Tips, advice and news from Evolution Internet http://new.evolution-internet.com/blog http://backend.userland.com/rss ContentSuite v1.0 Too big to ignore All ecommerce site owners should now be using Twitter as part of their overall marketing strategy. Many ecommerce site owners simply dismiss Twitter out of hand. 6 months ago, I'd probably have agreed with them. Yet with 75 million users, it isn't something that you can ignore. New accounts grew by 1,500% last year and although that growth is slowing, it is still growing. On top of that, Twitter posts appear highly in the search engine rankings... http://www.evolution-internet.com/blog/how-and-why-ecommerce-site-owners-should-use-twitter.html http://www.evolution-internet.com/blog/how-and-why-ecommerce-site-owners-should-use-twitter.html See great returns with permission based marketing Of all marketing, permission based email marketing generates the highest ROI. It is relatively cheap to implement and run and highly testable. As an ecommerce owner, email marketing should be one of your top marketing priorities so if you're not doing it, start today; no matter how small your current list is. The main problem most ecommerce sites have is that it takes time to build their email list... http://www.evolution-internet.com/blog/increasing-your-ecommerce-mailing-list-and-open-rates.html http://www.evolution-internet.com/blog/increasing-your-ecommerce-mailing-list-and-open-rates.html What is Google Product Search? Google Product Search , AKA Google Shopping, AKA Google Base, AKA Froogle is a Google search system. Similarly to the better known image and video searches, it allows users to search for a specific type of page - in this case, products for sale. Potential customers can search for products, compare prices, filter by price and other attributes and can click through to your site to purchase... http://www.evolution-internet.com/blog/how-to-use-google-product-search-to-increase-sales-and-traffic-to-your-ecommerce-site.html http://www.evolution-internet.com/blog/how-to-use-google-product-search-to-increase-sales-and-traffic-to-your-ecommerce-site.html This is where your customers normally leave your site Everyone's encountered a frustrating error page. You click a link, or type an address and then - nothing! The page that you were looking for doesn't exist. Or you click a button, the site errors and you lose your information. This is the point when most customers will simply leave your site and go elsewhere. Yet it doesn't have to be this way... http://www.evolution-internet.com/blog/how-to-use-a-custom-error-page-to-increase-conversions-on-your-ecommerce-site.html http://www.evolution-internet.com/blog/how-to-use-a-custom-error-page-to-increase-conversions-on-your-ecommerce-site.html A well known problem Google Maps' merging problems are well documented and have been going on for a long time. Despite more and more businesses experiencing merging difficulties, Google are still not doing anything about the problem. There are a number of ways to unmerge your listing , but they aren't guaranteed to be successful. However, if your business listing is merged with an unclaimed listing and you aren't worried about the morals of removing the other listing, there is something that you can do about it... http://www.evolution-internet.com/blog/how-to-use-google-maps-merging-problems-to-unmerge-your-listing.html http://www.evolution-internet.com/blog/how-to-use-google-maps-merging-problems-to-unmerge-your-listing.html Could offering your customers less choice increase your sales? We know from split testing landing pages and best practices that reducing the number of choices and distractions increase conversions. Can the same be said for the number of products displayed on pages or your navigation within your ecommerce site? Fewer choices has shown a 1000% increase in sales Over the past 50 years customer research has demostrated that giving your customers less choice will increase sales... http://www.evolution-internet.com/blog/do-less-choices-mean-more-sales.html http://www.evolution-internet.com/blog/do-less-choices-mean-more-sales.html UK laws for ecommerce sites simplified Under UK law, you are required to include an enormous amount of information on your ecommerce store. The Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002 came into force on 21st August 2002 and they specify information that must be included on a website, but these are not the only regulations you must adhere to. You must also follow the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003... http://www.evolution-internet.com/blog/is-your-ecommerce-website-breaking-the-law.html http://www.evolution-internet.com/blog/is-your-ecommerce-website-breaking-the-law.html Before I start my rant I'd like to state that for some businesses - those that have been lucky enough not to have experienced my points below - Google Local is a great product. But for the rest of us it is a long way from being perfect. For businesses Google Local is a tool which can't be ignored, but I can't help but think that it not ready for mainstream use (in the UK anyway). I'm not going to throw figures about, but as you would expect, the number of people searching for local services and companies is massive... http://www.evolution-internet.com/blog/10-reasons-why-google-local-is-failing.html http://www.evolution-internet.com/blog/10-reasons-why-google-local-is-failing.html Here's a few hours of my scouring the Internet, researching websites to find inspiration for ecommerce designs. I hope you find them useful and if you know of any others, please let me know and I'll add them. Enjoy! Ecommerce Inspirational Resources Design Galleries Ecommerce Gallery Cart Craze CartFrenzy Carted Up Best Web Gallery CSS Cutie CSS Chest Style the Web CSS DSGN Design Bombs Ecommerce User Interface Elements Smiley Cats - Shopping carts Smiley Cat - Mini shopping carts Ecommr - All elements Checkout progress bars Patterntap - Ecommerce elements 80 Examples of Add to Cart Buttons for Design Inspiration Add to cart button showcase 20 Add to cart buttons for your inspiration 107 Add to cart buttons from top retailers Over 140 buttons 111 Designs for checkout buttons Add to cart buttons from top 50 retailers View-cart, add to cart and proceed to checkout buttons A collection of continue shopping buttons Ecommerce Icons 30 high quality icon sets for ecommerce designs Ecommerce icons collection 23 Free E-Commerce Icon Sets for your Designs Shopping cart icons collection Inspirational Ecommerce Designs and Showcases 12 Tips for designing an excellent checkout process Showcase of web designs for ecommerce fall sales Showcase of fresh and well designed online shops Shopping carts gallery examples and good practices How simple web design helps your business 35 Free high quality e-commerce templates 25 Magento templates for your e-commerce business 20 Well designed ecommerce websites 30 E-commerce websites for inspiration 26 Examples of online t-shirt shops 35 Inspirational fashion website designs 10 Tips to design usable shopping carts 30 Example sof well designed ecommerce websites 40+ Magento themes for e-commerce websites 30 High quality magento templates 20 Of the best ecommerce websites 35 Inspirational shopping cart page designs 17 Creative online ecommerce designs 10 Awesome grungy e-commerce sites 20 Gorgeous examples of e-commerce done right The 20 best ecommerce website designs Beautiful designed e-commerce websites 25 Beautiful ecommerce website designs 30+ High quality shopping cart templates 25+ Inspirational e-commerce website designs 25 Well designed sports e-commerce sites Site search trends for ecommerce websites 45 Most inspirational ecommerce website designs 35 Excellent ecommerce user interface designs 30+ Fresh examples of e-commerce website showcase to raise design Clean ecommerce designs Inspirational online ecommerce shops 9 Inspirational ecommerce websites Hello Themes Again, if you know of any other websites please leave a comment below and I'll update the list... http://www.evolution-internet.com/blog/61-ecommerce-inspiration-website-design-resources.html http://www.evolution-internet.com/blog/61-ecommerce-inspiration-website-design-resources.html Complying with the distance selling laws Under UK law, all ecommerce stores must comply with the distance selling laws. Yet there remains a lot of confusion about returns policies. Many ecommerce stores have unenforceable returns policies that flout these laws. I've lost count of the amount of customers who have asked us to write their returns policy for them, or those that have come to us with a returns policy copied from another website (sometimes even with the links still in!)... http://www.evolution-internet.com/blog/writing-an-online-store-returns-policy.html http://www.evolution-internet.com/blog/writing-an-online-store-returns-policy.html Gone are the days of the dialup modem I shudder to think of the time I wasted waiting for files to download on my 56k modem. It makes me laugh to think how excited I got when I had ISDN installed...ok hands up, I'm a geek! Actually the modem doesn't seem to have gone away at all. Whilst digging around the analytics for one our sites, I was surprised to see that 15.1% of its traffic is dialup. What happened to the 100kb rule... http://www.evolution-internet.com/blog/online-tools-for-testing-your-bloated-websites.html http://www.evolution-internet.com/blog/online-tools-for-testing-your-bloated-websites.html Is your listing in Google Local showing incorrect information? Despite Google increasing the prominence of Local listings, it seems that there is a flaw in their algorithm. We first noticed the problem when our Google Local listing, which had always been quite highly ranked and bought us in a lot of traffic, dropped off the results for most searches. The only way we could even find the listing was to search for our company name... http://www.evolution-internet.com/blog/how-to-fix-a-merged-google-local-business-listing.html http://www.evolution-internet.com/blog/how-to-fix-a-merged-google-local-business-listing.html Would you like to be on the first page of Google? Every business owner would like to appear on the first page of Google, but many don't realise that it's relatively simple to do so, at least for searchers from your local area. In 2009, Google started to include its local search results in the main search results, even when a geographic name wasn't included in the search. This means that if your local listing is complete and well optimised, you could attract signitficantly more business... http://www.evolution-internet.com/blog/how-to-claim-your-google-local-business-listing.html http://www.evolution-internet.com/blog/how-to-claim-your-google-local-business-listing.html