Want Regular E-commerce advice? Try E-Commerce Roundup, our new blog.

Hi Guys!

I hope you are all having a fantastic day!

ECommerce Roundup offers tips, hints and professional insight in a simple and light hearted way. The idea of our new blogging site is to focus on anyone in the ECommerce space (big, medium or small business) and assist with any isssues or difficulties that you are having in the ECommerce space.

I hope you enjoy it, and find it insightful. 

Thanks Chaps!

Rob Oxborough

Please do not hesitate to contact us, or follow us tweetpeeps @ECommsRoundUp

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This post was by Rob, business development associate at WeMakeWebsites. We are e-commerce and Drupal experts based in Clerkenwell, London.

When Bounce Rate Is A Problem

Bounce Rate. What is it?

A ‘bounce’ is when a visitor arrives on your site, views one page, then presses the back button or otherwise leaves your site.

It’s bad because it means your site is not interesting or relevant enough for the visitor to continue through the site. Google uses this as one of many measures and if your bounce rate is bad for all your pages it may move you down the results.

When It’s Not Bad

Note that bounce rate isn’t always a useful measure - it could be that the visitor spent 20 minutes reading your page and got what they needed. Blogs and ‘how to’ pages may have a high bounce rate despite having good content.

But retail websites and brochure websites should all have bounce rates lower than 40%.

Bounce Rates should be combined with other metrics because they can be misleading and on some pages we should expect high bounce rate, such as Contact pages, where the visitor gets what they need.

If your bounce rate is bad on a page that has a clear call to action, where you are directing the visitor to another part of your site e.g. “click here for a quote”, you need to think seriously about improving the effectiveness of your website.

Improving Bounce Rate

Some quick tips:

• Improve your copy, use a large title or pull quote to convey your message. Make it interesting.
• Include a clear call to action if you want to steer the visitor somewhere else after seeing your content
• Keep menu navigation clear and easy to use so visitors can browse your site easily
• Ensure our site loads all assets fast. Consider using an infrastructure upgrade, lazy loading content or CDN (Content Delivery Network) to help with this. A good CMS should help optimise your site also.
• Nowadays a huge amount of content is consumed on mobile devices - ensure your site works on a phone and consider a responsive design so that your website is always optimised no matter what the device size.

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This post was by Alex, project coordinator at WeMakeWebsites. We are e-commerce and Drupal experts based in Clerkenwell, London.

Improve Your Business Website In One Hour

You should be able to do these updates yourself easily. If not, you should consider a new CMS enabled website (related post: what is a CMS?).

1. Make better use of your front page

Ask two questions:

1. What problem am I helping prospective clients solve? Choose one.
2. Do I have interesting stats or facts to backup my track record? Focus on where you’ve help clients sell more, gain cost savings, have more impact or otherwise improve.

Put a clear pull quote that stresses these on your front page.

Impact measure: The bounce rate on your site should improve.

2. Write a helpful post on your subject area.

Like this post. Hopefully… Anyway write a genuinely useful piece, if you are selling craft products what about “5 Creative Birthday Gifts For The Person That Has It All”, if you sell sales consulting services “3 Techniques For Improving Pitch Documents”, if you sell business cards “3 Trends in Business Card Design for 2013”, you know because you’ve all read these style posts before, because they really work.

Promote them via your networks, it’s not shameless self promotion because you are offering genuine insights. The impact is that people may like/share your content, or even link to it, but more importantly you are positioning yourself as an expert in your field, so next time they need a service like yours, you should be the one you think of.

Impact measure: Visitor count should be up and pages per visit too.

3. Remove unnecessary text or other distractions.

Don’t ramble in your copy, keep it short, use bullet points, don’t talk about the structure of your company, talk about ways in which you help clients, in other words, end benefits for them and prospective clients like them.

4. Write relevant page titles

The bit that shows up in the menu bar I mean, it’s the same thing that appears on the results page on Google. Your company name should be at the end, not at the start, so that you get the maximum keyword benefit from the terms in each title. Each page should have a unique title that is relevant to the content and to the key terms you want to rank highly for.

Your home page title should be the key term you want to score for the most. On this page, it’s OK to put company name first. So for us:

Home - “We Make Websites / London Drupal Websites”
About - “An Agency that make Drupal websites / We Make Websites”
Blog - “Drupal Insights Blog / We Make Websites”

5. Love Testimonials

This is my favourite. I love testimonials. If you don’t have any, get some! Existing clients should be happy to provide them.

As a customer I always check reviews and testimonials and a lack of these usually makes me look elsewhere. Have these on a clear menu tab or, even better, inline with content and on your front page. This is a lot more interesting then your copy on company philosophy or history, this will help you convert more.

Impact measure: You should have more people contacting you because of your website.

Maybe you’ll even have some time left after this to make yourself a brew. All the while your website will be working better than ever.

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This post was by Alex, project coordinator at WeMakeWebsites. We are e-commerce and Drupal experts based in Clerkenwell, London.

Building an E-Commerce Site: Our approach

We have tried and tested design process for developing e-commerce site based on years of experience.

1. Objectives

On commencing a project, we usually meet with the client at our Spitalfields office near Liverpool Street. We discuss the business objectives of their project, which for example, could be to improve revenue from their online channels or perhaps to integrate their new website with a third party solution.

2. Analysis

Only then do we begin to analyse what the website should do to meet those requirements, which involves making wireframes showing how each user audience will use the site. This involves examining what the audience wants to achieve and who they are (for example: their knowledge of the client’s industry, typical needs, how they arrived at the site, computer literacy).

After this step we have the architecture and wireframes for the site and a ready to make it look good.

Based on the client’s budget, we will also choose the platform we will build the site in at this point (Drupal, Shopify, Squarespace or Ruby on Rails).

3. Design

The fun part - we use best practice design and usability expertise to make a website that appeals to your target audience. Depending on the client and their budget, we may issue three concepts and then two rounds of revision based on their chosen concept.

4. Build, tweak and test

Using the output from the analysis and design phases we build on the chosen platform. We will make tweaks inhouse based on our internal testing, before showing the site to the client for review.

5. Make sure the client is happy

During testing, we put the site online at a test location so the client and anyone working on the project can access it.

We take in to account the client’s feedback and integrate any requested changes providing they don’t conflict with the ability of the site to meet it’s objectives. Maintaining focus on the objectives defined in phase 1 is part of the magic in generating a good result.

6. Adding in Content

Once the site is functionally ready, the client can add set up their content (e.g. pages, blog posts, products) ready for launch.

We can provide photography services and product import features if they require it.

7. Lift off!

Once the site is ready, we set it up your site on our world-class Rackspace hosting ready for new and existing customers to find, enjoy and purchase from. This step involves technical configuration such as setting up analytics and making DNS A record changes to redirect the client’s domain to the new site.

We guarantee high performance, 99.9% uptime and pro-active monitoring.

8 - Analyse and improve

Using our analytics tools we review the site periodically to optimize it and ensure high conversion rates and hence more revenue.

That’s It

We hope that was insightful - if you’d like to learn more about our e-commerce services, do get in touch.

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This post was by Alex, project coordinator at WeMakeWebsites. We are e-commerce and Drupal experts based in Clerkenwell, London.

Two ways to encourage new customers to create accounts

The benefits of customers creating an account is that you can more effectively target them using email marketing. Once they end up on your site again they are far more likely to buy if they already have an account with you and therefore do not need to enter all their details again.

Here are two ways to encourage them to create accounts without reducing your conversion rate.

Option 1 - let them enter a password post-checkout to create an account

On the checkout completion page for unregistered customers, make a clear section at the top of the page that suggests the user creates an account. Since you’ve gathered their email during checkout, you just need to ask for a password. This technique is used on booking.com and works effectively.

Option 2 - ask if the customer wants to create an account

This is how Amazon and Asos do it. At the start of the checkout process, ask the customer, if they already have an account. I suggest on half of the screen you add an email and password field, and on the other half you have a ‘create an account’ page, like on the image above.

Existing customers can sign in at this point to retrieve their details, new customer can continue and create an account later by entering their password on the checkout form.

Keep the wording minimum, like the Asos example above, and ensure you don’t make checkout harder for new customers by forcing crazy validation on new passwords, make it ultra-easy by just checking password length.

Summary

My favourite technique is a combination of both, a minimal account creation step at the start followed by a request to enter a password post-checkout if they aren’t an existing user and haven’t chosen to create an account.

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This post was by Alex, project coordinator at WeMakeWebsites. We are e-commerce and Drupal experts based in Clerkenwell, London.

23 Website Optimisation Tips for Faster Page Loading

For all the developers in our audience, here is what I think is a definitive list of optmisation tips for websites, with a focus on Rails apps. Email me if you think I’ve missed any ( alex@alwaysmaking.com ).

With all performance fixes there is a trade-off between getting your site to load quick and making it maintainable. Also, remember not to optimise too early, make sure you know your site works and that you are improving actual bottlenecks rather than wasting time.

Page Rendering

1. Ensure that any JavaScript that can be executed after the main page content has loaded is in the footer of the page. This will include Analytics JS and any AJAX requests.
2. If you’re AJAX request is less than 2k, use GET, it’s quicker. Try cache AJAX responses where possible.
3. Don’t scale images in HTML, make sure the image is the correct size on the server. If an image is going to be displayed 100px wide, save it as 100px wide

Optimising Assets

1. Use an External CDN for loading client-side scripts or images available from other sites (e.g. Yahoo YUI libraries or Google-hosted jQuery libaries), refer to them directly rather than storing them locally on your server. This means that users who have visited sites that use the same scripts will already have them cached in their browser.
2. When releasing JS and CSS to prod ensure that it is minimised (i.e. remove whitespace, comments etc.) using tools such as http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/compressor/   Some CMS software can do this for you in production, such as Drupal.
3. Optimise graphics for web (In Photoshop, Save for Web)
4. Use CSS sprites, which involves combining multiple images in to one graphic, and then cropping the image in multiple areas (explained in point 1 here: http://www.leemunroe.com/optimise-website/). By loading only one image from the server, the number of HTTP requests is significantly reduced.
5. If you have multiple local css or javascript files, consolidate them in to one large CSS and JS file. This cuts down on HTTP requests which introduce unnecessary overhead. You can do this easily in Rails, as explained here: http://maintainable.com/articles/rails_asset_cache
6. Gzip what you can if you’re using Apache (http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2007/07/high_performanc_3.html)

Caching

1. Try and cache in memory rather than in the file system. This will work if you have a server with plenty of RAM. I was once on a training course where the bloke claimed that if accessing RAM takes 1 second (obviously in reality it is much less) then accessing the equivalent data on disk would take 3 months. Whatever the figure, cutting out the mechanical bottleneck of accessing the disk is certainly going to speed up your load times.
2. iPhone specific-tip: keep assets under 25k otherwise they will not be cached on iPhones

Database Access

1. Use indexes based on the where clause of common queries on each table
2. Analyse tables regularly. Our tables get analysed and hence re-indexed everynight, so the tables perform better more of the time.

Rails Specific

1. Use Timed Fragment Caching to simplify caching a page fragement for particular time periods e.g. 1.hour.from.now (rather event-driven expiration e.g. when a new post is added, when a user signs in) - http://www.ruzee.com/blog/2008/07/timed_fragment_cache-on-rails-21
2. Cache models using acts_as_cached (http://errtheblog.com/post/27)
3. A couple of Ruby tips for good measure: Always use regular expressions over expensive loops. It’s often possible to remove some slow loops all together by restructuring code.
4. Avoid dynamic finders like SomeModel.find_by_*, use SomeModel.find_by_sql to query directly instead
5. Question the use of helpers i.e. do you really need a form helper for a static form or can you make do with the pain of writing the html once?
6. Use eager loading for models with has_many relationships (http://railscasts.com/episodes/22-eager-loading)
7. Automatic asset minimisation - http://davetroy.blogspot.com/2007/12/automatic-asset-minimization-and.html
8. Use Rails’ excellent Page/Action/SQL caching helpers http://guides.rubyonrails.org/caching_with_rails.html

Use Yslow to identify bottlenecks

1. Use firefox add-on Yslow (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5369)
2. It requires Firebug, which if you don’t already have it, is a good tool to have anyway (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843)

Do you have any more? Feedback welcome.

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This post was by Alex, project coordinator at WeMakeWebsites. We are e-commerce and Drupal experts based in Clerkenwell, London.