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December 3, 2010
Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
October 18, 2010
Earlier this year I wrote about 5 Second Test, a site that allows you to see what people notice about you website. Today I want to share Clue, another free tool with the same concept.
How it works:
- You give Clue your website URL.
- Clue takes a snapshot of the page and shows users your page.
- Clue users see the page for 5 1/2 seconds, and then tell you what they remember about it.
Why use it?
- To see if what your site is about is apparent to users unfamiliar with your brand
- To see what elements of your site stand out most to users
- To figure out if you need to make changes to your site to make its mission more apparent
- Free of charge and fun to try!
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
October 1, 2010
Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:
Earlier this week I wrote a post about features you might want in an ecommerce system. A few readers asked me to suggest systems that do all of this. First, you may not need a system that does ALL of those things, check out my list and see which features your business needs. Second, I can’t personally vouch for any ecomm systems out there because I use a custom built system. My background is in writing web applications, so for me it was easiest to just create a system that had the exact features I wanted. Writing my own system also means I can tweak it forever to make it do what I want as I get new ideas. This isn’t a practical solution for most people, so here are two resources to check out: Practical Ecommerce’s Directory of Shopping Carts and their shopping cart reviews.
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
September 3, 2010
Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
September 2, 2010
In the marketing world a cross-sell is an attempt to sell a customer an additional product, related to a product they’ve already expressed an interest in. You see this all the time on major online retail sites. If you click a book on Amazon you’ll see a section on the page that says ‘customers who bought this also bought…” If you click a jacket on the Express website you’ll see a column titled “may we suggest” with a list of products similar to the one you’re viewing.
Huge online retail sites like Amazon may use complicated formulas to decide what to display to customers. These sites may have millions of products and millions of sales records to comb through and rely on to make product recommendations.
For a smaller business like mine (or yours), it’s a less daunting task. For my own site, I set it up so that any time I add or edit a product, I have the option to select related products. Those selections are what produce the cross-sells for my website. So now my product pages look like this:
Monday I talked about how I added tabs to my product pages. One of the tabs was a listing of current coupon codes. Since my coupon codes require a certain dollar amount spent, having cross-sells right under those coupon codes is a great way to encourage customers to select a second item.
I also added a cross-sell section to my view cart page so customers can get product suggestions based on items they’re likely to purchase.
If your shopping cart has a built in cross-sell feature, why not try it out. If it does not, but you have access to your cart’s source code, you (or a programmer) may be able to build in a feature like this quite easily.
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
September 1, 2010
If you’ve got more than a few products on your website, you’re probably going to want to make your website searchable. A site search is valuable for two reasons:
1. It helps customers quickly find what they want.
2. It can be a form of market research. (With a little programming, you can set up your site to record all the searches, and then you’ll know what customers were looking for. This can help you improve your SEO and drive the direction of your product offerings!)
So how can you add a site search to your website?
1. For the Not-So-Technically Inclined
Your shopping cart may have a built in search function. If it does, huzzah! You probably already have some form of site search. If it doesn’t, another option is Google.
If you’re cheap/broke, you can put a Google search box on your site for FREE. The catch is that your free search results will display Google Adwords. This could be bad news. Imagine you sell jewelry and your customer types “handmade silver jewelry” in your search box. Now your competitors’ ads are showing up on your website. Yikes!
If you’re willing to spend a little cash, you can solve this problem with Google Site Search. Starting at $100 per year, you can have the power of Google’s search on your website, with no ads.
Pros & Cons: The built-in search from your cart or Google solution is an easy one to implement. It’s also cheap or free, depending on which option you choose.
The downside is you have less control. You may not be able to track phrases searched. You may not be able to build some smarts into your search engine that apply specifically to your website.
2. For the Moderately-Technically-Inclined and Moderately Lazy/Cheap
Chances are you can find an open source search engine to install on your website. You’ll need a little technical know-how to do this, but it’s easier than creating an entire search engine from scratch. Here’s a list of some free open source search engines for PHP. With a little Google research you can probably find other options like these.
Pros & Cons: Open source code is free and you can even modify it to do things you’d like it to do. (Such as recording your search phrases.) It’s less work than writing your own search tool, but you’ll need some tech savvy to get set up. It will probably also take a little more effort than something as quick as Google Site Search.
3. For the Technically Inclined/Those With Deep Pockets
For ultimate control of your search feature, you can always write your own search tool. (Or hire someone to write a search tool for you.) This is a solution more commonly seen with bigger companies, but if you have the means/skills and you want the most control, you can certainly write a search tool.
This is actually the route I ended up going for my own website. I went this route because I wanted my search tool to:
- Intelligently interpret product types (i.e. It understands that “womens tshirt” and “ladies tshirt” mean the same thing)
- Intelligently understand colors (i.e. It understands that purple and maroon and lilac mean the same thing as far as my product colors are concerned)
- Work with tags (i.e. if a user searches for a forest t-shirt, I want the results to include all tees that are tagged with the word forest. My tagging system allows my search results to take into account user intent instead of just the words in product titles and product descriptions)
- Record searches so I can improve upon my search tool, improve my SEO and get new product ideas.
Pros & Cons: Creating your own search tool is going to require considerable technical skills or the funds to hire a programmer. Either route will require some time to gather requirements and write the code. The nice thing about this DIY route is that you get exactly what you want. You can build the search that’s best for your products and website.
Note: One last option to consider is a premium search tool like SiteSearch Pro, Nextopia or PicoSearch. These solutions are somewhere between the options I describe above.
You’re using a pre-built search tool so it may not do every little thing you want, but it does come with pretty sophisticated capabilities and also probably comes with support to get you set up, which is great if you’re not super tech-savvy.
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
August 31, 2010
I’ve been toiling away at some pretty big changes to my ecommerce website and I’m just about done. Some of them are already live. Although the changes I made may seem small (my site pretty much still looks the way it did before), my tweaks have improved the site usability. Today I want to talk about changes I made that make optimal use of limited space.
A truly effective web page conveys all the information a customer needs to make a purchase decision WITHOUT the appearance of an overwhelming amount of copy. So what do consumers need to know?
From your site navigation:
- All product categories
- All product sub-categories
- Various ways to shop (e.g. search, by color, what’s new, by collection, etc.)
- All informational pages (e.g. returns, contact info, company info, customer service, press, etc.)
From your product pages:
- Product description
- Product options (e.g. size, color, etc.)
- Product photos
- Sizing chart
- Shipping information
- Special Offers
- Related Products
So how did I present this information without putting a novel in the customer’s face? By making use of some simple CSS and Javascript.
My Navigation Fixes:
When visitors mouse over my top and left nav bars my product categories expand, displaying all their subcategories. This allows me to get over 35 links into my left nav bar without the customer having to see them all at once.
This new navigation scheme made space for me to merchandise products in more ways. Customers can now browse by collection, color, gift guides and popular themes.
My Product Page Fixes:
My old product pages were on the long side. To read all the information a customer would have to scroll pretty far down and might miss something important. I fixed this problem by adding tabbed navigation to my product pages.
I got a lot of my site improvement ideas by reading the articles I post here on Fridays and by visiting the websites of major brands. If you’re thinking about some usability fixes for your site, check out what major brands are doing like Nordstrom, Victoria’s Secret, Pottery Barn, Amazon. Pay attention to what information they display, and how and where they display it. You’ll benefit from the ideas of experienced, highly paid and specialized professional web designers.
Since a lot of the types of changes I’ve talked about today involve client side code, you can even sneak a peak at the code that makes other websites run. Just view the source of their pages and take a look at their CSS and Javascript. If you’re not tech savvy yourself, send your web designer to the sites you’re hoping to emulate and ask them to do something similar. While I’m not advocating copying other site’s designs, other sites are a great place to shop for ideas for your own website design.
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
August 30, 2010
I spent the last few weeks pulling my hair out. I was working on re-designing some of my ecommerce website (more on that later) and that means dealing with browser compatibility issues. If you’re designing a website with anything remotely fancy like CSS, Javascript, etc. you’re going to run into browser compatibility headaches. Here are a few tricks I used to make sure my site looked okay for all the different browsers.
1. Download ‘Em
If you’re working on a website re-design, download as many browsers as you can. Get IE, Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome and Opera. You’ll want to view your site in all of them, so get ahold of as many as you can.
2. Get IE Tester
Internet Explorer has put out some finicky versions over the years. IE 6 and IE 7 render things quite differently (aka stupidly) than later releases. You can’t easily run various versions of IE on your computer, but you can get IE Tester. This free program will show you how your site would look in various versions of IE.
3.Visit BrowserShots
Browsershots.org is a free tool that allows you to see how your site will look on different browsers and operating systems. It takes a little time for your site to show up, but if you’re short on cash, it’s a handy resource. If you can spend a bit of money, browsercam.com is another way to view your site on different browsers/operating systems. A 3 month license if $40.00
4. Use Your Phone
If you don’t have a Mac at home, your iPhone is a great way to see how your site looks on a Mac. Mine was quite handy for debugging a pixel spacing issue I was struggling with.
Have you looked at your site on different browsers and operating systems? Even if you’re not in re-design mode, it’s still a good idea to make sure your site looks okay in different environments so that all customers have the same user experience.
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
August 27, 2010
Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
August 6, 2010
Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
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