ecommerce sites

Survive and thrive through the credit crunch

By any measure the world’s economy is in dire straits and just about every sector of the economy is suffering. With high levels of debt and reluctance on the part of banks to lend more money businesses are being squeezed, jobs are being lost and people are spending less. We are all watching our pennies and spending cautiously. We are looking to reduce or cut costs and we are seeking out the best deals. And, whether in business or as a consumer, where do we go to find what is available and what represents best value for money? And what part of every country’s economy is actually growing by volume and profit? So if you seriously want to be part of the action and not just a spectator, let’s rev up those shopping karts and go cruise the information highway!

Build your brand

It is only common sense to understand that merely having a shop is no guarantee of selling anything, particularly if what you are selling is the same as everyone else in the mall. Retail is detail, stylish shops are really stylish brands and – in every sense of the word – they are well positioned. We are virtual shop fitters, virtual window dressers, virtual demonstrators… we provide online signage, point of sale, point of purchase, customer relations, advertising and so on. But we need a clear business rationale to be able to help you make your web shop a success. We need a clear understanding of your market; your potential customers and your competitors, we need to agree on your unique selling proposition and we need to make you stand out as special. Armed with that we can help you build a profitable ecommerce business.

What kind of ecommerce?

If you want to sell from your website and if you are new to e-commerce there are several options available to you but first it is worth considering if this is likely to be a commercial success. Here is the million dollar question: why would anyone want to buy from you? Is it a great price, terrific range, unique product/service, latest fashion, brilliant idea? So who else is doing it, how much are they charging and how much business are they really doing? Check out the web and check out Ebay. Be honest with yourself and totally realistic about any assumptions you have made which are challenged by what you discover. There are thousands upon thousands of people out there ready to make a buck on the web and consequently there are thousands of people trying to make a buck out of those hopeful souls. Check out the dropshipping model and work out just who is making the real money there. Dropshipping is where a person or company sells someone else’s goods on the web which they do not actually stock themselves. They take orders at marked up prices which they then pass onto a wholesaler paying the wholesale price and shipping costs. The goods are dispatched by the wholesaler, often using the branding of the website where the original order was made.

Which e-commerce program?

You can go out and buy some functionally excellent web shops many of which are open source like osCommerce, Cubecart, Zencart and Magento and for information about open source software see www.opensource.org Or you can buy an OEM solution like Actinic which will give you a lot more support and technical assistance. We can help you choose what is best for you and make any modifications, help you set it all up and get it running smoothly. The crucial bit is making your shop look and feel special and to promote your USPs - unique selling propositions – to build your brand and set you apart in the marketplace. And if you want to integrate your web shop with your real world shop or shops and you want to share the same stock control system, order processing and sales ledger we can probably sort that out too. For this and for Actinic in particular we work closely with Kudos Software who are experts in retail solutions and a delight to deal with.

Which payment system?

(prices correct at January 2009) The simplest way to collect money from your website is to use PayPal which is easy and fast to set up and will enable you to accept payments from all the major cards. With PayPal there is no set up or monthly fees, you only get charged per transaction and this ranges from 3.4% + 20p for monthly transactions up to £1,500 to 1.4% for monthly transactions over £55,000. Internet Payment Gateways like WorldPay, Verisign, Netbanx, PayPoint and Protx connect companies with an Internet Merchant Account (IMA) to their acquiring banks. PayPoint currently charges £10 a month for small start up businesses trading only in sterling and going to the PayPoint branded site. It is easy to upgrade to higher levels of service including shopping basket integration and hosting your own branded payment page on your own secure server. Protx which is part of Sage charges small users £20 per month for up to 1,000 transactions per quarter. For more transactions than this they charge 10p per transaction. Worldpay, for annual sales of up £200,000 will charge a £200 set up fee and thereafter £30 a month on top of which they will take 50p per debit card transaction and 4.5% for credit cards. Not sure? Don’t worry we’ll help you sort out the system which best suits your needs and get you up and running and taking payments over the web.

What about hosting and security?

Secure Socket Layers (SSL which causes the padlock symbol to appear in your browser) use sophisticated encryption techniques to keep customers’ details private but outside this carefully guarded environment things are very different. Banks are very cagey about how much money is lost through internet fraud but even the most conservative estimate is £290 million last year in the UK. With simple and sensible precautions customers can guard against certain types of fraud and you would have to have been living on the moon for the last decade to fall for the average phishing email, but people do all the time. One of the worst crimes must be that of complacency on behalf of people who are otherwise honest and trustworthy. Unfortunately ecommerce makes it possible to elicit and store a great deal of information about people and all the privacy statements in the world are just so much hot air because they do nothing to engender the diligence and discipline necessary to create and maintain robust systems to keep such information safe and secure. So information stored unencrypted on work computers, discs and keys is not safe and anybody (armed forces, police, civil servants included) who are cavalier with personal or commercially confidential information should be punished by the law.

What next?

We are sorry for the above rant. If you want a successful business selling directly to people over the web, please either telephone us on 01752 830000 or email us enquiries@logodesign.co.uk outlining your ideas and we will chat it over. Bling!

What happens next?

After all that dull, dry, boring stuff we don our smocks and easels and make a right old mess being creative with string and glue to make pretty visuals for the home page and for any other major parts of the site. Once these have been approved – and not until then – we make the master artwork and then code it into whatever language is required (HTML, Java, PHP, ABC and XYZ) and Bob’s your uncle. Usually work in progress can be monitored by our clients by logging into one of our secure servers.

Ignoring the boring

Search engines strive to return useful, relevant information. As a consequence they use various criteria to assess which websites contain information which is likely to answer the needs of the searcher. They use a variety of algorithms to assess the relevance of a website to particular search strings and they also tend to favour sites where the content is regularly changed and updated. Increasingly the sites we are building have at least one or two sections which the clients manage themselves. Latest products and special offers are obvious areas to use a content management system (CMS) without the risk of tampering with carefully designed ‘window dressed’ display pages. In practice there are usually plenty of other areas of a webshop where the client should be in control and actively maintaining. This can only happen if there is the conviction on part of the client to devote company time on a regular basis to refreshing the content of their webshop. And then, of course, as every good shopkeeper will know is the ‘on sales’ which often involves suggestions for accompanying products. ‘People who bought this also bought…’ How many times have you bought ‘special shoe cleaner’ to go with those new shoes?

Testing, testing

One of the final stages of the build process is to test the new site on all the popular web browsers and operating systems. Some funny things can happen: what looks great on a Mac running Safari can look like a dog’s dinner on Firefox on a PC. Even different version of Internet Explorer will display code in a different way, or not at all sometimes!

Monitoring performance

Watching how visitors to your website behave is key to not only understanding what interests them but also what works well and what doesn’t. As a matter of course we include a statistics program like Google Analytics coding into the sites we build. It’s free and it tells you day by day not only how many visitors you have had but also which pages they visited and in what order, how long they stayed, where they were when they left. It tells you where they came from, what search engines directed them and which words and phrases they typed in to the search engines. As with any marketing data, it is at its most useful if it is monitored over a period and also when things change like launching an Adwords or Pay Per Click campaign..

Call to action

There are no short cuts and few – if any – legal and honest ways to making good profits by selling over the web. You cannot afford not to take your webshop seriously and so for our own call to action: email us or, better still, call us on 01752 830000, it will cost you nothing and you cannot afford not to.