Apollo Hosting- Company Blog

Our friends over at TopHosts put up an article with some input from Apollo Hosting personnel. It's called "Riding the eCommerce Web Hosting Wave" and it concerns how best to make the most of the growing ecommerce market out there. Useful for those budding resellers, and worth a quick read even if you're not in the reseller business. Bottom line is there's a lot of people heading onto the web to sell stuff, both useful and... less so. That's the beauty of the Internet, you could be successful doing either one.

Ecommerce is only getting bigger, so I'll try to devote this blog to some tips for your budding store, or even just some ideas for getting into ecommerce in the first place. Well, I won't provide those ideas, but our customer relations associate, Madison Lockwood, sure can. She's been writing a series of articles focusing on various professional groups and how a website can benefit them. Check them out on our Articles site. As always, they're free to reprint if you follow the easy instructions at the bottom of each article. We even have very simple HTML versions of each that are easy to copy and paste into your site.

Some, but not all, of Madison's topics include:

• Click and Print: Photography Websites
• Building Your Dream - Locating Resources for Nonprofits Online
• Why Do Real Estate Agents Need Websites?
• Call For Bands - Going Beyond MySpace
• Teachers - Make Your Life Easier With A Personal Website

So, check them out, as we're adding new ones regularly. I suppose one day Madison will have covered every profession, so just be patient for yours to pop up, she's getting to it. If you have suggestions for a similar article topic on a profession we haven't yet done, send them in to "articles (at) apollohosting.com." Due to the popularity of blogs with spambots, you'll need to reformat that email a bit for it to work, but I think you can figure it out.

Ecommerce Tips
I'll try to focus these tips on improvements or add-ons, as covering the basics of "how to get online" is available elsewhere. I'll go over what should be some easier tips then get some more "high level" stuff later.

Basic Organization: If you have a store with more than a very limited selection of products, utilize logical categories and make sure what you put in them actually "fits". Don't make it difficult for your buyers to find what they're looking for. WalMart doesn't hide products behind other products, or mix spatulas in with DVDs. It might be arguable it's still hard to find stuff in a WalMart, but it's not because they're actively trying conceal merchandise from you. Virtually every cart provides some kind of category management system. If you have such a small number of products that categories aren't necessary, still try to organize the default list in a logical pattern, most usefully in terms of ascending price.

Optimize Images: You want to provide pictures of your products, that much is obvious. A problem with a lot of owner-run carts is they use photos that are too large, which slows down the browsing experience for the user. Just because you're uploading your photos through the shopping cart interface doesn't mean the shopping cart is going to "optimize" them for you. Just like the rest of your web graphics, you need to take care of that before putting them online. Shoot for something on the order of 20-30k per larger image, and 5-6k for thumbnails, even smaller if you have a large catalog with many images appearing in a single category.

"Floating" Product Shots: You want them, don't you? They look pretty cool- the product just hovering there, completely integrated with the background. Though this could be the topic of an entirely separate article, the short version is you'll need some kind of photo editing software to achieve this effect. Your best bet, if you're the one taking the photos in the first place, is to start by photographing on a neutral background, like a white sheet if you have a white background to your cart. That will make selecting and removing the background far easier when you get into your editing software. Then remember to save the end result to a reasonable size, per the previous tip.

"Detail" Text: Make sure your detail text is truly detailed. Product shots are good, but give the customer a full description when they click on the thumbnail to go that product page. Writing content can be an arduous, time consuming task (trust me, I know), but it's important to sell with your words, not just your images. Unless, of course, you're selling images... and even then, some spiffy text can't hurt.

Cart Integration: This is where we get to the harder stuff. Integrating the cart with the layout of your site is something that could consume a lot of articles in terms of the actual nuts and bolts, but I get a pass here because this is just a "tip" to say you really need to do it. It's primarily a question of presenting a "reputable" front to your customers when your shopping cart and website are smoothly integrated with the same look and feel. Every major online retailer does it. Clicking away from a nicely formatted site to a cart URL that, even if it doesn't look "bad", but still looks completely different, can cause trust issues. At the very least, if you're not confident enough in your own skills at integration, try to change the basic color scheme of your cart to reflect that of your site, then contact a good designer to get them working on more complete integration.

Extended Search Capabilities: More a question of cart features than anything else, but adding things like "related search" and "customers who bought this also bought..." searches not only adds value to your cart, it can result in higher sales. This lets the behavior of your customers become a kind of guide to future customers, allowing them to find the kinds of products they're looking for faster, because everyone who came before them found those products.

Fast Checkout: Again, cart capabilities come into play. Allowing shoppers to create accounts with a store, add their information, and store payment info online can result in more repeat business. It speeds up future checkouts to a click or less, affording shoppers the ability to skip the tedious process of filling out address and payment info every time they return. Keep in mind, security is part and parcel of this, as users won't be willing to trust you with their information if they don't think you can keep it safe.

Well, that's about it for the ecommerce tips. Hopefully most of them seemed pretty obvious. No one ever said ecommerce as easy. Well, I'm sure someone did, but they are probably fibbing. Like anything, it takes some effort to do it well.