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Do you find you Website hard to update and manage? Do you find that your visitors are leaving your site too quickly? Last but not least, are you not getting the repeat traffic and sales that you would like to see? If you answered yes to all of the above three questions, then you most likely have a static Website.
We don’t want to get too technical and throw at you words that may go over your head, but if you had to know what a static Website basically is, it is a website which does not respond dynamically to each visitor. It is typically a promotional Website that remains constant between each update.Let’s have a look at an example of a static Website:
And they usually requires the right technical skills or a web developer to make changes for you, making hard to update and manage. Let us have a look at an example of a static Website:
This is a static Website which sells books and DVD’s about pottery but does not really engage the visitor very well. Nor does it respond dynamically to each visitor. For instance, a visitor may not be able to buy from this Website online (i.e. there is no shopping cart software) nor can the visitor have an account where he may view his orders and such.
You may have already figured out by now that a dynamic Website is one that responds dynamically to each visitor, and is easier to update and manage with only basic technical skills. We took a look at a dynamic Website, so let’s have a look at a dynamic one too:
This is a dynamic Website that sells chocolates online and enables the visitor to ass products to a basket and purchase it online, whereas afterwards, the order get processed in a database making it easy for the Website owner to complete the order.
Nope. They are not all the same! In fact, they differ in the degree of functionality and scalability. You may have been sold on a what may seem a good dynamic Website for your online store, and then find out later on that you have to manually enter all of the products into the database.
What if you have 1000 or more products? This will take you days! If you are setting up an online store using a dynamic Website, then you must have features such as the products import tool, where you can just import a huge excel sheet of your products into the database and voila, you’ve got an online store ready to sell! Here is one of our clients who has many products and has imported them into his online store using the import tool.
So be sure to ask your Website provider, especially if you are setting up an online store with it, if they are also providing an products import tool to avoid manually entering in products all day long.
January 11th, 2010
Okay, so you may have seen more and more online stores use Youtube videos in their product pages, and you may have said to yourself, “I should have thought of that.” But have you though about it more carefully? Did you realize that the Youtube videos have glaring ad overlays that, in some cases, advertise other retail Websites? These retail sites could actually be your competitors because Youtube is owned by Google, and Google provides relative ads based on the keywords in your video and on your site! See it for yourself:
Notice the related videos circled in green in the above screen shot? This will most likely distract your customer away from your product page, wouldn’t it? Yes, Youtube is a cost-effective and efficient of adding videos to your site, but it can actually annoy and distract your customers with ads and related videos. Another thing to think about is what if Youtube goes down for maintenance, then you are left with a video that does not work on your site!
It is certainly interesting that IdealCases.com has actually embedded their Youtube videos without the annoying ads and related videos. In the first screen shot above, we saw that Ideal Cases used to have videos with ads and related videos. How did they do it? We are going to find out and share the solution within a future blog post, so stay tuned!
If you are an e-tailer selling many products, then it is almost inevitable that you will get at least one bad customer review about at least one product. The reality is that you will most likely get many of them! The typical business owner’s first reaction is to to get rid of them and leave just the good ones on there. But is this really the best action to take? Common practices say, “not really.” If you look at some of the world’s leading e-tailers such as Amazon and Ebay, you will notice that they strategically leave the bad reviews on their site. While this may seem hard to digest, here are some reasons why they do so:
1) Your shoppers are depending on unbiased feedback and reviews in regards to specific products. They want to hear what other buyers have to say about the product. If you do not encourage your customers to speak up on a product that has resulted in more bad customer experiences than good ones, or you get rid of the bad ones, then all you will keep on getting is more angry customers. So let your customers speak freely, and let them share their opinions unbiasedly.
2) It will help you figure out which products to either remove, replace, or enhance. When you are encouraging your customers to share their experiences on the products they’ve purchased from you, then you will get a quick and cost-effective insight into what is creating customers satisfaction and what is not; something that you would have to spend a lot of time and money into attaining through time-intensive and costly surveys and focus groups.
3) It will increase your credibility with your customers. When you leave bad customer reviews on your site, you are telling your shoppers that you care about them making the right purchase decision. What is even better is if you pay attention to the bad customer reviews and then respond to them by either replacing or improving the products that receives far too many bad reviews.
Fortunately, Halixo is equipped with a cutting-edge and powerful user-generated review and rating system. It can be very costly to develop one from scratch or to ask your e-commerce vendors to add one for you. But at Halixo, it comes fully equipped with the shopping cart, and the best thing is that we are constantly improving it at no charge to our clients. The monthly rate does not go up based on improvements that we voluntarily make to the shopping cart. To see our customer review system live, feel free to visit a product page of one of our clients who uses Halixo.
Well, it depends! You have to take a look at different factors such as the type of products , the average weight and size of the ideal shipment, the average purchase, the cost rate of shipping, the usual shipping destinations, and so on. You may see big e-commerce monsters such as Amazon and Future Shop offering free shipping, but the catch is that you must make a minimum purchase of $39, before tax. Not only does this help these companies differentiate themselves from their competitors, it induces shoppers to place more items in their shopping carts in order to surpass the minimum purchase amount to receive free shipping.
Although it seems like a good idea to replicate their strategy of offering free shipping by placing a minimum purchase amount, you have to assess your business and the type of product you have. Depending on the type of shipping agreement you have with your shipping solution provider, your profit margins, shipping destination, and such, it may actually cost you more to ship the product than you will make on the profit. For this reason, some businesses choose to place a minimum purchase to qualify for free shipping, but they will raise the par a bit by making it $100 instead of $39. So it all depends on your business and no person knows that better than you.
With the Halixo, you are able to provide free shipping on your products, and with a minimum purchase price as well. Unlike other e-commerce vendors, if you need help with choosing the right minimum purchase, we will actually listen to your needs and share our expertise with you, seeing that we are a small company and choose to be so in order to provide more attention to our clients an be able to provide great customer service.
Is your shopping cart equipped with the 5 features for success? It’s time you take a closer look at your shopping cart to see if it’s optimized at its fullest potential to allow shoppers to purchase from your online store with complete ease.
1) Shop First, Ask For Registration Later
You do not want to repel your shoppers by asking them to register when they first come to your Website. Wait until they have checked out with heir items and then ask them to register as one of the options of completing the order.
2) Checkout Without Registering
Although you want shoppers to register with you and give them your information so that you can market to them and induce them to make repeat purchases, some shoppers just want to purchase the items and get the heck out! If you force them to register, then they will abandon the purchase. So it is very important to have an express checkout without registration option.
3) Offer an Online Chat
Some people want instant help and support for their purchases, so it is a very good idea to offer online chat support. You can place the hours of operation so that shoppers do not think that you are not delivering upon your customer service outside of normal work hours.
4) Keep Shoppers on the Cart Page
Whenever you are cross-selling or up-selling to your shoppers, allow them to add recommended products to their shopping cart without leaving the shopping cart page.
5) Have a One-Page Checkout
Don’t make it any harder for shoppers to make a purchase if you don’t need to. Put everything on one page and make it as easy as possible for your shoppers to finalize their purchase. Do you want them to make the purchase with ease or what?
Halixo is one of the only shopping carts that has all of the above features plus more all in one package. On top of that, we have full-time staff that dedicate all of their time just to find out how they can improve Halixo and what additional effective-selling features to add on to it. Visit our news page to see the list of features that are under development for the Halixo shopping cart.
