Postage Costs

For rural businesses, getting a good rate on postage can be more difficult than for businesses in town and cities. On top of the recent increases in Royal Mail postage, this could be a critical barrier to competing online. As the FSB article points out, consumers expect cheap or free postage and want their items to arrive quickly.

Possible solutions to this problem are to sign up for  a Royal Mail account and take advantage of their discounts, or use franking.

Distance Selling Regulations

Another barrier to selling online mentioned in the FSB article are the Distance Selling Regulations (DSR). Many sellers and consumers find these rules difficult to understand and it can put people off selling their goods via an ecommerce website.

Luckily the Office of Fair Trading have published information on what the Distance Selling Regulations mean for your business. As well as reading up on their website, it makes sense to be really clear with consumers about your returns and refund policy so that all parties understand what the situation is. The rules are designed to make sure that orders are dealt with fairly, not to cripple your online business.

The full article appeared in the Federation of Small Business magazine First Voice, April/May 2012, p20-22.

Retaining quality

You need to use JPG format images on your shop as they are compressed to speed up loading time and can handle a full range of colours. The only downside is that every time you open and resave a JPG, it compresses it again. After a few opens and saves the image will start to look fuzzy and pixellated, which you don’t want.

Therefore, try and work from original manufacturer’s shots or your own full size images off your camera rather than copying them from someone else’s website. Also bear in mind that you cannot increase the size of small images without them looking horrific. If the image is too small and you cannot get a larger version, make the canvas size bigger without increasing the size of the small image.

Standardising sizes

Images of various sizes can easily break the layout of your shop and make it look odd when images don’t align properly. Ask your web designer what size (in pixels) to make the images to fit your shop, and whether they need to be square or oblong.

Using photo editing software or an online photo editing tool, crop and centre the image on a white background. Leave a margin around the image to allow some whitespace – don’t crop it so tight that the product is touching the edges. For this example we will be using a shop design that uses square images and a white background.

An example of an unhelpful image. This image is cropped too tightly, and is an irregular size, which could break the layout of the shop by causing images to be out of alignment.

A better example – the image is centered on a white square. In our example shop, this will work perfectly.

Naming your images

It will not be immediately apparent when working with your shop, but if you don’t name your images properly it quickly becomes difficult to manage them. Follow these tips and your life will be a lot easier:

• Use dashes instead of spaces in the filenames – i.e. use “lovely-white-handbag-hb01.jpg” instead of “lovely white handbag hb01 .jpg”.
• Use a prefix for the product category i.e. “bags-lovely-white-handbag-hb01.jpg” – this will keep all the images together in the directory.
• Make sure everything is lower case – some web servers are case sensitive, so handbag.jpg is a different file to handbag.JPG. This can cause untold problems later down the line!
• Keep names short – if they are too long then the shop system may not handle them properly.
• Use a product code in the filename if you can, otherwise you could end up with lots of product images that all say bag01.jpg and working out which image goes with which product can be a nightmare.

Image sources

You may be able to get a CD of images from the manufacturers of your products, or gain access to an online image library. This is preferable to lifting copyrighted images from the internet.

You may not be able to get images from the manufacturers, or you may produce your own products, meaning you will have to take product photographs yoursel. If you are taking your own photos, here are some quick tips to improve the finished images:

• Consumer level digital cameras can produce good results – you don’t need an expensive dSLR. Don’t expect to get great pictures off your mobile phone though!
• Get a Lightbox – they are cheap enough off eBay or Amazon and will give a nice uniform background to your product shots
• Use natural light whenever possible or your shots will have a yellow tinge and require colour correcting later.
• Turn the flash off on your camera.
• Use a tripod/stand or brace the camera to avoid blurring.
• Use image editing software or an online photo editing tool to adjust the “levels” on the image until the background is completely white with the product isolated in the centre of the image.

Make sure your largest product image is an appropriate size – try 500×500 pixels and see how that looks on your shop. You can ask your web designer/developer what size and shape your largest product images will be. Too big and it will look hang over the edge of some people’s screens, too small and it will irritate your customers. There is no point having the master image at 100×100 pixels and it not getting any bigger when people click “View larger image”!

Stay tuned for part 2 – coming soon.

The site runs on our green web hosting and the TradingEye ecommerce software with a completely bespoke template for the new shop. It also uses the Google web fonts service for the swirly page titles – this is better for search engines than using images, as it adds extra text and keywords to the pages.

Here are some basics for increasing customer trust in your website:

1. Make sure your payment pages are protected by Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate. These certificates help prove your identity and increase sales.
2. Show the seal from your SSL provider prominently on your website to show that you take security seriously.
3. Use images of your retail premises and your key members of staff. People often prefer to buy from companies that have a real life shop with items in stock rather than a “drop shipper” working from their back bedroom and not keeping any stock.
4. Make sure your website looks professionally designed, without visual errors. A badly designed site shows a lack of quality assurance that decreases the likelihood of making a sale. After all, if customers perceive that you don’t care about your website, you might not care about them.
5. Use clear, sensible navigation and site structure that helps people find what they are looking for quickly.
6. Show your contact information on every page – don’t hide from your customers!

So here are some quick ideas to increase customer trust in your ecommerce website. Many can be dealth with quickly and easily to help you sell more products online.

Contact us on 01636 812 551 if you need help with adding these items to your website.

Nick

Things we like:

• WordPress is free, stable and well supported software
• We love WooThemes and their great framework & themes
• WordPress does well in search engines, it’s well structured, well coded and pings update sites to tell everyone you have published new stuff

Things we are not sure about:

• Because WordPress is so popular, people attempt to hack it a lot. Security updates are regular and need to be kept up with. Luckily they are easy to install!
• WooCommerce is a bit thin on features at the moment, but more plugins will be coming soon for payment gateways and new features.
• It might not be right for a larger ecommerce website – we’ll need to test how it works with hundreds of products
• If paid plugins are needed to access certain functionality then Zen Cart or Open Cart would be a better option as they probably have those features for free.

We are working on a demo WooCommerce shop at the moment, link to follow shortly!

Nick

The Zen Cart site uses our completely redone front end template, branded up to match Kate’s existing logo and colour scheme. We have added lots of extra features to Zen Cart to make it more user friendly such as popup Lightbox style product images, Facebook Share buttons and account functions across the top of the site.

The shop control panel benefits from our Paramita theme to make it more attractive and easier to use. Hearrings.co.uk also runs on our eco-friendly green web hosting, a quick and easy way to be greener!

If you’re thinking of setting up an ecommerce website, give us a call and see how we can help on 01636 812 551

The second is a Zen Cart eCommerce website for a Scottish jewellery creator and artist. She has been fortunate enough to secure funding to develop her business so we are providing green web hosting and building a new shop to promote her wares online.

More info to follow once the sites are finished!

Read the rest of the article at http://www.internetretailing.net/2011/07/uks-ecommerce-workforce-set-to-double-by-2015/

Domain Name
Firstly you will need to get a keyword relevant, memorable domain name and point it to the relevant server. You can brainstorm ideas for domains, or use a domain name suggestion tool – find one through Google.

Web Hosting
Next, web hosting: this is where your website and connected email addresses will actually live.

Web hosting is usually renewed yearly. There are many different web hosting companies out there so it can get confusing!

Prices vary wildly and reflect the quality of support offered, how many websites are hosted on one server and a whether it is Windows or Linux based hosting.

Cheap hosts almost always create problems, especially with shop software, and the time and money spent fixing these faults nullify any savings made by buying low-cost hosting. Add potential downtime and lost sales to the equation and cheap web hosting isn’t the bargain it might appear. Make sure you are comparing apples to apples and preferably speak to people who already use the hosting to see what they think of it.

There has been a massive rise in web hosts claiming to offer “green web hosting” – most of these are making a superficial effort to appear environmentally friendly. Our green web hosting is powered by wind turbines, making it properly green!

Installing Your Shop
Once you have chosen your shop software, you will need to download the latest version from the developer’s website. You will then need to upload the shop onto your new hosting account, set up a suitable database and connect it all together with the right settings in the config files.

You will then have a basic shop installed and ready to tailor to your requirements. It may come with a basic template, but you will need to alter this to make your shop match your logo and colour scheme.

If you choose to have a SSL Certificate on your shop, now is the time to install this too.

Shop Design
Don’t use tacky, freely available templates. Spend some money on a professional template so that your eCommerce website will look trustworthy and encourage people to purchase from your online shop. Branding is very important online and you need to make your shop recognisable and trustworthy.

Adding Products
Once you have your shop system installed, you will need to add your products! The systems we use allow two ways of adding or editing products. You can enter them manually through your control panel, or batch import products using a spreadsheet. The second method is MUCH quicker!

It’s worth thinking about how your products will be organised before you start uploading. Try to categorise products so people can search for what they want directly. If you sub-categorise too, results will be shown that are more relevant to what people are looking for.

Each product requires a unique SKU (Stock Keeping Unit), which is basically a ‘product code’. Naming images with an SKU results in a well organised system that means you can rapidly mass upload product images with the correct  names via your product spreadsheet.

While you can often get product descriptions pre-written from your suppliers, other ecommerce sites will probably also be using them. To capture your customers’ attention write your own blurbs promoting the most striking features. You could compare them to other products you sell so a range of choices are all laid out in one place.

Imagine selling the item face to face or recommending it to a friend: how would you convey the (time saving/revolutionary/novelty) features?

Images
A great photo can sell the product for you. Images should be square and centered on a white background with a margin round the edge. Use the largest, best quality images you can find. If you can, get professional photos from your suppliers, but if you’re providing your own shots, ensure the background and lighting is perfect, or employ a good photographer to do it. This investment will pay off instantly with increased sales.

It’s worth watermarking your images with your company name or website address: firstly this thwarts competitors trying to steal them, and secondly if people save the picture, your logo tells them where to go back and buy it from.

Pricing
Product pricing is a tricky area. Competition can be fierce when selling online, so have a strategy. Don’t assume that being cheaper is all that it takes to make the sale: customers also need to trust you and receive excellent service. Competing on price alone leaves you selling to bargain hunters who might return the goods anyway, wasting your time and energy.

However there isn’t a formula to what affects your sales so experiment with pricing, discount coupons and special offers after your site has started running.

VAT
UK VAT can be a nightmare: get advice from your accountant whether you should show VAT separately on your website and invoices. We are not informed enough to accurately advise on this aspect of your business!

Text Content
There need to be some pages like ‘About Us’, ‘Postage’, ‘Returns’, ‘Terms & Conditions’, ‘Privacy Policy’ etc. These are not provided with your shop software so you need to write them yourself or get a copywriter to create the content for you.

It makes sense to get legal advice on your Terms & Conditions to make sure you aren’t breaking any laws or setting yourself up for a fall.

Payment Gateway Setup
Your website needs to be connected to a service that checks customer card details, takes payment, and passes this information back to you. You could use Paypal or a payment processor such as Worldpay or Sagepay. These systems are usually set up in ‘testing mode’ until everything is working properly; then it’s switched to live mode for your customers to use.