One of my favorite features in AspDotNetStorefront also happens to be one of the least used.

Many products in your eCommerce store may end up having extra long product descriptions, and sometimes, that may cause the user to have to scroll to read it all, or they may miss other valuable information on that page, or they may see the 10 mile long product description, decide they don’t feel like reading that much, and close the page altogether!

So, how do you keep your product detail pages short and sweet without losing all of that valuable information? Spec Sheets!

Spec sheets are great for storing additional information related to the product that there just isn’t room for on the page. This feature creates a link for you on the page that goes to a pop up window that contains your extra details. This can be a bullet list of product specifications, manufacturer content, warranty information, or anything else product related.

The page is even HTML, so you can put any text or images in here you like.

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After installing a new skin and getting their site just how they imagined, many of our AspDotNetStorefront clients suddenly realize that the tabs on their account registration or checkout pages don’t look right and want to know how to change them.

Here’s what you need to know about those tabs:

1. The text and the tab background is a single graphic that is not editable in String Resources or with CSS. The only way to make the tab look any different is to directly edit the graphic.

2. Each tab is a .gif found in Skins/Skin_1/Images in your site’s root directory.  To find the specific tab you’re looking for, go to the front end of your site and right click on the tab, then either view Properties to see the filename or View Image to see the image filename in the browser’s address bar.

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Online spending between Nov. 1 and Dec. 24 2008 dropped 2% compared with 2007 according to the Wall Street Journal.

Online retailers still fared much better than their brick and mortar counter-parts who are predicting a decrease of between 5-8% from 2007.

The numbers point to a mixed-bag for online retailers. Amazon, Apple, and Wal-Mart all showed increases, with Amazon claiming the largest number of orders ever. eBay, and Best Buy both showed substantial decreases, 16% and 17% respectively.

A key factor for Wal-Mart, Amazon, and Apple was their ability to play to their strengths.

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Product photos can make or break a customer’s desire to purchase your product.  Steer clear of these common pitfalls and get your customers one step closer to making that purchase.

Poor quality images

Manufacturers spend billions of dollars on product packaging and product image.  As an online retailer, product photos are your make-or-break chance to sell the product by visual appeal.  All too often we see photos like this one.

Poor Quality Image Example

To woo customers with the beauty of your products keep these tips in mind:

1. Don’t resample! Don’t make a small image larger with Photoshop – there is no quicker way to reduce an image’s quality. An image that is 100px by 100px was never meant to be 200px x 200px.  If you want a product photo that is larger than the image you currently have, you’ll need to get a new photo.
2. Say no to distortion! When reducing the size of an image, be sure to do it proportionally (hold down the shift key in most graphics programs) by the width and height.
3. Web resolution settings are key. Keep photos for the web at 72dpi and photos for print at 300+ dpi.  Currently monitors can’t display more than 72dpi and higher resolutions significantly increase the page load time.
4. No Photoshop Evidence!Good Photoshop work should not be visible.  If a customer sees any image retouch work they will likely assume the entire photograph was retouched and that the product may not measure up to the photograph.
5. If you are taking your own product photos keep these things in mind:
   • Use quality lighting when taking product photos (this is, perhaps, the single most important product photography lesson!)
   • Use a quality camera and tripod when taking product photos – It doesn’t have to be a fancy 12 megapixel dSLR, but it should give you the ability to control the flash, zoom, and focus.  You can’t match a tripod’s stability when hand-holding a camera and it shows!

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If you’re using Image Filename override in your AspDotNetStorefront site, you’ve probably noticed some missing icon images in your related and upsell products sections.

Don’t panic, there’s a quick fix!

Go to the root directory of your AspDotNetStorefront site, and open up the XmlPackages folder. In there you will find XmlPackages that are used to control the display of your related products and upsell product items on your product pages.

Look for the file named: ‘relatedproducts.xml.config‘. Open this up in your favorite text editor, notepad will work just fine. (more…)

Focus your site copy on your customers, and Google will notice too.

Many of our clients are concerned with SEO and hire us to help.  We work hard to make sure their metadata is perfect.  We analyze their keyword conversion rates. We compare search volumes and competition to find the perfect keywords for them.

Then we get cracking on the metadata. Title tags, keywords, descriptions, image names and alt-tags. Traffic will go up, which is great. But, sometimes I’ll notice bottle necks and notice customers are abandoning the path to sale.

I’ll check the page and it’s got problems. It’s poorly written, has a couple of crucial spelling errors, or doesn’t tell the customers exactly what to do.

All of these problems are easy to fix, and even easier to avoid. (more…)

The predominant trend in 2009 will be leveraging the natural networking capacity of the Internet to increase the visibility of your brand and website. With the down turn in the global economy, online businesses need to focus their attention on proven methodologies for increasing online sales.

There is no ‘magic bullet’ for online success.

Customers buy from businesses they know, like, and trust.

Building trust and providing ‘real’ value is essential for eCommerce success in 2009. Effective eCommerce is a continuous process of providing innovative marketing and significant value.

You want to model your marketing strategy after the internet, and it will spread like the internet and grow like the Internet.

Focus on 2 things:

1. connecting with people
2. providing significant value

In 2009 you want to dominate your niche market. This means your website must implement the basic elements of eCommerce success:
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AspDotNetStoreFront 8.0 has been released and you’re wondering “What’s in it for me?”

Here’s the feature list you have been waiting for. There are some great new features that add functionality or can make your life easier.

Some of these features include:

• An exciting new merchant control panel, featuring a new layout, and expanded use of Wizards to assist you in configuring your store features, settings and capabilities.
• Intuitive tabs on the product page that can contain all of the product details without making the customer scroll or search around to find the information.
• Dramatically improved search performance. You can now search for root words, plurals, and compound phrases.
  The new search also reorders search terms allowing you to search for “apple red” and find “red apple.”
• Product Suggestions that are dynamically generated based on previous customer purchases. For example, if a customer purchases “red apple” and many of the other customers who bought “red apple” also bought “green apple,” “green apple” would automatically be added to the Product Suggestions section of the “red apple” product page. Your store literally becomes smarter about product relationships as people make purchases!
• Automatic display of a customer’s viewing history, allowing them to quickly locate and view “recently viewed” products. This reduces customer confusion and can remove a large barrier to conversion for a customer who likes to view many products before making a purchase.
• Automatic display of Related Products, based on heuristics of product-view data. Increase your cross-sell and upsell potential with this powerful tool.
• Improved use of “Delayed Capture” payment methods, to allow merchants to void non-completed orders.
• Improved compliance with standards, including the ability to specify the exact “alt” text of a product image. Alt tags are extremely important for user accessibility and can help with SEO.  This new feature takes care of both for you!
• Improved display of Product Stock Conditions, allowing merchants greater flexibility in indicating real-time inventory status – is it in-stock, out-of-stock, or somewhere in between? Now you can control what is displayed.
• Support for credit card processing by Sage Payment Systems.
• Improved “Page Not Found” (404 handling) display, offering excellent search suggestions based attributes of the missing page. This gives the customer a ‘best fit’ page that gets them back to shopping for products they are interested in as quickly as possible.
• Faster page loads which delivers the customer more quickly to your products and your shopping cart.

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The first and most important step in optimizing a website is to compile a list of keywords and phrases. It’s the foundation your SEO plan should be based on. Too often, businesses invest resources in optimizing for search terms that do not serve them well.

Determining the specific key words and phrases that are most likely to bring profitable traffic to your site ensures that the time and financial resources invested in search engine optimization efforts will pay off.

When developing a keyword list, it is important to pay attention to the following:

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So you have a website and you are getting visitors. But do they make it to your products, the real meat and potatoes, or are they simply seeing the home page and little else?

Knowing which pages your visitors are seeing, and more importantly where they are leaving from, is key to any site’s success.

This is where Google Analytics comes in. A small bit of code will give you access to a wealth of information to help you pinpoint your site’s strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement.
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