A Focus On E-commerce Fundamentals
Mauer’s Quickswing has been selling their baseball training products online for years, but their former e-commerce site had holes in it.  We took the Joe Mauer approach and focused on the fundamentals:

• An engaging, unique and clean custom web design
• Clear navigation, content and links to view and buy products
• Well structured and simplified product detail pages
• Search engine friendly build-out leveraging SEO best practices
• Easy e-commerce check out steps
• Flexible and easy back-end management for the client (SMC)
• Secure shopping with SSL & Merchant account services

We’re pleased with the overall outcome of the website and look forward to driving an increase in sales online for the Quickswing.  We’re not mad about having the Mauer team in our dugout of great clients either.

Check out the website: http://www.mauersquickswing.com

MotorSportsGearUSA.com

The Motorsports USA Gear site is the flagship of this e-commerce network of sites.  The initial release of the site only lists snowmobile gear for sale, but will eventually offer ATV, Motocross and more.

Brand Focused Websites
The other aspect to this site is that we are producing product line focused websites.  The first one we produced is focused on Klim snowmobile clothing and gear.  The main site will feed product information to each of the brand focused websites.

E-commerce Website Features
These e-commerce sites feature the following:

• Custom e-commerce design (we also made the site easy to re-skin for the brand focused websites to follow)
• Product catalog & shopping cart
• Multiple navigation locations for category, brand & search
• Product preview & product detail pages
• HTML sitemap & product sitemap
• On-page SEO
• Product options & product codes
• Authorize.Net merchant account

We’re excited to release these new e-commerce web designs and make winter a little more fun.

• View http://www.motorsportsgearusa.com
• View http://www.sledgearusa.com

If you are considering launching an e-commerce website or about to redesign your website, keep these e-commerce web design tips handy.

1.  Keep It Simple
You have a simple goal and that’s to sell.  Make sure your navigation is easy to use and make multiple paths to your “add to cart” pages.  Simple and redundant navigation is the best thing any website can do.  We try to create as many, easy to use funnels to get to product info and purchase.  These navigation items should be your main navigation bar, internal links in content, bread crumb navigation, a product search and site map at minimum. Yes, all of those are basics to a good site.

2. Seeing Is Believing
Most e-commerce purchases are visual.  If you are selling any product that a user needs to have visual trust in, do what you can to have the best photos or graphics of that product.  Many sites loose customers because of poor photos of their product for sale. Some of the things you can do to stand out and ear trust are have photos with enlarge options, alternate shots of different angles and zoomed in photos of product detail elements.  Don’t let your photos kill the sale, let them win it.

3. Answer The Details
Organizing  and displaying the details of your product are a must.  Having “answers” on your product detail pages that clarify measurements, specifications, materials, uses, options and more will get you more sales.  When users can’t find that one last detail to make a purchase, they’ll jump to find another site that answers their need.

These 3 e-commerce web design tips are just the start to a succesful website selling online.  If you can be the best resource by having an easy to use website, with better product photos and endless details … you’ll find yourself with the sales you desire.

If your business is getting ready to send out your holiday targeted email marketing campaign, consider these 3 tips for a successful email campaign. They are basic, but often overlooked.

1. Keep It Simple. If you feature specific products, make sure you do a small amount. Blasting out and email with 20 products will cause them all to loose focus with your recipient. Make sure your product feature links right to the page to buy it, not just your home page!

2. Give Ideas. Most people struggle to figure out the perfect gifts for the people on their list. If you can point out how an item is perfect for a mom who likes to travel, or a friend who is into sports, you have made their shopping easier. The power of suggestion!

3. Outline The Deadlines. Make sure that your email states when visitors/shoppers can order and still receive their items on time. Seems simple, but it’s often over looked.

Make sure these 3 easy tips are covered for your email marketing campaign this holiday season and you’ll find success converting recipients into buyers. The feedback from some of our clients on their holiday email campaigns this past week has been very favorable.

You can see the web design is clean and easy to navigate around.  Many e-commerce web designs can make shopping and checking out a difficult task, so usability is always important when Five builds an e-commerce website.  The lamb product pages offer large and professional photos and specific details on the lamb cuts included in the packages.

This e-commerce website is built on our SMC content management tool that allows Ranchline to easily manage their product line, pricing, shipping options. As a reseller for Authorize.Net, we integrated their merchant account into the SMC’s checkout to automate the process for Ranchline All Natural.  The SMC also allowed us to create the site with SEO friendly URL’s and SEO friendly product pages.

Naturally, it turned out to be a fantastic web design project for us. Check it out!

+ A “Non Big Brand” Twitter Case Study from Sugarrae
Get an outline of how a website providing Blackberry news and info started up with Twitter, gained initial traction, then flatlined and then reach a whole new level. This post has a great outline of what led to their recent burst and success using Twitter to strengthen their community and interaction with their website. Pay attention to the 9 great items on why their “Second coming” increased the success.

+ A Small Business Marketing Success Story: K9cuisine.com from Matt McGee
Matt wrote this article for Search Engine Land and put together a great interview with a niche e-commerce website that serves the premium pet food market. Company and website owner Anthony Holloway outlines their start, their success and the choices they made to get where they are.

Of interest to me was the information on how they leverage customer reviews of the products to increase the content and offering on the site. K9cuisine.com has created a simple but fantastic method to follow up with customers and get their 2 cents after the purchase. Every small business e-commerce website can learn one thing or more from this post.

Some of the project details for this e-commerce website were:

• Custom web design
• SMC for content & e-commerce management
• Enhanced product detail page visuals, details & options
• Layered item option selections for monogram options
• Payment gateway integration with PayPal Pro
• Search engine optimization & SEO friendly URLs
• Email marketing integration & web analytics
• Project, usability & e-commerce consulting

The complexity of the monogram options definitely gave us a challenge (great work Josh and Travis) that led to a longer production schedule then expected, but the final outcome more than makes up for it. Many times during the process and content entry phases, little dreamer’s commented on the ease of use the SMC offers and their excitement over launching the new design. We’re excited to see how our work impacts their business too.

See the new little dreamers website for yourself, maybe even get a unique monogrammed gift for someone you know and if you are looking for a fabulous e-commerce web design, give Five a shout!

Heat 1: Getting Customers To Your Site
What are your strategies to move people to your website? SEO, Google Adwords, email marketing, local search marketing, banner ads and inbound links are all ways to push users to your website. Offline is important as well, placing your web address on all your materials and finding ways to include your website as a step in working with you or the end result. More than anything, you can’t afford to just rely on one of the strategies I mentioned, you need to leverage a team of them together.

Heat 2: Search Engine Results, SEO
It’s the race to be ranked. Good site structure, content, trusted inbound links and a good page title are just some of the pieces to get you into the race for great search terms with your competitors. Make sure you are in this race by utilizing good search engine optimization (SEO) practices. If you choose to ignore organic search results, you won’t be anywhere near the finish line.

Heat 3: Design of Your Website, Make a First Impression
What is or isn’t great web design, is always up for debate. You can’t ignore the value of a professional web design, properly coded and constructed to produce a clean, easy to use interface for your website. While it is cheaper for the kid next door to put something together for you, it is expensive to lose this race repeatedly because your quality, experience and trust never connect with the customer.

Heat 4: Website Content: Less Fluff, More Good Stuff
You land them on your site, your design and layout is trust worthy and inviting … now they want answers. Explain what you can do for them, give them examples of how you’ve helped others, product reviews, needed details, relevant photos or graphics. If you answer their questions and educate them, you win their trust … you win them. The web is increasingly going the route of full disclosure, giving as much information to the customers so they can make a decision in their comparison is a must.

Medal Round – A Clear Path, Website Usability
I touched on it a little in heat #2, a website that is easy to use is often a winner. Don’t loose customers, don’t confuse them and don’t make them think. Just provide easy next steps to get them to the end goal they desire (which is usually your goal as well). Clear navigation, content funneling, well placed anchor text and call to action buttons/graphics should all be in the mix here. You should also employ various web analytics and reporting tools to identify roadblocks or patterns as you can always fix things and try new routes.

If you’ve won these heats in any order, you most likely have won the gold medal and earned that customer. They found you, moved through your site and gained answers and insight to how you can help them with their need, problem or question. You funneled them to the goal and they bought your product, filled out an online form, signed up for an account or even called you. Enjoy your moment on the podium.

GBTV #337 | Introducing Woopra from Neal Campbell on Vimeo.

Woopra is a new robust web-tracking & analytics tool. Currently in BETA, it’s mainly targeted for small to medium websites. Watching the video above you’ll see that it allows real-time stats in a fabulous interface, pushing some extensive data on the users visiting and moving around your site. Woopra features also include real-time chat with your visitors, visitor tagging and activity search. Small e-commerce websites should be lining up to get a version of this.

The killer part? Woopra would like to provide their service for FREE. The bad news is that while they figure out how to properly scale it, you need an invite to put it to use. A service like this will obviously spark some privacy issues, but I think that’s always a good thing for discussion sake. For those of you begging for more data and visibility into your websites performance, this seems like a winner.

I’ll keep you posted (so you should subscribe) on this web analytics tool being available to the masses for sure.