It’s safe to say that ecommerce is something of a big business. For any company looking to run part or all of their operations online, having an ecommerce element to their website is absolutely crucial, especially when you consider the models of success posed by retailers such as Amazon and EBay. Ecommerce has been around for a while and it’s certainly changed a lot in that time, with one of the biggest industry revolutions happening in 2007.

That revolution came in the form of a company called Magento. Even before the company came into existence, the term ‘open source’ had been used around the internet to describe various things, but arguably it was Magento ecommerce software that really helped to change the way open source solutions were perceived. It certainly had an effect, with online giant EBay buying the company due to its revolutionary way of working.

The achievement of Magento ecommerce software was to create a platform that gave vendors complete control over their online business while making it really easy for customers to buy their products. For instance, Magento allows you to customise the store to suit the clients that are most likely to use it, as well as to customise keywords for each individual product.

This offers many benefits for the vendors who use Magento ecommerce software. For instance, it allows you to update products easily, create priority lists and price filters. This allows customers to search for products in specific price bands and filter out everything else. They can also create wish lists of products extremely easily and when it comes to payment and processing, the whole thing is very easy: with minimal effort, they can send different products to different addresses. Making the process of using an ecommerce platform so easy encourages customers to use it more, which is ultimately good for the vendors – it helps to encourage more profits, too.

Another benefit of Magento ecommerce software is the fact it is still open source. This means that it is open to constant feedback from users and it is always evolving – always improving. Plus it is still free to download and use, which is a plus when many vendors have a limited budget but still need a quality product. Magento has also recently released a mobile phone platform, continuing their journey as one of the hottest ecommerce platforms around.

Magento is also on track to become the top ecommerce platform in the world: it is currently racking up around 100,000 orders every day. It is also regularly adding new features and adapting to new situations, a virtue of its open source nature. And the journey isn’t over yet. Magento is still evolving and in the grand scheme of things, it is still a relatively new development. It will certainly be exciting to see where it goes next.

For years it’s never really been an option to advertise your business online without actually having a website to direct visitors to. Why would you want to I hear you ask? Well, perhaps you run a small bakery business where you don’t necessarily need a website yet you still want to show up when visitors search for ‘bakery in bournemouth’.

Thanks to the new advertising service launched by Google, AdWords Express, it’s now possible to send visitors to your free Google Places page. Google Places is a business listing service which allows you to add contact information, opening hours, photos, reviews etc. for your business. For a demo, check out the Media Lounge Google Places page.

This service is particularly exciting due to the volume of mobile searches being performed. Currently, around 20% of Google searches are local, for example, ‘plumber in bournemouth’. This figure is rising as more and more people are using smart phones and searching whilst out and about.

AdWords Express only works with local searches and allows you to advertise your business on the main Google Search results or on Google Maps. It works in the same way as Google AdWords so you create your adverts and choose your keywords. You only pay when a visitor clicks on your advert and your position depends on how much you’re prepared to pay for a click and how relevant Google thinks your advert is (known as the Quality Score).

AdWords Express is designed to be simple and easy to setup. You can be up and running in a few minutes with no online advertising experience or knowledge required. When setting up your ads you provide the following information:

• Choose your business category
• Write your adverts
• Set your monthly budget
• Create your Google Places page or point to your existing page

By choosing a category that best suits your business, you don’t need to spend time researching your keywords. Google does all this for you. It also manages your campaigns for you and optimises your adverts automatically to ensure your conversion improves over time.

AdWords Express is a great way to get started with online advertising and is perfect if you don’t want to spend money on a website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most critical factors for any eCommerce website, of course we can build you the “Selfridges” of websites, but this won’t guarantee you a place on Oxford Street! We have listed some tips you can use to help your Magento Ecommerce website climb the Google ranks and outshine your competitors.

1. Simple URL’s: You should change your products and category URL’s to include names rather than dynamic ID’s, Magento allows you to specify each URL on the product and category “general” tab.

2. Unique Keyword Meta tags: Your meta title and description is one of the fist things a search engine will read when crawling your website, therefore make sure your meta title has your prominent keyword ONCE at the start, and the full title is between 30 – 50 characters. Your meta description should be no more than 150 characters and briefly describe your page content whilst mentioning you keyword just once. Magento allows you to set meta data for each page using the meta tab in each product, CMS page and category editor.

3. Original Content: One of Google’s main focuses, since the launch of Panda, is fresh original content, think about it, if Google has the choice of a site with content updated daily or one which updates once in month, which site do you think is the more relevant? Talk about your products and services openly in an informative and educational manner, this is NOT another chance to promote your sale!

4. Product Reviews: We often install “Review Booster” to a number of our ecommerce stores, this emails the customer a few days after their purchase and offers them a returning discount code if they complete a quick review. You get a review, you often make another sale and the customer gets money off. Win Win Win.

5. Google Shopping: Google shopping is another free tool to utilise and allows your products, images and prices to feature on Google’s shopping pages. Your Magento ecommerce store can list all your products in just a few clicks and monitors it’s performance with it’s syncing function.

6. Visible Content: Google can now see where you’ve hidden content on the page, so if you’ve sacrificed text to show off images, or hidden text behind “read more” buttons this should now be reverted. Ideally you need 500 words of content on your landing page to get Googlebot excited!

7. Image Optimization: Site speed has always been important, but Google now adds more weight to this and your speed is quite often reflective in your Google ranking. Why not optimise images, specially large banner images, these should be around 100 – 200kb at the most.

8. H1 Tags: Many stores make the mistake of adding their H1 tag to the logo or home page image. Google tends to read your site in this order, meta title, meta description, H1 tag, site content, therefore you should make you H1 tag your site strap-line which again should contain your primary keyword.

9. 301 redirects: If you’re a long standing business and you have a number of inbound links, should you change your product location, URL or no longer stock and item, simply update you htacess file to inform search engines and links pointing to your site of their new location. In the case of a product you no longer stock, why not redirect to something similar or the main category.

10. Site Map: Magento automatically generates and submits your sitemap to Google, but if you make important site changes why not regenerate the the sitemap and submit this via webmaster tools to keep Google informed and your pages indexed quicker.

If you require more help with SEO and your Magento ecommerce store, why not get in contact so we can scan your site and give you a full report on items that need addressing.

Nearly every high street retailer is benefiting for a social media presence, this should be no different for e-tailers. Most ecommerce businesses still haven’t used social media to it”s full potential, so below we have tried to outline some of the key benefits to taking part!

Social media is a fantastic form of feedback, if you’re launching a new product why not create a page or account and get poeple’s feedback on the product, price and features. After all the people who become contributors may ultimately be your first customers.

Viral marketing is effectively online “word of mouth” and free advertising. You promote your products and services with a like button or a catchy video and the snowball starts rolling. Users friends, with similar interests, see the things they like and this is often seen as a referral, so they also visit your store.

Facebook offer advertising space in limited areas throughout their site, this marketing can be heavily targeted, for example, if you sell driving lessons in London, you can select your advert to only appear to male and female users aged 17 from the greater London area. Facebook allows you to target ads based on the details the user makes public about themselves such as, gender, age, location etc.

Once a user follows you or likes your products and services you open the door to new communication channel and can update them with news, offers, promotions etc, but some of the more successful social media users don’t bombard their followings with the “sell sell” technique, they simply give the users a fun experience being part of their page/group with funny videos, light hearted updates and the occasion bit of company news. After all if you don’t like the updates as a customer you leave!

Since April 2010, Google has had an element in its search engine algorithm that takes the speed of websites into account. This is significant as not only does site speed have an impact on the overall working of your site but it can also make a difference to your user satisfaction – and your search rankings.

It’s important that you make sure your website is as efficient as possible, particularly if you have a Magento ecommerce site and there are various processes your users need to go through in order to make purchases. It makes sense to ensure that the whole thing is as easy as possible. Studies have also shown that a smooth-operating, fast website also reduces operating costs, which is good news for ecommerce site owners looking for ways to reduce costs.

There is a variety of ways you can test the speed of your ecommerce site to make sure it is running as quickly as it can. A lot of these tools are even free. For example, you could use YSlow, which is a Yahoo tool that suggests methods of speed performance, or Page Speed, which is a Google Chrome add-on. You can also use Google Webmaster Tools, which shows you how fast your site operates for users around the world, or WebPagetest, which gives you information about your website’s performance.

While the speed of your site is important for all sorts of reasons, it’s important to note that it’s not as important for your search engine rankings as the actual relevance of the website: this means that the content of your website remains the crucial factor. A combination of first class content and quick, efficiently operating websites will really help to make the online experience better for everyone.

Earlier in 2011, a new open platform business was launched, called X. Commerce. This was the result of eBay and PayPal merging their API with the aim of creating an ecommerce solution that would offer developers what it termed a ‘complete approach’ to online and offline business. This launch was made easier by the fact that eBay owns PayPal and, since the launch took place, eBay has also acquired e-commerce giant GSI Commerce and Magento, which is a popular e-commerce storefront.

Taken together, these e-commerce solutions – Magento, GSI, PayPal and eBay – form the pillars of the new X. Commerce. eBay intends to reveal this new platform properly in October 2011, at its Innovate 2011 conference. This means that there are now hundreds of thousands of developers at the disposal of this new platform, as PayPal and eBay together have around 200000, and the acquisition of Magento earlier this year has added another 450000.

One of the aims of this new software platform is to create what has been called a more robust ‘fabric’ that will vastly improve the online ecommerce experience of both retailers and online customers. eBay intends to announce a range of new partners that will also help to build up this fabric, making it as comprehensive as possible. A few of the partners have already become known, and X Commerce developers will be able to access analytics from the platform offered by Adobe’s Omniture.

Also, eBay has recently announced a new partnership with Kenshoo. This is a digital marketing software company that is backed by Sequoia. Kenshoo aims to help its developers to promote their online storefront through mobiles, online and in store by making use of their online marketing software platform. For instance, they can help companies with their SEO, create leads that could benefit businesses and also extract inventories of merchants. They already help a number of large retailers, including Amazon, Sears, Target and more.

It is said that this is just the ‘tip of the iceberg’ when it comes to the partnerships that will make up the new X Commerce platform and that there are still many more to be announced at eBay’s conference in October. All of this links to eBay’s plans to dominate both mobile and local commerce; they want to engage developers on its marketplace and the acquisition of Magento ecommerce and PayPal play a key part in this strategy.

For instance, PayPal has been able to help create a following of developers and now the goal for eBay is to start connecting all of these recent acquisitions and developments by joining them all together on an open platform. This is what the new X Commerce seems to be doing; bringing together a large amount of eBay’s assets and allowing them to create a new, powerful open ecommerce solution that covers everything including storefronts, payments and marketing.

It will be interesting to see what happens with this over the coming months and the eBay conference in October 2011 certainly sounds as though it is one to watch.

Getting people to visit your ecommerce website is only one half of the battle: increasing your ecommerce conversion rate is vital for all businesses, no matter how large or small they are. Read on for some useful ways you can help to increase your conversion rate.

Calls to Action
It’s amazing what a difference it makes to have some well-placed calls to action on your website and it can often make all the difference in whether or not someone buys something. You should be given them encouragement to take action and then guiding them through the process that follows.

You can split calls to action into primary and secondary focuses. Your primary focus should, of course, be to get the customer to buy the product. Your secondary focus could be something like giving them more product information. This secondary aspect of calls to action can be useful for those people who have not yet made up their minds about buying the products, and can be used to persuade them to take the next step. Make sure any such information is clearly labelled and so easily accessible, but also make sure it is clear and distinct from your primary focus.

Search Options
If you’ve got lots of products on your website, it’s vital that you take steps to ensure they’re easy to for your customers to find. Therefore it makes sense to include a search facility on your site.

Not only does this add another way that customers can get access to your products, but it can also provide them with other useful information, such as related products, prices and any special offers you might be running. You’ll also be able to find out the key search terms and phrases your customers use on your ecommerce site – something that could be very useful for your wider SEO strategy.

Clear Information
Customers appreciate it when ecommerce sites are upfront: don’t try and hide any information from them. Everything should be very clear and easy to understand, especially when that information relates to pricing.

For instance, if you add sales tax to your products, make sure this is made very clear as soon as possible or else your customers might feel as though you’ve cheated them later on. Also make sure terms and conditions are made clear alongside any offers or promotions you are running, and if you have a Unique Selling Point – let your customers know about it!

Payment
The payment options and processes can be a make or break area for ecommerce sites. Customers may abandon their shopping carts for any number of reasons, but you need to make sure that if they do, it isn’t because of you.

Try out different processes to see which you have the most success with. You should also make the process as easy and streamlined as you possibly can, although there should always be a way for your customers to opt out at any point if they wish. Try and keep forms minimal so they don’t appear daunting, and support as many payment options as possible to maximise your chances of a successful sale.

Customer Reviews
Positive customer feedback can be a fantastic marketing tool for ecommerce sites, so it’s a great idea to collect reviews wherever possible. Be proactive about asking them for feedback (such as in a follow-up email following their purchase) and be as respectful of any negative reviews you might receive as you are of positive ones – all reviews help to get more information about your products more widely known, and it is always better when the feedback is genuine, even if it’s not entirely perfect. A good service and top of the line products will help keep negativity to a minimum, at any rate.

Test your Site
No ecommerce site can ever be entirely ‘finished’. There will always be things to improve, updates to make, new product lines to add… There are various things that you should test regularly to make sure you are getting all the ecommerce site conversions you possibly can. For instance, test your navigation, special offers, transaction processes, product displays, company information and anything else you can think of to make sure your site is always in top working order.

Most ecommerce retailers appreciate the importance of a good looking user friendly website with a quick simple to use checkout process. However what a lot of ecommerce retailers overlook are the small details that can make the big difference to the success of their online shops.

5-10 years ago the majority of online consumers viewed the internet, as simply a place to save money. Price was king and retailers had to offer a saving from high street store to capture customers. However over the last couple of years we have seen a clear transition away from price being the primary motivation for buying online to the internet being seen as a more convenient alternative to high street shopping; no queuing, no struggling to park and a wider choice more readily available. Now that “who’s cheapest” is no longer the only factor consumers consider it’s the smaller details that are determining which web sites are successful and which sites aren’t. Simple factors such as delivery costs, returns policy, ease of contact that can so easily be overlooked by retailers play a big part in the purchase decision of consumers.

Back in 2008, a survey conducted by PayPal indicated that 43% of online shoppers abandon their shopping carts due to unexpectedly high delivery costs. Meanwhile, according to a separate survey, 61% of online shoppers prefer to shop with retailers that offer free delivery.

So what can etailers do to help make sure they aren’t missing out on customers? Here’s a couple of simple suggestions that we like:

New customer perks

Why not try upgrading every new customer’s first order to next day delivery as a “welcome” gift to ensure their first experience makes them want more.

Free delivery and free returns

Contary to popular belief consumers really don’t want to go through the buying process to then go through the inconvenience of returning their purchase. So promoting free returns isn’t necessarily going to spawn an influx of returns it is simply going to help give the consumer confidence in your products, hopefully making people more likely to buy more products at once, with the understanding that there are no consequences if they aren’t suitable.

Online Chat

If a customer is close to making a purchase but has a simple question you don’t want then clicking off the buying page to try and find the answer. Why not offer them the ability to have their question answered quickly ask without leaving the page their on.

These are are few simple suggestions that can make a big difference, but just because they are small, it doesn’t mean they haven’t been thought through thoroughly. When it comes to free delivery, for example, it’s worth investigating all the options to make sure the benefits stack up.

To make free delivery work, there are a number of things to consider, for example:

• Will people actually buy more knowing they are saving on delivery cost?
• Look into your product margins, is a minimum spend to qualify for free delivery a better option?
• Test a few options, what minimum spend level encourages the most purchases?
• Will offering free delivery but with a longer dispatch time and also offering express delivery at a small additional cost prove more effective?
• What about a sliding scale based on the number of items with free over a certain amount?

It’s vital to try different systems to see what really works for your customers.

Offering free delivery and returns and staffing online chat will clearly have a financial impact but the brand loyalty benefits, the increased conversion and reduced number of abandoned carts should outweigh the costs.

What little things can your business do to improve success?

Google’s new +1 button is the start of Google’s new +project, to help make the web more personal, encourage users to share experiences and allow recommendations with a simple click.  Much like the popular ‘Facebook Like” button, website owners can now add the +1 button to their website to encourage visitors to recommend their site.

To use the new +1 service, you must be logged in to your Google account and to take full advantage you should start building connections with people you know to help build a community of friends, family or business associates you would enjoy sharing experiences with.  By clicking the +1 button you have left your personalised recommendation on the site for others within your network to see.  Google will not share your information with site itself or show your personal details to anyone outside your network.

Clicking the +1 button is signalling your interest to display, share or recommend specific online content, this includes adverts.  In the bigger scheme of things, Google will use your recommendations to help target advertising and deliver adverts to you based on the content or products you have +1′d, which may extend to recommending these to people in your network as you may share common interests.  Advertisers are keen to spend more money when they know their adverts are targeted, being shown to an audience who are in the market place for their products or services, this can include age, demographics, location, but better still something you’ve already said you “like”, sorry “+1′d”!

If you have a Magento ecommerce website we would recommend adding this button to your site to allow users to rate your store, encourage friends to visit and benifit from this free advertising platform.  Ultimately, Google may also use this information to adjust Google search results, so it’s worth staying ahead of the game.

Sometimes, you come across a site that grabs your attention and instantly makes you curious about the brand in question, as well as the products or messages they are presenting. These sites inspire trust instantly and give the impression that you can count on them for great service, plus the great products to match.

This is something that, as an ecommerce store designer, I am constantly analysing. It’s vital to know what makes a website successful in terms of aesthetics and functionality, and a great way to do this is to view the site through the eyes of a potential customer. Imagining the expectations and preconceptions they might have is hugely beneficial when evaluating websites. Whenever I build a store, my aim is always to brand the ecommerce site in a way that means it fulfils the needs of its customers, places it in the right position in the market place, and encourages customers to return time after time.

With this in mind, every month I am going to share with you a critique of an ecommerce site that I judge to be highly effective in targeting an appropriate audience. I will focus on what I see to be the key components of any ecommerce site: the homepage, categories, product detail and checkout process.

Let’s start with a company I feel I should know about but for some reason – maybe I’ve actually been living in a cave for years without realising – I don’t. That company is LK Bennett. In some ways, I think it’s a positive thing that I knew nothing about them, because it meant I was able to learn about them very quickly through the design and layout of their website. When it comes to presenting a high class brand such as this, less is definitely more.

Homepage
It can often be hard to get sales messages across without accidentally making the site look cheap or crowding them out with other messages on the page. However, LK Bennett manages to carry this off very well; their homepage maintains a level of high class.

Another important aspect of the homepage is photography. In a way, this is the front window of your shop so it’s vital that you don’t show anything less than beautifully presented products. This is something that LK Bennett carry off very well; they’ve woven together three messages very cleverly. These are women’s clothing and accessories, elegance and style, and sale. There are interactive graphics on the header image that encourage user exploration and the use of the sliding banner allows them to display more messages in the same space, without forcing the page further down below the page fold. Most importantly, the main navigation is very simple and clean, allowing the user a clear set of options that takes them further into the site – and closer to making a purchase.

Category Page
So, I’ve chosen the department I want to shop in and I’m now in an area of the website where I want to home in on a specific product. One of the best things about the internet is that you can find what you’re looking for really quickly if the site you are using has been designed considerately. The category page is really important here as it is the part of the site where a large number of products will be displayed on one page.

The solution LK Bennett uses is to hide those things you don’t need to see from initial view. You can then access them once you have made some initial product category choices. There is a navigation tool on the left hand side of the page that allows you to control what you want to see on the right; this is a method of filtering that has been adopted by the vast majority of all successful ecommerce stores. If a user is having trouble finding something on a website, this is usually down to poor navigation; something that there should be no excuse for.

Product Detail Page
The product is most definitely the focus of this page, which is remarkably uncluttered. One of the most common mistakes that web designers make is to display all the information as soon as a user clicks onto a page. However, an increasing trend is to make it so that information is hidden and revealed on a need to know basis. There are many ways that this can be done effectively and there is no single right answer for it, as there are lots of ways to present product detail pictures successfully. I have only one criticism of the way LK Bennett has done it: there is no way to see the product in its entirety if you choose an enlarged view. It’s possible that they did this so people couldn’t download the images to be used on another site.

The main call to action on this product detail page is eye-catching and there is no confusion as to which path the user should take. An interesting feature is that the checkout button is not easy to find, which is perhaps to encourage the customer to continue shopping.

Shopping Basket
So far, the site has taken me through to the point of paying, while still giving me opportunities to carry on browsing. When I did land on the shopping basket, I could see the same clear layout and clear, intuitive design that allows me to complete the purchase. It’s always a good idea to remind customers that their purchase will be made in a secure environment and that their details will be protected. It’s also a good idea to highlight the return policy in case a user has any questions about this.

The LK Bennett payment page shows a 3-step checkout at the top. I think that this is a good feature and that they could have made more of it. At this point, the site is also operating in the secure environment (this is made clear by the ‘https’ in the browser URL bar). The steps used by the checkout follows the same process as a typical ecommerce site. The style remains clear and simple, keeping the user focused on the end goal of completing their purchase.

Conclusion
Overall, I would say that there is a lot to learn from LK Bennett, where the simple and uncluttered approach is almost certain to deliver a higher conversion rate of browsers to purchasers. Shopping online is supposed to be a joy, and the minute we feel frustrated or confused it only takes the click of a button to go elsewhere. In LK Bennett’s case, I would say that if purchases were ever to drop off, it wouldn’t be because of a poorly designed ecommerce store, but more likely due to the products and pricing.