E-Commerce

If you listen to the news during the any holiday you often hear analysts talking about our shopping habits.  That is where and more importantly how we shop, and every year more and more people are turning to internet as a way to shop.  Why?  Well it is convenient, fast, easy, but more importantly there are so many more options and variety of products out there.  So if more and more people are turning towards the internet, why would you not offer your product to the consumer that is ready to buy? 

      It is too often that I come across someone who sells a product the primitive way.  That is people just e-mail in the order and quantity and you have to then do everything else to send that package, or maybe you take your orders through the phone.  In any case, this is a slow, unproductive way of doing things. 

      Now think what if I had a power for people to find me on the web and purchase what they want as often as they want and they can do it all on their own without your help.  All you have to do is make sure that you keep enough inventory in stock.  There are a lot of web designers out there that can do this for you, so when you are looking for someone make sure that set you up with some of the following capabilities.  An e-commerce website should be able to have a simple one page check-out, a frequent shopper rewards program integrated, a tracking system for tax records, and it should have automatic shipping cost calculator.  There are a lot more options for you to chose from and take advantage of. 

      So the bottom line is if you have products that you sell and do not have an e-commerce website you are missing out on a lot of money as well as you are wasting time. 

Web Site Analytics, DO You Know Who Is On Your Site & What They Are Doing?

 Assuming that you have a website, how would you determine if it is actually helping you potential customers?  You can’t call everyone that clicks and ask them if your website was helpful; because after all, if your website is not helping your business, you should ask for your money back. 

      One of the easiest ways to know what people are thinking when they are visiting your website is to look at your analytics.  That is done by logging in administrator or contacting your web developer and asking for him or her to analyze webpage views, hits etc.  BinaryWebDesign.com utilizes and highly recommends using Joomla as a content management system because it gives you power to easily look at analytics yourself instead of paying your web designer $200.  Joomla allows you to look at what pages were hit, how long they stayed on that page, what search engine or link they used to find your website, etc.  Seems like a lot of info, but how can it help you?    

      By knowing how much time is spent on average on any particular web page allows you to see if the content is helping people.  For instance if you see that people are spending a lot of time on your home page and service page, but when they click on contact page they right away leave, means that there is something wrong with your content on contact page and needs to be changed.  Information like what links or search engine that people use to find you allows you to market one place like Google more then any other search engines.

      By looking at all of this information, you can slowly update your website to be more efficient in a way that it presents your business on the internet.   
 

By Eugene