E-commerce Website Templates for Pages – Template Frameworks is a must!
Creating content for your E-commerce Store is one of the more important tasks in your everyday management of an E-commerce Store.
Content is the juice the all-important search engines drinks, and you need to constantly feed them with delicious new juice.
But more importantly, you have a business that sells stuff. And your business needs customers to buy from you. In order to buy from you, customers want to check out your stuff, gain knowledge of “how this thing works”, how do I use it and so on.
What I’m trying to say is, don’t write content for search engines – write for humans – your customers! And the search engines will pick up.
E-commerce Website Templates
Before you start to create the content it self, whether it being content on product pages, category pages or information pages, you need a set of Website Templates in place for you to use.
When you want to create a new page, you should have a set of templates that varies in details e.g. the number of columns, content of the sidebar, different navigation menus, no navigation menus at all. You need a template to each use case. If your page is marketing related, a Facebook Page box, a Twitter stream or something could make sense, but if the page is your terms and conditions you might be better off with a plain and simple one column layout, without the social streams, newsletters and such.
The following is an overview of common layouts your templates could have.
From the Web Style Guide, chapter 6: Page Templates
Different use cases requires different templates. A landing page for an E-mail campaign might perform better if you go for a simple one-column template without all the navigation menus to remove clutter and focus on the message you’re trying to get across with the campaign.
Your product pages is different, here it makes sense to list the categories in a sidebar to help the user navigate other categories and find what they need.
In your checkout flow, the context of the user is no longer to find more products, but to actually buy those that they’ve already found. Then the categories list in the sidebar should be removed, you might get rid of the sidebar entirely – but you need to focus on getting the sale done.
Template Frameworks to the rescue
Your E-commerce platform must have a template framework in place, to make it easy for you to switch back and forth between layouts. You should be able to set the layout (One, Two, Three columns) on any template, and your should be able to set a template for any given page – whether that being product pages, category pages or information (content) pages.
A set of templates also makes it easier for you to cooperate with a designer. Your designer can create the templates you need, using the different layouts – and it is just a matter for you to use them. If you want changes to some of the templates, you simply get the designer to work and make them as you want. All pages using the updated templates, automatically gets the updated design.
Why Business Cards Still Makes Sense for E-commerce Stores
Most E-commerce stores have learned, that offline marketing doesn’t provide value for online businesses. Putting an ad in a magazine, newspaper, radio etc. is first of all not measurable, and it’s too much blind shooting given the fact that you’re not targeting people down to a narrow audience – like you’ve also learned you should do.
But there are other offline marketing tactics that are almost free of charge, and secondly involves a referral between people, putting your brand in the middle of a recommendation.
Business cards is an easy way to exchange contact information, but unlike the classic person-specific business card, E-commerce stores should get creative and use the space that wins a new customer in the context of a recommendation from an existing customer.
What I’m suggesting is, that you throw a couple of business cards into every package you ship. The business cards should include logo, your internet address, and a short description of what you sell – just as you have online.
Also, do mention on the delivery notice that you’ve included a few business cards that you can give to friends and family.
Use short URLs
If you want to get some sort of statistics on how many go to your e-commerce store from those business cards, put a short URL from e.g. Bit.ly on there, instead of the real address. Bit.ly gives you the ability to get information on each URL from their website by appending the + sign to the address. You’ll get a nice page with the number of clicks etc.
If you use Google Analytics, also make sure to “campaign tag” the URL you put into Bit.ly. This will give you a campaign in Google Analytics, that you can use to filter statistics and see how many click and buy from the business cards.
QR Codes
QR Codes is being used more and more for offline marketing campaings. Posters at bus stops etc. often include a QR code you can scan from you smartphone.
A tactic you can use on your business cards is to put the QR code on the backside. Bit.ly already provide QR code images with their short URLs, so you can just grab that – and you’ll keep the ability to track clicks etc.
Discount codes
To give enticement to purchase, you can get creative by including discount codes, free shipping, buy one get one etc. with your business cards.
This would also make the customer who should give the business cards away, treat the cards like a more valuable item since they actually are worth something then.
Get creative, try out new tactics with your business cards. It is definitely not a scalable marketing tactic for online stores, but they do take advantage of existing customers and spreads the word a little.
7 Design Elements Every E-commerce Site Must Have
You want to establish an online business, and sell some products. You know what you’ll sell; you have most things in place. You just need to find a nice design for your website – so that it looks delicious, is easy to navigate and easy to buy from.
You may have surfed the internet for a while to see if you could find any great themes for your E-commerce Platform, but they never seem to satisfy your needs. There’s always something wrong, either the overall color scheme doesn’t suit you, or the little details ruins the rest of the design.
What is wrong?
I’ll tell you. You’re trying to satisfy your needs with a “one-size fits-all” solution. It rarely works, and there’s a very good reason for that. Everyone is different. So is businesses, especially online businesses. This, of course, applies to websites as well.
Instead of trying to find a theme, which almost always lets you down, try to define the elements that will eventually make up the site.
This is what I’ll do now, this is a list of 7 Design Elements any E-commerce site must have. No excuses!
Home page
Obviously any site has a home page. But the home page in your store should not be a coincidence.
Your homepage must show the door to specific categories when a new visitor arrives. Your top categories should be present on the home page – a way in.
You need to guide visitors of your home page, through to the department of your store you’re most proud of, or the products you’d rather sell. Home page visitors are often browsers, killing time, maybe looking for a new bike, nothing in particular. This is your chance to tell them what they need!
Remember that loads of visitors will never see your homepage. Visitors often go directly to product pages from search engines, and such – but that’s a good thing, since they’re probably closer to making a decision.
Category page
Since the home page is showing the door, you need the room the door leads to. This can be your category pages, and a category page is a tricky thing.
Most E-commerce platforms deliver the category page as a list of product, and nothing else. This should not be the case for your E-commerce site, since visitors who browse your site should get more value from a page they see often, than just a list of products.
- Summarize your category at the top with images
- Bullet points (Unique Selling Points)
- Video
- A featured product
- Products on discount
- Make it easy to scan the page, to immediately see what this category contains.
Don’t forget to socialize – this is a great place to have a Facebook Like button, a Twitter button and any other social buttons.
Product page
The product page is where all the magic happens. Ultimately, to buy something, any user must go through this page (in most situations).
This is extremely important that your product page present your products in the most desirable way. Images are a must, video is sometimes better. Relevant information must be provided – such as price, SKU, whether or not the product is in stock, delivery information, product specifications – the list goes on.
Don’t make the mistake of just copying the description the manufacturer provides on their website, since this could give search engines an indication of duplicate content. Write your own!
Last, but not least. The “add to cart” button must be placed prominently, be sized prominently and grab attention with its color and call to action.
Shopping cart
Being an E-commerce site, users must be able to add products to their cart – just like they do in any regular store.
- What you should decide is how you want your shopping cart delivered to the user?
- Should it even be named “Shopping cart” in the first place?
- Are you better off with “Shopping bag”?
How should it look? Knowing your customers is important, so do think of them as you decide.
Checkout flow
Being an e-commerce site, you need a checkout flow just like any other store.
This is another very important step to get right. Think about how you can guide your visitors through the process easily.
- Is it too complicated to do in one step?
- Is this a place for you to up-sell?
- Which payment methods do you want (or need) to accept?
- Should the visitor be able to edit the cart, while checking out?
It all depends on what you’re selling, and who you’re targeting. How internet savvy is your customers? Take a look at the demographics, and design something that caters to their feelings and emotions. Take their side – make them take yours!
Order thank you page
Many forget this page. This is the page your customers will see right after they’ve placed an order with you. And when they’ve just done that, they’re in a state of mind where they trust you, they look forward to receiving whatever they just bought, and you have a much better chance to make them sign up for your newsletter, follow you on Twitter, or like you on Facebook.
Think about yourself, and think back to the latest purchase you made online. Wouldn’t it be very likely that you’d take another action after completing a purchase, if you were asked for it?
E-mail design
When you’ve got all the design elements on your website nailed down, don’t forget the look and feel of your e-mails.
You should be sending e-mails that instantly displays similarities with your site, so the recipients will know an e-mail is from you.
It should be a simple one-column layout with your logo at the top and using the same colour scheme as your site does.
5 Ideas on How a Blog Can Benefit Any E-commerce Store
A lot of E-commerce store owners have tried to establish a blog, only to give up on it a few months later. This is usually because of unrealistic expectations, and the idea of success before commitment (See the 2nd quote from the bottom).
Other E-commerce store owners might have the commitment and drive to succeed, but lack the ideas on what to blog about, and how the blog and the E-commerce store plays together.
This is my 5 ideas on how a blog can benefit any E-commerce store.
Find strong communities in your products
Part of blogging is to establish a following, a tribe, a community. Most products already have a huge community already. Let’s take an online bike store as an example. They sell both mountain bikes and road bikes. Each “category” has its own community already, so the bike shop could blog about lots of interesting stuff related to mountain biking:
- How do you ride up a steep hill
- How do you safely decent
- How do you clean your bike
And for road bikes:
- How to climb Alp d’Huez
- How to achieve optimal gear shifts
- How to decrease your bike’s weight
Also, if you can find a niche in your products, target that niche. It is much easier for your blog to succeed if you target a smaller niche, rather that a wide segment.
Teach, but don’t self promote
Most of all, your blog should be educational for your readers. So getting back to our bike store, you should not blog about the brand new Trek mountain bike and why anyone should buy that, and never write they should buy from you! Don’t self promote.
Instead, write your blog post for the general term of mountain biking, so anyone with a mountain bike can follow your blog. The interesting part happens when people who would like to have a mountain bike start reading about your wonderful tips, and decides to buy one. Which online bike store would they go to first? Yours, of course.
You should skip the salesy approach, and out-teach your competition, instead of trying to out-spend them.
Write “How To” posts, that include several products
When writing a blog post about how to clean your mountain bike after returning from a trail, make sure to include a couple of products the reader can use to better clean the bike. Find products that compliments the bike. There might be some great tools to use when cleaning the chain, brakes and gear-parts.
After cleaning the bike, should you add some rustproofing material? What about the brakes? The chain?
Anything that makes the reader feel they’re taking better care of their bike, because of your tips will benefit you. It builds trust, and establishes you as an expert in this niche.
Blog about events in your niche
This is a hugely underestimated tactic for blogging. Whenever something big happens in your industry, you need to get some content out there to target people following the big event/news. Your chances of getting lots of traffic are quite good. Try to search for iPhone 5 in Google. You’ll find dedicated blogs that even have iPhone5 in their domain name, like www.iphone5rumours.com.
This is a good example of arriving early to the party. They know that an iPhone 5 will be released sooner or later, so why not join the rumor wagon?
Getting back to our bike store, you want to blog about events going on in your niche. So the Tour de France, Giro’d Italia and Vuelta a España are obvious events to blog about. People follow those races all over the world. Yoou could write about lots of related things, such as:
- How they work to prepare for the Tour (Pro tip: Don’t write about doping!)
- What they eat before and during the Tour
- The equipment they use, what it costs – just as a fun comparison
Connect your blog with Facebook, Twitter and E-mail marketing
Don’t make your blog an island. Build bridges from your blog to the rest of your marketing efforts such as Facebook, Twitter and E-mail marketing.
Specifically, this means you should:
- have a sign-up form to your E-mail list on your blog
- tell your e-mail subscribers about your best blog posts
- have a Facebook Page box on your blog
- post new blog posts on your Facebook Page’s wall
- have a Twitter Stream widget on your blog
- post new blog posts to Twitter
Remember, if you want to start a blog to drive traffic to your e-commerce store – be patient, consistent and don’t give in a month later because you’re disappointed. Commit to making your blog a success, it takes a lot of time and energy so stick with it!
SEO Tips for New Websites
This is a guest post by Charles Mburugu. Charles is a professional content developer and an entrepreneur. Enjoy his tips on SEO for New Websites!
Creating a website is one thing, and surviving in the global online market is another. How many internet users will find your website from the millions of websites on the internet? This is a vital question which website owners need to think about after creating a new website.
The best ways of attracting visitors to your website is to get listed on various search engines. Being listed in the search engines’ Top 10 results will boost your business, since visitors don’t have the time to go through the thousands of sites listed in the different search engines. It is therefore important to get a top position ranking for your website.
The following are SEO tactics which can help boost your rankings in the search engines.
Quality Content
Your website content plays a crucial role in attaining top ranking on the search engines. On the other hand, it can also cause the falling of site ranking if it poor quality or copy content from already existing websites. Your website content should be interesting as well as unique so that users are attracted to visit your pages.
Proper Keyword Selection
While selecting keywords for your website, examine keywords as if you are a web user. Which keywords are most likely to be used by someone searching for your web content? This is an important question to think through. Initially, it is wiser to use general keywords rather than specific keywords. You could use your product details, company name or location as a keyword.
Link Popularity
It is not easy to get good ranking for your site without quality back links. Therefore, link popularity plays a vital role in a website’s ranking. You should always focus on getting one way links or quality natural links from relevant sites which have a higher page rank.
Competitor Analysis
All websites listed in the search engines would want their web pages to be highly ranked. Therefore, you should always keep track of your competitors’ activities. If you want a top ranking, analyze what you need to do and who you should compete with. When it comes to promoting your site, you should always strive to outdo your competition. If you lack the time to promote your website, you could hire a qualified SEO service provider.
Easy to Use Website
Your website should be easy to navigate and visitors should not have any problem reaching any part of the site. If you have a large website with many pages, you need to create a site map for your visitors. The site map will tell users about vital sections of the website and the pages under every section. This will enhance your website’s chance of a high ranking, and will also attract good reviews from your visitors.
Author Bio
Charles Mburugu is a professional content developer and an entrepreneur. He often writes about real estate, finance, business start-ups and internet marketing. In the past few weeks he has been writing for blogs where you can get the latest norton renewal coupon and promotional codes go daddy.
How to Raise your PayPal Receiving and Withdrawal Limits
PayPal claims they’re the easier and safer way to send and receive money. But there’s a lot of stories out there on the internet, saying they’re not. If you search for paypal scary story many of the top result is dedicated anti-PayPal sites that tell their own story of failure. But is PayPal really that dangerous?
PayPal account limits
Of course they’re not dangerous. They’re the fastest and easiest way to setup a payment solution that accepts Visa and Mastercard. You pay a fee per transaction, and you can transfer money to your bank account with ease.
The stories you read about people hitting a brick wall with PayPal, is probably people not reading or paying attention to the limits of PayPal. When you open an account, there a page where you can see your sending, receiving and withdrawal limits. These are very important if you want to do business with PayPal.
To see your limits, click the ‘View limits’ link at the My Account –> Overview page.
The page you’ll see then, shows you your sending, receiving and withdrawal limits.
Notice the ‘Lift Limits’ button? Tick the limit you want to lift, and click the button. A new page is displayed, telling you exactly how to lift your limits.
If you have the ‘Identify yourself or your business type’ link, click it and fill out the form on the page. When you return, you’ll have more options.
The above screens shows you that I’m subject to certain EU (European Union) regulations, but they’re easy to comply with.
You basically have to do the following steps:
- Link and verify a creditcard to your account
- Confirm yourself as a business
- Supply additional information
- Authorize account holder
- Identify account holder.
The reason PayPal wants all this information, is to minimize fraud. As long as you keep your account in good standing, and keep an eye on your limits you’ll be fine.
Only have a single account
Because PayPal does so much to prevent fraud, they keep an eye on not only your account, but also how many different accounts you log into from the same computer. If you have created several business accounts, they might suspend all of them. This is because, they don’t want you to be able to use another account if the first one gets suspended. So use only one account, and one account only.
You can still have a personal account without any of them being suspended.
Use PayPal to get feedback and move on
If you want to start an online business, you want to get going as fast as possible to verify your idea. PayPal is great for this, because they can set you up almost immediately. Use PayPal for this purpose, and if/when you start selling stuff on a regular basis, you can extend your payment setup.
Here’s a Quick Way to Solve Your Social Media Monitoring Problems
What, you don’t pay attention to what people are saying about you, your brand or your business? Fail on you!
Time for some hacking, in this post I’ll give you a shortlist of tools to make up your own Social Media Monitor.
Real world example
Before we begin, I just want to point out one example where monitoring Social Media can be of extreme value. Microsoft Xbox Support, pays close attention to what people are saying about the Xbox 360 on Twitter.
So much that they have an entire support team monitor and respond to tweets from customers having problems. They hold a record, for answering 5,000 tweets in an average time of 2m 42s during a timespan of 6 days.
Twitter monitoring
Being able to monitor your brand on Twitter, first and foremost involves being able to control and monitor the content that you share on Twitter. That means you must pay attention to how you publish your tweets, and especially your links – both links to your own sites, and external sites. Two simple tools to use for publishing your tweets:
- A Twitter client
- A URL Shortener
#1 – Twitter client
There’s a ton of Twitter clients on the internet. Some of the more popular ones include:
All the above clients have the basic features you need.
#2 – A URL Shortener
Since the anatomy of a tweet, is that it can be maximum 140 characters long you face a few issues regarding links. Luckily URL shorteners exists, and good news is that all the Twitter clients listed above automatically shortens your URLs.
I recommend that you set your preferred client up to use bit.ly as the URL shortener – simply because you can take any bit.ly short URL, and append the plus character e.g. http://bit.ly/gLwf6D+ and you will see a page containing some nice statistics, such as clicks.
Monitor your tweets, retweets and clicks
Assuming that you share quality tweets including links, you can now use bit.ly to see statistics of your tweets and links. It will give you an idea of what your followers like.
What others are saying about you on Twitter
To monitor what others are saying about you on Twitter, you can use Twitter Search. Twitter Search is an effective way of seeing real-time data filtered by keywords (your brand name), location and more.
To use Twitter Search, go to http://search.twitter.com and type in your brand name. This will give you a list of tweets that include your brand name.
If you want a more sophisticated search, click the ‘Advanced search’ link and you’ll get a whole lot of possibilities for searching:
Useful search criteria include:
- Language
- Location
- Attitudes
#Powertip – Grab the RSS feed
The whole idea about monitoring, is that you don’t want to go around the internet and find information all the time. You want it delivered straight to your computer. The best way possible, is to grab the RSS feed of the search result. Put it into your favorite RSS reader, and you will now get any updated matching your search delivered as it happens.
#Powertip – Use Google Reader to see statistics
If you use Google Reader for RSS reading, you have a hidden but useful feature. After adding your Twitter search subscription, let a week pass by so that enough data has been gathered.
Go to Google Reader, and click the search subscription. See the little ‘Show details’ link at the top, right corner:
I find the Day of the week stats useful for deciding on when to send e-mail marketing campaigns.
Social Media Monitoring products
If you’re looking for a dedicated monitoring solution, there are quite a few products on the market:
See more tools, including reviews in Murray Newlands’ Top 10 Social Media Monitoring Tools and reviews blog post.
What search engines have to say about you
This is not directly social media, but the search engines do have a lot of data indexed and that includes tweets that are syndicated to loads of 3rd party sites like Topsy.
Google Alerts is a great way to monitor what people are saying about you on blogs. With Google Alerts you can set up alerts that are delivered straight to your inbox as soon as they index something that matches your search criteria.
#Powertip – Get an alert whenever someone links to your site/blog
If you want to know about new links pointing your way, use this as your search term in Google Alert: link:www.mydomain.com with mydomain.com being the address of your site. If someone blogs about you, or links to your site from elsewhere, you’ll know as soon as Google have their link indexed.
The 7 Deadly Sins of E-mail White Listing
E-mail White Listing is something you should really care about. If you’re not already paying attention to e-mail white listing, now is the time to begin. You see, just because someone opts in to receive your e-mail, does not necessarily mean that their spam filter or e-mail client agrees with them. White listing your e-mails is another step in the opt-in process – a step that we cannot control. How do you make sure that new e-mail subscribers white lists your e-mail?
This is 7 Deadly Sins of E-mail White Listing. To clarify the consequences of not being white listed, here’s a short list of the issues you’ll bump into on a daily basis of doing e-mail marketing.
- Images are not displayed immediately, thus making open rates difficult to rely on.
- Your e-mails may be going straight to the recipient’s SPAM folder – and will probably never get read.
- If you e-mail ends up in the SPAM folder, and the recipient (for any reason) wants to unsubscribe, frustration may mount as the unsubscribe link is inactive until the recipient trusts the e-mail. I know this is not your fault, but in frustrating circumstances, your brand name is present and will most obvious be on the receiving end of the blame.
So now we’ve got (at least some of) the consequences covered, what are the 7 Deadly Sins of E-mail White Listing?
#1 – Not knowing, or caring about white listing
Did you not know about white listing? Fair enough. We learn all the time, and so should you, right now. I’ll admit that white listing is a very boring topic, and not the first thing on anyone’s mind when opening up the world of e-mail marketing. We’re so benefit driven, that we have difficulties identifying the pitfalls. But we also have to know about pitfalls so we can avoid them. Most of the times when we improve something, whatever it is we’ve improved, the source of improvement is often a result of a pitfall avoided.
Not caring? You’ve only got yourself to blame!
#2 – Not telling new subscribers to white list your e-mail address in the subscription confirmation message
It’s a bad mistake not to mention the second step of the opt-in process, already on the website where they sign up. Do it as part of the confirmation message, and make sure to give them the e-mail address to white list. Display the message as “if you don’t want to miss out on [All your e-mail benefits], make sure to white list our e-mail address”. Be sure to reiterate the benefits of receiving your e-mail. That will justify the action they need to take as step two of the subscription process.
#3 – Not sending a confirmation e-mail
You’ve already got them to sign up. They liked you enough to give you their e-mail address, so why not give them a warm welcome e-mail to cheer them up a little. If you sell products that are more complicated to sell, you could use an autoresponder series to send them a few e-mails, first of all a welcome e-mail that tells them to white list your e-mail address – but then continue educating about your products. Send them useful links to some related resources. If you sell digital cameras, send them a link to some articles about how to avoid red eyes, or how to shoot great photos indoor where there’s little light.
#4 – Not telling to white list in the confirmation e-mail
The title says it all. If you’ve already setup a welcome e-mail, and you’re not telling/asking them to white list your e-mail – well, that’s a missed opportunity. Some say, that 20% of all e-mail does not reach the destination, so make sure to ask right away.
#5 – Not maintaining the relationship
Having an e-mail list, should be regarded as a list of hot prospects that turns cold if they don’t hear from you. You need to maintain a relationship, not only by sending marketing-ish e-mails, but also telling them some useful stuff, sending links to great resources, educate and build trust. The more they trust you, the more likely they are to do business with you.
#6 – Not hosting images on your own domain
To make your e-mails as deliverable as possible, host the images you include on the same domain that is used as from and reply-to e-mail.
#7 – Not making it easy to unsubscribe
Make sure to have a link in *every* e-mail you sent that, preferably, unsubscribes instantly and not requires the recipient the enter the e-mail address or click something to unsubscribe. You can never maintain subscribers for the rest of their lives, and by making it easy to unsubscribe you can avoid a lot of spam complaints.
To get even more out of your (hopefully) already successful e-mail marketing, make sure to implement the above steps.