Ecommerce Web Design Blog

A few hours ago Australian time, Barack Obama was sworn in as the new US president promising "new energy for America". The world's economy is responding - online even Amazon.com opened an Inaguration store selling items for those who would be attending the historic event. Barack Obama's ambition and focus is what has taken him to be the world's first black US president. What can you learn from him for your ecommerce store? Setting and achieving goals.

Your customers will be buying from you without being to see your products first, so it is very important to make your store inviting, professional looking and easy to use and to give your potential customers confidence that their personal information is secure. Part of this is writing good product descriptions, having great photos of your products, setting your prices right and making it easy for customers to contact you.  Another big part is setting goals.

Here are some tips for goal setting:

• Visualise where you want to be. Imagine yourself having already achieved those goals and ask yourself how did you get there? What did you do? This will help you understand the 'gap' between where you are now and where you want to be.
• Set goals that are going to be hard to achieve but not impossible. That will push you to 'stretch' out and push yourself to success
  
• Set some goals for 2009 and then break your goals down by month. You can then break these down to by week and even by day goals.
• Make your goals real for yourself by writing them on to a calendar. Mark out the key milestones that you must achieve in order to achieve your overall goal for 2009.
• Never give up. If there is a motivational line from a favourite song of yours, repeat it to yourself when you feel like you are losing your motivation.  Write your motivational line or quote on the top of your calendar.  Although its intended context was different, one great line comes from the Nickelback song 'Far Away' - "Give anything but I won't give up"

To stay focussed on your goals, make sure you manage stress levels and reward yourself when you do achieve your goals.

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)

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.

If you are looking to buy an ecommerce website to start an online shop, you may have been trying to decide what ecommerce features are best for you. If you looked at some of our previous posts, you may have been visiting your competitor's websites and those of other online shops that you like to shop at.

There's another place you can go to help determine what ecommerce features you can choose. Review sites.

Finding a shopping cart software review website that covers Australia is very rare, and one that includes a comprehensive selection of the top carts available even rarer. But you can take advantage of US and other international shopping cart software review sites to see the features that people trade off, get tips from other buyers and look at reviews of other carts. This gives you some insight into what you should be looking for when you contact Australian-based suppliers.

One best shopping cart review site that you may wish to consider is Shopping Cart Reviews.  If you look at the carts that receive top 4-5 star ratings you will see a number of features are considered important by the reviewers of those site. Some of the key ecommerce features they consider important are (we have all of these):

• No product limits
• Gift vouchers
• Discount coupons
• Wish lists
• Customer registration
• Digital goods (downloadable products)
• Product options (also called attributes or variations)
• Site search
• Search engine friendly
• Affiliates programme
• Optional product reviews
• Newsletters
• Content management
• Design features (customisable)
• Bulk uploading
• Great support
• Reports

We are pleased to say that yes, if ozCart was a cart sold by Americans and not Australians, we are very confident that our feature set would have us right at the top of their ratings!

Whatever you want to sell online, if you want the best return on your shopping cart investment, you will need to get noticed by the search engines. So how do you go about promoting your ecommerce website?

Firstly, make sure you have chosen a shopping cart provider that allows you to set the title and search engine 'meta tags' for your website's home page.  The best title and meta description for you will depend on your industry, what your customers search for and what your competitors do.

If changing the title and "meta tags" can't be done by you in the admin section of your website, make sure (before you buy your shopping cart) that their support team can do it for you.  Having a website title that includes the keywords your customers will be searching for can play a critical part in getting noticed by the search engines.

What are Meta Tags, Titles and Search Engine Keywords?

You may have read the last paragraph and be wondering what all the jargon means - words like 'meta tags', 'primary keywords', 'title'. It may help to have a quick overview of how search engines index websites (skip to the next section if you are already familiar with what these terms mean).

When someone puts a search term into a search engine like Google, the search engine attempts to return the most relevant results to the person searching. It looks in its own pre-created indexes to find the pages that have the best fit for that search term as well as the overall popularity of that page or site (usually measured by the number of quality links to that website).

The title of the page is what appears in the top bar of Internet Explorer or Firefox and is something that search engines weight heavily in returning results to customers - after all, a page's title describes the main content of that page.

Meta tags and meta descriptions are content hidden into the top part of each web page. They tell the search engines what content is on the page which helps them compile an accurate index.  Some shopping carts like ozCart allow you to set separate title, meta tags and meta descriptions for each product as well as each category in your store.  Search engines like Google often display the meta descriptions when they return results to people who search for a particular term (or keyword).

Getting noticed by search engines

With well defined meta tags, descriptions and titles for each of your pages, a nice tidy ('Search Engine Friendly') urls in the address bar of your browser can also be useful for indexing of your pages and making them memorable to your customers.  For example, both search engines and people will find it easier to use a url like http://www.yourshop.com.au/jewellery compared to http://www.yourshop.com.au/index.php?category_options=all&sort=3&category_id=820119.  

Once your title, meta tags and urls are under control, look at the text you have one each page. Does it use the search engine terms (keywords) your customers will be using to look for the products you sell? If not, edit your product descriptions appropriately. If your shopping cart allows you to have category descriptions then use them too.

You will also need to gather lots of useful links. Think about ways you can get credible, useful websites with good integrity to 'vote' for you by linking to you.  One place to start is with directories, but link exchanges, 'social bookmarks' (links from places like digg or facebook) are also useful options for you.