Just because you have products on your website doesn’t mean they’re going to sell. Not even if they’re good products, or unique, or interesting. It takes a great website to convince a visitor to part with their money, much more than it takes for a bricks-and-mortar store. There’s a lot to consider in getting the online shop right.

This article was published in the August/September edition of In Touch In Business Magazine.

Credibility matters

Anonymity is a blessing for web shoppers, and a curse for web merchants. In the absence of a friendly sales assistant and a good shop fitout, your website needs to display the all signs of a fully-functional web business and make your potential customers comfortable to do business with you.

Start with the ways customers can get in touch if something goes wrong. So clear display of phone numbers, street address and email address.

Next, consider payment security. If taking credit cards customers will want to know their details are secure. This means using a secure payment gateway issued through a bank, or third party like eWay. At the very least own a secure certificate. This step isn’t to be taken lightly as credit card fraud is a great fear of online shoppers.

Credit card and bank logos feel trustworthy. Display the logos of the cards accepted in the footer of the website near the contact details.

Hordes of small business owners went into business because they were experts, specialists and had great track records of doing what they do best. Tell the story on your website through a company history or professional profile page.

You can never have too many photos

The budding digital photography industry has spawned a society of amateur photographers, but professional photography is still the way to go for anyone serious about making money online.

Professional photography ensures products are displayed in their most attractive and most sellable light. For emotional purchases, such as fashion accessories, have a number of different angles of the product shot. This is especially important with multi-purpose products such as handbags.

Keep the photos simple because when they’re displayed on a website they’re quite small, and complex styling or backgrounds will lose the focus of the product.

Don’t forget to include photos of the business owners and team looking smart in their uniforms outside the office. Photos of the management give visitors the people contact they miss from a face-to-face transaction. It also raises your credibility through recognition.

For an example of a shop with great photography, see the Cairns-based jewellery shop for little girls, Silver Bells & Cockle Shells.

Information overload

Online shoppers are curious, inquisitive and get annoyed by having to search for extra information. Think carefully about the questions customers ask about each product and answer all of them. Don’t be scared of having too much product text because interested customers will read it thoroughly, and the search engines love it!

Internet shoppers don’t like to be sold to, so by all means mention the benefits of your products, but don’t forget the facts. Consider writing light-hearted and informal product descriptions; the online shopping demographic tends to be younger, so we can afford to be a little less serious.

Prices need to be clear and easy to read. Remember that it’s likely people from overseas will be visiting your site, so ensure the currency is understood, and include a currency converter if you’re trying to appeal to the global market.

For a great example of good product text is Zazz who won NetGuide Online Shopping Site of the Year for 2007.

Clarity in delivery prices

It’s frustrating to get to the end of an online shopping experience only to find out the postage charges are astronomical, or even worse, the company doesn’t ship to Australia.

Make your delivery prices easy to find, and detail various shipping options with realistic timeframes for delivery.

For everyday products it is often the delivery charges that prevents websites from competing on a level playing field with shopping centres. Consider offering free postage for deliveries over a certain spending level, or drop the postage charges altogether and build them into your pricing model instead.

Shops like StrawberryNET have created a huge base of loyal customers by offering free shipping worldwide.

Ask me to buy through calls-to-action

Use strong, affirmative language to ask your customers for the sale. Don’t just do it at the bottom of a page either, ask your customers to buy at regular intervals throughout your copy.

If you forget this part, your customers will wonder what to do next. Buying from your website must be easy and intuitive with limited thought required!

I love shopping online. I love not being harassed by badly trained sales staff. Bliss is having an easy-going retail therapy experience in the privacy of my pyjamas. By concentrating on what the online customer wants in a shopping experience will inevitably bring legions of loyal and happy shoppers to your website.

September in Cairns bring back our first taste of the humid summer to come, and this September has certainly given us a reminder of the workout our air-conditioners will be having in the months to come.

It also brings spring… flowers, mating birds and cleaning. Your website needs a spring clean. So what’s on the spring cleaning list:

1. Check out 5 competitors’ websites.

They don’t need to be local, just businesses doing the same things as you. Have a good look at the information they give to their customers, and what features your website could incorporate.

2. Update your content.

Read every word of your website, and check it is still relevent. It might surprise you what has changed in your business since you last changed your website text!

3. Start a new website section.

Business blogs are popular at the moment because just about every business dreams of starting a newsletter to connect with their customers. But this isn’t the only section you might add… perhaps take the temperature of your customers and listen to what they’ve been asking of you. Usually the parts you need to add are the enquiries you recieve from customers the most frequently.

4. Change your look.

Websites change their design too infrequently. To keep your customers on their toes you should do a little change to your image every year, and a big change every second year.

5. Sell Something.

Start generating a revenue stream through your website if you’re not already. Service-based business could try selling their expertise through an e-book or online adjuct to an offline service.  Retailers should have more than just their store location and opening hours – get some product online, even if it’s only a small sample of what’s in your store.

The hot news on the web this week has been Google releasing its own browser, Google Chrome. Most reviews praise the new browser, and my experiences with it so far have been strongly positive. But… what does this mean for online business?

Well first thing is that you should download the browser and take a good look at how your website runs. Go to every page of your site, fill out your contact forms, make a booking or fulfil an order. The key here is to test every part of your functionality.

You may find minor formatting differences between Chrome and your normal browser, but the important thing is to check everything works. So far we’ve noticed some issues with javascript, but that’s just about it.

You may find it interesting that Google Chrome uses the same rendering engine as Safari for Macintosh, so how you see your website in Chrome will be the same as how it will look for Mac users with Safari.

Web developers job just got a little trickier with the introduction of Chrome, as there’s now another browser to add to the mix of our testing regime. If you’d like to know how your website looks in a whole bunch of browsers, have a look at Browser Cam.

When you tell someone a domain name over the phone, it seems instinct kicks in and you will inevitably be asked if that is all one word.

It’s a funny question because domain names cannot have any spaces, so they must all be all one word.

To help stop the spread of this question, I encourage you when asked to say “All domain names are all one word.“ 

I confess, I’m a member of the mobile generation. I’m not one of the annoying types who answer their phone at restaurants or during meetings, but I do carry my mobile everywhere and thanks to Telstra’s NextG service, I’m continually connected to the internet.

There are a growing number of constantly connected consumers, who, just like me, browse the web from their mobile phone, on an exceptionally small screen. We are a frustrated lot too, because most websites are not built with small screens in mind.

Many people don’t believe their website will need to be adapted for mobiles, but if your business does financial transactions over the phone, or have a retail store, chances are a percentage of your customers are already trying to find you. Here’s a couple of real life examples of how someone with a mobile might be interacting with your business.

Restaurants

While enjoying an afternoon out of the house, a couple decide to go to a restaurant for dinner, but aren’t near a phone book. They look up the restaurant’s website on their phone to find the phone number.

• Quickly seeking a phone number is currently the most common reason someone might use their phone-based internet provider.

Real Estate

While driving past an interesting property, someone might notice a For Sale sign out the front and look up a real estate’s website to find out the price of the property.

• Looking for specific information on a business website outside of operating hours is realistic, and will rise as customers become increasingly time poor.

Retail Stores & Attractions

While out and about we might want to check the closing time of a particular store, or opening times of an attraction.

• Easy to find trading hours is an essential asset on websites.

Accommodation

On the way for a weekend getaway, you forget how to get to an accomodation property. You whip out your trusty mobile phone and look up the website for directions, or just for an address to enter into your GPS unit.

• Driving directions and addresses are handy additions to your website for customers.

Your web designer should easily be able to adapt your website to create an easy to read version for a mobile phone in 30 minutes – 2 hours, but having all the information a mobile user might require is important in the first place.

The next time you see a friend with one of those fandangled-looking mobiles that can surf the internet, ask if they can look up your website and have a go at browsing it, or finding specific information. You’ll be suprised how it looks!

Do you know that feeling you get when a sales assistant tries too hard to sell you something that you’re just not interested in. You were perfectly content browsing the store, but they’ve come over, bugged you, and now you just want to leave?

It’s remotely similar to those Persian rug TV commercials that The Chaser are always making fun of. There’s just a sleazy, icky feeling about them.

Well… the web have an equivalent. Actually, there’s a few things that fit into the web sleaze category, and are definitely things you should avoid on your website.

Scrolling Text

Left over from the late 90’s, any text that scrolls is too hard to read. People mistakenly think the movement is going to make people want to read it, but unfortunately that’s not the case.

In case you didn’t feel like waiting… Visitors will not wait to read any text that moves.

Animated GIFs

Little images which blink, twitch, shake or jiggle are likely animated gifs. Here’s a couple of examples:

Now how can you possibly concentrate on the rest of this blog post with all those little guys captivating your attention?

Sound

I won’t start playing sound automatically when you read this, I couldn’t possibly do that to you. But some websites do… and it’s a rude shock when you’ve got a client in the room with you and something starts bleating through your speakers.

So, don’t play sound on your website. Visitors don’t like it.

A couple of people in my office have recently been searching for a new home, and have both lamented at how the real estate agents haven’t quite embraced the web as well as they could, especially considering they’re such an ideal web-based business. The frustrations they’ve experienced are echoed worldwide in other industries too.

Here’s how we think real estate agents could stand out from their competitors:

Detailed and accurate information

The biggest thing driving us mad are the things wasting our time. Finding out the property doesn’t match the description written in the listing is big on the time wasting list, but also needing to call the agency to ask for an address is driving us insane.

The primary reason customers turn to the internet is to save time researching. Agents compound this problem with boring, short descriptions that provide very little information.

Agents need to carefully consider the suitability of properties to particular target demographics and consider the questions that demographic would ask when seeking a property.

Take great photos

We’ve been giggling about the abundance of awful photography. Some are photos are date stamped 2004, there’s a great kitchen shot with a big FLU INJECTION reminder tacked onto the fridge, and someone tried to rubber stamp something out of the back yard and botched it up. Many listings have no photos at all!

Photos will do more of the selling than any words you write, so ensure they’re clear, in focus and recent. Have a peek at my previous post on taking photos for your website.

Real estate cliches

There are so many sayings that need to be erased from the agent’s vocabulary. Here’s the shortlist of ones making us shudder:

• Neat as a pin
• Location, location, location
• Properties like this do not come up very often
• If you sleep on it, you won’t sleep in it

Don’t these just get your goat? OK, enough with the cliches.

A colleague of mine introduced me to a unique eCommerce concept from an Australian website, Zazz.

Zazz sells just one product each day, which is a curious decision for any shop, and sells that product until it runs out. A new product is released the next day.

Perhaps the thing I love most about Zazz though is the owner’s quirky sense of humour going into great detail about each product listed and sometimes posting videos of the products in use.

I must confess, I haven’t bought anything yet, but I read the new product almost every day and have no doubt I’ll purchase something in the near future.

A great example of how a unique twist on a normal sales process can win untold loyalty (and perhaps riches too!)

Today’s product, the Puchi Puchi was sold out.

… and how long is a piece of string?

Websites are like houses, they’re all different! Most web development companies will custom build your website just for you – they’re the consultant, project manager, architect, designer, builder and marketeer too!

In Cairns, Australia, websites are known for being much cheaper than they are throughout the rest of Australia. Nobody really knows why, but Cairns businesses certainly get a great deal over their down south competitors.

Here’s a quick guideline to what you would be paying for in our area.

New Websites

Microbusinesses: $2000

These are tradesmen or single-operator businesses. Mostly they need a simple website to show their scope of skills and their prices.

Service-based industries: $2500 – $3500

Lawyers, media/PR, accountants, web developers… anyone who provides a service fits in here. These industries are hoping their website will provide a strong credibility tool with a good portfolio facility and detail about services provided.

Ecommerce websites: $5000+

Any website which sells something requires credit card security, lots of great photography and good product spiels.

Website Changes

Most web design firms work on an hourly fee for services, and if they give you a fixed price there’s a good chance they’ve considered the time it will take them and multiplied it by the hourly fee.

A good web designer will charge between $80 – $130 per hour.

If the cost is any less than this, I would have a thorough look into their portfolio and check the developer isn’t cutting any corners in essential places.

When asking for a price, consider that most developers will have a minimum charge, some as low as 15 minutes. All jobs, even the smallest ones take at least 15 minutes. Here’s a list of the things a developer does when you request changes to your website:

• Reads your email, or chats to you on the phone (5m)
• Does the job (time depends on the job)
• Checks the changes in Firefox, Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7 & Safari (5m)
• Uploads the changes (5m)
• Checks the changes went up ok (2m)
• Notifys you the changes are online (5m)
• Bills you for the changes (10m)

So even without taking the actual time for the job into account, that’s 32 minutes work. Many of these costs are often absorbed though, parts like billing or receiving the job.

Annual Fees

Unless you’re in a marketing program or have something special you won’t have any ongoing fees associated with your website design.

However, you will have some web hosting fees. You should allow for between $250  -$500 annually to cover your website hosting and domain name registrations.

Did you get that title?

The past two days I’ve noticed a number extraordinarily long domain names… they’re a bad idea because they’re very hard for your customers to remember.

Domain names should be as short, snappy and memorable.

If you have a long business name, consider dropping non-essential but common words from your domain like services, the or solutions.

You could also consider using initialism, although you do need to be lucky in registering those. For example if your business name is The Hurley Brothers Real Estate you might consider the following domain options:

• HurleyBrothers.com.au
• HurleyRealEstate.com.au
• HurleyBrothersRealEstate.com.au

But you wouldn’t consider TheHurleyBrothersRealEstate.com.au. Definitely too many words.