Ecommerce posts

The popularity of shopping for items online is greatly increasing. If you ask me why I like to shop online, it’s because I have pretty solid control over my purchase. I get to have time to open up another tab and read up on reviews from other folks. I don’t have to be forced by sales people to just try it on and see how I like it. And 9 times out of ten, I’m shopping online because I know exactly what I want it. It’s kind of an “in and out” experience.

Whether I’m looking to buy a laptop or a cool shirt, it’s no different. Buying clothes online allows you to see different iterations of certain trends and is often easier to jump from store to store. Not to mention, it’s easier to shop at a place in California from the comfort of my Virginian abode.

For many of these reasons alone, clothing e-commerce shops...

There are a number of options out there for WordPress e-commerce plugins, including both free and paid options. The user experience with many of these plugins though, can be somewhat lacking.

That’s where the MarketPress ecommerce plugin comes in. It was designed specifically because the developers felt that the UX of WP-ecommerce was pretty awful, so they set out to build something better.

What they ended up with was one of the best...

Running an ecommerce store is a lot different than running a blog or an affiliate marketing site. The sole purpose of an online store is to make money. As a result, each and every design decision is critical when it comes to converting customers into dollars.

And speaking from experience, even the smallest of slip ups can lead to a drastic loss in sales. 

Today, I’m going to reveal to you 3 boneheaded design mistakes that cost my online store tens of thousands...

The web design field has gone through immense advancements and in some cases overhauls over the last decade. These advancements have undoubtedly introduced new technologies and innovations in order to make online consumer experience more pleasurable. However, they have also brought about new challenges as well, especially when it comes to mobile sites.

Ever since e-commerce websites went mobile, the playing field changed beyond recognition. New rules were made. Older ones were rewritten. And in some cases, traditional design approaches were abandoned altogether in favor of new versatile web design practices. These practices had one thing in common,...

The success of a business often depends on how easy the shopping mechanism is for the end user. Whether you are selling goods online, or in a conventional store, at the end of it all the payment system has to be hassle-free and easy to use, otherwise you may end up losing customers in no time.

Particularly if you are into e-Commerce, there are certain things that you needn’t (or perhaps can’t) run through your staff support desk — electronic payments top...

[This is a sponsored review for Izzonet]

There are a lot of options out there for building an online store if you don’t want to self-host or start from scratch, Shopify; BigCommerce; Volusion; and IzzoNet.

It’s important to carefully consider your options for ecommerce software before making a decision. IzzoNet has an extensive feature list and full flexibility means you can adapt it to fit your needs, rather than the other way around.

Free, professional templates help get you started right away. Not satisfied with an out-of-the-box template? The built-in website builder...

In this day and age, if you are not selling your product online or at least making it available online, you are missing out on a ton of money. Unfortunately, the makers of these sites are most interested in making a dollar rather than making sense (did you catch the pun?).

At any rate, some folks get the job down. They understand that design is a way to communicate and get their point across, rather than something that needs to be pushed to the side in order to get people to buy. Good companies understand good design can mean a better bottom line.

If you need inspiration for your upcoming e-commerce site or you just like this type...

Optimizing websites for the mobile web is a chore. And optimizing e-commerce websites for the mobile web is a beast that designers and developers have only begun to tame.

Not surprisingly, larger companies are embracing the medium first, likely because they have the resources and sales flow to justify it. After all, even if an e-commerce website gets sizable traffic, a small percentage of that will be mobile-based. And an even smaller percentage of that traffic will actually complete their sales.

With the momentum only really beginning in this arena, people’s experience with full mobile e-commerce transactions is limited. This makes the niche an experimental one at best. Fortunately, given the nature of e-commerce, success can be carefully measured and tested. This is a medium still in need of definition.

A huge hurdle towards progress is the scarcity of examples.

There’s a phenomenal focus on generating traffic in the online marketing world. Businesses fight for clicks, stage immensely competitive bidding wars and spend thousands of hours pushing their websites to the top of search pages.

Top-ranking websites and prominent ads, often on auto-pilot, generate thousands of dollars a day.

But is this the most profitable way to secure clients online? The amount of traffic running through a website isn’t directly tied to the amount of income that the website generates.

A more apt measure of success might be the number of conversions that the website produces from its pool of traffic. More conversions means a quantifiable increase in sales and even an increase in the number quotes you provide to potential clients. It’s not just a measure of traffic.

The...

Sometimes, web stores get too artsy with their designs. Some use flash animations that can slow down the shopper’s browser, while others use color schemes that send the wrong signals to shoppers.

There are many cases where experienced web designers might overlook usability issues, though creative elements might look very attractive from the design standpoint, they can be a nightmare for online shoppers trying to click their way to checkout. A/B testing helps put those in perspective to achieve the best results.

With more than ten years of experience in the e-commerce industry and designing online storefronts,...