America’s favorite shopping season is right around the corner and with it a barrage of online bargain shoppers. Is your site ready to handle the Black Friday shopping rush?If the answer is anything but yes, you may want to consider a quick preparatory revamp.Why? Because the year-end holiday season is not only the best time to meet your annual sales goals, but a great time to capture new customers. Following Thanksgiving, Black Friday and the last two months of the year are prime for gift-giving; people are shopping for themselves, their family, and their friends. Not to mention, over the last eight years, Black Friday retail e-commerce spending alone went from$534 million USD to $1970 million USD – and it’s only expected to rise again this year. Which means optimizing your site for online sales now can ensure your business is ready to roll this holiday season.So how can you prepare?The first step is to decide which holidays you want to run promotions on. Once you’ve determined that and set up a promotional calendar, you can move on to polishing your website and online holiday marketing strategy.To make it easier, we’ve compiled a checklist to help get you on your way.
Check Your Server Traffic Capacity. Black Friday weekend is sure to draw a lot of traffic to your site, especially if you are running promotional deals. So making sure your server can handle the influx of customers is likely to make both their and your experience easier. Check your server capacity before the season starts at LoadImpact.com or Blitz.io.
Create Landing Pages for Your Black Friday Deals. If you plan on setting your customers up with some awesome deals, it’s important to make sure they know what they are and where to find them. Landing pages on your website specifically made for the Black Friday/Cyber Monday promotions can help alert your customers to all the seasonal discounts you have on offer. Going the extra mile and creating a banner for your deals to be displayed on every page, will also help ensure no one misses out!
Make sure your website is mobile friendly. The share of mobile sales on Black Friday in 2013 went from27% to 48% in 2016. And with more and more customers turning to their phones for online shopping, having a site with responsive design is more important than ever. Don’t know whether your site is mobile ready? Check it out with Google’sMobile-Friendly Test. And if you still can’t figure it out, let us take a look!
Test and troubleshoot everything. Even with the best promotions, the holiday shopping season could still be a complete bust if your customers aren’t able to make purchases from your site. Whether it’s a broken link or simply a slow loading page, it’s important to make sure you’ve tested the durability of your landing pages and made sure your promotional coupons are working fine.
Make the checkout process as seamless as possible. Simplicity is key. Customers like it when they can make a purchase with the fewest clicks possible – and obvious clicks at that. So spend some time ensuring your website has a user friendly interface with clear add/delete item and checkout buttons. And if you need a little help, let us know.
Have your Shipping and Returns Policy for the shopping season in fine print. To prevent any future misunderstandings or complaints, it’s best to have your holiday season shipping and returns policy listed on your website where customers can easily access or see it.
Track EVERYTHING. To make sure you’re getting the results you want and your leads are converting into sales, keep a detailed track record of every change you’ve made to your site and how it has affected your conversions. A great way to do this is through tracking yourGoogle Analytics andFacebook Pixel data.
Marketing Yourself Right
Now that you have your website ready to go the next thing to tackle is your marketing strategy. To start, look at your past marketing data to see how your business performed during previous years. This will make it easier to plan a marketing strategy as you’ll have a better idea of what worked and what didn’t.Once you have that data, you can start to plan for the future holiday season. And the following tips will help you put your best foot forward!
Research your customers. A good marketing strategy starts with great research. For example, do you know 100% who your customers are? Have you created buyer personas? If you haven’t, check your Google Analytics demographics to ensure that the personas you have in mind match the factual customer data retrieved by Google. This will help you market to not only your current customers, but all potential buyers as well. Still unsure? Take a look at this helpful B2B Buyer Persona Guide for a more in-depth look on how to make your customer-data work for you.
Create a winning PPC Campaign. Pay-per-click is one of the best ways to reach targeted customers. If you have optimized your campaign with the right keywords, your ad should appear at the top of Google’s search results. However, if you did not have the time to get your SEO and keyword targeting in place, PPC can help! For example:
Shopping Ads is one of the best ways to get your products in front of your customers, because its CPC is much lower when compared to a Text Ad, and it can get you better conversion rates. You can also target local customers with Google’sZip Code Targeting.
And if you are already running PPC campaigns, the holiday season is a good time to start a remarketing campaign. Reach your customers who are actively searching for your products, or are loyal to your business with remarketing campaigns.
Utilize social media for customer insights. Your social media channels can be a treasure trove of information. Places like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are full of consumer opinions on products and services. And not just on products they currently use, but items they are interested in buying. Put this information to use by –
Promoting your Black Friday deals on social media sites like Twitter or Facebook.
Creating product hype and awareness by offering special discounts to your followers.
Closely monitoring comments or mentions on your social channels and responding to any customer queries and feedback promptly. You can even make use ofsocial listening tools to listen to what people are saying online about your brand or products.
Creating your own hashtags for the holiday season. You can stick to the regular hashtags of #BlackFriday and #CyberMonday, of course, but you can also create hashtags specific to your business. If you do, make sure you plug them on all your marketing channels- website, social media, and emails.
Using Facebook Dynamic Shopping ads, which are a great way target customers who visited your website and added a product to their cart but never followed through with the purchase.
Start an email campaign targeting current customers. When it comes to gettingresults, email marketing is still very effective. Triggered emails like those to customers that abandoned full online shopping carts, still tend to bring in more customers than many social media campaigns. To get the most out of your email campaign –
Categorize your email lists. Segmenting your emails into specific customer lists based on products they’ve looked at or purchased is likely to get you more email open rates.
Personalize! Include the name of the subscriber and offer specific promotions based on their location.
Create and manage your email workflows in advance. This will ensure that every email is catered to the customer receiving it, and be less work for you in the long run.
Leverage your current customer base through exclusive deals. Not only will this help build anticipation for future Black Friday deals, but it will show your loyal customers that there is some advantage in following you.
Create a countdown timer for your emails to promote urgency.
In the End
No one knows your customers as well as you do and any website adjustment or marketing campaign should be planned with them in mind. However, we hope these tips will help get you and your site on your way to holiday-ready! And if you still have questions, let us know!
Graphic courtesy of Four51 OrderCloud. Used by permission.
The world of B2B selling is ripe for a revolution. Ecommerce technology has flourished in the B2C sector for decades, but it has not yet seen widespread adoption in B2B. Of course, that’s for good reason: the limitations of old software made eCommerce cumbersome in the complex world of B2B.
All that has changed. B2B eCommerce is now a viable alternative to the complex legacy systems used by many B2B companies. The benefits of adopting an eCommerce model in the B2B sector are many. To the company, eCommerce offers a better bottom line with less waste, higher margins, and all backend complexity maintained and streamlined; to the customer, it offers a simplified, intuitive buying experience that works on any device.
For today’s B2B executives and managers, only one question remains: which B2B eCommerce platform is right for my company?
[clickToTweet tweet=”Which #B2B #ecommerce platform is right for your company–#PaaS, SaaS, or in-house?” quote=”Which B2B eCommerce platform is right for your company–PaaS, SaaS, or in-house? ” theme=”style1″]
First, we’ll talk about the problem. Then we’ll outline 4 potential solutions.
The Problem: B2B Ecommerce Solutions Must Handle Complexity Efficiently
B2B selling is complex. In many legacy systems, that complexity means wasted time, money, and effort. For example, a typical B2B sales path might include:
A customer service representative who takes orders over the phone and enters them manually into a tracking system.
An email newsletter platform that can only communicate with a customer database through manual data entry.
Inability to take electronic payments.
Customer-facing website that displays products but cannot offer on-site purchasing due to complex permissions governing pricing.
Customer-facing website that is not optimized for mobile devices.
Each of these points of information exchange contains hidden inefficiencies. These inefficiencies add up to lower margins across the board for B2B companies.
Ordering through CSRs may not be the first choice of some demographics, such as Millennials. That means HR expense that may not be necessary.
Manual data entry is inefficient.
Processing non-electronic payments can be time-consuming.
A non-eCommerce website serves as little more than a print catalog of offerings, forcing the customer to jump through another hoop (phone call or fax) after determining what to purchase.
A non-mobile-friendly website could lead to missed sales as mobile users give up on type that is too small to read and buttons that are too small to tap.
Worse, every time information is exchanged within a system like this, there’s potential for error—which introduces even more waste.
CSRs can make mistakes in manual order entry, leading to costly returns.
Marketers building email lists from customer lists can make mistakes in data entry and grouping.
Paper invoices and checks can get lost in the mail.
Customers can make errors in relaying their buy lists to a CSR. These errors may come under dispute later.
For non-mobile-friendly B2B eCommerce websites, difficult navigation leads to more attention needed from CSRs. That is a cost to the company.
Solution 1: Cloud-based PaaS (Platform as a Service)
In an interview on the 216digital blog, Bill Osteraas, VP of Channel Development at OrderCloud, talked about the features which PaaS offers for B2B ecommerce. “We face this topic with a different approach,” he said. “Flexibility over features.”
[clickToTweet tweet=”.@OrderCloudIO shatters the B2B #ecommerce #PaaS market with ‘flexibility over features’” quote=”OrderCloudIO shatters the B2B eCommerce PaaS market with ‘flexibility over features’” theme=”style1″]
OrderCloud is an API-first platform that allows developers to build the exact custom apps that a unique B2B eCommerce client needs.
In other words, B2B managers don’t have to sort through a long list of “included” and “not included” features when trying to figure out if OrderCloud’s PaaS will work for them. If other B2B eCommerce solutions are a finished house with most fixtures installed, OrderCloud is a floorplan and foundation. Everything else is open for development, ready to be built out into a unique, efficient configuration.
In the world of B2B eCommerce solutions, PaaS is ideal for companies that have complex relationships with manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, and multiple sets of customers. Platforms like OrderCloud are ready to be built out into multi-portal eCommerce stores, with features like varying permissions per user group, variable pricing per user group, CSR interface that talks directly to inventory, and much more.
Example 1: Bachman’s B2B Ecommerce Model
Image courtesy of Four51 OrderCloud. Used by permission.
Because OrderCloud is PaaS, the core foundation is ready to integrate with all the 3rd-party APIs that this company needs to run its business. The flexibility allows a custom solution, and the company pays only for what they need.
Pros of cloud-based PaaS for B2B eCommerce:
API-first configuration ensures that your third-party software will work seamlessly with your store across ongoing upgrade cycles.
Your custom PaaS solution is built right the first time with functionality that fits your unique, complex operation and the place you occupy in your market.
You do not pay for a one-size-fits-all SaaS solution that then requires customization to work for your unique business.
You don’t have to build from scratch. A raw, highly-adaptable framework is provided, ready to be built out.
Your custom applications are cloud-hosted and can be accessed from any web browser.
Upgrades are automatic.
Pay-as-you-go pricing.
Flexible support plans that grow with your business.
PCI compliance built-in.
Total flexibility in payments.
Omnichannel order management.
Total order fulfillment tracking.
Powerful CSR automation.
Solution 2: Licensed SaaS (Software as a Service)
In a SaaS (software as a service) solution that is not hosted by the software provider, you purchase a license to use eCommerce software. You must arrange your own web hosting and install the software there. This is a common arrangement in the B2C eCommerce world. How well it adapts to B2B will depend on your business’s unique needs.
Common SaaS eCommerce platforms not hosted by the software provider include Magento and WooCommerce. Note that while these platforms can be adapted for simple B2B operations, they were originally intended for B2C eCommerce. They may not provide all the custom rules which a B2B eCommerce solution requires.
[clickToTweet tweet=”A #SaaS solution for #B2C may not provide all the functionality required by B2B #ecommerce” quote=”A SaaS solution for B2C may not provide all the functionality required by B2B eCommerce” theme=”style1″]
Pros of Licensed SaaS:
You can choose the most competitive hosting plan that meets your company’s specific needs.
Because hosting is not tied to your eCommerce software, the cost of your hosting will likely depend on bandwidth and storage needs, rather than a sliding revenue-based scale.
Likewise, there are no transaction fees deducted from your revenue.
Cons of Licensed SaaS:
You must adapt an out-of-box solution, with or without customization and/or add-ons, to the complex needs of your unique B2B eCommerce operation.
SaaS solutions are often not API-first.
You may have to establish PCI compliance yourself.
You are responsible for routine maintenance, updates, and upgrades to your eCommerce store.
You are responsible for emergency troubleshooting if the store goes down or a third-party integration stops working with your store.
Third-party integrations, critical to B2B operations, are often available only in paid add-ons which must be updated separately from the core software. These add-ons can break your store when compatibility issues arise.
Unknown whether you can create customer groups that allow multiple users from a customer company to log in and see each other’s orders.
Checkout process may require modification to meet the complex needs of B2B.
Solution 3: Bundled Hosting and Ecommerce (Cloud-Based SaaS)
SaaS hosted by the software provider offers tradeoffs that may be attractive to some business models. These solutions may charge revenue-based fees and/or transaction fees for use of the service. They are generally geared toward B2C eCommerce startups, and their application to large B2B enterprise operations is questionable.
Common SaaS eCommerce solutions hosted by the software provider include Bigcommerce and Shopify.
Pros of cloud-based SaaS hosted by the software provider:
All-in-one eCommerce and hosting package that does not require you to get your own hosting.
Software updates are pushed automatically without compatibility issues.
Cloud-based solutions are generally PCI Level 1 compliant.
Easy, cost-effective solution for small B2B startups that do not require complex functionality and do not plan to grow beyond the capacities of cloud-based SaaS solutions.
Omnichannel functionality is available, generally with paid extensions.
Cons of cloud-based SaaS hosted by the software provider:
Different pricing for different customers or for different customer groups may require third-party add-ons.
Complex permissions structures may require third-party add-ons.
Revenue-based pricing.
Transaction fees.
No FTP access.
SaaS solutions are often not API-first.
Unknown whether you can create customer groups that allow multiple users from one company to log in and see each other’s orders.
Checkout process may require modification to meet the complex needs of B2B.
Frankly, this is an obsolete solution. Even for large companies that can afford the expense, the benefits gained by such a great capital outlay are available for a much lower price with a PaaS solution. Since PaaS providers like OrderCloud have already covered the ground of building the foundation, you gain nothing by reinventing the wheel—particularly when these providers make their reusable eCommerce foundations available at highly competitive prices.
Pros of proprietary in-house B2B eCommerce solutions:
Total control over all aspects of the solution.
Cons of proprietary in-house B2B eCommerce solutions:
They uselessly reinvent the wheel.
They do not provide any value beyond that of existing solutions.
They cost far more than any PaaS solution to develop, deploy and maintain.
Making a Decision
Paul Demery reports in B2B Ecommerce World on a recent study by Forrester Consulting with examined emerging trends in PaaS and SaaS deployment for B2B eCommerce. The study found that “the rate of increase in planned PaaS-based deployments over the next two years is twice that of the increase in planned SaaS-based deployments.”
[clickToTweet tweet=”Next 2 yrs, % of planned increase in #PaaS installations=2x planned #SaaS installations in B2B #ecommerce” quote=”Over next 2 yrs, rate of planned increase in PaaS installations=2x planned SaaS installations for B2B eCommerce” theme=”style1″]
In other words, the B2B world is moving to eCommerce. And it’s choosing PaaS over SaaS.
For B2B decision-makers, the time is now to begin pursuing a new B2B eCommerce solution. As more and more companies roll out their own highly customized B2B eCommerce machines, companies without a competitive solution will be ill-equipped to meet the market’s new expectations. They’ll be stuck with old processes that don’t work and customers who can’t get a seamless, personalized front-end experience.
PaaS solutions are beginning to lead the B2B eCommerce services market. As one of theTop eCommerce Development Companies, we believe that the trend will only increase. PaaS solutions offer the right balance between customization and an affordable foundation to build on. Where SaaS is too constraining for modern B2B eCommerce, the sky is the limit with PaaS. Where in-house, proprietary eCommerce solutions uselessly reinvent the wheel, PaaS offers a client-agnostic, reusable foundation for an infinite variety of eCommerce businesses.
On 11/19/15, Google posted an update to their search quality rating guidelines. In the post, you’ll find a link to a PDF which provides instructions to Google’s search results raters. These are human users who rate the quality of results that Google returns for search queries. Google’s PDF does not provide direct advice on best practices for SEO—that’s simply not its intent. However, by reading Google’s instructions to its human raters, we can understand SEO best practices in a new way. In this post, we’ll comb the Google document for new information that’s relevant to ecommerce store owners.
A large portion of the document deals with mobile search results. While much of this information is not new, it’s great to have it all in one place, straight from the source. However, there are a few points to be made.
User Intent Behind Queries
Google classifies search types based on user intent. This is a great way to approach the keywords you’re trying to rank for. What is the user intent behind the keyword? It should always match what users will find on the page which you’ve optimized for that keyword. It’s a fairly obvious point, but it’s worth making. For example, if you’re a paid stock photo site trying to rank for the keyword “free stock photos” so you can persuade users to buy stock photos when they searched for free photos, the intent of your landing page does not respect the user intent behind the keyword. This practice is fundamentally deceptive. Just don’t do it. As Google’s instructions to raters show, Google continues to refine its ability to match user intent to honest search results.
If you’re a brick-and-mortar business, you should pay special attention to “Visit-in-Person” search intent—that is, local searches on mobile in which the user is looking for a nearby brick-and-mortar location. For example, a music store with both a physical retail location and an ecommerce store should prepare its online presence for Visit-in-Person search intent. As well as a fully functional, mobile-responsive online store, this business should have a fully populated Google Business page with accurate location, contact information, and hours. Incomplete or inaccurate information could stop mobile users from finding the brick-and-mortar location they’re looking for. You’ll find this information in section 12.7.4 of the PDF.
Google Is Getting Better at Understanding User Intent
Image Link
In that same section, you’ll find a discussion of ambiguous queries that could be the name of a restaurant (Visit-in-Person intent) or the name of a spice (purely informational query). In writing web copy for your site, you should be precise, leaving no room for semantic ambiguity, while also writing naturally. Be informative, clear, and natural. This will allow Google’s powerful Semantic Search to match precise contextual results to keywords that display ambiguous intent when examined out of context.
Take note here: fundamentally, Google is getting better at divining user intent behind queries. That means that SEO efforts will gradually move away from technical precision (e.g., including exact-match keywords in copy at a recommended density) and towards excellent, well-written copy that matches user intent. Good content marketing is fast becoming the most effective road to good SEO. We expect that trend to continue.
Special Content Result Boxes
Special Content Result Boxes Image
In Google’s PDF, you’ll also find a discussion of “Special Content Result Blocks” (section 12.8.2). If you haven’t noticed, this feature has started appearing at the top of SERPs when the query has a definite answer for which no entity can claim copyright. As the document makes clear, SCRBs only appear when the user has asked Google a specific question—for example, “how much does a gallon of water weigh?” In our screengrab, the SCRB appeared with a URL to a landing page—but not all SCRBs have landing pages associated with them.
Content Strategy
For ecommerce stores, that means checking content strategy very carefully. If some of your content strategy involves trying to rank for questions with definite, non-negotiable answers related to your niche, you should trim those topics from your content strategy. Google is so sophisticated at this point, it’s starting to give us answers directly, without sending us to 3rd party sites for the answers. That means content strategists must narrow the focus to topics on which they can provide fresh, useful information which Google can’t get elsewhere or prepare from aggregate data.
Give Users Fresh Content When That’s What They Want
For ecommerce stores associated with a niche that evolves regularly, that means publishing fresh, accurate content on news within your niche. If users google “boston marathon” and your business is associated with the marathon, you should publish timely content about the next marathon. That’s what users are likely searching for.
The Bottom Line
Google is always tweaking things. This causes some stress in the SEO community—but it shouldn’t. Google is trying to create a better experience for users. Keeping up with Google’s constant algorithm refinement helps us all to create better experiences for our users. For ecommerce store owners, happy users mean satisfied customers. There’s really nothing to lose.
When the mobile revolution hit, everyone had to get a mobile-responsive website. That’s still critical, by the way. If you don’t have a responsive site, you’re losing mobile customers. But now mobile ecommerce is changing again. Buy buttons are coming to the major social media platforms—and to Google.
What does this mean for brands and digital marketers? There isn’t one single answer. Brands that use Pinterest will need a different strategy than brands that primarily use Twitter, for example. In this post, we’ll take a quick overview of each platform’s buy button functionality. And we’ll tell you what it means for brands that thrive on that platform.
Pinterest is unique among social platforms. Its underlying philosophy is brilliant: to capitalize on our voracious appetite for visual beauty—and to enable our love of stashing things for later use. But as users have long complained, Pinterest didn’t offer an easy tie-in to purchase the items you had pinned.
That has changed.
As Pinterest announced on their blog, buyable pins are coming to Pinterest. Initially, only big brands—Macy’s, Neiman Marcus, and Nordstrom—will have access to buyable pin integration. However, Pinterest plans to roll out the function to many more brands, particularly those using Shopify, Demandware, Bigcommerce, or Magento as their ecommerce platform.
Initially, the Pinterest buy button will be available only on iOs mobile devices. However, it is coming to Android and desktop soon.
For small-to-midsize ecommerce retailers whose primary social market is on Pinterest, this means two things. One, waiting (unfortunately) until the buyable pin integration is available more widely; and two, preparing a good marketing strategy now. Once buyable pins are dropped in your lap, you should be ready to go.
Pinterest Buy Button Strategy
Think about what the Pinterest buy button will do: it will enable instant purchasing of a product—when the user is still feeling love at first sight. In a sense, the Pinterest buy button will accelerate the Pinterest shopping experience, cutting out the delay that can change intent-to-buy into a lost sale.
That means putting your best foot forward on buyable pins—your best foot in every area: most attractive products, best photography, products priced best for your market, and highest margins for you. These are the products you should prepare first for buyable pins.
The Twitter buy button will appear directly in a tweet—that’s right, a regular tweet that can be favorited and retweeted. That means unprecedented viral potential for actual product listings. Of course, this functionality only enables virality at the platform level. Most likely, only truly innovative and astounding products will see significant viral lift from the Twitter buy button.
Still, the Twitter buy button is attractive for many reasons. For one thing, Twitter isn’t starting with a few major brands. The buy button is now available to all ecommerce store owners in the US who use Bigcommerce, Demandware, or Shopify as their ecommerce platform. By our count, that’s over 173,000 online stores. In this blog post, Twitter advises ecommerce store owners to contact their ecommerce platform representatives to discuss implementing the buy button functionality.
Twitter Buy Button Strategy
If you’ve used Twitter’s advertising function, you know that the targeting options are highly granular. As well as choosing from hundreds of interests, you can target users who follow certain Twitter accounts, users who watch certain TV shows, and much, much more.
Couple all of this with the coming of Twitter buy buttons, and you have a whole new level of ecommerce targeting precision. That means when you go to promote a buy button tweet through a Twitter ad, you should come to the table with complete, detailed, and accurate information for the market demographic that wants your product. If you match product to demographic well, you should see a high conversion rate.
Instagram Buy Buttons For Visual Shopping
Instagram previously displayed concern over advertising on its platform: would ads disrupt the seamless visual flow of the Instagram experience? Instagram decided the answer was no—as long as the advertising format was considered within the context of the Instagram experience as a whole. Now Instagram is rolling out its own version of the social buy button. According to the platform’s official blog, Instagram’s buy button functionality will provide “an advertising experience that feels native to the platform.”
If you’re concerned about targeting options for the Instagram buy button, you shouldn’t be. According to that same blog post from Instagram, the platform will work with Facebook, enabling advertisers “to reach people on Instagram based on demographics and interests… We want to leverage the best of Facebook’s infrastructure for buying, managing and measuring the success of ads on Instagram.” This sounds like a great partnership, and advertisers who are familiar with Facebook’s high-powered targeting options should find it easy to add Instagram advertising to their repertoire.
Google Buy Buttons: BIG Changes Are Coming To Online Shopping
As Google announced on the Adwords blog, the search giant will start adding buy buttons to “I-want-to-buy” paid search results on mobile. For ecommerce retailers, that means mobile consumers can purchase from your store without ever visiting it. Google will transmit all the purchase data to participating retailers.
For consumers, this sounds like a great way to streamline the mobile purchasing experience. But what will it mean for ecommerce retailers? That’s a bit unclear. In the same blog post, Google says, “While Google hosts the product page and provides purchase protection for customers, retailers own the customer communication and can offer customers the option to receive marketing and promotional messages.”
How will this work? That remains unclear. Allowing customers to opt in to your newsletter is one of the greatest assets to your checkout process as an ecommerce retailer. Will Google collect this data, giving consumers that option? Will Google funnel this data to you in a useable format? It’s too soon to say. As usual, Google’s blog post on the subject is incredibly vague.
Facebook Buy Buttons: Not Quite Yet!
If you were ramping up for the launch of the Facebook buy button, you may have to wait a little longer. As the New York Times reports, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, said, “We are working on this, but it’s not the most important thing we’re working on.”
How will the Facebook buy button affect ecommerce when it does arrive? Clearly, it will work hand-in-hand with Facebook’s sophisticated ad targeting capabilities. That should give merchants the ability to promote a product post directly to the audience that’s most likely to buy the product. For niches whose primary social platform is Facebook, this will be a godsend.
However, not all products may see success with this form of promotion. For example, products with many options, like clothing and tech, might appear too streamlined in an in-line product listing in Newsfeed. Without all the options readily available, consumers might think, “that looks nice, but is it exactly right for me?” Doubtless, Facebook will address this problem; but for now, it remains a valid question.
The Bottom Line
What’s your ecommerce market? At 216digital, we’ve specialized in ecommerce consulting for over 15 years. We know the digital marketing landscape backwards and forwards, and we make informed recommendations to our clients every day. If you have questions about social media buy buttons in your market niche, get in touch. We’re happy to advise you.
Welcome to Part 5 in our in-depth analysis of major ecommerce platforms. In the previous four posts, we discussed WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and Bigcommerce. We examined the inherent pros and cons of each platform. In Part 5, we’ll talk about the ecommerce dark horse: Miva Merchant—or simply Miva, as it’s now called. Let’s get started.
How Does Miva Stack Up?
First, let’s talk about what Miva isn’t. Because Miva is so functional and expandable, it’s not for the entrepreneur on a shoestring budget. The old saying, “you get what you pay for,” holds true in ecommerce platforms as in everything else. While Miva isn’t free by any means, it provides great value and—if managed intelligently—great ROI. With a small but devoted development community and none of the inherent limitations we examined in Shopify and Bigcommerce, Miva customization is limited only by store owners’ imaginations.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Because @miva is a subscription service, PCI compliance comes built in. @216_Digital #ecommerce #saas” quote=”Because Miva is a subscription service, PCI compliance comes built in.”]
Also, note that like Magento, Miva isn’t for DIYers who don’t know code and can’t hire a developer. An entrepreneur considering WooCommerce likely isn’t in the market for Miva. Miva runs on a proprietary script, and major modifications are best left to professional web developers. However, just about every modification you can imagine is possible; and because Miva is a subscription service (unlike Magento), key functionality like PCI compliance comes built in, giving you one less thing to check off your list after signing up.
For code-savvy entrepreneurs (or those with plenty of development budget), Miva and Magento might look like neck-and-neck contenders at first. However, as G2Crowd reports, Magento doesn’t stack up too well against Miva. While Magento offers a free platform with added robust functionality at a development price, Miva offers a subscription platform plus added functionality at a lower total cost. Since Miva comes with more functionality out of the box, Miva development is simply not as expensive as Magento development. And while you’ll have to outsource Magento support to your 3rd party developer, Miva support is included in every subscription—even at the boutique pricing tier. That means you don’t have to pay $20,000/year to get someone on the phone. As Miva puts it on their website, they offer an enterprise-quality ecommerce solution without the enterprise-level price tag.
Miva: The Ecommerce World’s Best-Kept Secret
Don’t tell, but Miva is awesome! – Photo courtesy of Steven Depolo. Licensed under CC 2.0.
Now, Miva isn’t as well-known as some of the big ecommerce players. But why should it be? Where Miva’s competitors win new customers with a glitzy marketing machine, Miva is arguably the ecommerce world’s best-kept secret. Remember, marketing is expensive, and businesses pass expenses to their customers. If you sign up with a marketing-heavy service, you’re paying for the marketing that convinced you as well as future marketing to net new customers. Ecommerce owners who choose Miva do so for quality and reliability, not for the feel-good experience of working with a great salesman.
Miva has always maintained a transparent relationship with its users. Miva executives can be found posting in Miva forums and responding to reviews on 3rd party blogs. While Miva script is proprietary and customizations require involvement from the development community, the culture of Miva has an open-source feel. Among Miva users and developers alike, the saying is, “if the solution doesn’t exist yet, it can be created.”
Let’s put it this way: if you google “best ecommerce platforms,” you may not see many mentions of Miva. But that’s a testament to the other companies’ focus—marketing. Miva has a dedicated community of longtime clients and experienced developers. If you search for Miva reviews, you’ll find many testimonials from store owners who’ve been using Miva for a decade or more. Most say they would never switch.
Miva isn’t super aggressive in pursuing the low-budget startup—and for good reason. The shoestring budget can’t afford the quality that Miva provides, and the uneducated entrepreneur will take the sales pitches of the big companies anyway. Miva’s strategy focuses more on providing the very best ecommerce platform possible to those who can pay for it. Where Shopify’s average customer does $10k/year in sales, Miva’s average customer does $500k/year. These average customers are both small businesses, but as Miva president Rick Wilson explains in this post, “it’s a different kind of small.”
Further, the average lifespan of a Miva store is 8 years. For Miva’s competition, that average store lifespan is 2.5 years. We think that says it all.
The Bottom Line
As in all things ecommerce, there’s no right answer to the platform question. That answer depends on your market’s growth potential, the functionality you need, your budget, your projected yearly sales, and more. For larger small businesses that need limitless functionality without the handicap of transaction fees and limited access to development tools, Miva and Magento remain excellent choices.
In the early days, like everything else, design was a male-dominated profession. Today, women designers are changing the face of design with incredible innovation. At 216digital, we’re design connoisseurs. We thrive on innovative design thinking. We keep a pulse on the design industry, and we take note when someone creates something amazing. In this blog post, we wanted to talk about our favorite women designers and their work.
You’ll see an incredible amount of innovation in these designers’ portfolios. In the disciplines of graphic design, illustration, typography, and more, these 26 designers are pushing the boundaries of convention and creating new visual expressions.
We’ve organized our favorite designers into several specialty areas. But let’s be clear—these designers aren’t ranked in any kind of order. They’re all great, and no two are alike.
Jiani Lu practices groundbreaking graphic design in Taipei, Taiwan. Her work integrates all aspects of visual communication—imagery, graphic elements, and typography—with a new kind of flair that we haven’t seen before.
Shown: To My Future Self. Used by permission of Jiani Lu.
Jiani is a Canadian designer working in multiple disciplines. She has won awards from AIGA, Graphis, Adobe, and others.
Fanny Öhlund is forging a career in cutting-edge design. Her work features beautiful graphics and typography integrated into a unique whole. She has done work in print design, album cover design, branding, and more.
Shown: Áhpi album cover. Used by permission of Fanny Öhlund.
Fanny’s sense of pattern, contrast, and color is truly beautiful. For this writer, her work is often more than the sum of its parts. For more of Fanny’s work, see her website or Behance page.
Teresa Sdralevich has forged a remarkable career in illustration, poster design, and cover design. Her work utilizes large blocks of color and bold typography. She often engages social, political, and cultural issues, and her approach draws the most out of a simple collection of elements.
Book cover: Vota Larry, by Janet Tashjian. Used by permission of Teresa Sdralevich.
Teresa was born in Milan in 1969. She currently lives and works in Brussels, where she practices silkscreen printing in a collaborative space shared with other artists.
Best Ecommerce Platforms for 2015 – Pt. 4 – Bigcommerce
Welcome to Part 4 of our series on ecommerce platforms. In the previous installments, we examined WooCommerce, Shopify, and Magento. We discussed the inherent pros and cons of each platform. We concluded that WooCommerce is an excellent basic option. We also mentioned that Shopify’s transaction fee schedule could hurt high-growth businesses. In looking at Magento, we concluded that almost every business model would need custom development to fully utilize Magento’s functionality. In Part 4, we’ll look at another big ecommerce name: Bigcommerce. Let’s jump right in!
Bigcommerce:
Bigcommerce is growing fast. The Revolution Fund invested $40 million in Bigcommerce in 2013. SoftBank Capital and others pitched in $50 million in 2014, bringing the company’s net worth to $500 million. With something like 90,000 online stores running on the platform, Bigcommerce has big market share. Its features are quite competitive, though customer complaints suggest a lack of adequate support.
Industry insiders agree that Bigcommerce has one thing down pat: they’re a marketing powerhouse. An aggressive campaign has netted them tens of thousands of new users. When Magento pulled the plug on Magento Go, their SaaS (software as a service) version, they sent approximately 10,000 customers to Bigcommerce. However, big things develop their own kinds of problems. When a company’s goal is to eat up an entire market, other considerations can fall by the wayside. Though ecommerce beginners may not realize it, Bigcommerce has some serious shortcomings that limit its adaptability.
While Bigcommerce boasts tons of bells and whistles, it doesn’t give users some crucial features. As this thread in the Miva Merchant community forums explains, Bigcommerce doesn’t allow for template logic. In other words, you can’t add code to create a conditional statement like, “for this family of products, include a download link to the manufacturer’s docmuntation.” This is a serious shortcoming—and one with no workaround. Further, because of Bigcommerce’s API, you can’t integrate 3rd party functionality into the platform. This stands in stark contrast to Miva and Magento, which offer vibrant development communities and total freedom to develop custom 3rd party integrations.
Photo courtesy of Mark Sebastian. Licensed under CC 2.0. Modified by 216digital.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Unlike #miva and #magento, #bigcommerce can’t do template logic. @216_Digital” quote=”Unlike Miva and Magento, Bigcommerce can’t do template logic.”]
That’s not the only thing we worry about when we look at Bigcommerce. In the development area, user FTP access is limited to a few folders. Worse, Bigcommerce doesn’t provide any database access. That means if you want to change anything in those areas, you’re out of luck. Some developers complain that Bigcommerce’s code is too hefty, potentially dragging down SEO results. Finally, as with Shopify, you can only host a Bigcommerce store on Bigcommerce servers.
The Bottom Line
For a certain segment of the ecommerce market, Bigcommerce will work just fine. Ecommerce store owners who don’t need certain functionality and have no development background will love Bigcommerce. It works, it looks great, it provides a lot of power out of the box, it’s easy to use, and hosting is included. The trouble is getting functionality that’s not provided in the software itself. For store owners who want limitless custom functionality, Miva and Magento are lightyears ahead of Bigcommerce.
Stay tuned. In Part 5 of 5 in our series, we take an in-depth look at Miva. Mellier has built a remarkable career in graphic design, typography, and print design. Her work uses simple geometric shapes arranged in strategic placement. Her strong eye for color transforms her minimal geometry into vibrant, cohesive works.
Fanette completed her education at the Graduate School of Decorative Arts in Strasbourg. She learned from masters such as Pierre Di Sciullo and Pierre Bernard. With this background, she has contributed significantly to the world of typography and intellectual communication.
Anna Kuts is a graphic designer, photographer, and calligrapher from Kharkiv, Ukraine. Her work marries a strong emphasis on texture with a nuanced approach to color. She is passionate about logo design in particular. She often combines unique textures with clear vector elements, and the results are beautiful.
Kharkov Guitar Quartet Poster. Used by permission of Anna Kuts.
We see a little Soviet Constructivist influence in this poster, but the overall effect is unmistakably contemporary. The piece contains excellent contrast, and the overall look is quite balanced.
Mercedes Bazan specializes in UI, UX, and editorial design. She lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her work features strong graphic elements, complex alignments, and refreshing color palettes. Her editorial designs in the magazine field are fresh, contemporary, and surprising.
Shown: Nikola Tesla Pressbook. Used by permission of Mercedes Bazan.
Cristina Pagnoncelli’s work utilizes great typography, balanced composition, and a clear sense of cohesiveness. Cristina shows an ability to weave seemingly unrelated elements into a total composition. Her use of type and lettering is particularly inspiring. Facebook asked her to create 10 letterings inspired by American cities. Now Facebook users can use these letterings on their photos.
Shown: Orlando lettering. Used by permission of Cristina Pagnoncelli.
With her sister, Raquel Pagnoncelli, she runs Des Figure, a communication studio. Cristina’s work shows an intuitive understanding of diverse graphic disciplines. She is one to watch.
Sue Doeksen is a graphic designer based in Amsterdam. She often focuses on bold color, eye-popping texture, and a fun approach to high-concept design. Her work is thoroughly contemporary, yet it knows its roots in great European design.
Shown: Landmark Pins. Used by permission of Sue Doeksen.
Sue describes herself as a “visual adventurer.” This approach shows in all her work. Sue’s designs are not static works; they seem to transform themselves as you look at them—even those that aren’t animated. Sue has collaborated multiple times with fellow Dutch designer Marta Veludo (see below).
9. Marta Veludo
Marta Veludo is an Amsterdam-based graphic designer, artist, and visual thinker. She works in a wide variety of design fields, including art direction, graphic design, brand communication, and set design. Her work regularly features playful colors and visual relationships.
Shown: D & R Wedding Invitation. Used by permission of Marta Veludo.
Marta’s work is truly unmistakable. She marries a quirky eye to a strong sense of formalism. The result is a dynamic visual language that is contemporary, yet knows its history. She has collaborated multiple times with fellow Dutch designer Sue Doeksen (see above).
Along with Enikő Deri (see below), Nora Demeczky runs De-Form, a design agency based in Budapest. Her work features a strong graphic impact and carefully-constructed balance across a cohesive whole. She achieves a great balance between form and content.
Enikő Deri runs De Form, a Hungarian design agency, along with Nora Demeczky (see above). Her work often features dramatic use of geometry in strict black-and-white. Her shapes and organization are incredibly fresh, and the overall effect she creates is mesmerizing.
Shown: Albert. Used by permission of De Form.
II. Branding Design
12. Kelsy Stromski
Photograph by Kyle Caldwell.
Kelsy Stromski founded Refinery 43 to design cohesive visual identities for her clients. She has designed unique branding for interior design studios, personal brands, nonprofits, food products, and more. Her design expertise is highly fluid and adaptable.
Shown: Bouchard Family Farms Ployes pancake mix packaging. Used by permission of Kelsy Stromski.
Kelsy’s work is firmly grounded in a thorough knowledge of her clients. She combines this knowledge with a deep understanding of the intended audience for the brand. The result is highly-targeted branding.
Ipek Eris is a freelance designer working in the fields of branding, logo design, and corporate identity. She has lived in Kenya, France, Germany, and England. This experience has given her an eclectic visual sense, and it shows in her work.
Shown: Rumeli70 Pharmacy branding package. Used by permission of Ipek Eris.
Ipek’s work shows a keen awareness of her client’s needs, married to a great visual sense. She establishes unity between separate elements by repeating motifs with variation.
We didn’t have to look far to find this designer. Sarah Yeager works for us! And while you may chuckle at the fact that we included our own designer in this list, wait till you see her work. It’s why we hired her.
Shown: MatVacay app design.Shown: Textbookly.com website.Shown: Sarah’s award-winning design of EmpoweRING, a piece of jewelry that lets the wearer send a distress signal to emergency contacts if he or she is in danger.Shown: #BrainCandies branding for WedoWE.
Sarah received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Communication Design from Kent State University. Aside from her design education, Sarah’s wide range of interests also informs her design process. She has worked in entrepreneurship, videography, photography, and painting. She finds these experiences invaluable as she designs websites, logos, and creatives for our clients.
Shown: John French with Hasselblad, paper collage on panel, 18×12.5 inches. Used by permission of Lola Dupré.
Lola Dupré has created an incredible illustration style. Working exclusively with paper and scissors, she makes surreal, distorted images, often using the human body as her subject. In enlarging some parts of her source image, she criticizes cultural assumptions about gender and beauty. Her work is beautiful, disturbing, and unmistakable.
Nina Geometrieva is a rising star in photography, graphic design, and branding. She brings a strong sense of geometry to her design as well as her photojournalism. For this writer, her most incredible work is the stunning photoshoot of Tokyo which she produced with Damjan Cvetkov-Dimitrov—including the capsule hotel photos which you’ve probably seen somewhere on the internet already.
Shown: Tōkyō desu. Used by permission of Nina Geometrieva.
Nina and Damjan documented their Tokyo trip in this Medium post. Check it out for more incredible animated GIFs.
Nadzeya Makeyeva is an illustrator and designer based in Minsk, Belarus. Her work features ingenious use of texture and line, and each piece seems to create and inhabit its own world. Check out her Psilocybin Rabbit:
Shown: Psilocybin Rabbit. Used by permission of Nadzeya Makeyeva.
Nadzeya attended College of Arts #26 in Minsk. She has worked as a concept artist, illustrator, designer, and UI/UX designer, at multiple firms and as a freelancer. Her work shows a remarkable fluidity and ability to adapt to different purposes, styles, and materials.
Vicki Turner is a British designer and illustrator with a strong eye for color, shape, and line. Her work features incredible geometric representations of common shapes. Vicki has developed her own consistent style, almost an iconographic language which is easily understood by anyone.
Shown: Misty Morning Commute, shortlisted for the AOI & TFL Prize for Illustration. Used by permission of Vicki Turner.
Vicki has worked with non-profits, startups, and everything in between. She brings a problem-solving mindset to the client relationship, and she offers insight on product and branding. She is also the founder of Feist Forest, a boutique builder of fine wooden tables for creatives.
Erin Zingré started her illustration career in style, at age 4, with a preschool drawing of the Headless Horseman, a Guillotine, and Death Himself. As she puts it, this drawing still captures the essence of her work: “kinda cute, kinda creepy, and altogether not-quite-right.” It’s a beautiful kind of not-quite-right.
Shown: Coloring Book for Grownups. Used by permission of Erin Zingré.
Erin is a multidisciplinary designer now working out of Seattle. She is not taking freelance work at this time, due to her work designing at Amazon. With this talent, it’s no surprise she’s been snatched up.
Anna Grosh is a Siberian designer working in San Francisco, CA. She specializes in illustration, typography and lettering, and design. Her illustration shows a nuanced touch and a powerful expression of emotion.
Shown Circus D’Hiver Bouglion poster. Used by permission of Anna Grosh.
Anna also excels at highly ornamented work and calligraphy. In the digital age, it’s refreshing to see a human touch and detailed hand work. Anna is one to watch.
V. Typography, Calligraphy, and Typeface Design
21. Marian Bantjes
Marian Bantjes has forged a remarkable career. Her work spans graphic design, typography, calligraphy, and lettering, and it has won her international acclaim. In the following piece, which she created for AGI’s annual special project, she used dirt and sand from around the world to create a Coexistence poster. Note the obsessive attention to detail—and the transience: she didn’t glue the sand down, and she wiped the poster away after photographing it.
Marian worked as a book typesetter from 1984-1994. From 1994-2003, she ran Digitopolis, a graphic design studio which she cofounded. From 2003 to the present, she has pursued freelance work in design, art, and lettering.
Laura Pol is a designer, photographer, and videographer based in Venice, CA. As a designer, she has created a wide variety of logos, both type-based and graphic, in which she integrates clean typography with an overall aesthetic. She has also created several fonts, which are available for free (donation suggested) on her website.
Shown: Tyde Font sample. Used by permission of Laura Pol.
Typography and typeface design aren’t Laura’s only pursuits. She has also collaborated on editorial designs, art direction, branding, and more.
Lisa Pan (Pan, Yi) is a graphic designer based in Taipei, Taiwan. She has developed an incredible illustration style, and she also excels at creating beautiful typography. She often combines lettering with illustrative work. Her pieces are truly jaw-dropping.
Shown: Typoholic Zoology Collection. Used by permission of Lisa Pan.
Lisa shows an incredible ability to adapt her illustration style and her typographic sense to any project. Her work also shows a great balance between complex and simple textures.
Louise Mertens received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in graphic design at Sint-Lucas Antwerpen. While in school, she interned at Mirror Mirror. After an internship at Sagmeister and Walsh, she launched Louise Mertens Studio in 2014. She now specializes in art and art direction, with a strong emphasis on collage. In the work below, she achieves a dynamic unity from several competing elements.
Shown: Jiyu 4. Used by permission of Louise Mertens.
Louise’s use of color and her carefully-combined textures are unmistakable. As she says on her website, she is “inspired by the female body, the mysterious, and the incomprehensible.” She has developed a truly unique style.
Marta Gawin practices design in Katowice, Poland. She specializes in editorial, poster, exhibition, and visual identity design. Her work features strong contrast between graphic elements, plus incredible typography.
Shown: JazzArt Festival 2015. Used by permission of Marta Gawin.
Marta earned her MA in Graphic Design from the Academy of Fine Arts, Katowice, in 2011. She works as a freelancer now, and she is regularly hired by both commercial organizations and cultural institutions. Her work is high-concept, with a heavy emphasis on unique content.
Candy Chang takes her background in urban planning, her expressive sense, and her training in design and combines them to create beautiful public art installations. Among many incredible works, she created the Before I Die phenomenon—a black wall stenciled with the phrase, “Before I die _____”.
Shown: Before I Die. Used by permission of Candy Chang.
This is a participatory public artwork which invites passersby to share their deepest longings in public. The original Before I Die wall in New Orleans gained international attention, and now there are over 1,000 Before I Die walls in 70 countries around the globe.
Design is changing faster than ever. New trends are always emerging, and in our opinion, things just keep getting better and better. These 26 women are pushing design to new places we’ve never seen before. This is truly a golden age of design, whether in web, branding, typography, illustration, or photography.
From 216digital, a hearty THANK YOU to these designers for their willingness to share their work. Keep at it!
Best Ecommerce Platforms for 2015 – Pt. 3 – Magento
Welcome to Part 3 of our ecommerce platform comparison series! In Parts 1 and 2, we examined WooCommerce and Shopify. We discussed each platform’s strengths as well as its weaknesses. We concluded that WooCommerce is excellent for basic, low-budget ecommerce startups. We also noted that Shopify’s transaction fees could seriously hamper business models that forecast high growth rates. In Part 3, we’ll examine one of the biggest players in ecommerce: Magento. Let’s get started!
Magento:
Magento occupies a unique place in the ecommerce software market. The platform is available in two major divisions. The Community Edition, or CE, is a free, open-source download with a vibrant user and developer community. It’s a robust framework, but it requires thorough knowledge of code to get it running (and keep it running).
Magento Enterprise is a subscription-based service aimed at high-volume online retailers. Enterprise prices start at around $18,000/year and may range up to $70,000/year. Note that a custom quote for the Enterprise version can only be obtained from the Magento Enterprise sales team.
Magento Maintenance: Sold Separately
This guy can’t help you update your Magento installation. You’ll have to do it yourself. Photo courtesy of Pedro Ribeiro Simões. Modified by 216digital.
While Magento CE is free, maintaining a Magento CE store isn’t free. It will cost you, either in time (if you’re already a professional developer) or in money (if you’re not). Since the software is open-source and hosted on your server, Magento doesn’t help you with upgrading its software, fixing problems, or keeping your backend architecture in good shape. If you don’t have the time or expertise to do all this yourself, you’ll need to hire a developer, potentially on a recurring basis.
However, you get what you pay for. Businesses that can afford ongoing professional web development will find great value in Magento. The platform is powerful, scalable, and ready to integrate with countless 3rd parties.
How Big Is Big Enough For Magento?
That’s a great question. Some sources say Magento provides value for stores doing $500,000/year and above in gross sales. However, some developers who work with Magento don’t recommend it for stores doing under $1 million/year in online sales. Needless to say, Magento is not for the bedroom entrepreneur with a laptop and a dream. For startups on shoestring budgets, WooCommerce for WordPress may be a more reasonable solution—as long as WooCommerce’s fairly basic functionality is sufficient for the business model.
Support is part of the ongoing development cost associated with Magento. Magento itself does not offer phone or email support for its CE users. Magento forums are available, with a large community of users and developers posting regularly. However, as with any online forum, it’s “buyer beware” with regard to the quality of any given answer. In this regard, hiring an experienced development team is a great solution for firms that can afford it.
Because Magento is free and open-source, it doesn’t come with PCI compliance out of the box. You’ll need to work with a 3rd party solution to achieve PCI compliance. However, Magento’s $0 price tag comes with benefits, too. Unlike Shopify, Magento doesn’t charge transaction fees—though of course, you’ll still pay transaction fees with your 3rd party payment gateway. Lastly, as a free product, Magento CE offers another advantage over more “user-friendly” platforms: it has no inherent restrictions in bandwidth or number of products.
The Bottom Line
For larger firms with the development budget to get the custom store they need, Miva and Magento are the most powerful options. A Magento license is free, while Miva is an SaaS (software as a service) subscription. However, Miva may be cheaper in the long run, since more features come bundled into that subscription and won’t require custom development.
Ready for more? In the next post, we look at Bigcommerce.
Miva Retro ReadyTheme Customization: Tailored To Your Needs!
Miva users know that Miva is the ecommerce world’s best-kept secret. With Miva now offering responsive ReadyThemes free with every license, it’s easier than ever to put a functional, beautiful skin on your Miva store. In fact, most of our clients agree: Miva ReadyThemes really nail it after just a little customization.
Bee Bald Man Care Products sells skin care products for the head. Their products offer incredible value for bald and non-bald men alike. But men aren’t the only ones who love Bee Bald; women use their products, too. Bee Bald has a developed a great brand. Clearly, they needed a great website to match.
When Bee Bald came to us for a redesign, we knew that the Miva Retro ReadyTheme was perfect—well, nearly perfect. Bee Bald founder Dennis Fisher wanted to make a few changes to the theme. He had some ideas on how to optimize this theme for his business, and we were happy to help. The fact is, a pre-loaded theme is rarely a perfect fit for a business owner’s vision. Every business is unique, and themes are designed to please a wide user base. Bee Bald needed something unique. We agreed that Dennis had some great ideas to take his online store to the next level.
So how did we take the Bee Bald store to the next level? Let’s dive right in.
Dennis liked the Retro ReadyTheme overall. “As a template, it was great,” he says. “But it’s not all things to all people.” Specifically, he wasn’t happy with the theme’s homepage layout. The stock layout was functional and looked great, but that functionality didn’t quite fit his product line. We adjusted the homepage product offering template, replacing the stock configuration with a product carousel. We also tweaked the colors and the copy to match Dennis’s specifications.
As you can see, the resulting Bee Bald homepage looks stunning. Dennis has developed an amazingly cohesive brand—one that really sells his product to his niche. Clearly, Dennis’s design decisions were one key part of building that awesome brand. Honestly, we think a lot of marketers could take a cue from Dennis.
It’s obvious that a great ecommerce design appeals to online shoppers. However, a great design coupled to a cohesive brand also makes a great impression on other businesses. In Dennis’s case, as he hammered out relationships with distributors the old-fashioned way, his website turned into a stellar asset. Dennis could throw someone a link with confidence, knowing his website design would showcase the excellent quality of his product line.
Responsive Web Design: Critical In Today’s Ecommerce Market
Ouch. Looks like non-responsive design. (Original photo courtesy of Jan Vašek; modified by 216digital.)
Dennis was getting a lot of mobile traffic on his old site, but mobile users weren’t converting. Dennis thought that mobile users were leaving the site because it wasn’t resizing to the small screens of phones. We agreed—and the same is true for all non-responsive sites today. If you’re not serving pages optimized for mobile devices you’re losing sales.
For ecommerce store owners, mobile website design isn’t an option. It’s a necessity.
The Retro ReadyTheme is fully mobile responsive out of the box. However, when you add custom extensions to a responsive theme, you have to ensure that the customizations look great on mobile, too. Dennis needed a store locator module for his site. We integrated a powerful store locator module into the new Bee Bald site—but we knew that that alone wasn’t enough. We made sure the store locator module was fully mobile responsive and integrated into the look and feel of the theme. That way, customers could find a Bee Bald store on the go—and they wouldn’t be distracted by a clunky store locator experience.
Bee Bald looks great on mobile.
We believe it’s the little things that count, so we also tightened up the overall look of Dennis’s Retro ReadyTheme installation. These incremental changes added up to a great overall brand impression—on mobile and on desktop.
The Cleveland Connection: A Local B2B Partnership
photo by: Rick Harris
An entrepreneur often wears all the hats. When Dennis started gearing up for the launch of Bee Bald, he was learning about the ecommerce world from scratch. Since the technical aspect of ecommerce was so new to him, he realized only shortly before launch that he needed to make changes to the proposal he’d submitted to his developer. The developer was local to the Cleveland, OH area, but they weren’t quite prepared to deal with the nuances of changing a Miva project on the fly. While Dennis’s relationship with his original developer had showed initial promise, he began to realize it wasn’t till-death-do-us-part. He needed a dedicated Miva developer.
Enter 216digital. Justin Sims, our lead web developer, took over Dennis’s project. When we asked Dennis to reflect on his experience with us, we could hear the genuine appreciation in his voice. “Justin did a terrific job,” Dennis said. “He was accessible and responsive. He helped streamline the process.” Now that’s an aspect of responsive web design that you don’t hear about every day—responding right away to a client’s needs and concerns.
In the process of working with us, Dennis learned a lot about Miva. We didn’t keep any secrets from him. Dennis can now perform many store updates himself, meaning we’re billing him less. A lot of companies wouldn’t do that. Why give away the secrets that build value into your services? We simply don’t see it that way. Dennis is our client, and it was our job to build the best ecommerce tool we could for him. Dennis was equipped to learn Miva, and we were happy to teach him.
The Bottom Line
At 216digital, we have a passion for all things Cleveland. Cleveland beers, Cleveland sports teams, we’re 216 all the way. (That’s the area code around here, by the way.) It was exciting to help a Cleveland-area entrepreneur achieve his business goals.
Of course, our clients come from all over. If you aren’t from the Cleveland area, we’ll show you the Cleveland work ethic as we create a stellar ecommerce site for you. So, when you’re ready to start that next project, remember 216digital. With 15 years of experience as a Miva certified partner, we can make your Miva ReadyTheme nail it!
Best Ecommerce Platforms for 2015 – Pt. 2 – Shopify
If you search Google for “ecommerce platforms,” you’ll find a lot about WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and Bigcommerce. If you do a little digging, you might find Miva, a longstanding ecommerce platform that’s not as well-known. Each platform has its own selling points and drawbacks. For some businesses, hidden drawbacks to any given platform may eventually overshadow that platform’s selling points. In this in-depth series, we’re examining the benefits and drawbacks of 5 major ecommerce platforms. In Part 1, we talked about WooCommerce. In Part 2, we’ll look at Shopify. Let’s dive in!
Shopify:
Shopify is a major player in the ecommerce game. With 150,000 active stores, Shopify is responsible for an incredible amount of online commerce. Shopify offers a range of responsive themes, Paypal integration, blogging functionality, a CMS (content management system) and a fairly basic abandoned cart email integration. In that regard, Shopify is generally competitive among ecommerce platforms. However, Shopify has some serious drawbacks which entrepreneurs should consider before committing.
Watch out for those transaction fees!
The biggest problem with Shopify is its transaction fee schedule. This is tied to your choice of payment gateway. If you go with Shopify’s own gateway, Shopify Payments, you’ll be charged 1.8%-2.4% plus $0.30 on every transaction. The percentage charge depends on your plan tier. If you want to use Shopify Payments, you’re in luck. But if you want to integrate with a 3rd party payment gateway, you’ll pay two transaction fees every time you make a sale: one to your 3rd party, and one to Shopify itself. In this scenario, Shopify’s fee goes down to 0.5%-2.0%, depending on your plan tier. Keep in mind that you’re already paying Shopify for the software and hosting. If you’re considering Shopify, you should really crunch the numbers on your projected sales and margins and see how this all adds up.
Shopify’s discount functionality is also limited. The only discounts you can apply are percent off, dollars off, and free shipping. Clearly, these are the most common discount types; but what about scenarios where you need a different type of discount solution? Miva’s built-in discount functionality is far more robust. Without add-ons, Miva offers volume pricing, add-on products, basket discounts, buy product X and get product Y, product discounts, and two types of shipping discounts—entire order, or per-product.
Some developers have claimed that Shopify’s code is not lightweight. Shopify contains in-line javascript at the beginning of the page. Experts generally recommend using external javascript or putting it at the end of the page. Note that Miva in stock configuration has no in-line javascript at the beginning of the source code.
Shopify gives you two shipping methods out of the box. However, carrier-calculated shipping rates aren’t available in any plan below the $179/month tier. This puts smaller operations at a disadvantage. In Miva, shipping options are in no way tied to your website hosting setup.
Overall, Shopify provides a good value to startups and small online stores that don’t need unlimited functionality and have big enough margins to take the transaction fees. Shopify is feature-rich, and those features will work just fine for many smaller operations. However, the limitations we discussed could hamper a store that starts to take off. That’s a key question that entrepreneurs should ask themselves when considering an ecommerce platform: will this software still serve me well in 3 years? In 5 years? In 10 years? And in the case of Shopify, as business grows, how will those transaction fees add up over the years?
The Bottom Line
Shopify offers excellent functionality and features. However, its transaction fee schedule represents a serious drawback for businesses doing larger sales volumes. In this regard, Shopify is more suited to small operations that will stay small. For larger operations, or for fast-growing stores, Miva and Magento offer more freedom and flexibility and have no inherent transaction fees. Note, however, that they may be more expensive than Shopify to get off the ground.
Best Ecommerce Platforms for 2015 – Pt. 1 – WooCommerce
Google “eCommerce platforms,” and you’ll probably find a lot about WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and Bigcommerce. Dig a little deeper, and you might find a longstanding platform called Miva. Each of these platforms has its strengths and weaknesses. For some businesses, the weaknesses of any given platform may heavily outweigh that platform’s strengths. In this in-depth series, we’ll take a look at the benefits and drawbacks of 5 major eCommerce platforms. We’ll also look at what kind of business each platform is most suited for. As one of the Top WooCommerce Developers, we’ll be kicking things off with our analysis of the WooCommerce platform.
WooCommerce: Great For Startups With Small Budgets
WooCommerce is an online shopping cart plugin for WordPress. As such, WooCommerce can only run on WordPress installations. WordPress is the web’s most popular blogging platform and content management system, and it’s only gotten better in the last few years. With the WooCommerce plugin installed, it’s a great option for anyone just starting out in online selling.
The WooCommerce plugin itself is free, making it even more optimized for startups with low budgets. However, the free plugin lacks some extensions. Certain shipping options, payment gateways, extension of product fields, and other functions require add-ons. Some of these plugins are free, but most require a purchase. For more complex online stores, WooCommerce isn’t free at all, due to the number of plugins that must be licensed.
Because WooCommerce was developed by WooThemes, it allegedly runs best on one of their WordPress themes. Most of those aren’t free. Because the plugin is open-source, WooCommerce users do not have access to phone or social media support. However, users who purchase a WordPress template from WooThemes do have access to the company’s support forums.
For simple operations, and for entrepreneurs with simple requirements and zero budget, WooCommerce can’t be beat. However, for larger stores and established operations, WooCommerce can’t provide the full functionality and flexibility of Miva or Magento. Magento requires extensive 3rd party development to reach the level of functionality that larger ecommerce firms will require. Miva requires less development to get a new store to market, but it may still require some, depending on the new store’s business model. Though development costs more than plugins, larger stores see the value in having storefronts, checkout procedures, and product features optimized to their exact market needs. Because WooCommerce is WordPress-based, WooCommerce users depend on existing plugins to modify site functionality. In Miva and Magento, the possibilities are almost endless.
The Bottom Line:
WooCommerce is great for simple operations and low-budget startups. However, it doesn’t have the extensibility of larger and more expensive platforms like Miva and Magento. As such, it may not be suitable for low-budget startups with complex storefront needs. But for bloggers who already use WordPress and want to start a basic online store on the same domain as their blog, WooCommerce is perfect.
Now that you have your website ready to go the next thing to tackle is your marketing strategy. To start, look at your past marketing data to see how your business performed during previous years. This will make it easier to plan a marketing strategy as you’ll have a better idea of what worked and what didn’t.
Once you have that data, you can start to plan for the future holiday season. And the following tips will help you put your best foot forward!
