E-Commerce Design Mistakes To Avoid

E-commerce websites are a relatively new territory for both buyers and sellers, and as a result much traditional retail wisdom does not carryover to the web. Though many business professionals view websites as simple ads for their products, in reality e-commerce sites need to account for essentially all aspects of the real-world shopping experience to successfully attract and engage consumers. To safeguard against the common pitfalls of e-commerce website design, check out the 10 most common design mistakes.

Hard-to-use checkouts

Usability is crucial for e-commerce websites, as it defines how intuitive, convenient and effective a customer’s online experience will be. A poorly designed website that suffers usability issues can easily frustrate customers into giving up on a purchase mid-checkout. Quality e-commerce sites make a point of creating optimal usability during checkout. The best checkout system let customers make purchases with or without having to log in, and they carryover users’ information when they do log in to help them save time and effort. Also, having as many payment options as possible and making shipping rates and policies obvious from the get-go helps improve the user experience and save customers a lot of worry.

Denying customers a good look

When you keep a customer from getting a close-up look of your items, you might as well be redirecting them to the mall from whence they came. E-commerce sites should maximize the interactive experience for users while offering their products apt visual representation. If you can’t find the means to put in multidimensional, rotating views or videos, simply including a series of high-resolution product shots from differing angles can still work wonders. And finally, all products deserve professional-quality photography, whether your goods are on eBay or on American Apparel.

Neglecting search and discovery features

Having an obvious and easy-to-use search feature is expected of just about every website in this day and age, so e-commerce site owners have no excuses when it comes to the search bar. But products should be not only searchable, but also discoverable. Product discovery is akin to the window-shopping experience of a mall. On the web, customers can’t glance to a neighboring aisle and have their attention caught by something different. But product suggestions can absolutely compensate for it. Amazon knows this. Pinterest knows this. And now you know it.

Omitting product details

Trust is absolutely vital to e-commerce. Hoping your customers trust your word regarding product color and quality is one thing. Hoping your customers trust you enough to buy blindly is another. Just like limiting visual product previews to a singular, tiny image hurts the customer’s shopping experience, obscuring or omitting crucial information in written form does it all the same. In order to feel confident in your products, customers want all the information you can give. They want details, details, and more details — both visually and in writing.

Providing cause for insecurity

One of the biggest hindrances to consumer trust in e-commerce is the absence of privacy policies. Obscure and hard-to-find privacy policies are equivalent to entirely absent ones. You can also increase your customers’ security by using reliable and reputable credit-card processing services and making sure to protect their personal information — especially if you intend on asking for a lot of it. Compared to physical stores, there are fewer barriers to setting up an e-commerce site, and that’s why e-commerce sellers need to take all available measures to make customers feel safe and secure from the start.

Forgetting about customer service

In line with combating e-commerce-inherent trust issues, websites should make a big emphasis on customer service, making the online experience easily translate into a personal connection when possible. As such, contact info should be made obvious on e-commerce pages, and customers should be able to get a hold of a real person on the phone or at least have their questions answered caringly and promptly via email or other methods. Good e-customer service is a huge step in bridging the gap between physical and digital stores, so be sure not to neglect your contact information.

Overdoing product categories

While having a lot of product categories might seem like a good way to beef up the perceived size of one’s inventory, it tends to do the opposite when the categories are too specific, ambiguous or overall lacking in products. Worse yet, it can confuse and overwhelm customers and prevent them from finding what they want. A strong category list should be intuitive, helpful and relevant to customers from all backgrounds, especially if you sell niche products.

Underestimating the importance of aesthetics

Website aesthetics give customers their first impression of your company and products. Customers’ perceptions of credibility are established instantaneously, making their trust in your products and services essentially a gut reaction in regard to your appearance. Now more than ever, having an attractive website can really pay off. That’s why e-commerce websites simply cannot afford to be anything but beautiful. Certainly, beauty is subjective, but pairing high-quality, professional images with a clean, organized and logical layout leaves relatively little room for error or complaint.

Trying to fit too much on the homepage

While it is crucial to give customers as much (relevant) information as possible, one common mistake on e-commerce sites is wrapped up in being informationally over-ambitious on the landing page. Think of your landing page as your store window. It should engage potential customers with a glimpse of something desirable, offering visually appealing imagery, catchy and concise writing and an emotional hook. It should not feel like a page out of a catalog, drowning customers in hard-to-decipher details. Landing pages should leave customers wanting more—not leave them scrambling for the door.

Trying to do it all yourself

Finally, the biggest mistake e-commerce professionals can make is trying to save money by doing everything themselves. When cost-cutting measures are taken as far as putting under-qualified individuals behind the wheel of website development, design and marketing efforts, it typically does more harm than good. Tasks that are fast and easy for professionals become costly learning challenges that often result in emotional attachment to subpar work. Worse yet, it can spread you too thin to focus on other important matters. Design may look easy but, like anything else, it’s best left to the professionals.

The author of this piece was Olga Kharitonova, an experienced Magento Project Manager from Customer Paradigm. 

Need help with eCommerce design? Call 303.473.4400 or click here to have a real person contact you now >>

Talk about HTML email errors…

I received this email from Apple, and they messed up the image source reference links:

<img src=”https://itc.mzstatic.comhttps://itc.mzstatic.com/itc/images/email/itc-header.png” border=”0″ alt=”iTunes Connect” width=”700″ height=”45″>

 (double https:// in there)

Oops… Apple sent out an email with the images broken due to a coding error…

In magento 1.7, the menu is now created via an *event* (page_block_html_topmenu_gethtml_before)

The catalog observer hooks into this and adds menu items as Varien_Data_Tree_Node objects.

I have some samples here to show you how to add a link at the beginning of this menu.

config.xml portion:

Copy The Code:

===============================
<pre>
<config>
….
<frontend>
<events>
<page_block_html_topmenu_gethtml_before>
<observers>
<catalog_add_topmenu_items>
<class>cp_layout/observer</class>
<method>addTopMenuItems</method>
</catalog_add_topmenu_items>
</observers>
</page_block_html_topmenu_gethtml_before>
</events>
</frontend>
</config>

</pre>

observer portion:
=================================
<pre>
<?php
Class Cp_Layout_Model_Observer
{
/**
* Adds additional links to the top menu
*
* @param Varien_Event_Observer $observer
*/
public function addTopMenuItems(Varien_Event_Observer $observer)
{
$nodeId = “home”;
$menu = $observer->getMenu();
$tree = $observer->getMenu()->getTree();

$data = array(
“name” => “Home”,
“id” => $nodeId,
“url” => Mage::getBaseUrl(),
“is_active” => Mage::getSingleton(‘cms/page’)->getIdentifier() == ‘home’ && Mage::app()->getFrontController()->getRequest()->getRouteName() == ‘cms’
);
$homeNode = new Varien_Data_Tree_Node($data, ‘id’, $tree, $menu);
$this->_prependNode($homeNode, $menu);

}

protected function _prependNode($node, $menu)
{
$menu->addChild($node);
$nodeId = $node->getId();
$readded = array();
foreach($menu->getChildren()->getNodes() as $n)
{
if ($n->getId() != $nodeId)
{
$readded[] = $n;
$menu->getChildren()->delete($n);
}
}
foreach($readded as $r)
{
$menu->getChildren()->add($r);
}
}
}
</pre>

]]> http://www.customerparadigm.com/magento-programming-adding-a-home-link-to-the-top-menu-magento-way/feed/ 0 http://www.customerparadigm.com/magento-imagine-2013-recap/ http://www.customerparadigm.com/magento-imagine-2013-recap/#comments Mon, 15 Apr 2013 19:55:12 +0000 Jeff Finkelstein http://www.customerparadigm.com/?p=8004

888.772.0777 303.473.4400

It was so wonderful to see so many people at the Magento Imagine conference last week. You might have seen me walking around with a camera during the conference; I’ve put together a summary of what I learned at the conference, using photos to help me remember it all… Enterprise 1.13 Released The biggest news was the release of Enterprise version 1.13, announced by Magento founder, Roy Rubin (below): Magento’s CTO, Matthew Mengerink Magento’s Matthew Mengerink spoke about what to expect with Magento’s new Enterprise 1.13, including faster indexing: For merchants with large catalogs (i.e. 50,000 products or more), Magento Enterprise 1.13 offers an 83% faster re-indexing time. And the ability to instantly have products displayed on the site, instead of a twelve-minute delay for version 1.12. What Magento Enterprise 1.13 means is that with the same hardware, you can accept 33% more orders per day: Magento Has 26% Marketshare: Magento has gained marketshare, and more than 150,000 websites run their eCommerce systems on Magento. Magento has 26% of the eCommerce sites in the Alexa 1 million most trafficked sites, worldwide: Magento Community 1.8 To Be Released Soon Magento will be releasing Magento Community 1.8, and for anyone worried about the Magento acquisition by eBay, there were many, many assurances that the community platform would continue to be updated. It’s clear that Magento knows that the open source, Community version, was the springboard that propelled them forward, and allowed the premium version of Enterprise. Our MC, Gary Forman, Director of Marketing for Magento: Gary kept the keynote presenters rolling: … unless he was tied up: Mobile, Mobile, Mobile. And Responsive Design. Other than the launch of Enterprise 1.13, the biggest theme of the Imagine conference was the focus on mobile. Mobile payments, mobile options, how PayPal is seeing exponential growth in mobile payments through their system. James Barrese, the CTO of PayPal, spoke about new innovations from PayPal, and the shift in the market: According to James, the average US consumer’s phone is never more than 3 feet away from them: 96% of mobile users search for product information from their mobile device. And 80% use their device in-store. People are clearly using their smart phones to buy stuff. In 2009, PayPal handled only $141 million mobile transactions. In 2013, PayPal is expecting $20 billion in mobile transactions: One reason people turn to PayPal: they can checkout quickly and easily, with just an email address and a password. It’s tough to type in a long credit card number, billing and shipping information, on a small credit card-sized screen. A new innovation is "Order Ahead" by PayPal. It allows you to use a mobile website, hooked into your Magento store, to allow customers to place an order, and have it ready at the store for pickup. Imagine going to Jamba Juice (this is the example that James used), and bypassing the line, because you placed an order online. It’s ready for you, with your name on it. And you don’t have to do anything other than pick it up. PayPal also released an extension for Magento that allows "In-Aisle Selling." If you’ve ever been to an Apple store, this is the same functionality of someone who comes up to you with a mobile device (i.e. an iPhone, iPad, Droid, or other tablet), and swipes your credit card with a credit card reader. There is no checkout counter. If you want to give this experience to retail customers, it’s now available via a free PayPal extension in Magento. Responsive Design: Because so many people are using mobile devices, including iPhones, iPads, Droid Devices, and various-sized tablets, many of the speakers focused on Responsive Design. For those who partied a bit too much and didn’t attend the various breakout sessions, responsive design allows you to come up with one single design for your site, and have the layout shift and change, depending on the size of the device.     For a traditional PC or laptop, you might offer a three column layout, appropriate for a screen that’s 1000 pixels wide, as pictured above on the left. For a tablet using touchscreen technology, the site might shift to two columns, or just have a smaller overall footprint, as pictured above, second from the left. For an oversized phone (i.e. Galaxy), a wider look, like the layout second from the right. For an iPhone, a small, one-column feel, like the one all the way on the right. Responsive design adds a bit of complexity to the design process, but allows you to have one website across multiple devices, regardless of screen size: Mobile User Stats (US): 50% of US Smartphone users use their mobile device to look up restaurants and bars. 31% to research or book travel 76% watch videos on their mobile devices 80% visit social networks (But really, who are they kidding. It’s Facebook.) 46% use their phones to research future purchases. (Source: Google 2012) Responsive Design – Good For SEO. One of the problems with separate mobiles sites (m.dot sites, they’re called), is that Google has to index that site, and treats it as a completely separate site, with a different URL structure, and often its own subdomain. Responsive sites often have better search rankings, because Google can index one site, not worry about duplicate content and the end user experience on different browsing platforms. Apps Are Out. Responsive Design is In. With more than 800,000 apps available for the iPad, iPhone and Droid, consumers are increasingly not downloading dedicated shopping apps. And if they do, they are logging in once or twice, and then deleting them. This is great news. Rather than spend a ton of time, money and energy trying to What this means is that companies can focus their resources on their Magento site, instead of trying to keep a main website, a mobile site, and apps for the iPhone, iPad and Droid devices. Measure What Mobile Devices Matter For You. Skinny Ties found that iPhone users spent 5.3x more than Android shoppers. While this might not be true for your site, this means that more resources will go to supporting iPhones vs. Androids for Skinny Ties: Year Over Year (YOY), Skinny Ties found a 57.8% increase in transactions. Revenue from iPhones (after they implemented a responsive design) was up 473%. Android devices were only up by 187%. Magento is Used By A Lot of Fashion Sites: Magento is used by many of the largest names in fashion. Just don’t ask me to tell you all of them. But one I did recognize was Christian Louboutin. Probably because I read about their quest to trademark the red soles of their high heels in the Wall Street Journal. Sharon Meers, head of Enterprise Strategy for Magento, introduced a surprise fashion show, featuring products by Magento fashion eCommerce sites: As a photographer, it’s always fun to have a surprise fashion show to shoot! Here are a few images from the models, wearing clothes, shoes and handbags from high-fashion Magento stores. All of these images were shot on the Canon 5D Mark III, using the 70-200 mm f/2.8 lens, handheld, without flash. Settings were 1/200 second, ISO 3,200, f/3.5, with manual exposure. Wow… those are some crazy shoes: Gary, striking a pose at the end of the fashion show: Steve Levitt, Author of Freakonomics Spoke: Steve was one of the better and entertaining speakers at the conference. I’ve been a big fan of his books, and he said that his success in economics was based on finding a unique niche (i.e. studying call girls or drug dealers), and finding results that change conventional wisdom: Jane McGonigal Spoke About the Value of Gaming: According to Jane, more than 1 billion people around the world play electronic games. And after her talk, I’m convinced it’s not such a bad thing: According to Jane, 71% of US workers are not engaged. (Although I’m sure 100% of my team is Gamers play games as a way to express their creativity, curiosity, and create a sense of contentment, awe and wonder: And in clinical trials, casual gamers outperformed pharmaceuticals for anxiety and depression: I don’t have any images of the massive, multi-player thumb wresting session, as I was a participant, and put the camera down…   Why Upgrade to Magento Enterprise 1.13? Magento’s creative partners created a couple of videos to show current Enterprise customers why they should upgrade. Doom and Gloom: And rainbows and unicorns… featuring Roy Rubin: And Magento CTO, Matthew Mengerink: Taylor McFerrin, Music Entertainment: Music sets the mood, the tone, and the vibe. Instead of a "Hey you guys, quiet down and listen to a boring speaker," the Magento Imagine conference featured the amazing music of Taylor McFerrin. Taylor started and ended much of the show, and I was able to capture some fun images of him performing from my seat in the front row: Parting Shot: Here’s a parting shot of the Las Vegas strip at night from the M Resort, taken from my 6th floor window: I know I didn’t cover everything… I know I didn’t mention everyone who spoke. I didn’t take images of eBay’s CEO, John Donahoe. (He sat in a place where it was tough to shoot.) He’s clearly worried about competition from Amazon.com. I also didn’t take images of Jeff Jordan, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Jeff was funny, and talked about the eventual demise of big box retailers as more and more eCommerce shifts to the Web. He was teriffic. Jamie Clarke told a great story of adventures on Everest (he climbed with a friend of mine, Wally Berg, on one expedition), and crossing a huge desert on camels. He knows gear, so he’s started an eCommerce website, using Magento. Very entertaining guy. There was another panel or two of Magento Enterprise retailers from around the world (interesting stories), and lots of breakout sessions that I wasn’t able to attend. My apologies for anything I missed, left out, or omitted. See you at Imagine next year… Thanks, Jeff Finkelstein Founder, Customer Paradigm 303.473.4400 Connect Via Facebook >> Connect Via Google+ >> Connect Via Linked In >> Connect Via Twitter >> We love referrals! Our Referral Promise >> P.S. All of the images above were taken with the Canon 5D Mark III, with either the 50mm f/1.4 lens or the 70-200 f/2.8L lens, handheld, without flash.

Customer Paradigm 5353 Manhattan Circle, Suite 103 Boulder, Colorado 80303 Visit our Website direct 303.473.4400 fax 303.374.6104 toll free 888.772.0777 Web & Print Design • Programming • Email Newsletters • Search Engine Marketing • eCommerce

]]> http://www.customerparadigm.com/magento-imagine-2013-recap/feed/ 0 http://www.customerparadigm.com/roy-rubin-of-magento-introduces-magento-enterprise-1-13/ http://www.customerparadigm.com/roy-rubin-of-magento-introduces-magento-enterprise-1-13/#comments Wed, 10 Apr 2013 01:45:44 +0000 Customer Paradigm http://www.customerparadigm.com/?p=7997 At the Magento Imagine Conference today, Tuesday, April 9, 2013, Roy Rubin announced the release of Magento Enterprise Edition version 1.13

Magento Enterprise 1.13 Announced by Roy Rubin, founder of Magento

The biggest benefits to Magento Enterprise Edition (EE) 1.13 are all performance related. These improvements are the hardest to describe to a customer, but for large accounts, are the area that Magento has been most lacking in.

We have received a lot of inquiries over the past 2 years of customers trying to squeeze the most out of Magento  We always have some way or another to help them, but the truth is just that Magento is somewhat clunky. The improvements I’ve seen in 1.13 indicate that Magento feels the same way, and the core team is making every effort to remedy that issue (an effort that I hope will come to full fruition in 2.0)

==================================================================

Redis Support

Magento EE 1.13 now support Redis NoSQL as a cacheing session storage solution. I’m not yet sure of the specifics, but this could provide an advantage over memcached — and Magento now recommends using redis on new deployments. It’s not that redis is “faster” in terms of storing cached values, but it has more support for storing objects (I’m getting into some pretty technical stuff here, but the point is, this could be a better cacheing solution assuming the Magento core team implements it correctly). However, I’m not sure how long it will take for hosting solutions like pier1/nexcess to support Redis.

Reindexing

As many of you may have encountered, re-indexing is a pain in the @$$. Especially on sites with large (10,000+ SKUs) catalogs. EE 1.13 supports mysql database triggers as a means of keeping the indexes up to date, and it makes re-indexing an incremental process rather than an en masse process. The Magento core team has also limited the number of instances where a full re-index is required (hopefully never once the store is setup)

From the Magento article:

In Magento Enterprise Edition 1.12, any change to a product would result in a full re-index. Magento Enterprise Edition 1.13 introduces a new feature–incremental re-indexing. With incremental re-indexing, only those items that were changed or added will be re-indexed, reducing the processing time to a fraction of what was required before.

This is huge—I’ve seen stores where store owners are crippled if they update their product data, as reindexing 10,000+ products can take hours. So, this is a big plus. No longer will a store owner need to have a once-a-day product update regiment.

Also, if you look on the bench marking page: http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/ee113-performance-and-scalability-white-paper you will see significant improvement in the time required to make a full re-index (53% improvement on 500,000 SKUs!)

Onepage Checkout Speeds

So, whenever a user enters the checkout, Magento can’t rely on all the fancy cacheing layers. And, it’s a known problem that onepage checkout is slow; this is the whole reason onestepcheckout exists. But, even that (I’ve noticed) has problems related to the amount of time it takes to return shipping rates, payment methods, and order review steps.

See this link: http://www.magentocommerce.com/images/uploads/2184-1.13_Benchmark_Report_Checkout_Flow_r1v1.png

You will notice the checkout has been extremely optimized in terms of the amount of time it takes to perform one of these operations. As to the effect that has on the core code, I’m not yet sure. I’m really hopeful this feature will be in CE 1.8 as well.

From the benchmark page:

During our testing, which simulated a storefront running at peak hours, EE 1.13 executed 33% more orders and 31% more page views than Magento Enterprise Edition 1.12 on the multi-node benchmarking configuration. Notably, Magento Enterprise Edition 1.13 served 47K pages during the test run (10 minutes).

This is also a big improvement…once again, it’s only targeted at high volume sites, but I can think of several customers that would benefit from this.

MySQL Performance

I’d like to highlight one of the observations made in the bench marking article:

• The MySQL instance did not show any significant signs of CPU or I/O load during the tests.
  • The CPU was under 10% and no queries exceeded a 2-second threshold.

I’ve noticed that MySQL seems to be a memory and CPU hog on some instances of Magento  This observation (specifically the no queries beyond 2-second threshold) shows an improvement in the scalability of Magento from a database perspective. Now, I don’t know what Magento’s benchmark for 1.12 was, but I’ve definitely seen stores not getting near the volume that the benchmark took place with, having MySQL performance issues.

Improved Tax Calculations:

There had been problems with tax calculations, especially with rounding up to the one-cent and when using multiple types of currency. The tax calculation algorithm was updated to get rid of errors with rounding offsets when displayed on purchasing screens. Additional support has also been given for various nationalities, primarily Canadian.

Increased Overall Functionality:

A whole slew of over 350 functional improvements for the web store, shopping cart, web API, payment options, import and export functionality, and admin order creation. All of these minor improvements add up to a big difference in the end, which will drastically increase user experience, and make it easier for admins to make changes without worrying over slowing down the whole site.

“Amazing job guys, best contract Magento programming I’ve ever had. Customer service was awesome and the communication was perfect. Thank you!”

We’re here to help!

Three more programmers from Customer Paradigm passed the Magento Certified Developer exam.

What does does a Magento Certified Developer Mean?

It means our developers have gone through the process of learning the Magento commerce system – inside and out.  Need a Magento Certified Developer?  Call Customer Paradigm – 303.473.4400 or visit here >>

But don’t take our word for it.
Our developers know Magento’s 150,000 lines of code inside and out, and have been tested directly by Magento and certified to work on Magento Websites.