Wordpress Development, Email Marketing Australia, Magento Development, Facebook Design and Development

After venturing unsuccessfully in the Online retail space in early 2000, David Jones have just launched their online. The store looks great and we are excited that it will bring out all those other big retailers back into the online space.  Big Australian retailers has traditionally not been as open to online stores and have tested the waters and decided not to jump in. This hopefully paves the way for online shopping.

There are some things that we don’t understand from a usability perspective why they have been put in such as double scroll bars. However the store is sleek and works fairly well. Hopefully this works great for them.

Based on our hosting offering, we have now launched a test store so that you can test the speed and features of Magento Commerce.

Here is the link for the store front. Please note this is a test store so there are no actual products on the store.

http://test.hostmagento.com/

Magento Commerce Online Stores

We are currently involved in building a few Magento commerce stores in the next month for our clients. Stay tuned to view all our online stores as they go live before the end of November. Magento Commerce is a very exciting and feature rich platform powering over 30,000 online stores in the world.

As exciting as it is to be building Magento Commerce Stores, there is a big issue with the speed of Magento Commerce platform.

Full features of Magento Commerce platform

Magento Commerce Speed Issues

While other ecommerce platforms have 20-30 tables to run, Magento Commerce has over 300 tables that it pulls information from to show the information. This creates a big problem with normal web site hosts because of the amount of information that is being pulled out and the number of tables (sources) that you pull product information out of. Usually on a normal web hosting package, a Magento commerce page loads in roughly 20-30 seconds.

Some web site hosts also can have connection time out issues where your online store will not load because the data that is being pulled is taking too long to come.

Announcing Magento Commerce Hosting

On the back of building all these Magento Commerce websites for our clients, we have started using multiple hosts to see how they compare and hosting our clients websites on hosts that provide the best results. With that in mind, we are now announcing our own hosting packages that we can help you run your Magento Commerce platforms from. Because of our testing and hosting multiple ecommerce stores, you can be rest assured that you are getting stable hosting with the speed and performance that your Magento Commerce platform requires.

Contact Us for more Details

We will be releasing more details about the specifications of the store shortly, but meanwhile if you need more information please use our contact us page.

Example Magento Commerce Stores

Send us an email at info@dzineclub.com to view example Magento Commerce stores that you can play around with.

Test our Magento Commerce Hosting with an live Store

The example store is now live at the address below for you to play around with.

http://test.hostmagento.com/

Why you should sell via Facebook

Here are some stats on user behaviour.

* Visitors now spend more time on Facebook than Google
* An average person spends more time in Facebook than watching TV
* Bing user Facebook liked pages and links  in its search engine results
* A Facebook fan has 68% chance of buying a recommended product through his social network
* There are 500 million Facebook users
* All signs and trends points towards Facebook Domination rather than Facebook downfall

Essentially Facebook is so integrated online and with search engines, that without a good Facebook presence, you are potentially discarding almost half or more of your customer base.

Facebook for Businesses

Its amazing how most people still see Facebook as a place where teenagers go to talk to their friends. In the last few years Facebook has identified and filled the gaps to pull businesses and help businesses work better in Facebook. Some of the examples are

Facebook Events

Facebook Events allows a business (or individual) to host events and invite their social network. The social network can then RSVP and tell if they are attending, maybe attending or not attending. We wont’ go into depth here but we have a few posts on Facebook events on this blog.

Facebook Groups

Facebook Groups has had a good revamp that allows businesses as well as individuals to not only create groups and discussions but also leverage it for marketing and promotions.

Facebook Fan Pages for Businesses

A game changer, with Fan pages, businesses could virally generate huge amounts of leads and promote and market to those users.

Facebook Like and Facebook Share

Facebook Like and Facebook share allows easy integration with websites/links but those links now show up in Google and Bing.

Facebook Connect

Facebook Social Connect allows a business to leverage Facebook logins on their website making it easier for customers to interact with their website.

So Facebook is vibing community for individuals and businesses.

Advantage of Selling in Facebook over Google/ website

Humans are social beings. We talk, we socialise and we get persuaded by what our friends like.  We tend to like paintings that people are gathered around etc. Facebook creates this opportunity for social recommendations that Google and your normal website can’t. There are ways to validate products on your website / Google but not as effective as the way you can leverage on Facebook.

Tools Available to sell things on Facebook

Facebook Marketplace

The inbuilt solution that allows you to post things on the marketplace. It is not as effective for commerce.

Facebook Plugins

There is an ever growing list of plugins that allows you to put your inventory in the fan page. This is the best way to put your products online. Some plugins allow you to rate products etc.

However this said, it wouldn’t be right to just have a Facebook store and not a website. A day might come when you might just have products no Facebook and mobile apps but that day is still a long way away. So you should also do a really good Facebook integration with your ecommerce store.

Facebook to ecommerce Website Integration

Facebook Comments on Products

Allow your customers to comment on products on your website via their Facebook login.

Facebook Like and Facebook Share

Allow your customers and visitors to like and share your products. This has multiple advantages such as:

• Users don’t need to log in via your website
• Most liked products show up in Facebook Search when Facebook users search for the words
• Most liked/shared products show up in Bing Search Results

Best Selling Products List

Have a best selling product list on Facebook so that users can quickly view your best products. This will help you turn the lookers to bookers

DzineClub does Facebook commerce and consulting for its clients everyday. We live and breathe social media and websites. Talk to us for tips and tricks that we have implemented for clients but can’t discuss on the blog.

Easy to reach contact Information on each page

Helps the customer enquire about the product at any stage of the purchase. If they were not sure about buying the product, your reply should help them make the decision.

Allow to buy without creating an account

Make it easy and quick for the casual shopper to your online store. As long as you get paid for the product and it is easy for the customer to buy it, that is all that should matter. Also make sure that you have the option to create an account for easier repeat purchases.

Product refining options

As you dig deeper into category, there should be options to refine your search based on different attributes. Colour, size, price etc.

Price Range Options

Have a few price ranges to match the budget against products. More often than not a visitor is thinking more around the price than the product

Multiple and Detailed Product Pictures

With latest zoom plug-ins and scripts, there is no excuse to not have a picture that can be enlarged and zoomed into. Most products also require multiple angle shots for best customer experience.

Detailed Shipping Rates and Calculator

Don’t make the shipping rates a last minute surprise (or shock) Inform your visitors from the start on how much it would cost them to ship the product.

Return Policy

Customers are always wary of buying products online. Make sure that you have detailed the return policy and re-enforced it on the pages to keep them at ease.

Alerts for out-of-stock Products

Set up alerts for products that are out of stock. When the product lands in the store, the customers get automatically notified.

Related and Combined Products

Show a list of related products. If a customer is already looking at a product, chances are that they will want a related product or look at a related product as an alternative.

Product Pictures in Real Life

Make sure you have enough of the product pictures in real life scenarios. Think of IKEA for example. This makes a huge different in user perception.

One of the newer plug-in in Piwik Web Analytics is Goals. This plug-in allows you to track Goals on your website, put monetary value against them and analyse which areas and sources of traffic are contributing to your goals.

It is not as advanced as Goals in Google Analytics and not as comprehensive. It doesn’t have a conversion funnel and multiple stages but still does a really good job of giving you an overview about how and why a conversion is happening on your website.

Types of Goals and Setting them

Visitor Goals

Visitor Goals can be set up and assigned a dollar value when

• a visitor visits a page on the website
• a visitor downloads a file
• a visitor clicks on a link to an external website

Manual Goals

Manual Goals can also be set up and called as required

• Visitor makes a purchase (The price value can be passed to the Goal)
• Visitor clicks on a link
• Visitor Fills a form (or a form element)

Once all of these are set up, comes the interesting part.

Reporting – The Interesting Part

Once you set up your goals, this is where it gets interesting. The data you can get out of Goals in piwik quickly is amazing. Here is the info you can get

Please note that all the reports below are reflective of only one goal – enquiries

How many Goals you are hitting every day

A graph of daily Goals on your dashboard, which gives you a quick overview of how many goals you are hitting daily and the trend

What is your conversion Rate on Goals

Based on the conversion graph you can see how many conversion you have had, and what is our conversion rate. If you have setup multiple goals you can see the overall conversion rate for all the goals

What Keywords and giving you the highest Conversions

This report is very good and quickly gives you a good overview of what keywords are producing conversions for you.

What Search Engines are Giving you the highest Conversions

A report on what Search Engines are Giving you the highest Conversions

What Websites / Affiliates are Giving you the Highest Conversions

Some Affiliates might be sending you a lot of traffic but not necessarily turning that into conversion. This report will help you identify the hit rate for goals against your affiliate websites

What Marketing Campaigns are giving you the highest conversions

This includes your email campaigns, direct mail campaigns, Advertisements, Offline campaigns that you have tracked as well as your SEM Campaigns

What is your breakdown of conversion across Search Engines / Direct Entry and Referrers

Which of your referrers gives you the highest conversion. I

Conversion Goals  Breakdown by Country and Continent

What countries and contributing to your Conversion Goals

Conversion Goals Breakdown by Time of the day

What time of the day are your visitors most likely to convert

Would you like to get these reports for your website? Get in touch with us at info@dzineclub.com

DzineClub staff have written a lot about facebook in the last year while the blog has been live. We thought it would be best to consolidate all of them in one central location. When we add new links, we’ll add them here too so that it is easier to find.

1. Available Social Media Channels

2. Facebook Social Media Advantage for Business

3. Facebook Social Media Strategy

4. Facebook Business Landing Pages

5. Facebook Stats for Online Stores

6. Managing your Business events using Facebook

7. Tangible facebook – putting a money value on Social Media

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dzineLabs is where our developers create software that helps your build your website and online marketing. Essentially it is our software development area. Currently there are two inhouse software that we have developed which makes it into dzineLabs.

Currently dzinelabs beta products are only available to existing clients so dzineSEO is available to our existing clients. Full products such as dzineStore is available to all our clients.

Please click on the links to view more information about dzinelabs software

dzineSEO – the SEO reporting platform 

The SEO Platform for SEO Professionals and Online Businesses – DzineSEO

dzineStore – quick and easy online stores

5 minute shopping Cart

Thinking of starting an eCommerce Store or a shopping cart. Here are the things you need to consider before setting one up.

1. Stock Inventory

How are you going to manage your inventory. If you put up a product online, you will need to make sure that you have the product in stock. Also if you sell the product from its physical location, you need to make sure that you update the product inventory on your website.

2. Postage, Handling and Delivery

How are you going to deliver your product.

• Are you going to check every order, put them in envelopes and send it through the post
• Are you going to hire a courier who can run around and get your products delivered quickly
• Does your product meet the requirements to go through post/courier
• Is it a fragile item?
• How much are you going to charge for Postage and Handling?
• Are you going to offer international postage?
• Do the dimensions of the product make it an issue for Postage?

3. Photographs of products

• How are you going to get photographs of the products.
• Do the photographs of the products adequately display the product
• Do the photographs answer all the questions your potential customer has from the look of the product
• Are the photographs so well done that the actual product looks inferior compared to the photograph?

4. Sale and Promotions

• Are you going to run sales and promotions
• Does your eCommerce platform allow you to mark products down
• How will you communicate sales and promotions to your customers

5. Marketing your Online Store

• How will you market your store?
• How will you initially get customers to the online store?
• Have you got a list of email addresses of customers that you can communicate to?
• Have you got an social media strategy?
• How will your existing customers know that they can buy products online?

More to come on this later….

Continuing our trend of 5 minute DIY website/marketing setups we are currently working on an Online Store software that allows you to publish your products live within 5 minutes and start accepting payments.

New Features of Shopping Cart

The new version of DzineStore allows you to setup your online store within 5 minutes and start selling your products online. The new version of DzineStore features:

• A funky custom slider with captions for you to showcase your products or catergories
• Social media integration – allowing you to put links to your facebook, twitter and ebay stores
• Email Marketing – a bare bones email marketing platform that allows you to communicate special offers to your contact base quickly

Existing Features

• Product Catalog Management
• Supplier Management
• Category Management
• Paypal Integration
• CMS system for creating supporting pages
• Email Newsletter Subscriptions

Launch

We will be putting up some example stores next week and launching the platform at the end of July so stay tuned.