Ecommerce Web Design Blog

Every year, consumers in Australia, New Zealand and all around the world spend up big at Christmas in stores and online too. With online traffic at high and growing levels, you can expect Christmas 2008 to be a big one. For example, in New Zealand Visa International survey results released in October 2007 showed that over three quarters of New Zealanders spend online - with a strong proportion of spending being overseas in Australia because of the strength of the New Zealand dollar. Given the similarities between the two countries, similar figures may be expected in Australia.

If you're thinking of getting your business online to take advantage of Christmas spending sprees, now is the time to start thinking about it.

At Osc Works you could have your fully professional ecommerce online store up and running in just a few business days, fully configured for doing business in Australia or New Zealand. Here are some great online ideas for sites or promotions that you might want to consider:

• Christmas Decorations and wrapping paper - save your customers the hassle of going to stores, or offer specialised christmas crafts not available in stores
• Children's fashions - while in many families adults only give small Christmas gifts to eachother, children often receive gifts from many people in the family. Children's fashion is big business on auction sites, so why not have your own ecommerce store too?
• Office Gifts service - contact wholesalers of your choice and offer direct purchases for customers of gifts for office employees. If you are friendly with a senior corporate executive, you could encourage a whole department or company to purchase their 'secret santas' from you
• Online Christmas cards - at the last minute, expats or travellers often go online looking for christmas cards to send. While there is plenty of choice in stores, if you're a graphic designer or anyone artistic with Photoshop skills, you could produce cards that can be easily printed, sold online and dispatched. Or downloaded as a PDF for them to email on. Sure beats generic or North American based ecards.
• Gift buying service - if you like shopping this is for you. People purchase from you a voucher indicating how much they want to spend and then you (or your shopping delegates) purchase gifts on their behalf. Your ecommerce site could include a survey tool to find out more about the person you're shopping for, your cart could just have free text for your customers to tell you about the person. This business can extend to a Valentines Day or birthdays gift buying service too after the xmas season is over. Ask us about the Gift Wrapping options in ozCart stores.
• Crafts - whatever your hobby from pottery to painting, selling your products and services online could net you a tidy profit this Christmas. People looking for something unique and interesting for their special someone will be sure to be using the Internet to be looking for gift ideas. If you're online, you could be cashing in on those searches.
• Personalised Santa Letters - great for hamper stores - Children love to receive personalised letters from Santa and if you're a talented artist or graphic designer you could profit. If you're running a gift hamper store, these could be a great addition and a way to drive additional sales this
• Christmas Christmas lights - many people like to make a real statement with lights on their home. Run an online competition where people log in and vote - and entrants can purchase discounted lights for their home from you.
• You could sell candles and lights at other times in the year.
• Already have an online business? here's a promotional idea - shipping discounts or free shipping days - to drive additional sales consider running promotions on shipping costs. Shipping may be a small percentage of the cost of your products to you, but is often a cost that makes the difference to consumers.

Whatever your business idea, make sure you have your distribution strategy carefully planned. One of the biggest fears from customers and the complaints they will about ordering online are finding that perfect something for their loved one and then it not being delivered in time for Christmas. Make sure you are clear to customers about your service guarantee (and have this arranged with your distributors or courier company in advance).

Merry Christmas and happy selling. If you don't have your own ecommerce online store yet, it's not too late. Osc Works could help you have your own shopping cart solution and be online in just a few business days. View our ecommerce solutions page to find out more.

Ecommerce is becoming as important to business as a telephone, fax and email address, and you're only limited by your ideas and the effort you want to put into it. Here's why having your own online store is what you need.

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:

• You could sell online advertising space to other businesses

• 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

• 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

• You can continually update content on your site for no additional costs - whereas updating brochures or flyers will cost you money to reprint them

• Your website becomes a 24/7 salesperson for your business, open tirelessly for your potential customers

• 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

• Check out our Ecommerce Xmas Ideas too.

1. Make your products easy to find. Your shopping cart software comes with the ability to set up categories so it's wise to take advantage of that. Making it easy for customers to find your products will enhance their shopping experience.

2. Make payment processing easy. Let your customers pay you in multiple ways - bank transfers, simple payment systems like Paypal or Paymex, or through online payment gateways (which allow credit card processing in real time and keep customers on your site through the payment process). The more payment processing options you can accept, the better.

3. Don't forget to promote your site. Setting up a great site with a cool domain name is one thing, but how will your customers know about it? Think about purchasing a SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) ecommerce add-on so you can use friendly names in your URLs which are easier indexed by search engines, and better remembered by customers. Submit your domain name and URL to the search engines about every six weeks to make sure they keep coming back. And if you have a marketing budget, put your domain name on your flyers, business cards, shop front, posters, newspaper ads and everything else. Banner ads and affiliate programmes could also help you.

4. Add your personality to your site. Give your potential customers a real sense of who you are, where you're based and what you believe in. Include a photo of your office if you have one and physical contact details. Impersonal or missing About Us pages could prevent you from achieving sales. Anything you can do to bring a sense of personality to your site through your About us page or the way you write your descriptions, could help your site be memorable. Include links to your privacy and returns policy.

5. Ask customers if they would like to sign up for a newsletter - but only after a sale is made. Customers hate having the sale process interrupted to answer questions - if you annoy your customers as they go through the checkout, they're less likely to be satisfied by the sale experience.

6. Let people know how to contact you offline: If something goes wrong and customers want to be able to contact you, they'll want to know somewhere to write or a phone number to call. If you don't include this information in your site, they could be wary of buying from you.

7. Display good quality, large photos of your products. Would you buy something in a supermarket by only looking at it from across the aisle? Putting good quality, higher resolution images of your products on your site can be time consuming, but well worth it as your customers will probably want to see what they are getting. Make sure the photos show the products in their best possible light.

8.Try creating packages of items: Pre-made packages suited to particular customer groups or occasions can help sell your products and move less popular items. Put yourself in your customer's mind and think interesting and appealing names for your package. Sell it at a slightly discounted price than purchasing the individual items that make up the package. If you sell packages, try to sell 'light' or simplified versions of your products - this works well if you sell electronic products like books, reports or music.

9. Purchase a cross sell module: Accessories are a great money-spinner for retail stores, so why not take advantage of them on your site too? If you purchase an ecommerce add-on for your site that allows cross selling functionality, you could increase your average sale amount for every customer who goes through the check-out. A simple 'you might also like these products' could help

10. Get your site ready for Xmas early: Traffic's up during the holiday season, so get it coming to your site. Email your top 20 or 50 customers with a discount coupon, or suggest items they may be interested. If you hold stock for your site, start purchasing it now to make sure you have extras in time for the Christmas season. Look out for wholesale options.

Ecommerce could help you turn your website from an electronic business card into an electronic store. But is ecommerce right for your business?

Beautiful website graphics by themselves won't help you sell your products and services online. But ecommerce will. Reach out to new customers with minimal financial investment and overheads. An ecommerce store is a low-cost and low-risk way of gaining new customers. Osc Works ozCart shopping cart stores are secure, flexible, convenient and very easy-to-manage. With low overheads they're an ideal way for small businesses or home businesses to expand. They're also ideal for large corporate customers. Here are some of the benefits of ecommerce to businesses like yours. It's good to consider how important these factors are to you before deciding to go ahead with an ecommerce website or not.

• Faster payment methods for your customers. An ecommerce website gives the customer instant confirmation that their transaction has been processed. They don't have to fill out a form and email you with an enquiry and wait an unknown time to get a reply. For customers purchasing things in a hurry this can make the difference between a sale for you or your competitors.
• Responsive customer service. There are many ways an ecommerce website can help you improve customer service. For example, it allows you post frequently asked questions or help to common tasks in a knowledge base. This saves your customers time queuing for service on a phone. It allows you to respond to enquiries promptly via email, or also allows you assign tracking numbers to the goods you ship, you can also allow customers to track their purchases on the way to them.
• Ecommerce could help you reduce your costs of doing business. Through reducing the costs of order processing and the time involved and in many cases reducing the costs of holding stock, hiring staff, reduced office space required and day-to-day costs like faxes and couriers that can be replaced by email.
• Faster order processing. Electronic ordering is more efficient than manual processing so can get goods to customers faster and save you a lot of processing hassle. Increase customer loyalty. Give customers a great experience and they'll keep coming back to you, whether they're local, from another state or international. With ecommerce features like tailored pricing, customer group discounts, pricing specials and advanced features like gift vouchers available you can keep customers repeat purchasing.
• You can also contact your customers with marketing techniques like specials for Christmas like 2 for 1 offers, discounts or gift vouchers to keep them purchasing.
• Modify your products for new markets with ease. If you purchase a translation of your content into another language, your Osc Works websites have the ability to display your products using multiple languages, automatically adjust for GST whether customers are in your country or overseas and you can determine what currency you wish to trade in.
• Online is great for marketing. The costs of advertising online (through things like Google Adwords) are often significantly cheaper and more targeted than advertising in newspapers on radio or using flyers.

Just about anyone selling anything can benefit from ecommerce. In Australia and New Zealand it could give you a real edge over your competitors too, because few businesses have really recognised the potential of the Internet yet. Talk to Osc Works about how an ecommerce website could help you.

"Why is ozCart the right shopping cart software for my Australian business?" Here's why.

There are a lot of ecommerce packages the market, but what where do you find tailored shopping cart software for Australia? OzCart from Osc Works is the answer.

We offer websites that are complete shopping carts, and include:

• Australian GST system set up and ready-to-go
• Australian currency pre-configured
• Australian payment options: eWay, Paypal, Paymate, Payment Express (DPS), DirectOne, e-path and more. Other solutions such as Commonwealth Bank CommWeb and the NAB Payment Gateway may also be available on request.
• Web Design by Australian designers for Australian businesspeople
• An easy to use website
• Australia Post Delivery Rate Calculator - which you can optionally use
• A secure platform to do business on with the ability to use SSL encryption in your checkout (this comes free for 12 months with our Platinum package)
• Australian support staff, at your service 7 days a week, 365 days a year
• Respect! A lot of our customers come to us after having bought a cart from other providers. They appreciate our respectful and professional attitude, the huge range of features ozCart packages offer and our affordable prices
• Performance! Your website being hosted on a high-performance secure server that is actively monitored and managed by server administrators 24/7.

An international customer? Our product is usually configured for Australia as that's where most of our customers are. But if you're from New Zealand, the UK, USA or beyond, we can configure ozCart for you too. Just ask us.

Want to find out more? Visit our shopping carts features and pricing page, our main ecommerce page or you can simply buy ozCart now.