Customer response is measured by metrics such as the conversion rate, total online sales, bounce and exit rates, etc. all of which can be found simply if you click on your analytics dashboard. But similarly, you can’t just rely on your analytics data for the entire picture. There are metrics that are based on the site’s performance, if measured correctly, can really help pinpoint the symptoms that are leading to low conversion rate etc..

According to Internet Retailer’s Andrea Mulligan there are 3 performance metrics that are directly related to the online experience and of course impact sales: Store Availability, Response Time, and Consistency. The Internet Retailer’s Top 500 were measured against these metrics:

Continue reading Online experience metrics from the top 500 e-retailers

Tags: Ecommerce, online retailers, performance metrics, response time, store availability
Posted in Ecommerce, Technology

In my first post, I discussed the first seven areas you should evaluate your ecommerce options. The areas we covered in the first post are:

1. Out of the box features
2. Time-to-market
3. Ease of migration from current systems to new platform
4. Ease of integration with external and internal systems
5. Scalability issues
6. Ease of customization (branding, change of look and feel, etc.)
7. Upgrade challenges with an ecommerce package

In this post I discuss the other 6 areas you should consider when choosing an ecommerce option:

Continue reading E-commerce implementations: 13 areas to evaluate your ecommerce options - part 2

Tags: ATG, custom development, Ecommerce, ecommerce packages, ElasticPath, etailers, osCommerce, Sterling
Posted in Business, Ecommerce, Sales & Marketing, Technology

Companies have three main options to choose from when it comes to implementing an ecommerce site:

• Custom build the e-commerce website
• Choose an e-commerce packaged solution
• Go with a hosted ecommerce solution

Each of those options has advantages and disadvantages. And while there are no correct an absolute answers in this area, there are some common approaches to select the best solution that will coincide with the business’s mission and objectives. A solution that works well with one business model might not be the best option for a different one. You also should consider the short and long-term costs associated with each of these options. The combination of benefits and costs should influence your final decision of which approach to choose.

Continue reading E-commerce Platform Selection: 13 Areas to Evaluate E-commerce Solutions - Part 1

Tags: ATG, custom development, Ecommerce, ecommerce packages, ElasticPath, etailers, eterprise ecommerce, osCommerce, Sterling
Posted in Business, Ecommerce, Sales & Marketing, Technology

**Thank you for all the wonderful comments and suggestions of analytics tools. This is an update of our last post with 5 more more great tools to add to your list.

Never undermine the importance of testing and analyzing your site. On the most basic level, analytics data will help ensure whether or not you’re on the right track. And if the data is reviewed and utilized on the site it will help you increase conversion rates. Who doesn’t use analytic tools these days? You’d be surprised. We have come across ecommerce site marketing VP’s that can barely tell us the number of visitors, conversion rates, or results and rankings for paid and unpaid traffic. Now, for those of you who are familiar with analytics data and tools, I thought this was a fun little blog that may pique your interest to what’s new out there.

We’ve worked with these 15 tools that can be found on Techlicous’s to help analyze and gain a better understanding of your site’s traffic.

Continue reading Top 20 Site Analytics Tools to Help Optimize Your Site

Tags: analytics tools, Conversion Optimization, Ecommerce, software
Posted in Conversion Optimization, SEO, Technology

1. Set Expectations from the first day: Nothing will bring your project down more than wrong expectations from your staff or client team members. Make sure that everyone involved in the project understands the goals, deliverables, what is included and not included in the final solution. Client management should also understand the time and resource commitment they will be required to invest in the project. Successful projects require clients to provide feedback on deliverables within a reasonable timeframe, so make certain that this is communicated to the client team members at the beginning of the project. Your own staff must understand what is expected from them, how their performance is measured, and what they should expect if they achieve or miss their goals.

Continue reading 10 Essential principles of successfully managing a web project

Tags: project management, scope, successful projects, web projects
Posted in Business, Technology

There are thousands of tools out there that will simplify your life one way or another. This is a list of tools I find myself using on weekly basis. Some of these tools are technical in nature, others are very easy to use.

1. Beyond compare

There are many instances where you have to compare two different versions of a particular file or different directories. Beyond compare is a file and directory comparison and synchronization utility all wrapped in one. The tool compares text files, folders, zip archives, and FTP sites. Beyond compare is available for a 30-day free trial.

Continue reading 19 Tools every online entrepreneur should know and use

Tags: Agent Ransack, Beyond compare, entrepreneur, FileZilla, online tools, online-marketing, SQuirreL SQL Client, textpad, utilities, XAT image optimizer
Posted in Business, SEO, Technology

An old client of mine called in yesterday to ask for some help. I helped architect an enterprise e-commerce website back in 2001. The website integrated with a complex back office solution (SAP/ Oracle) that handled all the counting aspects of the system. The client was hoping to upgrade portions of the system to allow visitors to their website to enter coupon codes. Also at surface this may seem to be a fairly forward and easy to implement task, however, it must be said that there are usually some technical challenges when attempting to integrate several systems. As I sat with the client team members to talk about the different aspects of the design for the system upgrade, the discussion slowly moved towards how website visitors will enter the coupons on the site. I listened to different team members present their thoughts. As I listened to one team member after the next, I slowly started to wonder if any of them had put themselves in their site visitors’ shoes. The answer was NO. Whether it was the business analyst, the marketing specialist, or the technical staff at the meeting, no one was concerned with visitor and how they might react to respond to the new enhancements.

After lengthy discussions we were able to come up with a solution that will be somewhat better for visitors. However this made me think about the bigger context. How many times are these large enterprise systems built without thinking about the end-user? I’ve been on close to 20 implementations of e-commerce websites. Most of these implementations involved business analysts and technical design teams. On very few occasions were marketing teams involved in the design process.

And what is the end result of all of that?

Large enterprise systems can cost the clients anywhere from 2 million to 20 some million dollars. Designing these complex systems requires huge investments not only in money but in time and effort as well. And yet one system after the next, the very essential component of understanding the user is missing. This is not unique to large enterprise systems. I have seen the same problem with smaller companies attempting to design their websites. I have had my share dealing with a company president or a marketing director, who thought they knew exactly what would appeal to their visitors.

Many ecommerce sites do not think about usability issues until the site is released and visitors start complaining about its functionality. The same thing happens with conversion optimization. I have seen many e-commerce websites, where discussions around conversion optimization do not start until sales goals are missed.

So, how do you avoid making the same mistakes?

1. If you are about to release a new e-commerce website or redesigning your current website, you must consider at a minimum involving your marketing team in the design/redesign process.

2. Investing the time necessary to understand your target market and your website visitors can help you in the end to produce a site that is user-friendly as well as one that converts at higher rates.

3. Under no circumstances, should you leave screen wireframes, design, site layouts and navigation on technical teams. This comes from someone who once was a software architect on numerous projects. In my experience it is true that software engineers make for lousy usability experts.

4. Not all web design companies are experts in usability issues. The sooner you recognize that the sooner you can save your project. Designers by nature believe that they are more connected to users. This may or may not be the case. I have seen designers who are amazing usability experts, and on the flipside I have also seen designers who made terrible usability decisions.

5. Any person who will take on designing individual screens in an ecommerce system, the site layouts, or navigation must have deep expertise in both usability and conversion optimization areas. Sometimes it is difficult to find a person who combines both. It might be an option to combine a team from both areas to handle any new designs. That is the only way he you’ll be ensured that your e-commerce website will provide an amazing user experience, as well as generate the revenue you need.

Conversion optimization should be at the forefront of these implementations. Creating a client-centric and visitor-focused site is the cornerstone for a better user experience.

Tags: e-commerce, e-commerce design, e-commerce optimization, e-commerce usability
Posted in Conversion Optimization, Technology

Let me start with a confession: UI is not my strongest skill. Actually I survived for 15 years in the software industry without having to touch any html (jsp in my case).  Of course, that all changed with our blog. In my attempt to move the blog from Joomla to WP, I customized the WP template to match our Joomla design. Everything looks good. Except, well for the white space that appears whenever it feels like it. You can see the whitespace problem here. Needless to say, IE and Fire fox don’t behave the same way. Something I feel IE is to blame for. But you will notice that some of our posts will have a large white space in them. The only common factor where this happens is I use the html element blockquote. The css for it is defined as follows:

blockquote {
background:transparent url(http://www.invesp.com/site/v1/images/blockquote-invesp.png) no-repeat scroll left 0%;
clear:left;
font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;
font-size:1.1em;
font-style:italic;
line-height:1.75em;
margin:15pt 40px 15px;
min-height:35px;
padding:15px 0pt 15px 70px;
}

So, if you have any suggestions on how to fix this, please share them with us. Or bare with me as I try to figure out how to fix the problem.

An update: Yannis helped solve this issue on the Cre8asite Forums. Thanks A lot! The problem was with “clear:left” element in the css. I removed that and the problem is gone

Posted in Blogging, Miscellaneous, Technology

I complained Friday that Joomla is not well equipped to handle all the features required for a blog. So, I worked over the weekend on installing and customizing wordpress on our server. I completed 80% of the customization work. But anyone who worked in software will tell you that the last 20% of any project take 80% of the time.

This blog page is running on wordpress. I am still working through the list of glitches trying to make Joomla and Wordpress templates look similar to each other. If you notice a problem with the blog, I would appreciate a quick comment on this blog.

Tags: Joomla
Posted in Blogging, Business, Technology

The response to our $400 give away in RSS contest has been great. I am happy to see that many bloggers linked to the contest over the last few days. However, the biggest complaint that I keep hearing about is the issue with our partial RSS feed. People hate partial RSS feeds. I even noticed that some will subscribe to our feed but when they discover the feed is partial, they unsubscribe.

Truth be told, I hate our partial feed myself! I wish I can find a way to provide a full feed. See, our site is built using Joomla CMS. And while Joomla is great for content management, it was not built with blogging in mind. So, here are the main limitations of Joomla when it comes to blogging:

1. The core RSS functionality in Joomla is strictly provided for the front page of the site. Since our blog is not on the front page, there is no built in syndication for the blog. This stinks!
2. No track back functionality: There are no modules that I know of that provide that functionality.
3. No pinging functionality: There are modules that claim to provide ping functionality but I am yet to see one that works well.
4. No core comment functionality: There are modules that provide this functionality. But because these modules are not core to Joomla, you can not display the number of comments per item on the main blog. A reader must click on the item to view the number of comments on it.
5. No tagging functionality: I guess you can always tag blogs by hand. But if you use a WYSIWYG editor inside Joomla, the editor will strip out the “rel tag.”

Of course the biggest pain point is the first one where there is no way to syndicate content that is not on the main page. There are two modules that provide a solution to this particular problem. The one we are using for our site will only provide partial feed functionality. I am yet to be able to get the other module that claims to syndicate non-front page content to work.

So, here I am stuck with a partial feed and trying to figure a way out of this whole mess. I am leaning towards using Wordpress for our blog. Of course that in itself will be a headache because we will have to integrate two different platforms (Joomla & WP). The biggest problem is making the blog look like the rest of the site. Sounds like I have a long weekend ahead of me! So tell me:

• How do you feel if the blog looked different than the rest of the site?
• Do you recommend a place where we can purchase our word press theme?

Tags: Joomla, RSS-feed, wordperss
Posted in Blogging, Technology