Feb 07
Free Stuff, New Updates, Work, Yahoo Store inventify, stock notifications, Yahoo Store No Comments
With Inventify, you can keep the customers updated about the availability of various products on your store. Your visitors can sign up for a notification on the store. When you have the item back in stock – it sends the customer an email notifying the availability.
Oct 11
Design, Web Dev, Work, Yahoo Store photoshop, quality in design, web design No Comments
Quality is a word that a lot of people like to use when describing their web design services. But what is quality, how do you know if a design is quality or not. Well, I think that there’s quite a few ways to spot quality within web designs. Once you can see just what goes into making a quality web design, you can use the techniques to perfect your own style.
I’ve put together a few pointers, and collected some examples to explain just how I look for quality within a website design.
One of the main things that I look for within a good website design is clever use of spacing with design elements. Paying close attention to how certain things are spaced out and lined up can really make a difference to the overall appearance and sense of quality of your design.
I think the key to getting your spacing right is to look at all of the elements within your design. Looking at the bigger picture really can help you get a good idea of how best to space your elements. Sometimes zooming out and taking a different look at your designs can be a great help.
As you can see here, there is a very clean and open feel to the content here. This is completely down to the designer allowing a good amount of space around the text & images.
Having well spaced out elements can make them a lot more attractive, and a lot more clickable. Digital Mash is a great example of a very welcoming website.
Aug 05
Work, Yahoo Store, iphone / Mobile Download, FREE, Leopard, Mac, OS X No Comments
Take a look at the 2009 Lifehacker Pack for Mac OS X – DOWNLOAD FREE!.
Like our 2009 Lifehacker Pack for Windows (and its predecessor), the Mac version has the same goal in mind: to provide Mac lovers with a single, handy list of the best free applications that you’re likely to use on a regular basis.
Note: You can head directly to each application’s download page from the [Download] links and see what we originally wrote about them at the [LH Post] link.
Things change daily in the world of free software, and we by no means believe that this list is absolutely definitive, so if you’ve got your own I-can’t-believe-they-didn’t-include-X must-haves, tell us all about them—and share any other thoughts on our list—in the comments. Happy downloading!
Mar 28
Design, Web Dev, Yahoo Store No Comments
When was the last time you called customer support because you were having problems checking out online? Probably never! Cart abandonment rate is at around 60%, and most of it happens before the user even begins the checkout process. Sometimes, convincing your customers to trust you is your biggest challenge.
There is no “Consumer Trust for Dummies,” but as eCommerce designers, we need to focus on some fundamentals. The following topics may seem as obvious as walking into a seven-foot Wookie, but rest assured you will find plenty of websites with a mouth full of fur.
If your core demographic is women between the ages 35 and 65 who have an annual income of $60,000+, you would treat them different than the 18- to 25-year-old male demographic. First and foremost in e-tail: forcing your visitor to think is a bad idea. When creativity stops being subjective and can be measured by a dollar amount, making sure you’re designing for the customer is a no-brainer.
Years ago, I had an SVP of DotCom tell my team, “You can go home if you want to paint pictures.” And for the rest of the day, I couldn’t wait to get there so that I could make sure the next morning his inbox was full of expletive material illegal in most counties. After calming down, I realized he was right. All along, what he was telling us was simply to design for the customer and not ourselves. This was a challenge for designers working in an eCommerce corporate atmosphere but a very important lesson to learn.
Build brand loyalty to gain patient, forgiving customers for a lifetime. For instance, Apple’s customer loyalty exceeds all other brands with an unusual cult following. Apple lovers forgive the company when it makes mistakes and zealously defend the company’s products and reputation.
How do you make your customers trust you this much? The answer is to give the user an “Experience.” It is not enough simply to make a website usable. The experience you create for the customer has to make them not realize that they are “using” it. It’s a tough concept to grasp, and the recipe changes from website to website, but the right combination of usability, creative design, writing, psychology and metrics and a strong brand will create an experience through which your customers learn to trust you.
Like the perfect score to a film, a good user experience is unobtrusive and transparent to the consumer because “it just works.” The Apple model will not work for everyone, but I often find myself challenged with a W.W.J.D. moment. Ask, “What would Jobs do?” and then look at other websites for inspiration.
Just because a website is usable, does not mean customers will use it. Usability and user experience are in the same family, but more often than not user experience is the forgotten child. There are key areas in which the two must co-exist. Below are suggestions for some areas where websites should spend as much, if not more time, on the user experience.
The product detail (PD) page is where some retail websites drop the ball. Too much focus is put on the design and usability of the home page, and that effort does not continue through to the rest of the website. More of the user’s time is spent on the product detail page than any other. Here, you need to offer customers all of the information they are looking for but present it in an intelligent way as well.
A few recent trends on eCommerce websites are “no-click” alternate images and swatches. A user simply has to roll over an image, without clicking, to get immediate feedback. The same approach can be used to zoom in to the image. Other UX options for the PD page are smart fields that let users know they still have to perform a required action before proceeding, without getting a typical error message.
Much like the PD page, the checkout process is a critical piece that engages the customer on a somewhat intimate level. However, unlike the PD page, where customers want to spend time to make sure they want what they are looking at, the checkout process should have as few steps as possible. Too many steps and the customer feels trapped.
But too quick and they feel like they have lost control. For instance, asking for credit card information too soon will seem out of order and no doubt scare even the most seasoned online shopper into abandoning their cart. Hidden taxes and shipping costs will make them feel like you are trying to take advantage of them.
Always making sure your customer knows that your website is secure and that their privacy will never be compromised goes back to the issue of trust. It does not take much effort to display a message telling your customers that they are safe in your hands; a footer link to your privacy policy is not always enough.
A page’s weight is determined by its file size, by adding up every image, every line of code and anything that gets loaded when the user first hits the page. Libraries such as Scriptaculous, jQuery, MooTools and even Flash Shared Objects are often forgotten, but they all add to a page’s “weight.”
Some fascinating things are on the horizon for developers related to user experience and page weight. One notable development as of late was the release of Safari 4 Beta, which has support for HTML 5 media tags, CSS animation and CSS effects. As more and more of these features become standard in browsers across the board, we can look forward to offering users a better experience by using features directly in the browser. More
Oct 02
The next big step you need to take is choosing an eCommerce Platform.
There are several requirements and aspects to consider during this process.
But first, let me make one point – nothing you do here is permanent! Many people get stuck in this phase and take way to long to analyze the pros and cons of every single platform available. But Nothing is Permanent! Please don’t get stuck in the paralysis by analysis syndrome here. Choose something that looks like it will meet your needs and move on.
The most important aspects to look for are:
Reliability – will it be up and running when it needs to be and will it handle whatever volume you bring?
Security & Fraud Protection – credit card security is extremely important to your business and you want to be sure the platform you choose is secure and has fraud prevention mechanisms in place.
Scalability – even if you are starting with a small number of items to begin with, can the system handle adding large numbers of new products?
Usability – how easy is it for you to update and make changes?
Customizability – can you change the design and layout however you want to for all conversion and navigation needs?
SEO-Friendly – some platforms allow you more access to the site structure elements to allow you the freedom to optimize your site.
Shipping & Tax Calculations – your solution should have the ability to setup different shipping options and calculate the charges and taxes associated with each sale.
Promotions & Marketing – does the system have the ability to add coupons, cross sells, gift cards?
Technical Support – once you have your store up and running, it will be critical to have access to a technical support department that can help you if any issues arise.
Of course, I can’t help but recommend the platform I use – Yahoo! Merchant Services – for several reasons.
There are several sites out there that can help you analyze the features and benefits of available platforms. Keep in mind that most sites I have found are “sponsored” by one of the platforms, so beware of that bias when you are reading.
Added:
For example, Yahoo Merchant Solutions (AKA Yahoo Stores) is one of the most robust platform which is available in the market. There are some real monters out there in the market which touch every corner of the ecommerce business – but what you need to look at is what fits right within your business model, your staffing and most importantly – your skills.
Business is not just about updating your ecommerce website. You may have a business that runs only on your ecommerce portal – but that means then it HAS TO BE backed by a reliable backend, bug free application and easily managable modules which requires least time to manage your orders and keep inventory synchronized with your warehouses.
Yahoo! provides exactly this – it is suitable for giant business and an enterpreneure. It has proved its existance by catering thousands of businesses across the internet – selling clothes, gifts, accessories, hardware, services, softwares and many more.
Find out more about the platform here:
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