Press release, courtesy of Moore & Smalley and Freshfield PR:

When Mark and Lucy Fuller became frustrated with the lack of a suitable system for managing bookings at their South Lakes Hotel, the entrepreneurial couple decided to create their own.

The booking system they designed, in partnership with a web development agency BF Internet, has been so successful at maximising sales and improving efficiency, they have decided to launch a new venture offering the software to other hotels and accommodation providers.

Direct Room Sales has been designed specifically to help smaller independent hotels offer online sales, manage room allocation, and take electronic payments, all within their existing website.

Mark, who owns The Sun Inn at Kirkby Lonsdale with wife Lucy, said: “For smaller hotels, such as those with fewer than 20 bedrooms, there was nothing out there in terms of software that enabled them to manage online reservations in the efficient way that larger hotels do.

“We wanted a system that allowed us not just to sell our rooms online, but to sequence those room sales in a logical order, offer packages and extras, and do things like automatically change room pricing structures for weekends or certain times of the year. A key feature for us was the link into our EPOS to automatically charge the guest room account.”

Mark and Lucy, who both have a background in hotel management and sales development for larger hotels, approached Milnthorpe-based BF Internet to help them design the software for their five-star inn, which they took over in 2006.

The duo also worked with Morecambe-based company LCR Systems Ltd, which specialises in cash registry and electronic point of sale (EPOS), to complete the system.

The software increased efficiency at the hotel so markedly, that Mark and Lucy approached their development partners about launching a joint venture business, offering the software to other hotels of a similar size.

The new business launched in July 2012 and, so far, five regional hotels have installed the system, which can be set up for as little as £300, depending on a size of the hotel. Hotels then pay an annual rental which includes integrating the software into their existing website, online hosting of the system and payment processing.

Lucy added: “What we’ve achieved with Direct Room Sales is to give hotel owners a booking system that boasts features of software used by large hotel chains, but which is simple to use. Managers and staff can be trained to use the system in as little as 30 minutes.

“It is ideal for those hotels that have a restaurant and bar, as well as their rooms, as it allows them to maximise sales by offering guests the facility to arrange room extras as they book. Not only does it boost revenue, it significantly reduces administration costs too.”

Mark and Lucy have received advice on the new venture from Moore and Smalley, which has offered accountancy and business advisory services to the business for a number of years.

Colin Johnson, corporate services director at Moore and Smalley, said: “With their years of experience in the hotel sector, Mark and Lucy have proved themselves to be very entrepreneurial, not just in the running of their own hotel, but in the development of this new business which has massive potential. There are literally thousands of hotels across the UK that could benefit from the Direct Room Sales software and I predict that business will be very successful.”

What’s new?

When putting together a hosting package, it is the physical rack space that makes up the bulk of the cost, rather than the hardware itself. By upgrading our hardware specifications to allow servers to be shared between 5-10 websites, we’re able to offer this new range of competitive commercial packages. Sharing the rack space means enterprise features are available at the fraction of the cost of a dedicated machine, whilst offering comparable performance & uptime levels.

Should I upgrade?

We’ve included guidance with recommended commercial applications for each package. If you’re on a Basic or Standard package and feel that even 30 minutes of downtime may cost hundreds or thousands in lost revenue, please invest in your hosting now.

Why BF Hosting?

All our servers are tightly managed to high levels of security, using enterprise-level hardware & software – you can see this on our standard features list. Our servers live in what we call a ‘good neighbourhood’ where very few people have access, physically and most crucially remotely. Our servers are used solely by UK businesses with agency-managed websites, offering a secure environment and peace of mind that cheaper providers cannot.

Google have stated that they are making the changes to improve the relevance of the shopping results.

“We believe that having a commercial relationship with merchants will encourage them to keep their product information fresh and up to date. Higher quality data—whether it’s accurate prices, the latest offers or product availability—should mean better shopping results for users, which in turn should create higher quality traffic for merchants.”

It has also been said that this new system would help create a level playing field for smaller retailers to appear alongside their larger counterparts.

As with traditional AdWords campaigns, retailers will only pay for the Google Shopping ad if a user clicks it. This means that any retailer wanting to use Google Shopping will need an AdWords account in order to manage the listings. This will then need to be linked to the existing Merchant account.

A full list of the information required by Google for your Google Shopping feed to be processed has been published and can be found here. More information regarding the upcoming changes can be seen here.

If you would like to discuss how this affects your Google Shopping Feed, please get in touch.

Google’s Content Experiment tools are free, and seamlessly link to Google Analytics to make it easy to analyse the statistics produced.  Each experiment is designed to help your site meet its goals – whether that it for customer to make a purchase, signup for a newsletter or to view a particular page.

Content Experiments let you target one page at a time, so that you can focus on the most important pages involved in reaching your website’s goals.  By concentrating on the individual elements of these pages, you can trial different variations and measure how each one performs compared to the original.

For example, the screen shots above show the Direct Room Sales homepage and variants to be tested.  This page is the first area a visitor will see, so the content displayed here is extremely important.  Google Content experiments could be used on this site to display different content to different segments of its visitors, while measuring each variants’ success.

This process has traditionally been called ‘A/B Testing’, which implies that the testing is only between two versions.  Google Content Experiments has advanced this and allows you to run up to five variations of the original page in one experiment.

What can you gain from Content Experiments?

By running sets of experiments on your site, you can improve your site’s performance to gain better conversion rates and increased overall sales.  If your site isn’t an e-commerce system, the experimentation process can work to improve its usability, therefore increasing its delivery of customer satisfaction.

How can you start your Content Experiments?

The first step is to decide what your site’s goals are and what it aims to achieve.   Once this has been established, the main pages involved in these goals can be determined.  BF Internet offer consultancy to help you select the best pages to target, and can suggest which elements within these pages may have an effect on your site’s performance.  Together we can form a plan for your experiments to suit your website.  The more variations we try the more solid the results will be – even the finest details of a website can have an effect on its visitors.

What do Content Experiments involve?

Each page variation within a set of experiments is built individually and tested. Once the variations have been set up, the experiment is launched and the results monitored via Google Analytics.

If during consultancy you decided to run several sets of experiments, it is best to wait until the first experiment is complete before setting any solid schedule for further experiments.  We can use the information gathered from the first set of experiments and apply it to any further sets.

It’s is also important to keep any unwanted variables in the experiment down to a minimum.  Simple things like making sure each experiment is run from the same day and time in the week can help to give reliable results.

We can tailor your experiments to suit your site.  Options such as choosing what percentage of visitors is included in an experiment gives us great control.

Continuous improvement via Content Experiments

Once the first experiment is under way, we can help you use this data to start thinking about other areas of the site that may be improved.  Your site may already change regularly, which means that there are more elements available to us to test and evaluate in the future.

Your site may see its greatest traffic over certain periods, such as Christmas or summer, and using Content Experiments is a great way to make sure your site is at its best for the visitors in this period.

Next steps

To talk through improving the revenue and return from your website using Content Experiments, contact BF Internet on 0845 519 4727 or email info@bfinternet.co.uk

Consider your users

The primary consideration for any web project should be the users, since they are usually your customers. When considering users and your mobile strategy you should seek to answer the following questions:

• Why will users be accessing my online content using a mobile device?
  It is to purchase a product or make a booking? Or merely to find out more about your company? Or am I providing a tool for my employees?
  
• What will they be looking for?
  Will your users want to find contact details, directions, opening times? Or maybe read your latest news?
  
• Is there any content from main website that they won’t need to see?
  Word documents for printing, for example, probably aren’t very relevant to mobile users
  
• Are there any new features or content they’ll need?
  With a mobile app you could take advantage of device features like the camera, push notifications and GPS
  
• Where will users be when using a mobile device?
  Will they be out and about? Or sitting comfortably at home? An iPad user at home may browse together with a partner, whereas a smartphone user may privately browse on the train.
  
• What type of device will they be using?
  iPad users may typically be at home, and possibly connected via Wi-Fi. There could be an opportunity to present these users with a great interactive brochure?

Some of these questions can be answered by looking at your website statistics (Google Analytics for example), some from placing yourself in your users shoes. Further insight may be gained by gathering information from users via a simple questionnaire.

Business sector

It’s definitely ‘horses for courses’ when it comes to mobile solutions. If you’re primarily a B2B company and your website generally serves as a simple online advert, an elaborate mobile strategy is probably not going to give you a great return. On the other hand, a retailer selling technology products targeted at the younger market may see a great return, as their tech-savvy customers use their smartphones to pick up the latest gadgets during lunchtime or on the bus home.

At this stage it’s going to be useful to research the competition and have a look at their sites. Have a look at the big players online also – Amazon, BBC, John Lewis etc. – and be inspired by their mobile presences.

Some examples follow showing how a variety of businesses tailor their approach for their sector. These are dedicated mobile sites:

Content

Having answered questions about your users and considered your business sector, you are well placed to begin drafting a content plan for your mobile site. Using your desktop website as a starting point, work through the key pages and functions and identify if they should be retained as-is for mobile, optimised for smaller screen situations, or removed for mobile users entirely.

When reviewing content for each page, consider the following:

• Can this content be more concise? There’s a myth that mobile users have a shorter attention span, but we must remember that all internet users have a short attention span! If you could make your content more concise for the mobile version, you could probably amend the desktop version too.
• Do we need to change image sizes? You probably do. Smartphone users won’t wish to download huge images through a slow 3G connection, whilst iPad users will thank you for glorious high-resolution photos that look great on a retina display.
• What about video? Any video that’s embedded on your desktop site is likely to use a Flash player, but these generally aren’t supported on popular mobile devices. Video should be embedded using a more modern HTML5 method.
• How will you manage content in future? In years gone by businesses published content for both printed materials and the web. That situation is fast becoming publication for web & mobile.

What next?

Now you’ve considered your users, your business needs and the mobile presence that best suits you, then next step is to put the plan into action!

Whilst mobile browsing accounts for an ever-growing proportion of your website traffic, there isn’t one ‘standard’ approach for catering for mobile visitors. The information you provide to a mobile audience and the methods used to present it should be considered on a case by case basis; user demographic, business sector and budget all dictate which solution suits best. With this in mind we look at four approaches and ask; which mobile strategy is right for your business?

1. The simplest approach: Adjust your desktop site

The simplest and cheapest option is to simply adjust your existing desktop website. This basically comes down to testing it with the most popular devices (your website statistics are useful here) and making sure everything works i.e. all the functionality is accessible, products can be purchased, pages can be seen and forms filled in. The aim here is to ensure that whilst the user experience is far from optimised for a smaller screen, no visitor with a mobile device is prevented from using your site (and so forcing them to go elsewhere.)

• Pros: Quick & cheap. A good first step.
• Cons: The user experience is not optimised for mobile.

2. The next level: Responsive design

To further optimise a website for a mobile audience we can employ CSS features called ‘media queries’ that detect the available screen size, device orientation and screen resolution. These features allow your website to behave differently for desktop, tablet and smartphone users, with further considerations to whether the device is being held in a landscape or portrait position. These tools mean true optimisation of the layout and appearance of a website can be undertaken; font sizes adjusted, buttons & navigation elements made ‘finger friendly’, layouts adapted to tall portrait and wide landscape screens.

A truly effective responsive design should ideally be built into a website from the beginning, however good results can be achieved by retro fitting media queries to address issues where navigation elements are too small etc.

• Pros: Reasonably quick to implement requiring only CSS changes. Allows for full layout optimisation for mobile users.
• Cons: Does not effectively allow optimisation of the content.

3. Full optimisation: A dedicated mobile site

A dedicated mobile site is one that runs on a secondary domain, i.e. http://m.visionexpress.com/. As a dedicated site runs independently of the main desktop site, it allows full optimisation of both the layout and the content for mobile users, without any effect on the desktop site. This means content which is highly relevant for users who are mobile (contact details, opening times, directions) can be moved to a position of prominence, whilst less important content (terms & conditions, file downloads) may be made less obvious or removed altogether. Images and video content can also be optimised both in proportion and file size, for the smaller screens and slower connection speeds.

It is recommended to use processes on the web server to detect the device being used and redirect to the mobile/desktop site accordingly, however you should always give mobile users the option to browse back to the desktop site (and maybe vice versa).

• Pros: Allows full optimisation of the user experience, for both content and layout. Allows you to tailor the experience for users who are ‘on the move’ who will have different requirements to those at a desk.
• Cons: Depending on the solution, may require maintenance of two websites (content, design, etc.)

4. A full mobile app

Whilst there has been plenty of buzz around mobile apps, they are not right for all businesses and audiences. In part this is due to the significantly higher cost of developing a mobile app, but also due to you target audience; they may not wish to install something on their handset in order to access your content, but rather just browse and go.

A full mobile app certainly has its place however; an app can be highly effective in providing your users (or even your staff) with useful tools, and the effectiveness of apps for delivering interesting interactive and viral content is clear to be seen. An app can interact with the mobile device in ways in which a website can’t: GPS, camera, notifications, contacts etc. and in situations where these handset features are required an app is the right tool for the job.

More often than not a mobile app is not a replacement for a mobile-optimised website, but rather a partner for it. EBay, Rightmove, Facebook & Twitter are all examples where a mobile app sits alongside a dedicated mobile site and the desktop site too.

It’s important to point out that there are two options available when considering a full mobile app; ‘native apps’ and ‘web apps’:

1. A native app is the type of app we’ve all seen in the app store on our smartphones. These are full applications written in a device-specific language by specialist developers. Whilst seen as ‘proper’ apps, they’re generally costly to produce and often require coding for each specific device (iPhone, Android, Blackberry etc.). Getting some types of application into the app store or marketplace can present challenges also, and you can’t submit an app for approval until it’s be designed, developed and tested.
2. A web app is something in-between a native app and a dedicated mobile site. It’s generally written in a web-programming language (e.g. PHP) and hosted on a web server. It is available to users outside the app stores, which means there isn’t the approval process, but there isn’t the coverage available associated with becoming a ‘featured app’ either. A web app doesn’t have full access to all device features – notifications, contacts, etc. – however HTML5 does provide features such as offline storage and location detection.

• Pros: A fully-optimised experience, making use of device features like GPS, camera etc. A popular native app can provide a source of revenue through app store sales.
• Cons: The most expensive option here. A full mobile app is often an addition to a mobile site.

Costs

If we were to plot the costs of implementing the above strategies on a chart, it may look like this:

You can see the costs rise sharply as the complexity and completeness of the mobile presence increases. Note that within each band there is an upper and lower scales of costs also; a highly complex responsive design may equal the cost of a basic dedicated mobile site.

So which is right for your business?

Looking at the range of customers we provide web services for, options 1, 2 and 3 would suit most businesses. Option 3 (the dedicated mobile site) lends itself to larger sites already experiencing strong levels of traffic, sales or interest from mobile users. For those businesses who offer products to buy online, we have an ‘ecommerce for mobile’ bolt-on for your existing site which can allow you to present an online store with mobile-optimised content and layout at a greatly reduced cost. Contact us for details on this package.

For smaller websites, or those presenting brochure-style information content, a combination of options 1 (Adjust your desktop site) & 2 (Responsive design) are likely to be most suited to your business.

What next?

Now you’re interested in catering for your mobile visitors, your next steps would be to think about planning your mobile strategy and then to contact us to discuss the options.

Still not on Twitter?

Ranked by browsing behaviour analysts Alexa as the world’s 8th most influential website, Twitter is now in its 7th year of existence. What’s more, industry experts predict that social media will have an even greater influence on both the business and personal spheres in the near future.

Through dialogue with our clients and contacts, we have come to the realisation that many struggle to get started with new online platforms. With that in mind, the BF team have created a step-by-step best practice guide to the Twitter sign-up process.

STAGE ONE

Once you’ve typed “twitter.com” into your browser, you will be prompted to enter your name, email address and password. If you are signing up for a personal account, it would make sense to use your full, real name. This should allow friends and colleagues to identify you easily. This real name will be separate to your Twitter handle (see “Stage Two” section below) and can often be the clearest way of communicating your true identity.

When signing up for a business account, it is important to clearly state your business name and to contemplate briefly describing your line of work. SEO considerations are becoming an increasingly important factor in the social media arena.

When selecting an email address, beware that Twitter will initially send you a high volume of updates relating to events surrounding your account. Brace yourself for the initial onslaught of spam and read on (“Stage Four” section), for advice on how to stop it. As always, when selecting a password, security and memorability are of vital importance. Choosing an easy-to-recall, secure password that includes letters, numbers and perhaps even symbols and punctuation is best practice.

Don’t worry, all of the fields that you’ll encounter at Stage One can be changed later.

STAGE TWO

The second screen will prompt you to choose a Twitter handle. A “handle” is an abbreviated username or moniker that will represent your account. Fellow Twitter users can use this handle to direct messages at you, or to reference and credit your work. The handle will always take the format of @yourhandlehere.

When selecting a handle, it’s important to keep punctuation to a minimum. Characters like underscores can lead to user confusion, and will only serve to reduce the amount of interaction that you receive.

It would also make sense to select a name that succinctly sums up your business. This could be an abbreviated version of your company name or maybe a company slogan. Handle availability can be factor on Twitter as, much like with phone numbers, each permutation can only exist once.

A new user should also note that it is often sensible to use capital letters at the beginning of words in Twitter handle, in the event that you have multiple consecutive instances of the same letter in a name. For example, if your handle were @expressstores, you may want to create a visible definition of the number of “S”s included i.e. @ExpressStores. This is an easy way to reduce consumer confusion. It should have no negative impact either, as messages will still be received if directed to the all lower-case variation. This capitalisation is purely window dressing. Twitter is not case-sensitive when it comes to handles. Once you’ve chosen an available name, simply click “Create My Account” to proceed.

STAGE THREE

At this stage, you will be prompted to begin engaging with the existing Twitter community.

We would suggest that all new users follow a few of the recommended celebrities, particularly ones that are relevant to your interests and/or industry.

It is also possible to run an online address book check. This will tell you which of your existing real world connections are on Twitter. If you use a compatible email service, such as GMail or Hotmail, you will be able to export your contacts quickly and easily. If not, and you use a facility such as Outlook, here’s a sneaky tip for you…open a GMail account, import your contacts from your existing email account, then run the address book check, after selecting GMail.

Importing your contacts can be particularly useful for business. You can save the time, effort and money that would otherwise be spent on manual searching. It will also give your new Twitter account an instant kick-start.

STAGE FOUR

Now you will have the opportunity to choose appropriate settings for your account.

By clicking on the cog at the top right of the screen, then browsing to “email notifications”, you will be able to un-check the ‘receive spam’ features. Simply click on the boxes next to terms such as “email me when I’m followed by someone new”.

You can also click on “profile” to begin altering your page’s visual presentation. In this area of the site you can change the background design of your page. Don’t spend too much time on this. A simple background that matches your brand’s colour scheme or, in the case of a personal account, reflects your personality works best. A recent addition to Twitter that complements the background feature is the large Facebook-influenced banner that sits behind a user’s profile pic. It’s important to choose an image or pattern that complements your profile picture and doesn’t take the eye away from it.
Speaking of profile pictures, be sure to upload one via this section. If you don’t, you will be left with a variation on Twitter’s default egg. The default egg is notorious amongst the online community. It’s the calling card of the spam artist. Once you become more familiar with the Twitter community, you’ll begin to notice robotic temporary accounts that frequently spring up and spread viruses and useless links – typically they’ll have the offending egg as their pic.

If running an account for business purposes, you might want to consider using either your company logo or a photo of a high-profile staff member (thus positioning them as a brand ambassador).

If using a company logo, be sure to use a high-resolution image that will show clearly in all of the possible formats seen on Twitter. There are instances where this image will appear in larger or smaller forms. If you’re having trouble with the way your logo displays, the easiest way to re-size is by opening the image file in an image editor and going from there. When it comes to size and resolution, beware that the maximum photo upload size allowed is 700,000 bytes. Right click on the image file on your desktop and choose “properties” to find out what the size is.

Once this is done, you can move on to filling out your bio section. Here you can enter a brief, keyword-rich description of yourself, your business and/or the purpose of your account. One current trend amongst influential industry professionals is to describe the things that they will be tweeting about, when and how often.

When writing your bio you will also need to be conscious that the maximum character limit is 160 (20 characters more than the maximum allowed length of a tweet).

The final feature of your profile is perhaps the most important – the URL that you post below your bio. Be sure to complete this section by linking back to your website, blog or another relevant internet hub. A link from a high-traffic, high-reputation site like Twitter can give an invaluable boost to a strategically-selected part of your online presence.

***

So there we have it, you’ve laid the foundations for an excellent social media presence.

If you’ve followed our instructions carefully, you should now have an optimised name and bio, an effective handle, attractive background visuals, the ability to avoid spam and more importantly, to avoid being seen as a spammer.

All that you need to do now is to maximise your contact base. Use the Twitter search bar to find people that fall within your natural, pre-existing network. They could be real world friends, relatives and colleagues, industry peers, members of your supply chain or simply neighbouring local establishments (yes, that includes competitors). Simply click on the “follow” button next to their bio. Try it now on the @BFInternet Twitter page, where we share regular information for people and businesses that are new to social media.

What is a dedicated server?

A dedicated web server is a physical server that is for the use of only one customer. The server is used to host websites belonging to that customer only; these websites are able to fully utilise the memory and processor resources within the system.

A dedicated server is the best hosting arrangement for any business and website, since the server resources are not shared with other companies. Your website exists in its own safe zone, unaffected by other website ‘neighbours’ who may be experiencing high volumes of traffic; this means that your business-critical website doesn’t slow down when others are busy. If your website is hosted on a standard shared server it may be competing for server resource with up to 300 other websites.

Because it is not shared with other websites, a dedicated server is the most secure and crucially the most reliable type of hosting.

When should I consider a dedicated server?

• Your online business is a key source of income
• Any downtime would be a costly experience due to lost revenue
• You expect peaks in website traffic at seasonal times
• You require priority support
• You require bespoke hosting features such as additional backups, server software, additional redundancy or a high server specification.

The advantages of a dedicated server

• No risk of your website becoming slow or even crashed by another business on the shared server
• Incredible server response times
• Priority technical support
• Increased server reliability and uptime
• Increased server security
• Options for a bespoke server configuration
• Options for an upgrade route as your website grows

The disadvantages of a dedicated server

A dedicated server doesn’t really come with any disadvantages for your website, which is why they are so popular with online businesses. The only consideration for your business is the increased cost. Hardware investment for a hosting company will run into thousands of pounds, but the cost to the customer is spread over a number of years. It is possible for you to lower your annual server cost by committing to a longer agreement – contact us to discuss the options.

Prevention is better than cure

As unpleasant as it may be, server downtime is inevitable at some point – whether that’s for maintenance or due to factors beyond all our control. From time to time a website owner may become frustrated that a website is offline and may even feel that the downtime is costing thousands in lost revenue. If you think you’d feel the same, that even 30 minutes of downtime may cost hundreds or thousands in lost revenue, please invest in your hosting now.

A shared hosting package costing a couple of hundred pounds per year is perfect for many website owners, but it will inevitably have its limitations and won’t suit business or revenue-critical situations. 99.99% uptime equates to 53 minutes offline per year and it is undeniable that downtime is more likely on a shared server. Contact us today to discuss the right hosting options for your business; prevention is better than cure.

This change in security is part of a new requirement for PCI-DSS compliance, so that login details are transmitted in an encrypted manner rather than as plain text.

You should begin using FTP over SSL right away. You will need to adjust the connection settings in your FTP client to use SSL, this setting might be phrased as “FTPS (Explicit)” or “Explicit FTP over TLS”. Once this setting has been changed, FTP will continue to function as normal.

Regular FTP will be disabled on Tuesday 30^th October.

Creating a smart & successful ecommerce website needs careful planning and consideration, balancing technology & design with good marketing and – more often than not – a keen price.

This article takes a look at 8 popular upgrades for ecommerce websites which improve customer experience and help drive sales.

1. Product reviews

When making a purchase offline consumers frequently act on the recommendation of others. In today’s social internet, product reviews are a great way of bringing this peer-to-peer interaction online.

Product reviews are a very powerful tool in driving online sales; consumers feel an increased level of trust when a genuine cross-section of customer feedback is presented. By reading experiences from other buyers would-be customers are not only able to identify the best product, but also find the best product for them.

Our product reviews upgrade allows you to moderate and approve all reviews before they’re published live. Why not book feature this for your ecommerce site today and start seeing increased sales and improved customer satisfaction levels?

2. Upgrade your website search

The standard search feature on most websites provides a simple keyword matching tool, however if your product range requires a little more depth and guidance you may wish to consider upgrading your search tools.

Upgraded search tools can make recommendations, suggest alternatives and intelligently rank results by relevance to help your customers quickly find a product, and ultimately drive sales. If your product range requires it, you may investigate a bespoke upgrade to your website search. A quick win however may be the simple ‘Site Search’ bolt-on from Google, which at around £50/year offers a fantastic feature set and great value for money. See an example we’ve implemented on mitrelinen.com

3. A filter navigation for your products

On the subject of finding products quickly, where your product range is large and you wish to assist your customers in browsing your range, you should look at employing a product filter to allow them to drill down with ease.

A filter allows the customer to reduce the amount of items shown within a category by selecting criteria that are relevant to their needs. This is often highly effective for ranges of specialist items where customers are knowledgeable on the desired product.

If a customer isn’t able to find a product on your site easily, it’s likely they’ll Google for the product and go directly to the purchase elsewhere. You can see one of our filters in action on visionexpress.com (take a look at the ‘Try on’ too; we’re quite proud of that!)

4. A customer account area

A customer account area helps your regular customers feel valued, especially when coupled with personalised offers, e-mailings, stored billing & shipping addresses and order updates. A customer account area is central to building great customer relationships through increased intelligence about the people who buy from you. A customer area also encourages repeat ordering; when a quick click to ‘buy this again’ is all that’s required it’s unlikely that a busy customer is going to take the time to shop around elsewhere.

5. Allow your customers to save their card details

We all hate the tedious task of fishing out our credit cards to pay for something, so chances are your customers do too. Once registered with your customer account facility, the SagePay token system allows customers to store their card details securely for future use; payment for subsequent orders can be made simply by logging in and entering the 3 digits from the back of the card. Great for encouraging repeat orders!

For peace of mind, all card details are securely held by SagePay, who are a PCI DSS Level 1 payment service provider.

6. Add ‘back in stock’ notifications

Where you have desirable, rare or unique products, a customer is likely to wait to buy from you rather than going to look elsewhere should the item be out of stock. When an item returns to stock, wouldn’t it be great to notify all the expectant customers automatically? And wouldn’t it be great to know how many people are keen to snap items up before you order? Our ‘back in stock’ feature does just that; you can see it in action on ilovemykanken.com

7. Product comparison tools

A third feature to assist potential customer in finding the right product: comparison tools. These are best suited to ranges of products where items are similar but subtly different; the comparison allows a customer to view a selection of products and their associated features side-by-side, only requiring a quick visual scan to find the item that’s right for them. A great example of a product comparison in action is the TV department on johnlewis.com

8. Google Shopping Feed

A Google Shopping Feed is the number one upgrade we recommend for all ecommerce sites. Why? It’s a great source of traffic, it can put your products on page one of Google quicker than other methods and most importantly, it’s FREE. You can read about the benefits of Google Shopping here. Setting up a feed to Google requires an additional module for your ecommerce software (and some extra data for your products) but once configured the feed is fully automated and you can receive the benefits of the extra traffic with no on-going cost. Why wait?