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.
  

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)

How many times have you entered a search term into Google, and the first result that comes up has some predefined sublinks underneath? For example putting oscworks into your browser reveals the sitelinks currently defined for our website:

You can see we currently have links to our Shopping Carts, Features and Layouts page for our ecommerce shopping carts as well as some other pages that Google considers relevant to users. These are some of the most frequently visited pages on our website as well as the pages that we refer to ourselves as relevant in terms of the way links are set up on our site.

Once you have sitelinks, they are updated on a weekly basis and can frequently change. You can't control what pages do come up, but if a page comes up that you don't want indexed with a Sitelink, you can block that page from having sitelinks by blocking it in Google's webmaster tools.

How Google determines which pages  have Sitelinks and whether your site has them or not is a closely guarded secret by Google. But here are some things we have observed about Sitelinks:

• You have to rank #1 on the term where the sitelinks appear, so in most cases they only come up when you search for your business name. There are very few searches in any industry where sitelinks are given
• Your domain usually must be two years or more old
• The pages you link to frequently in your site you are designating as important. These pages have a higher chance of coming up as sitelinks.
• Ensure you have a very clear page navigation structure and you don't have too many navigation links. Put your key categories in your sideboxes and use subcategories where appropriate. If you use too many navigation links, then Google (and your visitors) will have trouble working out what the most important pages in your site are
• Make sure your site has lots of links from relevant sites back to you. This ensures that your site is considered relevant as a whole (and therefore worthy of sitelinks).

If you don't have

When you visit a website on the Internet that you want to come back to, most browsers will let you mark it as a favourite or bookmark. But what if you want to share your list of bookmarks with other people? This is where the practice of social bookmarking comes in. Social bookmark websites allow people to keep lists of favourite sites on publicly available lists on the Internet and tag them with keywords. This makes them useful to share with other people or come back to themselves later.

Because they are publicly available, you can visit other people's lists as well to see what sites they find useful. Search engines can visit these lists too and index them in the search engines. This means social bookmarking can play a big part in helping your website rank in the search engines.

There are a huge number of social bookmarking sites available. Facebook and MyYahoo are probably two of the most well known social news and social bookmarking sites on the Internet, but there are many others too: digg, del.icio.us, Stumble Upon and Technorati are other examples.

How can you take advantage of social bookmarking for your search engine marketing activities? Here are a few things you can do:

• Write useful and interesting content that will make people want to bookmark those pages and come back to them. Use a blog if possible, as some social bookmarking sites focus only on blog/news links and not products.

• Offer innovative products with clear, concise product descriptions so people will bookmark those pages to show others your products (or come back and buy them)

• Add a social bookmarking toolbar to your pages or sideboxes (like the one below this article) to make it easy for your website's visitors to bookmark you. The easier you make it, and the more relevant the bookmarking sites you choose to feature are to your target customers, the more likely you are to be bookmarked.

Whatever business you are in, competition is part of doing business.  Knowing who your competition is the first step in being able to ensure your pricing structure is appropriate for your market, and knowing who else your potential customers may be buying from.

There are a number of  strategies you can use to identify and research what your competition are doing. Here are just some of them:

Online

• Google is your friend. Search for your industry by name or any of the top competitors you know about and see who is on page on. Visit their sites and read their about us pages. See if they are running any specials. Look at their product ranges and pricing. How does it compare to yours?
• Use Google to see how many links your competitors have to them. Type link:www.competitorswebsite.com.au into Google and it will return some of the sites that link to them. Repeat this exercise in Yahoo (the command there is linkdomain:www.competitorssite.com.au) as Yahoo often reports more links than Google.
• Use Yahoo Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.yahoo.com) to see how many pages have been indexed on your competitors. Yahoo is a more useful tool for seeing indexed pages as it often reports more of the pages that it has found than Google does.

Offline

• Yellow Pages - look at what your competitors are saying about themselves in the Yellow Pages. How big are their ads? What do they say? Is your ad there too?
• Business Associations - joining an industry or manufacturers group may give you a wealth of information about your competitors and what they are doing
  
• Libraries - the library is an underutilised resource for researching your competition.  If your competitors are publicly listed companies, you may be able to obtain their annual reports from the library. You may also find business directories (from all around the world) and for government industries you may even find market research reports.
• Buy from your competitors. If you are a business, buy from your competitors as a personal customer. Listen to how they sell themselves and what they give you. Compare it to your own. What kind of experience do they create? How did they make you feel as a customer?