Ecommerce Web Design Blog

Choosing an appropriate colour scheme for your website is a crucial part of personalising the site for your business. Even more importantly, an appropriate colour scheme can help you attract customers, keep them on your website longer, and buy more products and services from you.

How do you go about choosing the colours for your website? The place to start is to put yourself in the minds of your target customers. If you were them what colours would project the image about your business that would help you read the product descriptions, have positive feelings about the business and buy? The colour schemes that appeal to your customers may not be the same ones that appeal to you, so putting yourself in your customers shoes is crucial.

Some things to think about in choosing colours are:

• Colours that are too close together in terms of brightness can cause acolours problem for your customers when they print out your webpages, as colours of similar brightness may appear the same shade of grey when printed in black and white.
• Many research studies show that dark text on a light background is significantly easier to read on a screen than light text on a dark background. If you are going to select a dark coloured background it's generally better to still display your products on a white background even if the main background colour is different.
• Some people are colour blind, with difficulty in distinguishing green being the most common colour challenge. Since web colours are made up of a combination of red, green and blue, this difficulty in distinguishing green can make it difficult for people to distinguish similar colours like yellow, and orange. Keep similar colours to a minimum in your site.
• Your site is for your customers, not you. Keep it easy to read and you're giving your customers the most chance of buying from you.

Yes you need ecommerce. Why? Ask yourself this: If ecommerce wasn't profitable, why are so many ecommerce e-tailers appearing?

A lot of local businesses such as market sellers, arts and crafts shops, clothing shops and corner stores believe that they don't need ecommerce and simply rely on the physical traffic they receive at local markets. If the business is content on limited sales and limited growth potential, then that's fine. But those are the types of businesses who really need ecommerce the most. Why not make sales when you're not at the markets? You could sell while you're asleep!

Especially in travel accommodation and tourism, businesses are no longer able to simply rely on passing foot traffic, referrals and telephone business to succeed. When was the last time you selected and booked a holiday without using the Internet? Last minute booking websites make being online essential to compete for the lucrative holiday accommodation market and to get a slice of mind for the travel dollar.

In Australia and New Zealand, holiday destinations in remote locations are finding that adding ecommerce to their website not only allows them to be found by overseas tourists in North America (who are heavy users of search engines for travel and accommodation bookings) but get access to the lucrative domestic holiday market that is growing heavily at the moment.

Don't be deterred from the past - learn from it

Many people say that they are deterred from setting up an ecommerce website because of the failure of so many dotcom ecommerce websites in the late 1990s. Those failures were because those companies offered poor customer service, poor navigation and were not prepared to put in the effort selecting the products to list, setting their prices, writing appealing descriptions and updating their site regularly. You can learn from this and make your site a success.

Ecommerce has the opportunity to make money

The bottom line here is that if you're committed to putting in the effort, ecommerce websites can make you money with little cash input and ongoing management. If you build a site with high traffic, an appealing design and good products you can eventually sell advertising on your sites too.

If you're not online, you're losing money. It's that simple.

To get started with your own ecommerce shopping cart website, talk to Osc Works today.

How do you make money from an ecommerce website? What kind of e-commerce solution do you need?

Why are so many businesses adding ecommerce to their website? New ecommerce websites are appearing every day and turning retailers into etailers. What's more, many existing businesses are realising that they need to have an ecommerce website to stay ahead of their competition.

Luckily it's not too late to get online and there is tremendous potential for any business to grow and reach new customers through taking advantage of customers who want to buy it now online.

How do you make money from an ecommerce website? What kind of ecommerce solution do you need? How much money you can make will largely depend on the effort you're prepared to put into selecting and listing products, writing appealing product descriptions, choosing your prices, checking out what your competitors are doing and ensuring your site is easy to navigate, leads customers easily through the checkout process, and the order fulfilment process is not too onerous for you.

Done well, an ecommerce website can provide significant financial returns with limited initial investment and ongoing involvement.

How do you make money from ecommerce? Here are some ideas for an online store.

What makes a great ecommerce website business?

Why are so many businesses adding ecommerce to their website? New ecommerce websites are appearing every day and turning retailers into etailers. What's more, many existing businesses are realising that they need to have an ecommerce website to stay ahead of their competition.

While almost anything can be sold online (look at the success of auction sites), some things are particularly suited to online stores as they help small local businesses compete on a level footing with huge multinational corporations.

That's because no matter where you are physically located, in the online world people visit the same places to find things - search engines and directories. If you have a good site, make it easy for customers and have outstanding customer service, people will keep coming back.

Things that are particularly well suited to ecommerce websites include:

• B&B, Hotels and Holiday destinations in remote destinations

• Arts and craft stores

• Hand made jewellery

• Artists - protecting your identity online

• Market stall sellers - sell on the days you're not at the market

• Costume hire companies - let customers find and hire costumes from the safety of their home

• Pizza delivery and fast food - if you deliver a website can be as valuable as your phone

• Gift hamper stores - especially with Christmas coming up

• Book and DVD stores

• Sports retailers

• Naturalists, Homeopaths, Massage Therapists

• Fashion and lingerie

• Computer software suppliers - find new customers, especially if you're a small local software producer

• Florists - reach out to customers sending flowers who don't live locally Selling clearance products from other failed businesses

• Setup and Sell businesses - creating an online business, running it for a short period of time until it's established and selling it. This is a business strategy used by Investment Banks and Property Developers to great effect. By buying, trading and selling website businesses you could too

• Ecommerce resellers - you could buy ecommerce websites at wholesale rates and sell them to your own customers as if they were produced by you. If you're interested in this, Osc Works is leading the way in Australia for ecommerce website wholesaling.

Basically anything that can be viewed online makes a great opportunity, especially for people working from home. And if you have multiple sites you can advertise the other sites using banner adverts on your first site - further driving traffic and links to your site too.

How to get started - making money

Your site can make money if you put in the effort up front. Some things to think about are:

• Give your customers great customer service through having an easy-to-navigate online store, a prompt and easy-to-use payment system and efficient follow up after an order

• Ensure your ecommerce website is easy to manage and has the features you want

• Choose an ecommerce provider who can offer an easy and secure payment method for your customers.

• If your site becomes big enough you may be able to make money from it through selling online banner ads - or allowing search engines to put paid Google Adwords placements on your site.

• It pays to think about your long term needs rather than short term ones. A lot of businesses make the mistake of building a simple website with the view to clipping ecommerce on to it later. But those businesses invariably end up having to rebuild their site - it's usually easier and more cost effective to build an ecommerce site first and then turn off the payment functionality until you need it - that way you can showcase your products and it's an easy transition when you're ready to trade

• Also check out our Ecommerce Xmas ideas.

It's easy to get online if you approach starting a website in the same way as if you were opening a physical store - choose your partners carefully and make sure the ecommerce solution you choose meets your needs before you spend money on it.

Avoid Auction Listing and Success Fees

Setting up an ecommerce site usually comes down to answering a simple question: do you want to keep paying listing and success fees or have your own website and control your content and profits.

If you're a small business selling a niche product then auction sites are an easy way to get started in business as they have access to sometimes thousands or millions of potential customers on their doorstep. But auction sites have some severe downsides:

• You have to pay a listing fee for every product you showcase for sale

• Every time you make a sale, you have to pay a success fee - often a percentage of your sale price

• Some customers may not view your business as reputable as it does not have its own online store - this could limit your growth potential

• You miss out on potential customers who do not visit auction sites.

Having your own ecommerce website is easy to get started. For example, at Osc Works, we help businesses get online through developing a professionally designed site based on their logo and business colours, offer a huge range of advanced features like gift vouchers and have an easy-to-use content management system for adding products and updating their prices. We also offer a payment plan to help cash-strapped businesses get online without a significant up-front investment.

Once your site is online, you'll be in control of the profits you make as it will be your products that are listed in any way you want, and you won't pay success fees every time you make a sale.

Auction websites are a great way to start if you plan on selling a couple of items at home, but for someone serious about growing and running a successful business, an ecommerce website is far superior.

Every business is different, but there are many examples of thriving Internet-based businesses that have been run on only a small number of staff, often between 1-4.

Can a successful online shop be run from home buy yourself? Of course it can. It will take commitment to making your business a success. It does not mean just because you have a website that people will come. And when they do come it does not mean they will buy just because you are there. Just like a physical shop, you need to put in the time to promote your store, and when customers do buy give them an outstanding customer experience. If you do that well, that will often mean being available to answer questions, sending out products promptly and managing returns. It is really hard to do this and have a full time job as well, so if you are serious about an online store, you will usually need to be doing it full time - or hire at least one staff member full time to work on these things.

 As your business venture takes off, you will usually need more staff - particularly handling items such as accounting, chasing up non payments, answering customer questions, sending out your products and managing any returns.

Luckily, selling online does not mean that you need to have an army of staff. That is one of the benefits of an online shop - lower overheads than a physical shop. If you have a physical shop, opening an online shop is an excellent way to utilise your existing staff and reach out to new customers, especially in times business in your physical store is slower than usual.