Big On eCommerce » Important Factors

The Two Most Important Factors In eCommerce Design

admin — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:55:01 +0000

OK, so the title isn’t strictly true there is one important factor in ecommerce shopping cart design and two things you have to do achieve it. The goal is to make people purchase your product. The two things you have to do to make them buy is to help and persuade.

When you design a site you need to pay serious attention to it’s usability and it’s persuasive abilities. The aim of a good eCommerce solutions is to gently (or not so gently) persuade the sites user to purchase the product they want to make sure that they find this as easy as possible you need to make sure that your website is as usable as possible. There are thousands of usability and persuasive design methodologies and we don’t intend to cover them all in this article. We have identified a couple of the most important factors in both areas and given you some tips and guidance to help you tailor your shopping cart software to increase sales.

Usability Design

When a customer lands on your internet store they will only have a certain amount of patience, once this all runs out they will give up and leave your site for one of your competitors. The easier your site is to use and the less they have to think about how it works the longer they will stay on your site, and the more likely they will be to purchase from you.

With the increase in the use of CSS and the increasing accessibility of graphic manipulation packages people are able to completely customise the way the ‘things you click’ on their web-site look, the limit it pretty much their own imagination. Unfortunately this can lead to some confusion for users who have to think about what is clickable and what isn’t, this will cause them to get frustrated.

With text links it’s best to follow HTML tradition, keeping links in a contrasting colours and keep them underlined. Users also like to know where they have been, so keeping links that have been visited in another colour is good practice.

The best course of actions with buttons is to .. well .. make them look like buttons. I know it seems patronising but a lot of people forget this when they have spent a lot of time making sure the buttons on their site fit in with the design. Raised looking buttons are difficult to make look nice and clean without them looking a little ‘2001′ but it’s really worth spending a little time thinking about your buttons.

One of the easiest way to lose customers is to actually lose them. If you customers can’t find their way around your store, or can’t find their way to wherever they want to be they’re not going to buy from you.

What’s the best way to achieve this? Well it’s probably by using tabs. they give a good idea of where the user is, and how they can get to where they want to be.

Tag Lines are frequently dismissed from modern website design in order to make at design look less cluttered, and certainly there are situation where removing a tag line will do no harm but generally there are useful. It is important that a customer know as quickly as possible if your site will sell the product they are looking for. A good example of this is Amazon when they first launched they used a tag-line similar to ‘Online Bookstore’ because when customer landed on their page they would have had to think a little to work out that a company called Amazon was in fact an online book store. However as Amazon are now so well known they have removed it as it’s no longer needed.

Persuasive Design

Once you’ve addressed the Usability of your store and your visitors can find their way around your site easily and find their way to where they want to be, you must then consider the second important part of the design. You need to make then go to where YOU want them too, the order confirmation page. Below are 3 tips for making this happen.

Once the user has put some items into their cart and clicked on the checkout button there is a good chance that they really want to buy something. So whatever you do make it as easy as possible for them to put their credit card details in and click the order confirm button.

A design practice that we implement is removing all unnecessary links from the order process. For example all links to the home and search boxes are removed. If the user goes searching for other products then it’s possible that they’ll get side tracked and forget that they were going to buy your products. But make sure that the user still has access to the information about the product that they’re buying, we try to implement this by including all the information on the shopping cart page, or by linking to pop-up with the info in, we do not link back to the original product page as this could lead to further distractions.

Long checkout processes with multiple pages is also something that should be avoided. Only ask the customer for information that you really need.

One of the main ways that people will look for products on your site is by using the search box. Rigging (or Mapping) your searches will allows you to map products to keyword, so when a customer searches for a word related to a product that does not include the keywords in the title or the product text you can make sure the products show up. This is just like a customer asking a shop assistance for a product when they know what they want the product to do, but are just not sure of the name of the product.

You need to make your product descriptions and products images as descriptive as possible, do not ever assume that your customers are as well versed on your products as you are. If there is something they want to know and you haven’t covered they will do one of three things:

- Ask you, which happens a lot less than you would imagine.
- Go and look on a competitors web-site, if they have the information then it’s likely you’ve lost a customer.
- Give Up.

Also the more information that you include the more ’spider food’ there is got the search engines, writing the product descriptions is a good time to focus on Search Engine Optimisation.

Following a couple of these simple guidelines you should see a marked increase in the conversion rate for your store. There are also many other usability and persuasive design models that you can apply and we defiantly recommend searching for some more to apply to your shopping cart.

Choosing Shopping Cart Software

admin — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:39:23 +0000

Introduction

Choosing shopping cart software can turn into a tough job due to the large number of e-commerce solutions available on the market. Overall, it’s almost impossible to say which product is the best one since their feature richness, pricing, flexibility and the range of extra services vary to a great extent.

Therefore, buying the right product which fits into your goals can save a lot of time and effort, while a mistake may turn into extra costs, additional months of work or even cause starting the whole project from scratch.

There are several key factors which should be considered while picking the right solution. In this article, I’ll try to outline the most important steps that definitely should not be missed. The tactics described below may be varied according to your goals, however, following this advice will be useful in the decision-making process as a whole.

Key groups of factors

Who you are

In my opinion, the first thing you should ask is the role he’s going to play in the online store functioning process. The key factor of this role (at least for small and medium businesses) is the level of a person’s technical knowledge.

In most cases, technology is an issue for store owners, managers and administrators. Since each store needs its own unique design, functionality and storefront design along with the initial setup and server administration, you should clearly understand how these services could be purchased and what the manufacturer has to offer. Another important issue for this target group is the ease of administration and usage of basic functions.

Another group of users are web developers and designers who are technically skilled and usually maintain the store by themselves or develop e-commerce solutions for their clients (which usually involves complex code changes and development of extra functionality). For these people, the most important factors are: the quality of code, the ease of customization and add-ons implementation and flexibility of storefront design.

Types of shopping carts

All shopping cart solutions can be divided into two large groups: hosted and distributed.

Hosted carts are usually provided in the same manner as hosting services, which means that a customer has several predefined plans/packages (varying in number of products, monthly bandwidth, number of features, etc) to choose from. The pricing structure is also based on regular (monthly or yearly) fees. A hosting platform is provided directly from the manufacturer and the cart is usually activated without any actions needed from a client.

Hosted shopping carts are managed through the administration area which provides the interface to manage product catalog (add, remove items and edit their properties), define and change prices and so on. The storefront design can usually be altered by modifying templates, however, the access to the source code for hosted solutions is usually limited and it’s not always possible to modify the functionality.

Distributed solutions are sold at a fixed price (one-time fee for a lifetime license) as a software package which should installed on any compatible server chosen by a customer. After the initial setup, the store can also be managed using the administration area.

Usually such products come with source code and thus can be modified or extended to suit your needs. However, such modifications require good technical and programming knowledge (or working with those that have those skills).

Overall, hosted carts are often preferable for store owners as more easy to use and administer while web programmers, designers and developers mostly choose distributed solutions due to their flexibility.

Additional services

While most shopping cart features can often be used right out of the box, it’s important to note that in most cases online stores require some additional professional services.

For example, e-commerce software may come with a number of pre-installed design templates, but a serious store owner would usually have its own unique store look or integrating it’s existing design into the storefront. Also, since it’s impossible for an ecommerce product containing each and every possible feature or working the way which is totally suitable for everyone, a shopping cart manufacturer providing custom programming service is a good option in case you’re planning to implement some extended functionality.

Another option worth checking is whether it’s possible to get a fully-compatible hosting solution (since shopping carts usually have significant server-side requirements due to their complexity) and technical support (in case you need consultations or assistance in problem resolution).

Integration with external systems

Ecommerce software should not be treated as a standalone product, but rather as a solid ground for interaction between various components.

Not all operations are performed within the shopping cart engine. Most often, external services are used for payment processing, real-time shipping rates calculation, order processing systems, affiliate and statistics software, product directories and so on.

Thus, the richness of integration allows store owners to have a wider choice of services for their online business.

Technical support, forum & third-party solutions

Responsive technical support is another key factor which ensures that you’re not left alone with your problems and, in case the assistance is needed, you can be sure to receive a thoughtful response or a solution in a reasonable amount of time.

Support schemes from different companies may vary in type and costs. For shopping cart vendors, technical support is often on a pay-per-incident basis, or yearly/monthly flat-fee contract. Free technical support for ecommerce solutions is quite rare and may not always be effective or timely.

Forum activity is also a good indicator since it can be a good, free source of knowledge and assistance from experience software users.

In addition, it is advisable to check if third-party vendors offer modules or services related to a chosen e-commerce product to ensure that you will have a decent choice of extra solutions.

Tips and advice for research

Requirements

First of all, before proceeding with the actual product research, I’d advise that you collect the list of key features which are necessary for your upcoming online store. Such a checklist will allow you to ensure that all (or most) of them are present while examining features lists for chosen candidates.

Looking in search engines using relevant queries

Next, you may proceed with picking products for comparison. To find the most popular solutions, start searching in Google/Yahoo/MSN using relevant search phrases characterizing the product, like “shopping cart software”, “ecommerce solution”, “online store builder” etc.

For each query, pick products from top ten or top twenty search results. Visit their websites, compare product features and services presented there, pricing and any other information that you may consider relevant.

Looking for reviews and comments on forums and directories

For each product in your list, you would surely be interested to know what others have to say. In this case, independent sources provide valuable additions to official information from software vendors.

Most likely, product profiles along with customer reviews can be found on large script and software libraries like HotScripts, Freshmeat and Download.com. Also, check out some comparison sites, for example, Epinions and Shopping-Cart-Reviews.com. Also, you may search through archives or start a new thread with your questions at popular IT forums, like SitePoint or WebmasterWorld.

Contacting sales department with your questions

Finally, I’m sure that for your short list of solutions, some questions may still remain. This is a good reason to contact a vendor’s sales team to find out their responses. Do not hesitate to do it, since the quality of feedback and attention to you as a potential client is worth checking before you actually proceed with the purchase.

Conclusion

Choosing shopping cart software may not seem easy since it involves significant effort from a serious customer. However, the rewards for the effort is obvious: you get a product which fits into your goals and allows you to concentrate on sales and marketing without worrying about the technical side. Moreover, as a client, you get to know the software vendor before buying a product and ensure that the technical side can be handled without a problem.

As a possible option, I’d like to suggest that you take a look at ecommerce products from the company I work for, Qualiteam Software. We are the makers of two PHP shopping carts, X-Cart and LiteCommerce. Both of our solutions come with an open source code and can be used both as ready out-of-the-box shopping cart solutions and powerful shopping cart engines for a customized web shop. We also provide the whole range of extra services, including (but not limited to): shopping cart hosting, e-commerce web site design, custom development, installation services & 24/7 technical support.

Good luck in your research.