Multiple Web Browser Compatibility

Posted on August 17, 2009 by admin

browsers-logosAs online users are now using more different types of internet browsers than ever before, it is more important than ever that your ecommerce site performs consistently throughout all browsers.

The good news is that the vast majority of online shoppers – over 80% – use either Internet Explorer or Firefox. The bad news is that there are over 100 different browsers and countless flavors of the Internet Explorer & Firefox.

The common argument used to avoid dealing with compatibility issues is that as the percentage of people using for example Chrome is relatively low, around the 3% mark globally, it isn’t worthwhile taking those users into account. This is probably not a wise way to approach the issue, especially for an ecommerce based site. 3% can make a big difference to your bottom line, as it’s not only Internet Explorer users who buy goods and services online.

The truth is, that tailoring an ecommerce site for cross browser compatibility is a pain. But the benefits can pay off in the long run by allowing you to secure sales from a wider customer base.

The main difficulties when it comes to browsers

1. Variety of Web Browsers:

As Windows Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Opera and many more.

2. Different Web Browser Versions

The major difference between two versions of the same browser is their support for newer portions of the HTML language. Internet users though tend to upgrade their browser based on the addition of new features, like email integration and instant messaging. However, not all users switch immediately to the newest versions. A good rule of thumb is to design your pages to work for the last two versions of the major browsers.

3. Older Browsers

As web technology advances web browsers are falling behind. These lagging browsers put ecommerce businesses in something of a quandary. How do you offer customers the best possible user experience without leaving some of those customers behind?

How to become Multiple Web Browser Compatible

1. Set a Goal

The first step toward solving old browser or noncompliant browser problems is to apply the 80/20 rule also known as the Pareto principle. Basically, 80% of your online store’s business comes from 20% of potential customers. When applying this principle loosely we’ll focus on the top browsers only.

2. End User Web Experience

Ensuring that your Website looks and performs well in a multiple browser world starts with measurement and testing. The overall goal is to provide a quality Web experience for the end user and to accomplish this consistently. Cross browser testing can be divided into four main categories:

• The Visual – The easiest measure is to simply take a look. Visual verification is a straightforward process. However, verifying five or six major browser vendors and the multiple versions of each can become tedious.
• The Functional – Do your critical business functions work successfully? Or will you leave someone with a full shopping cart waiting or unable to check-out?
• The Performance – Three benchmarks can be used to assess end- user web application performance: 
         o Availability: Shows that a Web page or full end-to-end transaction requested by a user is executed successfully without errors.
         o Response Time: Shows the speed at which every end-to-end transaction, page, image or third party content downloads.
         o Consistency: shows the site’s ability to achieve a quality customer experience across multiple visits.
         o Perceived Performance: It measures how long it took for the page to appear like it finished moving and how long it took for all visible “above the fold” components to load.

3. World Wide Web Consortium

Another thing you should make a habit of is to validate your pages through the World Wide Web Consortium. Founded in 1994 the W3C has made it its obligation to guide the development of the Web and create a common basis to build upon. W3C offers free validation tolls.These useful tools are trying to ensure that your visitors will get roughly the same experience when they visit your site.

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Green Ecommerce

Posted on August 11, 2009 by admin

Every day issues like environment and global warming are discussed. No surprise that shoppers are trying to make a contribution to the sustainability environmental movement in several ways. Consumers prefer to purchase energy-efficient products and appliances as well as locally-made items. More and more shoppers choose products in recyclable packaging or buy at farmer’s market.

Ebay recently introduced the Ebay Green Team as a result of record number of customers choosing to buy items that could be classified as “used”, “organic”, “refurbished”, “vintage”, “sustainable” or “remainder.”

The good news for online retailers: Ecommerce itself is green and in order to become a “greener” online shop all you need is to make a few environmental changes. The rewards will justify the effort.

Green Online Shopping

Online shopping is “greener” than shopping via traditional models. A study by the Carnegie Mellon University  compared the impact of buying online vs. driving to and from a store. It concluded that the online transaction reduced the environmental impact with 35% less energy consumption and CO2 emissions.

• Green effect 1. Less vehicle miles: Shopping is one of the most frequent reasons for car travels. Each time that a customer decides to buy online rather than go shopping by car CO2 emissions are saved.
• Green effect 2. Less printed materials: Online e-newsletters and brochures replace their physical equivalent therefore it saves paper and reduces distribution costs.
• Green effect 3. Less waste. Across the whole supply chain of procurement, manufacturing and distribution, the Internet can help reduce product and distribution cycles. Auction services like eBay and Amazon Marketplace even enable redistribution of second-hand items promoting recycling.
• Green effect 4. Dematerialization. Better known as digitization, this is the availability of products like software, music and video in digital forms.

Green Online Shop

• Packing Material: For mail-orders, packages are indispensable. Nevertheless avoid e.g. disposable packaging and use environmentally friendly, recycled wrapping materials instead.
• Bulk Mailing: Offer to ship several items in just one packing instead of several separate packages.
• Email instead of paper: Send invoice, newsletters etc. by email instead of paper and offer for example paperless payment.
• Whenever paper is unavoidable, use 100% post-consumer recycled paper.
• Offer to withdrawal old batteries and other electric appliances.

Green Online Retailer

In order to become an environmental Ecommerce retailer it might be worth to share your own green office efforts with your customers. Further reducing energy usage is good for the planet as well as for your business as it translates into lower operating costs.

• Use compact fluorescent light bulbs instead of incandescent bulbs in the office and warehouse.
• Setup the energy saving features on computers during the day.
• Turn off all computers, monitors, printers, scanners, etc. through a power strip at the end of the day in order to prevent “standby” energy these devices are often using.
• Use a paperless accounting system saves immense amounts of resources. A small investment up front on equipment and services (backup hard drive, scanner and online backup service) will pay for itself in costs on resources such as paper, file folders, and file cabinets.

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How To Deal With Customer Reviews

Posted on August 3, 2009 by admin

Online review portals continuously grow in popularity among users. Whether someone is looking for a new camera, shoes or a doctor: More and more users consult portals before buying.

Ecommerce retailers are skeptical though, because they fear criticism of their offers and services. Despite previous fears that consumers posting honest and unfiltered material could damage sales, it has been having the opposite effect in most cases.

In fact, visitors who clicked on the highest customer-rated reviews were more likely to purchase. Therefore online retailers should strengthen their presence on such sites. Only then, they have the opportunity, to use these platforms to their advantage.

7 tips for dealing with customer reviews:

1. Don’t avoid negative feedback. Nobody is perfect – and not every single customer will be content. If a company is basically highly rated this criticism is by no means a disadvantage, since it increases the companies’ credibility.

2. Resolves an evaluation in resentment, the top priority is: a deep breath. Anger is a natural reaction to subjective or provocative contributions, but should not guide your actions.

3. Try to see your company from the perspective of the customer. This will help to decide whether the criticism from the perspective of the evaluator is justified.

4. If you receive a positive critique, write a thank you. It will please your customers.

5. If you do not share the criticism make your perspective clear. Act professionally and constructively by posting a comment or writing to the author a private message.

6. If a customer is unhappy and you know that you can do better, make him an offer which will convince him. This could be in form of a discount or a coupon.

7. An evaluation is always a snapshot. You – as well as the customer – should always keep this in mind.

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Optimize Images for Search

Posted on July 27, 2009 by admin

There’s an area that is often overlooked in SEO and that’s images. Just like the words on a website, images generate traffic and links, too.

In terms of aesthetics, images are an integral part of website design. They break up a copy-heavy page and give site visitors instant visual stimulation. In terms of SEO, images can be optimized and bring additional visitors to a website. Actively using images as part of your overall optimization strategy can pay dividends.

Image Search Optimization Tips

Image naming: Give image filenames a title that reflects the content and is descriptive such as “Sony Ericsson C905″ instead of “SEC905.jpg”. Make the image names of your files match what is actually represented in the file. Don’t stuff your Alt Tags full of keywords though- especially ones that don’t relate to the rest of your page as they run the risk of being seen as spam.

Image linking: Boost internal linking and traffic by linking images to relevant articles and/or blog posts on your website. If you are sending out press releases or contributing articles to other websites, provide an image link.

Image quality: Good quality pictures with high contrast tend to work better. Make necessary resolution adjustments between your full size images and your thumbnails.

Image formatting: Photos saved as JPG files and other graphic image types as GIFs are the preferred image formatting.

Image freshness: Keep images fresh. If you’re targeting high popularity keywords it’s worth re-uploading images. Image freshness is a contextual clue for the search engines and could affect relevancy.

Image appearance: Further increase relevancy by optimizing the page the image appears on. Search engines look at text surrounding an image to determine relevancy.Text within the anchor tag and next to anchor text is especially going to influence image-search rankings.

Image duplication: Avoid duplicate image content on the website. If for example, you have a thumbnail, a medium size image, and a full size image, you don’t want these to all be indexed. The best way to handle this is to use robots.txt to prevent the crawler from looking at the versions you don’t want indexed.

Image filter: Enabled image search option at Google webmaster tool.

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FAQs & Ecommerce – A Highly Recommended Match

Posted on July 21, 2009 by admin

The frequently asked questions (FAQ) section is one of the most visited sections of each website. The users expect clearly written, well-organized, complete and actionable answers to their questions. Still only half of ecommerce retailers offer FAQs on their websites. Among those sites offering FAQ, almost one in five FAQ systems does not satisfy the client.

A FAQ section is especially helpful throughout critical stages of the buying cycle. Issues including the online ordering process focusing on payments and security can be solved through the FAQ section.

Tips about FAQs:

Effective FAQs
The FAQ section of your ecommerce site needs to be updated frequently. Keep it user-focused, and make sure that your FAQ page offers other easy, immediate ways (e-mail, phone, live chat) for the potential costumers to get answers.

Specific FAQs
Most FAQ sections are too long. Limit the general FAQ section to the handful of questions users are most likely to ask and create specialized FAQs for specific products, services, or types of users.

Dead-End FAQs
Some FAQs provide dead-end answers. The question is answered but the answer doesn’t include or link to relevant information that enables the user to take action. An excellent answer would link to an opt-out form or provide the e-mail address and phone number of a person to contact to opt out.

More FAQ facts to take into consideration:

Websites neglect FAQs and waste their potential
Ecommerce retailers are neglecting the answering of FAQs on their websites or the FAQs are lacking in quality. Yet FAQs can solve customers’ issues quickly and easily. Looked after carefully they provide customers with the information they seek faster than an e-mail.

FAQs rarely provide the right answers
FAQs frequently fail to do what they are supposed to, instead leaving behind more questions than answers. Almost one in five catalogues of questions leaves potential customers with their service queries entirely unanswered. And 70% of companies only occasionally provide the right responses.

FAQ saves time & money
An intelligent question-and-answer system which does not involve elaborate navigation can help customers to help themselves and it increases satisfaction levels because they can obtain a solution to their problems at any time of day or night. It also relieves other communication channels which involve much more staffing and cost. Furthermore, most customer queries relate to issues that can be dealt with more quickly by FAQs than by e-mail: delivery times, methods of payment and shipping costs. Powerful self-service solutions therefore offer enormous potential savings.

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