gone through, there is a waiting time of 30 days to make sure that the order is properly processed and that the customer stays with us. Then we pay you!

Reasons to choose Osc Works and ozCart

•  Our servers are PCI DSS compliant. This means that provided you meet the business rules for compliance you will be complaint with Visa and MasterCard's security standards. This is now mandatory for all businesses accepting credit cards online. Visa and MasterCard are imposing heavily penalties for non complaint businesses (and shopping carts)
• We have 7 days a week, 365 days a year support
• Huge range of Australian & NZ payment and postage modules (and more in the pipeline). International options may be available on request.
• Search Engine Friendly Features
• Wholesaler and Customer Management Features
• Wishlists
• Run your own affiliate programme without paying to join a third party programme
• Professional design with colours and images customised to your business

If a hacker tries to gain access to your website or claims that they have, what can you do? Who can you report it to? Hacking is a very serious computer crime so there are a number of places you can go from your hosting provider to the FBI to attempt to trace the hackers and have them stopped.

First, report the hacking attempt to your website hosting provider.  They will be able to trace the activity of the hacker on your server and will probably be able to block them from returning to your site, and possibly the entire server. They may also be able to reverse-lookup the IP address of the hacker and tell you what Internet Service Provider they are using. You can then write to the ISP and report them there. Most ISPs and hosting companies have an 'Abuse' email address or contact form to report inappropriate behaviour of their customers.

Next, search for the hackers name on Google.  This is a fantastic resource for you as many hackers publish their hacks as trophys.  Visit these hack sites and see what you can find out about the hacker who is attempting to infiltrate you. If you find a website for the hacker you can then do a number of things:

• Look up the domain name of the hacker on a website like whois.sc. This will give you a lot of information about who registered the domain name and what company it was registered with.  If the details are fake or incomplete, this is often against domain registration rules in most countries so you may be able to report them for inappropriate domain name use.  At a minimum this will help you trace them as their domain name provider will ask them to update their details, or even better they may be penalised for inappropriate details.
• A whois lookup will usually be able to also tell you who the hosting provider of the website is. You can then write to the hosting provider and inform them that one of their customers is using their account for hacking - a serious crime that most hosting providers will terminate an account for if it can be proven to be true.
• You can also report the hacker to the police. The Federal Police in Australia have a computer crime division with contacts in many countries of the world. If you have actually been hacked or defrauded online, it is a crime against your business and therefore a crime in Australia.
• Report the site to Google so their site is not indexed
• If the crime is international or your website is on a US-based server, you can also report your crime directly to the FBI computer crime website. They have a detailed online form for you to fill out and take every computer crime report very seriously.

Preventing crime: what can you do?
Given the profitability of shopping carts , they can be a target for computer criminals if they are not kept in a secure and PCI DSS complaint environment. Take advantage of any website tracking software that monitors the visitors to your site in real time (if your shopping cart or website provider offers such a service). 

Keep your own computer secure too. Make sure you have up-to-date virus protection and anti-spyware software installed so hackers can't track you logging into the administration section of your shopping cart website and have a firewall installed if you have one.

If you choose a reputable ecommerce website provider who takes security seriously and you know what to do if someone attempts to hack you.

As we move into 2009, one of your new year's resolutions may have been to start the online business you have been planning for some time.  One of the key questions you will face as you start an online whop is what shopping cart software to use.  Many of the carts available in Australia tout many seemingly powerful and useful features, so how do you decide what ecommerce features will be right for your business?

Our advice to you is to try them out.  Get a piece of paper and visit the websites of your competitors. Shop around their categories and get a feel for how their pages are presented and whether as a customer you would find it easy to use their site.  How does their website design look? Would you put products in your cart? If you do put products in the cart is it easy to do? Try a few of your competitor's sites and then shop online at your favourite online shops to see how things are done in other industries. Make sure you write down the things that you particualarly like and don't. This will help you compile your list.

Once you have reviewed other shopping cart sites, try to compile a list of the 5 most important features for you.  With so many features to choose from, it will be hard to choose only 5, but this will help you compile your shortlist of websites to look at in more detail.  To help you further with your list, here is a list of some of the most commonly requested features by our customers:

• Customised web designs
• The ability to add zoomed in or enlarged product images
• Your own affiliate programme
• Wish lists
• A range of product payment methods like bank transfer, gateways (like eWay or ANZ eGate)
• A secure payment environment that meets Visa and MasterCard's PCI DSS compliance security standards

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.
  

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.