Ecommerce Web Design Blog

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.
  

How to compete against larger competition
When you are in a market competing against much larger competition it can be easy to get demoralised and feel like you are in a David v Goliath battle. Sometimes the larger competitors will be very afraid of smaller competitors entering and taking their margins and resort to 'competition bashing' instead of trying to compete on what they can offer.

Competitive environment: Are your competitors using "FUD" to frighten your potential customers?

If your competitors are using FUD ("Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt") to try to knock smaller competitors out of the market then it's usually safe to assume that those larger competitors have noticed the smaller players like you and they are probably having an impact on their bottom lines. You should always take FUD as a complement.

How do you recognise FUD?  When larger competitors have promotional statments on their website like "Don't buy from small competition - you don't know who you are buying from", "Unlike others in the marketplace we are not a small backyard business", "Who knows what you will get from a home based business", "Buy from an established business like us not a one man band", then you know that you and other smaller competitors in the market have been noticed and are probably having an impact on those businesses' bottom lines.

Even if your competitors are using FUD techniques (it's not common nowadays fortunately but still happens) you can still compete effectively with some lateral thinking and good business instinct.

So how do you compete with larger competitors? Some ideas...

1. Find niches. If you compete head to head with larger competitors who are well established you may struggle with margins and their established product range. But they are probably not covering every corner of the market. Find a profitable segment that is not well represented by your competition and focus on that.
2. Build loyalty. When your customers do buy from you keep them coming back. Make their buying experience excellent and deliver outstanding customer service.
3. Personalised service. Larger businesses find it hard to deliver personalised service especially online. Keep your customers informed of their order and go beyond what they expect if you can. How many times will the owner of a large online business be able to respond directly to customer enquiries for example? This will help you build loyalty (see above point)
4. Use promotional tactics to gain market share. Offer a popular product at a loss for a special promotional period to get customers to your store for example
5. Ensure you are using the best shopping cart possible for your business, that it has an appealing design and have loaded it up with all the marketing add-ons you can afford.

Remember larger competitors were smaller once. How did they grow? Chances are they faced similar challenges as they grew but overcame them by staying focussed. Take a leaf out of their book and stay focussed.

Our final words: As far as we are concerned, it is absolute rubbish to say that a small business can't compete as well as a larger one - especially online.  Online business levels the playing field in terms of competition - a great shopping cart combined with a great offer can help you be just as successful as the offerings of larger competitors if you market your product innovatively to the right market and build traffic. 

Also don't forget that some very large businesses are still owned by just one person - so if you're not registered as a company it doesn't mean that you're not a big player in the market. Customers buy on a number of things so do it better than your competitors and people will keep coming back.  Prove those who doubt you wrong!

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.

Whether you are selling online or offline, pricing your products is a key part of doing business.  What methods can you use to price your online products? Here are a few tips you may wish to consider.

Some common methods to price products include:

• Cost-based pricing (also called cost-plus pricing. this is the price that you paid for an item plus a mark-up)
• Market-based pricing (what your competition is selling items at)
• Value-based pricing (what your customers value your products at. You may apply a premium to reflect your brand, to depict quality or the value of your product in the marketplace)

In practice, the price you place on your products will often depend on a combination of the techniques above.  There are also many different strategies that you can use to price products depending on your objectives in the market.

For example, if you are a new business online you might run an introductory sale, you may have some products of popular items priced equal or below the competition to get people to your store and other products priced using value or cost-based pricing. 

Some  online businesses also use a technique called a loss leader of pricing one product below cost to match or better competition, to get people into your online store and looking around. If they buy that item and you can cross-sell it with others, you could build up a sizeable cart and make a profit overall, even if one item is sold at a loss. 

Whatever you do, make sure you look at the prices of your products as a whole and not only individually, as it will depend on your competitors, your products, your shopping cart website, your advertising and your brand as to whether customers will be prepared to pay your prices.

For a wary online consumer, one way to assess whether an ecommerce website is safe and secure to purchase from is to look at whether the site is kept up-to-date.

A well designed website that has a good selection of products, an easy-to-use checkout system, an active newsletter and is obviously well maintained is more likely to inspire confidence in the buyer that the products they order from you will be of high quality and actually get delivered to them.  Keeping your shopping cart website up-to-date by reflecting seasons and events (such as Christmas, Chinese New Year, Valentines, Easter,  etc) and sending out a regular newsletter to your subscribers/customers can therefore be a big influencer in whether your customers keep buying from you.

At the start of each year, mark on a calendar or in your online diary your planned promotions, events and seasonal messages for the year.  Allow your sales,  promotions or seasonal messages to run for at least two weeks prior to each event to allow people to find you and buy from you during your sale period.  For big sales, you may need to run them for four weeks to get maximum benefit. Each promotion will depend on the time of year, what you sell and your industry - there is no set formula.  Also, make sure you stay aware of what your competitors are doing as they will probably be keeping track of you.