6 Questions to Consider Before You Select Your E-Commerce Solution

Posted in E-Commerce, Marketing, Web Design on April 21st, 2009 by Angelina

shopping-cart Online stores

A friend recently asked for some advice on how to go about creating an online store. There are a lot of e-commerce solutions out there, which can make choosing the right one difficult.

However, before you rush off and research a load of options, make sure you can answer the following questions -

1. How many products is the site going to sell? How will these products be organised?

It’s important to have a clear idea of how you want to organise the products on your site, and indeed how many products you want to sell; as many e-commerce solutions are priced based on the number of products you want the solution to handle.

Ordinarily, we’d recommend creating a wireframe for the site, prior to selecting an e-commerce solution. A wireframe is a simple visual representation of the site and how the pages relate to one another.

For example, lets imagine that we are planning to launch a website selling socks. It’s conceivable that you’d have four top level categories:

Men’s

Women’s

Children’s

Baby’s

Then within each of these top categories you will have further sub-categories – e.g.

Children’s – Boys

Children’s – Girls

Again, from here you may have further categories e.g.

Children’s – Girls – Knee Socks

Children’s – Girls – Ankle Socks

Clearly it will take time to get all of this down on paper, but once you’ve planned your site out, it will be much easier to implement, and of course, you will have a much clearer idea about the sort of e-commerce system you are going to need.

2. Are the number of products for sale likely to change frequently? How regularly are you going to have to edit and update the site?

If you are going to regularly add and/or delete products, then you’ll be well advised to look for a solution will allow you to update yourself, rather than a fixed solution which can only be amended by the e-commerce provider.

3. What expertise is available to you? Do you have or know anyone with the technical abillity to help out? Do you need a system that can be used with little or no trainning?

Any e-commerce solution will require some training to use . However, work to your strengths – if the person who will be responsible for managing the system is not particularly technical, make sure you select a user friendly, intuitive solution.

4. How much control do you want over the look and feel of the site?

Some e-commerce solutions allow only very limited customisation – as such you may find that you do have as much say in how your site and the products you sell are presented. If you have a particular look and feel in mind – make sure the solution which you select is fully-customisable.

5. What payment methods do you want to use?

There are many different payment options available – these are often referred to as Payment Gateways. Your choice of payment method is very important, because you are asking your users to submit sensitive financial information – they need to be able to trust the payment gateway. Therefore using well known, trusted and established companies can be of benefit. As such we would also recommend offering more than one payment method, so your customers have a choice.

6. SEO considerations

Fortunately most e-commerce solutions generate search (and indeed user) friendly urls - e.g. www.sockz.co.uk/childrens-socks/girls/knee-socks.html rather than www.sockz.co.uk/product3/category1/sub5.html – but make sure your chosen solution generates search friendly urls; you’ll be saving yourself a lot of heartache in the future.

Ask Bring the Butler Back!

Posted in Marketing, Search Engines on April 20th, 2009 by Hannah

The BBC reported today that Search Engine Ask is reverting back to its original name Ask Jeeves, and is bringing back the Butler character as part of their corporate branding.

Jeeves the Butler was dropped from the brand back in 2006 as the brand attempted to increase market share.

Jeeves explains his own absence as follows:

“I popped out three years ago to travel the world in a quest for knowledge and I’ve returned to Blighty armed with answers. During my sojourn research showed the public wanted me back, which I found jolly touching.”

The search engine has been through a series of rebrands, including a TV advertising campaign portraying it as an underground alternative to Google.

In the autumn of 2008 it had another makeover, this time branding itself as the search engine that could best answer specific questions.

Way back when I got my first job in marketing at Ladbrokes back in 2000, I remember attending a course called ‘how to use the internet’. At the time I clearly remember the course tutor extolling the virtues of Ask Jeeves as it handled search queries asked in plain english very well. As such I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for the brand, and whilst Ask’s no Google killer, I’m pleased to see them return to their original brand values.

Monetisation – The Holy Grail of Social Networking

Posted in Marketing, Social Media on April 20th, 2009 by Hannah

Today I read an article in New Media Age wherein Danielle Long suggested that maybe Google has finally found a way to boost revenues from YouTube.

Having struck major content deals with the likes of MGM, Lions Gate Entertainment and CBS, YouTube will offer thousands of TV shows and full-length films for US users. These shows and films will be shown with ad breaks – effectively allowing TV ads to be shown to viewers watching online.

In addition to receiving revenue from advertisers, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has also indicated that in the future YouTube may utilise a subscription model saying: “We do expect, over time, to see micro payments and other forms of subscription to come.”

Monetisation is without a doubt the holy grail of those who own and run social networking sites – but the trouble is, it tends to sit somewhat uneasily with the users of these sites.

YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim in 2005. The site quickly grew and by July 2006 the site was receiving 100 million views per day. YouTube was acquired by Google in November 2006 for the princely sum of US$1.65 billion in Google stock.

Clearly Google saw revenue opportunities in YouTube, but as yet these have failed to come to fruition. Google does not provide figures for YouTube’s running costs, and YouTube’s revenues in 2007 were noted as ‘not material’ in a regulatory filing. Not surprising when you consider that YoutTube’s bandwidth costs alone were estimated at US$1 million per day in 2008.

The end game is – social networking costs the owners of the sites a great deal of money. However, the owners of these sites feel strongly that with such a large user base, the opportunities to monetise these sites via advertising should be great.

But in reality, it doesn’t seem to work like that. The advertising funded business model struggles as users complain about the ads interrupting their experience, and advertisers have complained that social networking users are not responsive.

As such, perhaps the subscription model which YouTube are considering could be the way forward – particularly if they offer advert-free subscriptions. As Danielle Long points out – the move by Google to introduce subscriptions to YouTube could be the tipping point for subscription models across other sites – which rather puts paid to the ideal of online content, and perhaps indeed social networking being free.

Image credit Tracy O

Brand Versus Direct Response Marketing

Posted in Marketing on April 16th, 2009 by Hannah

Broadly speaking marketing can be split into two distinct subsets:

1. Direct Response

This type of activity is primarily focused on driving the customer directly to purchase – examples include paid search advertising, email, direct mail etc

2. Brand

This type of activity is primarily focussed on increasing the visibility of the brand and ultimately increasing brand awareness amongst your target audience (i.e. the people who might be interested in purchasing from you / using your services.

Now clearly, it’s not as cut and dried as this, as inevitably direct response advertising may positively impact brand awareness, and brand advertising may indeed generate direct sales.

To understand the importance of brand v direct response it’s useful to consider how consumers might find you.

Brand – they are looking specifically for you. In this instance the consumer spontaneously recalls your brand and are searching specifically for it. An example of this would be a consumer searching for ‘Compare the Market’ when they need car insurance, rather than searching for the more generic ‘car insurance’.
Specific Product or Service – here the reverse is true – the consumer searches for ‘car insurance’ rather than a specific brand.
Ambient – here the consumer isn’t looking at all. They may not be aware of the product or service which you offer, but you make them aware of it.
Existing Customer - an existing customer may decide to return to you
Recommendation - someone who comes to you because someone else has recommended your product or service

There are of course many other ways that consumers ‘find’ brands, but just using the five examples above we can begin to see the importance of both brand and direct response techniques.

Many companies elect simply to utilise direct response techniques – this is because broadly speaking, these techniques are easy to measure, and when executed well, offer an excellent return on investment. For example, many companies elect only to run SEO and Paid Search campaigns.

No bad thing, some might say, and indeed these campaigns are cost effective; however – ultimately these companies are only advertising to those who are already looking. Chances are, unless you actively search online for the particular product or service which these companies offer, you might never know they exist.

Which is a bit of a shame, because if you look at the list above they are only hitting 3 of the 5 possibilities – i.e. people searching for a specific product or service; existing customers (although, they’re really only hitting these customers by default – they aren’t actively marketing to them), and they may pick up some recommendations.

I’m not trying to infer that direct response marketing is inferior to brand marketing – it’s not. I think in fact, that a balance of direct response and brand marketing often yield the best overall results.

We recently saw just that with one of our clients who in addition to their existing SEO and PPC campaign decided to do some TV & radio advertising. As a result, month on month they saw a 10% uplift in online leads alone – not to mention an further increases in offline leads (via their call centre and in store). Very impressive – particularly given the current economic climate!

We also observed that customers who arrive on websites from branded search terms convert at a much higher rate than those from generic search terms.

Interesting stuff, huh? As with any marketing activity, we would of course recommend a test and learn approach – but we think it illustrates the strength of integrating brand and direct response marketing strategies within a single campaign.

Image credit Heideho

Where Art Meets Web Design

Posted in Web Design on April 9th, 2009 by Angelina

For a Web Designer it is often hard to search through sites and turn off your critical goggles. As someone actively involved in the world of Art and Design I regularly look at number of artists’ and gallery’s websites and I am often amazed at how many creative people / agencies sell themselves short when it comes to their online representation.

With this in mind I thought I would give a couple examples where I think the artist/ agency’s web site has pretty much got it right.

DeborahCavenaugh.com is an excellent example of a site that showcases the artist’s creative style and offering well.

deborahcavenaugh.com

As soon as you land on this site the artist’s, unique illustrative style is immediately and efficiently communicated. One could argue that the site is a little hectic, however I would argue the consistent layout of menus and generous provision of information allows an interested visitor to delve deeper into the site without feeling confused or lost.

Ideally from an SEO point of view the menu items should be in text format rather than pictures, and the web page is very image heavy which adversely affects the load time. On a standard broadband connection (1-4mb) the page takes around 10 seconds to load. Clearly we would not recommend this!

That said, most of the page does load long before the 10 seconds, so you would hope it would retain the visitor’s interest.

All in all, I think this is a very attractively presented site that gets across as much information as possible in a friendly way. I think I would try and optimise the load time on the main landing pages and assess which images are necessary and take out the ones that are not.

www.20×200.com is an online gallery that represents a number of artists.

20x200 online gallery

The idea of an Online Gallery is something that has been around for a while. However, in my experience a lot of online galleries are actually designed to make money from the artists - be it through a monthly fee, one off payment or tiered membership scheme – rather than focusing on making it easy for visitors to browse and purchase.

With this in mind coming across 20×200 was a breath of fresh air. The simple layout and navigation allows visitors to browse the site with ease. It also seems in tune with user habits – for example there’s a text link to the homepage rather relying on a rollover on the logo that links to the home page.

The main problem an online gallery faces is how to show a large amount of work by numeroous artists without overwhelming the visitor. This is where I think 20×200 do really well.

Once you click on the ‘browse’ link in the menu you arrive on a page which is set by default to show all art work starting with the most recent in the cheapest range ($20). You then have several more options, to refine your search – date, artist and tag.

browse refinement options

My main criticism of the site is that when you click to view an enargement and more information about a picture you are interested in, you appear to hit a dead-end.

The only way to get to the page you were on before is by clicking the back button or by clicking the ‘browse’ link in the menu (which takes you back to the default browse page). A button to return you to your search results would much improve user experience.

Additionally, there are a lot of links that take you off of the site. Whilst I’m supportive of this, personally I would prefer it if the links that left the site opened in a new window rather than the existing window. I’d then be able to easily switch back to the page I was referred from without hitting the browser’s back button ad nauseum.

Overall however, the simple and easy to use navigation allows the user an easy and enjoyable experience and makes this one of the best online galleries I have seen.

In looking at both these sites you may begin to notice that the themes that I highlight in terms of good web design refer to usability rather than more traditional ‘design’ elements like colours and graphics used. For me, good web design is about consistency and good navigation not pretty pictures. I bet you never thought you’d hear a designer talk like that!

April 2009

6 Questions to Consider Before You Select Your E-Commerce Solution

Ask Bring the Butler Back!

Brand Versus Direct Response Marketing

Where Art Meets Web Design

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