osCommerce Blog - osCommerce solutions for business

Amazon Integration for osCommerce

Monday, October 20th, 2008

DataLink UK Ltd (also trading as Holbi) is happy to announce release of its new osCommerce solution - Amazon Integration with osCommerce.

Amazon Marketplace allows businesses to more effectively have their products advertised and sold online. Many osCommerce store owners also have accounts with Amazon Marketplace, receiving orders from these two channels.

Holbi’s osCommerce Development team identified how to improve online business of osCommerce store owners by integrating their Ecommerce web sites with their Amazon Marketplace accounts!

Orders placed by your Amazon customers can be easily downloaded into your osCommerce back end. Order status can be changed in osCommerce and this will automatically update status of the corresponding order in your Amazon Marketplace.

Products can be uploaded from osCommerce product catalogue to your Amazon Marketplace. Stock levels and prices of products listed on Amazon are updated immediately according to corresponding changes in osCommerce.

Holbi effectively provides osCommerce store owners with an easy to use automated solution to significantly improve performance of their online business by integrating osCommerce with Amazon.

Please feel free to contact us should you require more information about our Amazon Integration with osCommerce

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osCommerce Web Master’s guide to selling online

Monday, December 17th, 2007

We are proud to announce that our latest book on osCommerce Marketing was published last week and will soon be available from Amazon (US, UK, DE, FR, and other countries) and many other online book stores!

The book is called “osCommerce Web Master’s guide to selling online”. The main idea was to create a guide for osCommerce store owners and web masters on osCommerce Sales and Marketing approaches.

The book is available from the publisher and will be soon available on other online book stores.

We will be posting some extracts from its chapters over the next few months.

Posted in osCommerce Marketing and Sales | 1 Comment »

osCommerce Conversion Rates - how to improve?

Thursday, November 8th, 2007

I was given a link to this article by a good friend of mine earlier today.

http://www.jrlenterprises.com/articles/better-conversion-rates.htm

I hope osCommerce store owners will find some of those tips useful to increase their sites’ conversion rates!

Posted in osCommerce Tips and Tricks, osCommerce Marketing and Sales | No Comments »

osCommerce design - pros and cons

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

osCommerce comes with a certain default design.

This includes the logo, CSS style sheets, buttons, information box designs, and a number of “standard” osCommerce images and icons that are displayed on different pages of the web site (such as images on the User Account page, or the header of the web site, or the Quick Search icon).

It comes with the header, left, middle, and right columns and the footer. All or almost all bits of information are displayed in the so called “information boxes” that share the same or very similar style of the title, border, and content.

Actually, osCommerce comes with a complete design and is ready to be installed and start selling products online right away. That’s certainly a benefit of this Ecommerce solution.

In the same time, default osCommerce design, being very generic and basic, may not suit each and every online store owner, and may not help selling certain product ranges. Also it has not been changed for several years now, and doesn’t look as contemporary as it was in the past. Also, there are some design elements (like standard osCommerce icons for example) that do not help customers very much in understanding what this or that page is about, but could confuse customers instead. Actually, and many web design and development companies would testify – online merchants often ask to remove those standard osCommerce icons and design elements in the first instance.

osCommerce standard design doesn’t allow for easy manipulation with information boxes or other elements, web masters or web developers should be involved in order to make changes in design or layout of the web site.

Eventually, if a web site consists only of an online store, and products are either very unique or the prices are very competitive, one can afford leaving the standard osCommerce design intact – as the sales will be coming through the web site anyway.

Otherwise it may be a good idea to consider changing design of an osCommerce online store to something that would either match design of the main web site, or accompany product range, or make browsing or purchase experience smoother for customers – or just implements the three tasks all together.

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osCommerce Design matches target audience

Thursday, April 19th, 2007

Before starting an online business, or any business at all, one should carefully study the market, define target audience and study it too. So that products would be interested to the prospect customers, so that the prices would look reasonable to the target audience customers, so that every advertisement campaign would reach the desired target group of people.

Therefore design of an online store should “match” the supposed target audience. It should look somehow attractive to the prospect customers. It should somehow correspond to the life style of the prospect customers. Of course it’s a little bit mixed up with the design matching the product range. But if we look closely into it, we will obviously see that products themselves will always “match” the target audience – as otherwise the online store would not reach desired sales targets. So there’s no any problem in the online store’s design matching both products and target audience.

If an online store is dedicated to, for example, products for families – its design will most probably have all soft and round design elements, soft and clean font style, will include some photographs of happy families, etc. Even if that online store sells the latest video games – its design will stay the same, to make it attractive to those parents who would like to buy those video games to their children.

An online store that sells younger kids-oriented products (including products like merchandise, apparel, shoes, toys, games, even confectionery) will most probably be designed in a fun style, with lots of bright design elements, funny page-mates, and of course photographs of happy children, so that both kids and their parents
would be pleased to see that web site – as the process of choosing products online will most likely involve them together.

Yet another example would be an online store intended to sell its products to those who take sports seriously. Design of such web site will be more active, bright, even sometimes it can be a bit aggressive. It can be made resembling the spirit of exercise, strength, competition. And if it offers a big range of products, some of them may not be 100% related to the sports – like casual clothes, but nevertheless the style of the whole web site will be delivering corresponding “message” to its target customers.

One more important detail in choosing design of an online store is the default font size. Quite often online store owners or web designers forget about the importance of all the content being easy readable by the prospect customers for sake of nice looking pages. Yet without being able to read the information displayed on the page, or with having any difficulties reading it – the customer will more likely not complete the purchase process and leave the online store.

There exist a lot of online businesses where their target audience includes mostly people of middle age and older ones. Therefore bigger font size should be used by default to guarantee the prospect customers will not experience any issues reading any text on the web site.

Of course design of the web site should be made in a way that allows customers changing font sizes using facilities of their web browsers, and so that the web site still looks as good as possible with either default font size. Also, in some countries and regions there exist certain legal regulations that determine how the web sites should be built to allow people with sight problems using those web sites anyway.

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Getting as much as possible of unfinished orders in osCommerce

Sunday, February 11th, 2007

Quite often the customers would register in osCommerce, go to the checkout pages, pass the Shipping page, Payment page, find themselves on the Order Confirmation page, and …. would not complete the purchase. Any Ecommerce web site suffers from this. And every online store should try to get maximum from unfinished orders.

First of all lets see what can be done to monitor what’s happening during the purchase process. When using tools like Google Analytics, its possible to set certain “goals”. A goal is a customer reaching certain page, sometimes also coming from other specified pages. So, applying to osCommerce, the goals can be defined as:

Reaching the Shopping Cart page
Reaching the Checkout Shipping page
Reaching the Checkout Payment page
Reaching the Checkout Confirmation page
And finally - making the order, i.e. reaching the Checkout Success page

Some of our customers - osCommerce store owners - complain about the standard osCommerce Checkout process is a bit cumbersome. In such cases we recommend using our Easy Checkout module for osCommerce to simplify the checkout process, make it easier and less confusing for end customers.

But what if even a perfectly optimised osCommerce Checkout process fails and some customers still would not buy after reaching the Checkout Confirmation page? In such case we recommend getting as much of the situation as possible:

we can create a report based on their shopping carts, or send an email notification to the store owner once there was an attempt to buy that has never succeeded
we can send an automated email to the customer some days after the attempt and try to convince the customer to come back and buy
we can send an automated email to the customer if we notice that the goods he or she wanted to order now cost less. So we compare the present day cost of the customer’s shopping cart / wish list with what the customer has in the cart, and if we see the price has dropped - we send an email to the client and tell him / her: “You thought about buying some products from our store, and it would cost you £2,000 in January 2007. But now we have special prices, and it would cost you only £1,850. So why not you come back and buy?”

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Building customers’ confidence in osCommerce - part I

Sunday, February 4th, 2007

Once a customer reaches the web site, there are many reasons to buy or not to buy products. Product price is one of the most important factors of course, but yet many other factors affect customer’s decision.

The customer has certain needs when opens the online store web site. Hence one of the most important factors affecting purchase decision is customer’s confidence in the fact that the product will address customer’s needs now and in the future.
Another very important factor is customer’s readiness to buy online in general, and buying products online from certain web site in particular.

In order to convince customers to buy products online, store has to first buy their confidence.
Comparing online and off-line buying processes its easy to see why customer’s confidence is one of the key factors:

when buying offline the customer can see, touch, often try the product
when buying offline the customer can ask for an advise of the store staff
when buying offline the customer deals with a real existing store, which was standing at its place for a while and is supposed to stay there for a while too
when buying offline the customer can return the product at any moment accordingly to the consumer regulations that act in that country or territory
when buying offline the customer can pay in cash, or using cards, checks, etc – and money goes from hands to hands without much risk

Having listed all those benefits of buying offline we understand how important is to assure customers of offline stores that buying products online is secure, easy, fast, and safe method of purchase.

Providing customers of online stores with information that helps build their confidence is an important task of each online store manager. Without that information many customers would simply skip buying products on a particular site and will either place an order with competitors, or buy products from their local store or supermarket.

Default osCommerce installation allows for editing information about products and the online store in general. Product information (like product name, description, image, price, etc) is edited in the Administration panel of osCommerce. Information about the online store, and various policies can be edited in language files. Language files can be either edited in a text editor, or using the Define Language tool under the Tools menu.

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Multiple frontends in osCommerce

Friday, February 2nd, 2007

Almost every other bigger osCommerce project nowadays turns into a complex system where the store owner wishes to have multiple online stores - front ends - linked to the same backend and the same osCommerce database.

There are several reasons to consider this approach good for online business.

First - having multiple front ends all linked to the same backend allows for having different (from the buyer’s point of view) online stores. Correspondingly approaching various niche markets becomes possible. Each front end may have its own design, products, and even domain names. Each front end can be marketed separately, dependently on the best approach to reach its target audience.

Second - managing several online stores using the same backend is way easier than managing several separate online stores. The online store management team can be the same, all orders are stored in one place, all dispatches can be also managed easier. Finally, reports and statistics will show the status of the whole business and not just some of its parts. If properly implemented, the system should be very easy to enhance with more features, and those features will be automatically added to each front end.

Third - having the product catalogue split into several front ends may improve SEO of the whole system. Each front end can be given its specific product range, so keyword density within a particular front end can be higher than one of a web site that would have all the product. Also, all front ends can point to each other, improving page ranks. One fairly important note here is that it’s preferable to have different descriptions per product per each individual front end, as otherwise the problem of duplicate content may ruin SEO efforts.

Fourth - having a system with multiple front ends in place the online store management team can launch a very featured Affiliate Programme. Front ends are hosted on the same server where the back end of the system is located. Naturally, a front end of an online store with its list of products, with its own design is an ideal solution for an affiliate business. The store management team would just need to assign certain commission per cent on all orders received from an affiliate’s front end, and the system is ready to go live! All received orders will be stored in the database as orders received from certain front end, and commission per cent will be real easy to calculate.

Its clear that to turn osCommerce into a multiple-front ends system a significant amount of development and marketing efforts should be invested into the business, but a multiple front ends system can repay for itself very soon if properly marketed.

Some sort of such solution is available free at osCommerce Contributions site, though none of our customers who run real business went with it. Therefore we have come up with our own solution that addresses needs of real business customers now, and allows for a non-limited business growths in the future.

A good example of such solution can be seen here:

www.yogamad.com
www.fitness-mad.com

Posted in osCommerce Modules and Services, osCommerce Marketing and Sales | No Comments »

osCommerce purchases and SSL certificates

Tuesday, January 16th, 2007

A client has asked today if they needed an SSL certificate installed on their web site. They use WorldPay, so for secure payment processing they do not actually need SSL that much. One of their web masters suggested they didn’t need an SSL certificate at all.

No surprise though some of the end customers emailed them from time to time asking about if it was secure to buy from them, and telling they (the customers) would not buy a thing from a web site which is not secure.

Our advise to the client was: get an SSL certificate installed as soon as possible, secure User Account pages and the Checkout pages, and put a seal explaining the end customers the site is a safe place to buy products online and their account and payment information is secure.

The SSL seal may appear under the Shopping Cart box in one of the columns of osCommerce web site, on the Registration / Login page, and on the Checkout Payment and Checkout Confirmation pages. It may also appear in the User Account pages.

The end customers always expect their online purchase experience to be safe and their data to be secure.

That is why an osCommerce store owner first has to “buy” customer’s confidence to sell the goods.

SSL certificates not only secure customer’s data, but also help osCommerce store owners to improve online sales.

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Marketing prices in multiple currencies

Monday, December 25th, 2006

Going international for a store owner is usually a good step forward that helps the online business to develop, winning new markets. Besides all changes and improvements to the online store, the price on products should be right.

But what is the right price?

Its not only it should be competitive in the local market, it should even look nice! For example, a product that costs $199 may be easier to sell if it costs €149 than if its price is set to €151.642.

Lets call this marketing prices, i.e. attractive looking prices that the customers would like more be willing to pay.

Such a price needs to be set on the per-product bases, since standard currency conversion feature of osCommerce would use one and the same conversion rate for all product prices, and as the result prices in various currencies may even change daily.

Prices in other currencies may be displayed only when the customer chooses the corresponding currency from the drop down list, or displayed along with the price in the selected currency on the Product Information page - this needs to be decided by each osCommerce store owner individually.

There exist several osCommerce contributions that are capable of implementing this feature:
http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,4445/

http://www.holbi.co.uk/modules-for-oscommerce/product/item/oscommerce-marketing-prices-module/

The pros of this approach is to always have nice looking, easy selling prices in each currency that is available on the web site. Hence an osCommerce shop owner will see the turnover growing.

The cons are the prices do not change as the currency exchange rate changes. Dependently on the average margin made by the osCommerce shop and on how payments in various currencies are processed, the (profit / turnover) relation can be slightly lower comparing to other similar online shops.

But still if the turnover and profit grow - it still has sense to implement this feature if osCommerce online store has multiple currencies enabled.

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osCommerce Blog - osCommerce solutions for business

Archive for the 'osCommerce Marketing and Sales' Category

Amazon Integration for osCommerce

osCommerce Web Master’s guide to selling online

osCommerce Conversion Rates - how to improve?

osCommerce design - pros and cons

osCommerce Design matches target audience

Getting as much as possible of unfinished orders in osCommerce

Building customers’ confidence in osCommerce - part I

Multiple frontends in osCommerce

osCommerce purchases and SSL certificates

Marketing prices in multiple currencies

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