So many people who come to us for website designs are so focused on the overall design, the navigation and that it looks professional, so much so that they overlook their content.   Now don’t get me wrong, a professional, modern looking website is very important - for the first 10 seconds… to build consumer confidence and to visually demonstrate what your site has to offer, once on the site they stay for the content.

This is where so many ecommerce sites now fail.  Not only do a lot of ecommerce sites to fail to provide reasonable information about each product but they have horrible pictures.  Horrible in the sense that they don’t look professional, or they don’t match in size throughout the site, or they are blurred, or they are small, you get the picture (no pun intended).  Horrible in the sense that they cost these websites sales!

The picture is likely the biggest selling factor of any ecommerce store.  People want to know what they are getting and expect and accurate depiction of the product.   Shopping online has it’s limitations as most people like to feel and touch a product before they buy it in a brick and mortar store, however you can’t do this online so they expect very good photos.  They expect photos that are clear, show the whole product and the exact product they will be getting and if available in more than one colour, they expect to see all the colours. 

So many ecommerce store owners either rely on their suppliers or manufacturers to supply the photos or take an unprofessional photo themselves.  If your supplier or manufacturer doesn’t have all the photos you need or offers unprofessional photos then:

1. Invest in a tripod, background and some photo lessons

2. Hire a professional to photograph the products

If you opt to take the photos yourself, the photos don’t need the highest resolultions, they only need to be 72 dpi, so any standard digital camera can take the photo.  You do need to make sure you have a good background and consistent lighting.  You may then need to hire a graphic designer to clean up the images for you afterwards.  Also consider taking the photo from other angles if its a larger product or has a lot of elements or details (obviously you wouldn’t need to do this with a t-shirt, but with a car engine you would).  Also makes sure you take photos of all the different colours available and if it comes in a box a photo of the closed box as well as any extra products that come with it (Tiger Direct is a good example of this they typically have a photo of the box, the product and all the wires, cables, batteries etc that come with the product). 

This may seem like so much work and a real investment of time and money, but not having a great photo to show off your products will loose your business valuable sales!

I have had a few clients approach us and have seen quite a few projects on the freelance websites where businesses have wanted forums, chat rooms and blogs - essentially they want it all.

So this brings up the issue of who really should have forums, chat rooms or blogs, or better yet, who shouldn’t:

• New websites
• Websites who’s primary responsibility is to sell products or services (ecommerce)
• Small businesses, home businesses and entrepreneurs (some exceptions apply)
• Businesses targeting North American clients who’s English is not exceptional or those who aren’t comfortable writing professional text.

Why you ask?

1. Traffic - New websites just don’t have the traffic to fill up a forum or chat room.  Nothing looks worse to a prospective customer than a website with a dead forum or chat room or a blog with only a few postings.  It shows your “newness” to the internet or makes them wonder why you don’t have any activity and usually will take it as a negative sign.

2. If you are selling a product or service see #1 - a dead forum, empty chat room and empty blog is a sign of an unbusy business which will concern potential clients that you might be going out of business, have no busy and then wonder what is wrong with your product or service.

3. Time - Forums and chat rooms require monitoring.  You’ll likely end up with spammers trying to fill up your forum or chat room with links to illegal or questionable sites which hurts your site in the search engines. You may get unruly members who post offensive or negative comments which will reflect negatively back on your business if not quickly removed.   You need to be sure you have the time and staff to dedicate to monitoring a busy forum or chat room.

4. Writing Skills - This applies mostly for blogs.  Everyone wants a blog these days and there’s no restriction on who can have one, blogs are a great way to communicate to your visitors and perhaps build a following.  However, poorly written text, mispelled text or text with grammatical errors will turn away customers and reflect poorly on your business.  If writing in English is not your strong suit than hire someone to do the writing for you. 

In closing, Forums are best for social sites as a means of having members communicate, if there isn’t much hope that you would have at least 1000 active members to keep your forum going, than don’t bother with a forum.  Chat rooms, like forums, are best for social sites, I can’t think of an instance where I would be going to a business, a service provider or an ecommerce site where I would plan to chat to anyone.  Enthusiast sites, news sites and social sites are the normal places one would see a chat room.  

Blogs, however are great for anyone.  Just be sure to make it a habit to post at least once per week with meaningful content and you can get a good following or be a great SEO tool.

There are about as many popular ecommerce software platforms out there as there are web design companies so how do you make heads or tails out of what is best for you, your company and your budget?

To begin there are 3 main categories of ecommerce software; Open Source, Hosted and Custom.  The following explains the differences between each.

Open Source

These are ecommerce software that are free or relatively inexpensive. Examples would be Oscommerce, CRELoaded, Xcart, Zencart (all which are based off of Oscommerce platform but modified in different ways) and Magento to name the popular ones. 

Pros:
Great way to have an affordable custom designed site
Usually a large assortment of features
There are templates available at affordable prices
Designers are easy to find and usually affordable

Cons:
Designs are not overly flexible and looks can be limiting or boxy
Admin consoles are typically confusing and hard to use
Stability issues and numerous patches and updates

 Overall this is a good cart for those needing an entry level cart, but plan for frustrations and problems and the time needed to sorting out how the admin console works.

 Hosted

Hosted solutions would include any that provide you the software hosted on their server.  If you were to leave you would not be able to take the cart with you.  Examples would be Volusion, ProStores and Yahoo Stores. 

Pros:
An all in one price for everything
Ongoing support
Stable platform
Feature Rich

Cons:
You can’t take it with you, you can pay and pay and pay and in the end never own the site.
Can be costly - Designs with Volusion can average $2000
Boxy and inflexible - designs can be limited
Pricing based on the number of products carried
SEO Unfriendly - Volusion is known to be SEO friendly however ProStores and others are difficult to make fully SEO friendly
Hosting Costs - Volusion is very well known for their expensive Bandwidth, in other words if you have a popular store expect to pay for all that extra traffic

Hosted solutions are great for those that want full support and don’t feel comfortable having to manage a hosting company and web designer, however in the long run it will cost you much more than running your own site on your own hosting account.

The perfect solution would be to look for web design companies who offer their own shopping cart, hosted and supported but offer a contract term so that after some period of time you will own the cart outright.

Custom

Custom doesn’t necessarily have to be a custom hand coded shopping cart, you aren’t likely going to find many of those these days with the availablity of top tier shopping cart software like Miva, NetSuite, PinnacleCart and others.  These shopping carts however typically have a some very high price tags starting at $1000 up to $10,000 and even higher.  These sites typically offer a more flexible design than the boxy look of an open source and are stable and feature rich.

Pros
Flexible designs
Feature rich
Stable
Easily incorporate video and flash
Search engine friendly
Unlimited products

Cons
Costly to have designed
Support and additional design work may be costly based on the limited number of design companies that are experienced with the software

Overall these are the best shopping carts, but lower top tier carts start at $1000 and up and are the perfect step up from an open source cart when you are ready to move up.

Key things to look for in any ecommerce cart is that it’s search engine friendly and has the features you need for your specifc products.