Your first step on the journey towards ecommerce success

Do you sincerely want your online venture to attract visitors, make bucket-loads of sales and keep you in the style in which you hope to become accustomed ?  Then you simply must devote yourself to learning as you much as you can about your website visitors. Especially those who made the all important transformation from browser to purchaser when they actually bought something.

What’s the first step in getting to know your visitors? Data. Don’t delay for even one day, open a Google Analytics account and integrate it with your store so you can see where your visitors are coming from – we offer this small but essential service free to all our cCommerce website clients. Elaborate

Equally importantly the Analytics data will tell you what visitors have been getting up to during the time they spent on your website. Did they…. elaborate.

Here’s an easy to follow video guide from Google themselves if you need assistance to set up Analytics. Once you’ve finished the install it will usually it only takes a day after before you can start seeing data and charts. What are the key statistics to look out for?

That’ll be the subject of a post we’ll publish soon.

How to increase ecommerce sales with great product photographs you take yourself

Creating a great looking and successful e-commerce website depends to a large extent on the quality of the product images. Deprived of their other senses your customers will make purchasing decisions based on photographs and descriptions alone. So it’s vital to get this aspect right. But what if the budget won’t stretch to a professional photographer and you don’t have the talent to do take the shots yourself? Nothing looks worse than a series of amateurishly taken product shots with no clear theme.

Look around on the web for advice and you’ll usually find hard to understand technical tutorials containing phrases like:

For objects the size of a digital camera or smaller, you can use an EZcube light tent with two small 30-watt bulbs on either side. For larger items two 60-watt soft boxes on either side of the product should suffice.

Which might be fine for the serious amateur but it is likely to go straight over the heads of the genuine beginners.

Don’t worry. Help is at hand thanks to Handmadeology’s newest writer and resident product photography-pro Mariano, who has put together a low cost ( less than a tenner) product photography set up that will help you create studio quality product photography every time. Without the need to invest in expensive kit or spend the next 12 months in night school classes.

This easy to follow step by step guide will allow you to take shots of small products yourself for your ecommerce website and radically increase your chances of making online sales.

One more reason why Mailchimp is such a good emailing system

We love Mailchimp’s emailing system and have no hesitation recommending the service to our clients (full disclosure – we don’t receive any benefit from the guys at Mailchimp in return). When were going through the process of selecting a supplier we tested all the suitable candidates and Mailchimp came out top in just about every category.

And it’s not just the mailing services, it’s their intelligence. If you’ve ever struggled to dedupe a mailing list you know it’s fiddly and time consuming work.  Those clever Mailchimpers have worked out a code in Excel which does all the hard work for you.

How to optimise your website like a pro

Who knows more about SEO than Google? And in this new world of openness and collaboration Team Google have always been quick to share at least some of their secrets. They first published their SEO starter guide two years ago – it instantly became a classic, the must-have item for every SEO specialist on the planet.

What is Drupal and why is it such a good content management system?

Drupal is an open source content management platform which allows fast development and maintenance of both small and large web sites.

It is possible to create almost any type of web site with Drupal by calling on community contributed modules . There are users within the Drupal community who have recreated sites like Digg, Flickr and YouTube from currently available modules.

Drupal was started by Dries Buyaert whilst at The University of Antwerp, he and a group of friend wanted an internal messaging system for dorm room discussions. The system Buyaert developed for this purpose morphed into Drupal. Why the name? Dries meant to purchase Dorp.org which is Dutch for ‘Village but thanks to a typing error he actually bought Drop.org.  When time came to release the software which made the community run he chose the name Drupal from the Dutch word ‘druppel’ meaning ‘Drop’. Drupal is now on it’s sixth release.