Sunday, October 11, 2009

15 Common Mistakes in E-Commerce Design

Another great post by Smashing Magazine, every web designer and web store owner should really look into it, to make your online store more successful. Below is the content and link to the original post.

Selling online can open up huge new markets for many businesses. When your store can be open 24/7 and you can reach a global market without the costs of mailings and call centers, it can be a huge boon to your business. But there are plenty of things to consider when designing an ecommerce site. It’s not as simple as throwing up some shopping cart software and plopping products into a database.

There are tons of mistakes that online retailers make every day, all of them avoidable with a little careful planning. And even if you’re already committing some of these mistakes, most of them are easy enough to fix. Avoiding them will greatly improve the experience of your customers.

Below are 15 of the most common mistakes that e-commerce sites make, as well as advice on how to avoid or fix them. Take the advice under consideration before embarking on a new e-commerce project or when thinking over your current ecommerce site, and make efforts to follow the recommendations outlined here.



1. A lack of detailed product information

When you’re shopping in a brick-and-mortar store, you have the advantage of being able to pick up an item, feel it, look at it from every angle, and read any information on the packaging or labels. Shopping online removes that interaction. Ecommerce sites need to do the best they can to improve upon the in-store shopping experience.

How often have we gone to an online store and found their descriptions to be completely lacking? And if a customer is left wondering about the specifics of a product, they’re more likely to go look for the information elsewhere. And unless your site’s price is significantly lower than your competitors’, they’ll likely just buy from the other site.

What To Do About It

Provide as much product information as you can. Sizes, materials, weight, dimensions, and any other pertinent information depending on what the product is. For example, in an online clothing store, you might include the fabric type, sizes and colors available, a size chart (usually linked from multiple products), the weight or thickness of the item, the cut and fit of the item, care instructions, and comments about the brand or designer. Using descriptive words rather than simply technical terms can have a greater impact on the consumer.

Examples

ecommerce screenshot

ecommerce screenshot

ecommerce screenshot

2. Hiding Contact Information

Consumers want to know that they’re dealing with a real company when they hand over their credit card information. They want to know that if they have a problem they’ll be able to talk to a real person and get the help they need. If your site doesn’t provide any contact information, or hides it so the consumer can’t find it easily, they’re less likely to trust your site, and therefore less likely to do business with you.

What To Do About It

Put your contact information in an easy-to-find place on every page of your website. The most obvious places to put your contact information are either in your header, the top of your sidebar, or in your footer. Provide multiple means of contact if possible. A contact form, email address, phone number, and mailing address all add to the level of customer trust. Remember, too, that the more expensive or technical the product you’re selling, the more likely a consumer is going to want more contact information.

Examples

ecommerce screenshot

ecommerce screenshot

3. A Long or Confusing Checkout Process

This is one of the most damaging mistakes an ecommerce site can make. You have to make it as easy as possible for your customers to hand over their credit card information and complete their order. The more steps you put between them placing an item in their cart and actually paying for it, the more opportunities you give them to leave your site without completing their purchase.

The ideal checkout process includes a single page for consumers to check their order and enter their billing and shipping information, and a confirmation page before they submit their order. Anything more than that is only an obstacle to completing the checkout process.

What To Do About It

Follow the ideal model as closely as you can. If you have to include other pages, try to make them as quick and easy to fill out as possible. Combine pages if you can, and use two-column layouts for certain sections (like putting billing and shipping information next to each other) to make pages appear shorter.

Examples

ecommerce screenshot

4. Requiring an Account to Order

This ties in directly to the previous item. If you require a customer to sign up for an account before they can place an order, it’s another obstacle you’ve placed in their path. Which is more important to you: getting the order or capturing customer information? Remember that the second option may mean losing some customers.

What To Do About It

There’s an easy fix for this. Instead of requiring a customer to sign up for an account before they order, offer them the option at the end of their ordering process. Give them the option to save their account information to make placing future orders easier or to track the status of their current order. Many customers will opt to save their information, and you won’t be driving away customers before they’ve completed their order.

Examples

ecommerce screenshot

ecommerce screenshot

5. An Inadequate Site Search Engine

If a customer knows exactly what they’re looking for, many will opt to use a search engine instead of sifting through categories and filters. You need to make sure that the search feature on your site works well, and preferably has filters for letting customers refine their results.

How often have you searched for a product on a large ecommerce site and been returned with hundreds of applicable results? While the variety of options can be nice, if half of those results are nothing like what you’re looking for, it’s more an inconvenience than anything else. Including a way for customers to filter their search results by category or feature eliminates this problem.

What To Do About It

Make sure the ecommerce software you’re using has a good built-in search engine, or look for plugins to extend its functionality. Ideally, an ecommerce search engine should let users search by keyword and then refine results based on the categories your site includes. Let users sort their search results based on standard criteria (most popular, highest or lowest price, newest item, etc.) as well as eliminating items that don’t fit within a certain category.

Examples

ecommerce screenshot

ecommerce screenshot

6. Poor Customer Service Options

This is similar to the hiding contact information bit above. You need to make it easy for customers to get in touch with you if they have a problem or question. Make it clear what the best way to contact you is if they have a technical question, a sales question, or they want to return an item. Offering a help request form for customers to fill out can instill more confidence than just an email address.

What To Do About It

Use a ticketing system for customer service inquiries, especially if you don’t have a phone number available. Make sure that you post a FAQ that covers common questions customers might have, like what your return policy is or what to do if they need to order parts or replacement items.

Examples

ecommerce screenshot

ecommerce screenshot

7. Tiny Product Images

Since consumers can’t physically handle the products you’re selling before placing an order on your website, you need to do as much as you can to recreate and improve upon that experience. Tiny product images don’t effectively do this.

What To Do About It

Either provide large images right on the product page or allow users to click on an image to zoom in. You want users to be able to view the image as large as is practical on an average monitor. This means an image that enlarges to 1024×768 pixels is a good size to aim for.

Examples

ecommerce screenshot

ecommerce screenshot

ecommerce screenshot

8. Only One Product Image

Unless your product is delivered digitally (and even sometimes if it is), you’ll want to provide multiple images from different angles. An image in each color, of the front, back, and sides, and even detailed shots of specific features can all go a long way toward making a consumer more likely to buy from you.

What To Do About It

This one’s simple: include more images. Four or five images of each product are ideal, offering enough views to allow a consumer to feel comfortable that they know exactly what they’re getting.

Examples

ecommerce screenshot

ecommerce screenshot

ecommerce screenshot

9. A Poor Shopping Cart Design

Your shopping cart is an incredibly important part of your ecommerce website. It needs to allow users to add multiple products, to revise the quantities or other options about those products, and it needs to remain transparent at the same time. Not exactly the easiest thing to do, right?

What To Do About It

Make sure your cart lets a user add an item and then return to the last page they were on. Even better: allow them to add an item to their cart without ever leaving the page they’re on (by using a mini cart). Let your customers edit the quantities of items in their cart or remove an item from their cart. And let them preview what shipping charges will be before they start the checkout process.

Examples

ecommerce screenshot

ecommerce screenshot

ecommerce screenshot

10. Lack of Payment Options

There are plenty of sites out there that only allow users to pay with Visa or MasterCard, or to only pay with a PayPal account. There’s no reason for this anymore. What about the person who has an AmEx and doesn’t have or want a PayPal account? What about the person who doesn’t have a credit card and wants to pay straight from their bank account? You need to provide as many payment solutions as is practical to optimize the number of orders you get.

What To Do About It

Use a payment service that lets customers pay with each major credit card, and preferably also with an electronic check. Adding a PayPal checkout option increases the choices your customers have, making them more likely to purchase from you. Considering different consumers have different preferences when it comes to making online payments, catering to as many as you can means you’ve expanded your customer base.

Examples

ecommerce screenshot

11. Not Including Related Products

You’ve probably noticed when you go to a brick and mortar store that they group similar products together, or otherwise make it easy for you to find products that are related to you. They’ll put a battery display in the electronics section, or include cell phone cases near the cell phones. The same can be done on your website, and can increase add-on sales for you business.

What To Do About It

Use an ecommerce platform that lets you include related products on product description pages. A platform that will let you manually choose related products can also give you a big advantage, since you may see relations that a software program doesn’t (such as coordinating clothing pieces to create an outfit).

Examples

ecommerce screenshot

ecommerce screenshot

ecommerce screenshot

12. Confusing Navigation

There’s nothing worse than trying to find a product on a site with confusing navigation. Or even worse, an online store that doesn’t use categories or otherwise separate their merchandise to make it easier to find a specific type of product. The same goes for sites that have categories with no products in them or with only one or two items. Why even bother with a category?

What To Do About It

Think through your categories and navigation elements carefully before you start putting products in your catalog. Make sure that every category has at least a few products in it, or else group smaller categories together (or include them in larger, similar categories). Make it easy for customers to look through different categories, get to their shopping cart, and otherwise move around your site.

Examples

ecommerce screenshot

ecommerce screenshot

ecommerce screenshot

13. Not Including Shipping Rates

There’s no good reason not to include accurate shipping rates on your site. I’ve abandoned purchases on numerous occasions because it said something like “We’ll email you with an accurate shipping quote for approval before processing your order.” When shopping online, I want to be able to complete my order all at one time, without having to wait around for an email to decide whether the shipping charges are too high. Include your rates on your site, no matter what.

What To Do About It

Most major shipping companies and the USPS offer shipping calculators on their website, and there are plugins or widgets available for most major shopping cart systems to figure shipping charges on your site. Use one. If you can’t use one for some reason, then use a flat shipping rate that’s high enough to cover whatever it is you need to ship. For particularly heavy or large items, you can always include a freight surcharge in the price (just be sure to indicate that’s where the additional cost is going).

Examples

ecommerce screenshot

ecommerce screenshot

ecommerce screenshot

14. Not Including Store Policies

Before a customer buys from you, they’ll likely want to know what your shipping policies, return policies, and other store rules are. And there’s no reason not to post this information in a FAQ or somewhere else on your site. Making your store policies clear upfront can save a lot of headaches later on from customers who are unhappy with an order they’ve placed.

What To Do About It

Use an FAQ or store policies section on your site to spell out exactly what your rules are for different kinds of customer interaction. It’s something that can save you tons of problems down the road.

Examples

ecommerce screenshot

ecommerce screenshot

ecommerce screenshot

15. Not Putting Focus on the Products

The goal of an ecommerce site is to sell products (or, at least, that’s what the goal should be). If your site puts more focus on bells and whistles or the design itself, it’s not achieving that primary goal. Make sure your site displays your products first, and everything else second.

What To Do About It

Think about how products are displayed in brick and mortar stores. While an in-store or window display may show a lot more than just the products for sale, they all contribute to showcasing the products in their most flattering light. Do the same with your website. Make sure that every design element present is doing something to showcase your products in their best possible light.

Examples

ecommerce screenshot

ecommerce screenshot

ecommerce screenshot


MIRC SME Development Week 2009


Another event by MiRC for the SME. This event is from 19th October till 23rd October 2009. Kindly check out the below image for details or go to the MiRC website for more details

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Switch from Blogger to WordPress in 6 steps


For those who thinking to move from blogger to your own wordpress hosting, this is a good guide to avoid losing your reader.


Digital Inspiration’s Amit Agarwal compiled these useful step-by-step instructions:

Step 1: In case you haven’t done this already – register a new web domain, buy server space from some web hosting company that offers PHP/MySQL hosting and and install WordPress software on your new domain.

Step 2: Go to your WordPress Admin Dashboard > Tools > Import and select the Blogger option. Authorize WordPress to access your Google Account and within minutes, all your old blog posts and comments will be available on the new WordPress site.

Step 3: Copy this file into your WordPress themes directory. This is what you should copy over: blogger.php.txt

Step 4. Open your WordPress Dashboard and go to Pages -> Add New Page. Keep the title and URL of that page as blogger and select “blogger” from the Template drop-down. Save. There’s no need to add any content to this page.

Step 5. Open the template generator, type the full address of your new WordPress blog (including http:// and the trailing slash) and this tool will create a new classic template for your blogspot blog.

 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Step 6. Open your Blogger Dashboard -> Layout -> Edit HTML and choose “Revert to Classic Blog”. Copy-paste the template generated in Step 5 in the “Edit Template” area and click “Save Template Changes”.

Your are done. Open any page on your old Blogger blog and it should redirect you to the corresponding WordPress page. On the WordPress side, since we are using a permanent 301 redirect with the redirection URLs, all the Google Juice will probably pass to your new WordPress pages with time.

Update your RSS Feed: When you move from Blogger to WordPress, the address of your RSS feed will change as well. Go to Blogger -> Settings -> Site Feed, type the address of your new WordPress RSS feed here and Google Reader, Bloglines, etc. will automatically move to your new feed.

There you go, a complete and pain-free (for the most part) process that allows you to continue blogging without diminishing the user traffic that you have so painstakingly built over the years. Happy blogging!

Click here to see the link to the original link

Free Open Source Tool to Track Your Stock Investment

Found this open source tool for you to track all your stock investment. Best of All, it support 23 Country including my country Malaysia. Yeah!!!

JStock is a free stock market software for 23 countries. It provides Real-Time stock info, Intraday stock price snapshot, stock indicator editor, Stock indicator scanner, Portfolio management and Market chit chat features. Free SMS/email alert supported[.]

JStock boasts a pretty impressive feature list. I can see the alerts (email/text/tray) being especially useful. Additionally, it is built on Java, so it runs on any OS.

Click here to try out this tool

How to log in automatically with Windows XP


Recently, one of my customer is facing problem to login automatically to the window xp. After I check it I found out that the user account got a ASP.NET features. I google and found this blog and it provide me the current solution. Thanks to Kioskea.net. Below is the solution:


If you have recently updated your Windows with the Automatic Updates, you will notice that you will not be able to log automatically into your account. This is due to .NET Framework installation that automatically creates an additional account known as ASP.NET. This can be changed by the following method:

Using the Run feature


1. Go to the "Start" button and choose "Run"
2. Hence, copy and paste the command CONTROL USERPASSWORDS2. When done, click "OK"
3. From the given list, select the user that you want to allow automatic login on
4. Disable the option "Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer" and click "OK"
5. When done, enter the password for the user account to allow this option

Saturday, October 3, 2009

郑水兴KLCC主讲不一样的投资方法-投资房地产的讲座


Got Special Price ticket for the above Seminar. If interested kindly contact me. Below is this Chinese Property Talk Seminar Brief Details:

讲了这么多投资房地产的讲座,这一回我以最轻松的方式,告诉你一般人为何投资房地产不能成功,不能赚钱,那一切都因犯上非常普通的错误,而这个普通的错误是很容易面对。

事实上,超过80%的投资者第一次投资读犯上这些错误,而有经验的投资者也好不到哪里去,至少50%的投资者还是继续的犯上同样的错误,那些错误是什么呢?

下个星期日(10月11日)早上9点半到下午五点,欢迎在KLCC会展厅参加“郑水兴SWHENGTEE房地产投资讲座”了解一切,详情请联络 03-7983 0103

Friday, October 2, 2009

FOSS.MY 2009 is Coming This October


FOSS.MY 2009 is coming this October. Do register yourself before 15 Oktober 2009 to get the special price ticket.A brief description about this event:

FOSS.my 2009 is Malaysia’s premier Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) event. FOSS.my 2009 is our second such conference, we aim for this to be an annual event bringing together professionals and enthusiasts from Malaysia, Singapore, Asia and the rest of the world for a two day grassroots driven FOSS conference.

FOSS.my is different from other events in that we focus only on FOSS and that this conference is purely non-commercial. There will be no marketing/sales talks by vendors (we are very strict on this!) so all that is presented is FOSS goodness! Instead, vendors will be encouraged to speak on the FOSS technical aspects of their projects/tools. This approach works better as it benefits all through knowledge sharing within the community.

We’ve got an excellent line up: 4 keynote speakers, 28 great talks and 8 Bird-of-Feather side sessions.

Richard Stallman (rms), the father of Free Software, will be keynoting on Free Software Movement, GNU software and GNU/Linux. There will be a substantial Q&A session where you can ask him your questions and even get an autograph. We’re arranging for Free Software Foundation merchandise to be sold so you can show your support for the FSF.

Secondly, Brian Aker will keynoting on Drizzle and MySQL database engines. He is the Director of Architecture at MySQL AB and he kick-started the Drizzle Project (an important fork of MySQL 6 which is jointly developed by Google, Canonical & Sun). He also worked on other MySQL storage engines (Archive , Federated, Memcached, CSV, Blackhole & WebMethods (HTTP) Storage Engine).

Our two Malaysia keynotes will be opening and closing the conference, respectively. John Lim is our opening keynote. He is the principle author of the ADOdb database abstraction library, an extremely widely used web infrastructure software, and it started right here in Malaysia!

Dr Yusseri Yusoff is our closing keynote. He has done amazing amounts of “behind-the-scenes” work in pushing through FOSS within the public sector and industry in Malaysia. He was instrumental in kicking off the Open Source Competency Center (OSCC) and many other FOSS government and private sector initiatives.

All in all, we have also got more international participation this time around:

James Morris (author of the kernel Crypto API, contributor to SELinux, LSM, Netfilter and IPsec)
Pradeepto (KDE hacker and co-founder of KDE India)
Harish Pillay (Fedora community, Open Source Architect/Evangelist RedHat Singapore)
Harish Mallipeddi (Performance Engineering team, Yahoo! R&D India)
Giuseppe Maxia (MySQL community)

Of course, Malaysian FOSS hackers will be present in full force. Redhuan Oon of ADempiere ERP fame, Nur Hussein on running Linux on Big Iron machines, Kris Khaira on Drupal, Errazuddin on Zend Framework, Mohan on Tomboy Web Sync, and many more will be presenting.

Check out the conference schedule: http://foss.my/2009/schedule/

Registration packages are available here http://foss.my/2009/registration-overview/

If you would like to register for the conference, please go to: http://foss.my/2009/registration/


Government Grants and Contemporary Financial Assistance


I think this is a very good event to get to know what the Malaysia Government is offering. You check out more detail on the Facebook event link here


Date:
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Time:
9:00am - 5:00pm
Location:
Auditorium, Enterprise 4, TPM

Email:

This conference was conceived as part of MAD Incubator’s effort with the objective to provide a funding access platform for Malaysian entrepreneurs and technopreneurs, so they can obtain the latest updates of the government funds and alternative financial assistance.

Itinerary

08.30am Registration

09.00 Welcoming Address [Andrew Wong, MAD Inc.]

09.10 Opening Address [En. Shahazman, TPM]

09.20 Keynote Address [Roslan B Zakaria, MDeC]

09.30 Introduction of MSC Malaysia Pre-seed Fund & ICON Grant [MDeC]

10.00 Tea Break

10.15 Forum: Islamic Banking [Islamic Banks, Kuwait Finance House]

11.15 Forum: New Direction for Malaysia Investment Banking [Investment Banks]

12.00 Forum: Venture Capital and Private Equity [MAVCAP, Teak Capital, Netrove]

01.00pm Lunch

02.00 Government Grant Schemes [SME Corp., Cradle Fund, MATRADE, MOSTI]

03.00 Fund Raising 101 [Ingenious Haus Group]

03.30 Tea Break

03.45 Credit Guarantee Scheme [CGC, Prokhas]

04.30 Soft Loan Schemes [MIDF]

05.00 End of Program

*Note: The above itinerary is tentative and subject to change.

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