Do you have any ecommerce questions?...

Hi all

If anyone has any questions related to ecommerce or how to get the best out of their website that sells products or services, post your question here and one of us will surely be able to help you or provide some useful thoughts or pointers!

Tim

Re : Do you have any ecommerce questions?

Hi Tim

Do you have any thoughts why so many companies are still prepared to pump lots of money in their offline operations, with marketing, costs and so on, yet even today seem reluctant to spend any more than they absolutely have to with their online presence, despite it being the fastest growing channel and surely only getting more important as time goes on?

Thomas

Re : Do you have any ecommerce questions?

Thomas

Interesting question, I know addressed at Tim, however I do think things are starting to change in this respect and many medium and larger businesses in particular do now have sizeable budgets for online.

As ever it takes a few years for companies to get convinced that any new model works but it now seems undeniable that the future is online, as it were, and advertising spend in terms of billions of pounds online is going up and up each year, reflecting this trend.

Dan
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Web Design

Re : Do you have any ecommerce questions?

Thomas - Good question; my answer would be pretty much along the same lines as the one above!

Tim

Re : Do you have any ecommerce questions?

Depends on the size of the company - many large companies pump loads into the online space and often with little idea of how best to spend the money and realise a decent return on their investment!

Small businesses tend to be more switched on, actually, as to how to make sure they use their online spend to the best of its possible use, though you are right that many are reluctant to spend at all on online advertising, which is now a very short sighted view, and this includes their websites which is a primary form of marketing.

Chris

Re : Do you have any ecommerce questions?

Thanks for your thoughts

Thomas

Re : Do you have any ecommerce questions?

Any other questions out there...

Tim

Re : Do you have any ecommerce questions?

Yep one here..
I Have been looking at other similar sites to mine and am wondering why my site when you type say " welsh slogan t shirt" and you click onto it takes you to the category and not directly to t shirts???

Also when you see what it is under my URL is says "viewcategory.php?cat=3 -" and not welsh t shirt or whatever??

As i understand it (and its v limited) this confusing for the google spiders and so i wont ever get listed??
Thanks Tracey
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www.littlestorkbabyboxes.co.uk

Re : Do you have any ecommerce questions?

Hi Tracey

I searched on google and type in "welsh slogan t-shirt" like suggested and see you are at number 4 for that search, which is good in itself.

It goes through to that page because that has ranked best for that search - this is extremely common with ecommerce stores because there are loads of products on that page mentioning words like 'welsh' and 't-shirt' whereas the individual product page only mentions these once or so; so this is perfectly normal.

As for the google spiders finding your site, I've checked and you are well indexed, as proved by the search result above.

Finally, URLs ending with the viewcategory is again very common with ecommerce sites, you often see this with that sort of site. It is down to the way the database that shows the products works.

With most systems there are ways to re-write the URLs so they appear as category/welsh-tshirts for instance instead of that one. The importance of this is massively over-rated by people as the URL does not really have that much affect on the web site ranking. With this sort of thing a little knowledge is a dangerous thing - luckily your "v limited" knowledge here was therefore wrong as you are listed!

Most good quality web developers will be able to update the URLs to a format as mentioned above if you ask them too, of course there would be a charge for development work so it depends how important it is to you.

Tim

Re : Do you have any ecommerce questions?

Many thanks for the advice and clearing that up
Regards Tracey
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www.littlestorkbabyboxes.co.uk

Re : Do you have any ecommerce questions?

Tim

Good post

The change of one URL to another on the server side is called re-writing and is done on an Apache server using mod-rewrite. This takes one URL that is seen as the external address for a page like:
mysite.com/products/t-shirts
and at the back-end points it to the viewcategory.php?id=whatever

Obviously the conditions for each re-write need to be laid out so the system knows how to re-write the URLs.

Cheers

Dan
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Web Design

Re : Do you have any ecommerce questions?

Hi!

I've just launched the first stage of our new website at www.solutions4finance.com We are business finance brokers, but the website is geared more towards vehicle sales and finance (lease, HP, contract hire). Does anybody have any advice on how to increase our site traffic without resorting to the expense of using adwords (which is a very costly method for our industry).

Please contact me throught the website www.solutions4finance.com

Thanks

Justin

Re : Do you have any ecommerce questions?

Hi Justin

A very popular query - how can I increase traffic without burning money on Adwords.

There are a couple of methods you can use.

The first is to have a great website with lots of good content so that when people come, they view many pages and increase traffic and tell their friends and family.

The more content you have also the more content there is for search engines to index and therefore potentially return with queries.

Secondly get as many links as you can in to your site from directories and other relevant sites - this will help to increase the sites profile and therefore over time increase its rankings and traffic as a result.

Good luck!

Tim

Re : Do you have any ecommerce questions?

Justin

Hope you advice above was useful? Is the method fairly clear?

Tim

Re : Do you have any ecommerce questions?

If I want to extend my business into Asian market, what kind of payment gateway am I looking for? (I'm running my e-business already within Europe)

Re : Do you have any ecommerce questions?

Hi,

My experience of offline v online marketing spend tends to suggest that companies allocate an online marketing budget, then proceed to spend money on Google Adwords and wonder why it burns the cash, whilst not adding to the bottonm line.

My analogy is a pedestrian gets a new car that can reach more people quicker, but would you think it reasonable for the person to get in and drive off without considering how to drive the car, the route and the destination?

Online marketing should be linked to the offline marketing, but also the content of the site should be sympathetic to both of these activities. Joined up thinking and follow through is what converts punters to customers.

Who wants 1 million visitors to their site with a Page Rank 10, if it does not result in SALES!

My 2 cents worth.

Regards

Rob. :-)
http://www.paceretail.co.uk
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Regards Robert