Creating a good ecommerce experience isn’t hard – you just need to make your customers’ experience as easy as possible.

In theory, this is really easy, but many still get it wrong.

Let’s take a look at the example of a company called Scan. This company offers computer hardware and we occasionally use them for our company.

I’ve had a couple of bad experiences with them over the past couple of days. They were different orders but the problem was the same each time. I’ve also always had issues with their site, so I thought the time has come to offer some constructive criticism.

Their site design is generally alright, although the homepage is quite crowded. However, it’s still easy to see what they offer and I imagine most visitors find it quite useful to see the options and prices displayed as they are.

There are a couple of issues to my mind, though…

Display and navigation
I quite like the top navigation menu, but the problem is that when you click on an option, a new window pops out. You then have to choose the subcategories you want.

My problem is that I don’t like the tick boxes and having to make the selection in this way – it can also be hard to determine the differences between the sometimes very similar subcategory options.

Also, the product listing pages are often full of adverts and links so you have to go down to the bottom part of the page to see the products you’re actually looking for.

Lastly, if you make use of the filtering options, these are significantly above the products parts of the page. This means it’s quite awkward to scroll between the two and you can’t tell whether the filter selection has worked until you go back down towards the bottom of the page.

Account log in
The log in form on the Scan site is not the best I’ve ever used, to say the least. You need to get an account before you can buy anything, and you have to enter lots of details into separate boxes just to log in – your first and last names, postcode, password and your mother’s maiden name. I just can’t quite work out why it’s like this.

I need fewer details to get onto my online bank account than I do onto this account.

Also, because of how the log in form has been set out, the details are never properly saved no matter which browser I use, which means I have to enter most of it in manually each time.

Checking out
My big problem with the checkout form is that it always adds something called Scansure Procedure. This is an insurance policy that lasts for about a month to cover you in case you break something while installing it onto your computer.

I don’t mind them offering the service – I’m sure some people find it very useful. However, I don’t like the assumption that anyone placing an order will definitely need it. The cost is often upwards of £30 based on the standard value of one of our orders. You then have to acknowledge another confirmation when you try and remove it from the order.

This basically adds three unnecessary steps to the order process: noticing the extra charge, deselecting it, and then confirming the deselection.

One thing that I do like about this form, however, is the fact that you can choose a delivery time and date from a selection of options. More sites should do this as it really is very convenient.

Customer service fail
Even though the issues discussed so far are irritating, Scan could resolve them fairly easily. The really big issue that I have with them is to do with their stock levels.

They list everything on their site as either ‘pre order’ or ‘in stock’.

However, when they say something is ‘in stock,’ they don’t say how many they have in stock. This means that when you order, say, three graphics cards that are all the same, you can end up getting a nasty surprise later that day in the form of an email informing you that your order has been delayed.

They then tell you that because of a temporary stock shortage, you can’t actually get what you’ve ordered. They won’t even dispatch what they do have in stock: they put the whole order on hold. It’s not great when you’re relying on their components for your own customer orders.

You’re allowed to checkout and pay for your order – but then at the end of the day when their customer helpline has closed for the night, you find out you can’t get what you paid for.

This inevitably means that you have to once again go through the business of logging into the site to get more order information, only to find that there is no additional information or explanation. You just have to wait until the phone lines reopen so you can call for help.

This is what happened to me very recently. The guy on the other end of the phone was very helpful, but he had to admit that the site can’t tell how much of a particular product is in stock. Nor did he know why it took so long for me to be informed of a problem with my order.

When I asked if I could just be sent the one graphics card and have a refund for the other two, he seemed to get a bit of an attitude. It’s not exactly encouraging me to use them again.

Also, yesterday I needed a specialist part. Scan was one of the only companies I could find any of these parts at so I ordered two. The exact same problem happened to me again. So annoying!

Our company spends thousands – sometimes much more – on component parts every month, and I try to avoid using Scan because it’s such a hassle to use their service and they suffer from service problems that other companies don’t seem to.

All of these issues could be rectified without too much trouble, but it’s been this way for a couple of years now – they’re probably losing quite a bit of business from this.

Please, when you are designing a website, make sure you don’t do anything that might irritate your customers. It’s difficult enough getting their business in the first place: you don’t want to drive them away almost as soon as you’ve won them over.

There has long been a debate as to whether you should get customers register with a website before letting them make a purchase.

Lots of research has been done into this and the conclusions are very clear, yet lots of companies are still ignoring this.

Basically, you shouldn’t force people to register on your site before they buy something. Here’s why…

People hate lengthy forms
If someone is asked to fill in a very long form online, they are likely to be put off by your website. It’s really boring filling in forms and so it can be all too easy to drive people away.

After all, if you have a choice between buying something from a website with a long mandatory registration form and one that simply lets you make the purchase, you’re clearly going to go for the latter.

Research results
As mentioned above, there has been research conducted into this issue and it has been found that on the whole, customers much prefer ecommerce checkouts where they do not have to register to checkouts where they are required to register.

You can even read the results for yourself. For example, see this Get Elastic Spilt Checkout Test, this report from Forrester Research and these tips for reducing the chances of people abandoning their shopping.

Worries about privacy
When we buy something online, we expect that we are going to have to put some details into the website, such as our address and payment details. We expect it, and so we don’t mind.

However, what we don’t expect is for a website to start asking us questions that are irrelevant to the purchase we are trying to make, such as backup email addresses, ‘memorable information’ and shopping habits. When sites ask us for this sort of detail, we wonder what they’re planning to do with it – and more often than not, we conclude that they want to bombard us with sales information we never asked for.

If you don’t need to ask a customer a question in order to complete their purchase, don’t ask them that question at all.

Delaying the process
Interrupting someone’s purchase on your website simply makes it take longer – and if someone thinks it’s taking too long, it’s all too easy for them to go and take their business somewhere else.

Your aim should always be to make the process of sales as simple as possible, not making things harder for both your customers and your business by adding interruptions and complications to the process. Make sure you have a smooth process from initial site browsing through to sales completion.

Long forms are bad for sales conversions.

You don’t need to do it
Basically, when we sum all of this up, what we have to conclude is that there is simply no reason to make customers register before they make a purchase.

When they check out, they’ll have completed most of the information they’d need to enter to create an account anyway. Therefore, you don’t need to present them with a long additional form. If you want to encourage them to sign up with your site, you could simply offer them the chance to create a login password at the end of the process.

You can then use the details they’ve already entered to create their account without needing to ask them for more. This will help you to get the right balance on your site – but still many sites don’t adopt simple measures such as this. It’s time to make a change.

Why landing pages matter

When it comes to paid marketing, how crucial is your landing page? Can’t businesses just send traffic to their homepage? What are landing pages for?

Landing pages can be crucial for any form of marketing or promotion, but they are particularly useful for paid marketing. This is because you need to measure your ROI to ensure you can get approval for your budget. Your website homepage is often a generic starting point for people looking to know more about your company – by contrast, a landing page is much more focused.

Your homepage is likely to include information about many different things, with many different links and paths your customers can follow. This means that the chances of them finding the path you want them to are slim. A specific landing page will enable you to track conversions associated with a single marketing campaign.

Very often, landing pages seem very distinct in design from a company’s website. Is this separation recommended?

Ideally, your landing page shouldn’t have too distinct a brand or style from your main website. You need to keep your online brand consistent so that people are familiar with it and know what to expect.

One thing you need to look out for is called the message watch. This is a two-part process. It applies to the similarities between an ad and your landing page. For example, if you put out a Google ad talking about bananas, your landing page does, too. As well as this, the message watch concept also applies to the link between your main website and the landing page. Let’s look at this in more detail.

For example, let’s say you’re doing an ecommerce landing page designed to get people to ‘click through’ so they can learn more about your promotion before clicking through to your website/shopping cart. If you do this then you need to keep related visuals and brand details on both pages because if a user clicks through to a site and finds something entirely different, it can significantly damage their trust – which is bad for business.

If you’re working with a landing page for lead generations, this is often the destination point for the user. This means that your brand matching isn’t quite as important, but particularly if your company is well-known, you still need to take people’s brand memory into account or else you risk losing them.

Best practices for landing pages

If you want to create a high conversion landing page, what are the most vital aspects?

Make sure you focus properly. Ensure your content is clear and simple. Have a good, clean design that is very clear and easy to navigate. Make sure you have a good call to action, the purpose of which is easy to see.

There are two main things to look at for high conversion landing pages. Firstly, create a headline that can be read in 5 seconds. Then make sure it’s clear what the site’s about and include the call to action.

If you had to fix something that was performing below par on a landing page, what should you go for?

The thing that many companies get wrong with their landing page is the ‘message match’, so you are likely to need to be careful about this. This is where you promise someone one thing but then it turns out you’re actually offering another. As long as your message matches what you’re actually doing, you’ll be on the right track.

Ideally, you should put yourself in the position of your customer and think about what they might think about your landing page.

How long should your landing page be? How do you get the balance between too sparse and uninformative and too long and distracting?

There is a long-standing debate has to how long or short landing pages should be and there’s no precise answer to give. It really depends on the goal of the landing page. You might find that some things require a bit more description than others, while others might require so much description they’re not really suitable for a landing page at all.

You need to make sure you have enough information on there for people to be inspired to take further action – but not so much information that they switch off or can’t work out what the point of your page is.

If you are new to using Magento Ecommerce software then it might at first seem a little bit confusing. However, it is actually very straightforward to import products into Magento so as long as you have a basic understanding of how the software works, you shouldn’t have any problems.

Your first step is to import a product manually. This is a really easy process; all you need to do is assign a product to a particular category and then fill out all of the fields that relate to it. This is to make sure all the relevant information is displayed when you upload the product. For instance, make sure that you include the quantity, production description and price so your customers will be able to get the basic facts about the product. Then all you have to do is to upload the product to your Magento Ecommerce catalogue and you’re done.

Your next step is to export your products. You do this by exporting it to a .csv file. This is so you can work out which fields you will need to import. Simply go to the ‘System’ feature, then click on ‘Import/Export’ and then on ‘Profiles’. Then you need to click on ‘Export all Products’ before clicking on ‘Run Profiles’. It’s also a good idea to click the ‘Run Profiles in Popup’ button. Now you just need to wait for your export to complete.

Now, visit your Magento Ecommerce export directory. Here you will be able to download your .csv file ready for analysis. This is important as it will help you determine which fields you will need to import so that Magento can match the products you are importing. You will need to fill in as many fields as you possibly can to make sure all the information you need is there.

This includes entering information into fields such as the store, type, sku, category_ids, status, visibility, weight, tax_class_id, price, name, description, and any other relevant fields for your products that you think are required. Once you have entered all of the fields for the products you want to import, it is time to actually import them to your Magento Ecommerce store.

Repeat the previous step of clicking on ‘System’, ‘Import/Export’ and then ‘Profiles’. Then you need to click ‘Import all Products’ and change the type to CSV/Tab Separated. You can do this under the Data Format. Then you need to upload the file; browse for the relevant .csv file and then click ‘save and continue editing’.

Your next step is to go onto ‘run profile’. This should give you the option of bringing up a drop down menu that will allow you to select your file. Then all you need to do is to run the import and all of your products will be easily imported to your Magento Ecommerce store.

The process is very easy so you shouldn’t have any difficulty. You can also use this process to import images; alternatively, these can be manually altered after you have imported the rest of your product information.

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.