6 Checkout Guidelines for Online Stores

This is one of the harsh realities of ecommerce websites: Most of them fail when it comes to check out process making it seem complex for users to complete their shopping. A report released recently says at least 59.8% of potential customers at New York abandon their shopping cart.

In this article, we’ll share fundamental guidelines titled ecommerce checkout usability- an insight to both clients and developers.

Typical Mistakes Preventing Ecommerce Purchases

Force Registration before Checkout: Being ecommerce sales conversion killer by requiring a registration is a sin. After clicking the ‘checkout as guest’ button the user needs to be taken directly to the checkout process.

Using Contextual Word: “Continue”

The term “Continue” is ambiguous and tends to confuse customers as in like continue shopping or continue to check out. Instead use words that aren’t open to interpretation as in like “Check out now” and “Shop more.”

Neglect A Checkout Progress Indicator: A progress indicator increases the likelihood of initiating the transaction process whilst decreases the chances of shopping cart abandonment half way through the process.

Blurred & Lengthy Display: A large number of forms can be daunting and can turn the consumer off.

Repeated Questions: In most cases, shipping and billing addresses are the same. Then, why do many eCommerce websites ask for the same information over and over again and waste time.

Missing a Functional ‘Back’ Button

When it comes to eCommerce website development, it is generic to allow customers to return to the previous page and edit the items in their cart but without them having to re-enter all their shipping or billing information.  Two ways to do this actually:

1. Introducing a functional ‘back’ button during the checkout process lets users to move throughout the checkout process without losing any of the information.

2. To allow the user to change quantity, size, or colour options during the checkout process.

As a whole, when shopping online, customers are very concerned with their privacy and the security of the personal information. And only a ‘secure checkout process’ can go a long way in garnering the trust of the website visitor.

Would you like to have a flawless shopping cart? Then approach Openwave Computing Services, an ISO 9001:2008 certified Web Development Company, NYC who provides a robust platform for customer-centric website whilst boosting sales. Having decade plus years experience in wide range of Ecommerce solutions, we offer a huge gamut of online shopping sites using Magento, Virturemart, Prestashop, Os Commerce, Woo Commerce, Open Cart, ZenCart, X-Cart, UberCart and more. Do you need a bespoke solution for your e commerce website? C’mon, talk to us today!

 

Dos and Don’ts in Mobile-Optimized Shopping Experience

If your ecommerce site isn’t optimized for mobile then putting yourself on an equal footing with competitors requires a lot of exercises. Wondering how? Well…

The rise of smartphones, tablets, laptops and televisions has influenced online shoppers globally. So it is important to think beyond Ecommerce Website Development when marketing to potential customers whilst offering a satisfied purchasing experience. With so many screens to purchase, below listed are a few dos and don’ts for ecommerce merchants.

Do’s

Responsive Website: Regardless to the device used, whether your visitors are from a tablet or a television, responsive device organizes page content so that it may be easily read, seen, and used.

Optimize Images and Content: Besides a responsive ecommerce web design, a good multi-screen optimized website should serve up right-sized images, media, and content to ensure fast load times.

Complementary Technology: Take advantage of complementary technology say text messages which are more likely to get a shopper’s attention. Consider mapping tools that first collect a user’s location so that offer deals and discounts accordingly.

Content: To make your products seem more exciting online win them with the question: How can i help you? In precise, your content should be aimed at helping them, be it product descriptions or blog images.

Don’ts

Hide Content: if your site has been optimized for touching and swiping on different devices but after hiding content- what is the use?
Unplayable Videos: One of the excellent ways to communicate a product’s value in Shopping Cart Ecommerce is video. But what if they don’t play on mobile phones? Don’t waste time.

Pop-ups: These do well for newsletter registrations or similar actions but not for mobile commerce. Instead use a responsive design that converts the pop-up to a banner or similar on devices like smartphones, tablets, and televisions.

Above all, if you don’t hire professional website developers/ web development company who are skilled enough to handle multi screens, providing a completely optimized mobile experience for your customers is like half river crossed.

 

Web Design Checklist to Get Your Online Business Goals Back On Track

Haven created a master piece website that looks modern and is driven by high quality copywriting and high definition graphics doesn’t always show a wise traffic performance. At this point, many businesses plan to go for renovating the entire website but you don’t need to spend your every penny on it.

Here are some common denominators that define whether your Ecommerce Web Design Company is working in tune with your business goals or not.

Web Design Checklist to Find Out Where Exactly Things Go Wrong

Did you know? Custom Ecommerce Website Design done effectively can influences conversion rate, whether by filling a normal contact form, or an eBook download or newsletter subscription or anything else.

Attractive Design Elements: Dull and boring web pages won’t help with your business. Say, your web page is monotonous and isn’t able to convert all your money through CPC is going down the drain. Rather than concentrating on the number of clicks designing a rich landing page help conversions.

• Put Yourself in Visitors Shoe: Thinking from the user perspective helps you find the scope of blunders getting narrowed and comprehensible in Ecommerce Website Design. Tone the following as these can really helps your website developers a lot on the way.

1. A simple and neat user interface
2. Web design tuned with your business
3. Readability of Content with respect to font size and type
4. Site compatibility with mobile devices
5. Contact page with minimal questions

• Is Your Message Conversed? The main reason behind too many people bouncing off is about not convey the right message to the right people. It is imperative that you dispose message content with titles, headers and key points so that you can have control over the kind of people coming to your website.

Summing up, hitting the right chord with prospective audience depends on how you address to them.

 

3 Thoughts on Why Mcommerce Is a Must for This Generation

When it comes to retail shopping, an average American consumer looks not only brand differentiation and value offering but also a brand that is connected to them digitally. Mobile is no longer about adapting a cookie-cutter solution but an integrated part of the entire business proposition.

With the ecommerce surpassing every other technology inventions web-enabled mobile devices has a compilation of advantages. The funnel stayed the same while consumer brand interaction shifted. This is why mcommerce turned out to be more flexible with its unique functionality and seamless navigation of mobile optimized web store.

What Mobile Commerce Research Papers, 2013 Reveals

It appears as users are using their mobile devices to look for online discounts and better deals from competitors. Additionally, below are the three proofs why you need to incline Mobile Ecommerce Software Solutions to grow faster in business.

1. One-third (35%) of smartphone owners use their device to locate a store, (24%) of them use it to find coupons and deals, and 19% use it to look up product availability. Also, it is estimated that the total U.S. consumer spending for the year on mobile commerce is $30 billion.

2. 60% of online shopping customers come from desktop devices while 35% from tablets and 5% percent from smartphones which means, ecommerce website development for desktop should be your priority and then mobile site.

3. When compared to tablets which earn you $76, shoppers spent an average of $97 on smartphones. For instance, eBay’s mobile-only users are 24% on an average. Out of which, 50% of them use mobile sites and apps for shopping.

Besides Desktop Application Development, mobile sites too have the ability to synthesize each customer’s aesthetics as well as store owner’s requirements. Respective of the platform used, it is more flexible to be integrated with any custom store.

Hire a professional web development company one such Openwave Computing Services for any type of ecommerce related services. We are considered the best of breed in web and mobile solution for Magento ecommerce, Joomla Virtue mart, Prestashop Shopping cart and many more.

 

5 Important Facts Your Web Development Company Should Do

Trends come and go in web development. This transition empowers developers to build inevitable websites and faster apps that perform consistently across all devices.

Winning in a digital world still requires hard work, focus and new skills and what should you ecommerce developers being telling you?

Organic Search Engine Optimization

Most businesses in the past had to rely on advertising to attract customers. But now in the Google world all it requires is search engines to find you. Hiring an Ecommerce Website Development Company is important to build and optimize your website, social networks and content.

A team of “SEO” (Search engine Optimization) can enhance 40-60% of website traffic being a result of an online search.

Developing Ecommerce Site Requires Focus

Launching a new ecommerce website that ticks others is not to be taken lightly. It starts with workshops and then the hard part begins. It includes:
Creative brief, design, Development, Product loading, content creation, Integration, Testing, Launching, Optimizing, Marketing and Website Maintenance.

Content Is Important

A social web is the way to build trust and credibility is to publish online. That means crafting content that Educates, Informs with the latest news, Entertains, and Inspires your customers to change their business and their lives is VERY important.

Facebook Organic Search

Facebook is dominating the social web and so does many brands. Putting all of your eggs in it can result in a rapid demise of organic reach to your fans to single digits. Not only is it a smart and safe strategy but an integrated approach to your digital marketing strategy.

Automating and Integrating

Once websites were a standalone eco-system but now it has become a source of next day delivery, informative to customer queries and many more. Instead of manually break out somewhere automate and integrate your website with your back office systems. Hope your website developers are well informed of these.

Summing up, there is a lot more a professional website development company, NYC can do it for you. Say, we at Openwave Computing Services design various ecommerce solutions that deliberately focus on the user experience. And, our only objective is to ensure visitor retention and delivering high converting ecommerce websites that yield higher profits.

 

Top 5 Common Mistakes Most Designers Fail To See

Either new or experienced, negligent professionals are vulnerable to commit mistakes while designing. So, let’s have a look at the common mistakes happening in ecommerce website design so that you are aware of such blunders and try their best to avoid.

Most Avoidable Website Designing Faults

Planning the Right Line of Action:

Some of the most accomplished web designers think it is okay to get into the web design phase without planning the right line of action. An action plan involves,

• Assessing the targeted audience, and

• The strategies that helps you achieve

Having a clear goal, tracking the design in different phases, and evaluating each section individually help you avoid from going wrong.

Be Creative but With No Complexity

When designing the website, most importantly you need to keep the clients’ requirements in mind. There is a need to create web designs that are relevant and adds value for the visitors. Furthermore, neglecting a client’s suggestions would only result in unnecessary revisions and wastage of precious time.

Use of Good SEO Techniques

This seems to be very important for the website. There is no use of creating a website or spending so much effort on designing a website where no one visits. Means, a good website designer need to incorporate SEO into websites or else it will be a serious negative point against them.

Connecting Every Web Design Element with the Overall Theme

The clash in the colour scheming or fonts or navigation will reflect negatively in the Open Source Shopping Cart and the visitors will easily find out such huge blunders and blame the non-professional attitude and lack of exposure and skills of the website designer.

Very Interactive Design Style

Almost 99% users prefer to interact with the website and this trend urges socialised Ecommerce Web Design Services. Not to forget, only the level of interactive tendency makes your customers feel like they have got some significance and value for the business being represented by the website.

 

Top 10 Features That Are Out-Of-Date for Online Website

In the trendy world not only dresses become old-fashioned, websites too. Having realized that, entrepreneurs are getting packed up with initiating new features on their websites and so does website designers.

Are you planning for redesigning your Open Source Shopping Cart? Try to exclude these features from it.

10 Features Out-Of-Date For Fashionista 2014

Flattery Web Design: Ensure your web designers make it neat, stylish and easy to understand while not overcrowding with images or elements.

AutoPlay Videos: Creating great video pleases people. With great content, people are sure to watch it in order to get to know you better. Having autoplay option can make people quickly close strange website than examine it.

Page Reload While Navigation: Don’t let your users to wait until the full page reload. Modern technologies allow reloading necessary content instead of the entire page.

Mobile Version: Yes, mobile version has gone out-of-date and Ecommerce Website Designers suggest a great solution like technologies responsive design.

Flash: With number of mobile users growing every year, say adieu to flash replacing HTML5 can perfectly substitute flash and would be visible on every device.

Overcrowded Fonts and Colours: Make sure your ecommerce shopping cart doesn’t flash with all colours of the rainbow but corporate ones and shades for background, menu bars, buttons, banners, etc.

Old Stuff: Different things tend to clutter in your website and getting rid of old stuff, though it seems to be still good, is required.

Automated Popup: They do not increase sales or subscription but only annoys, irritates, and most likely your visitor would just leave. Having abstract content would let them subscribe it.

Text in Images: Don’t put important text as a picture and chances is there your potential client will just miss something vital.

Old Date Content: If you have @2005 copyright or latest news of 2008 looks absolutely terrible.

Summing up, these are just a few simple steps to make your ecommerce store look fresh and nice!

 

Checklist to Consider Before Migrating to Magento Ecommerce

Are you considering migration to Magento from your current shopping solutions? Applause! This is a great decision for a long run.

For the past decade, magento ecommerce solution has conquered the online business world by its magnificence and feature-rich vastness. Aimed with the widest spectrum of functionality and unlimited possibilities, this open source platform brings a good sum of return of interest for your store.

Checklist to Consider Before Magento Migration

There are few issues your Magento developers should consider before taking a leap to migrate to Magento.

Shift Database:

Until you move your database to new setting, don’t initiate the installation of modules. This might create a whole mess up during data migration if you choose to take the other way around.

Right Hosting:

Being highly resource-intensive when compared to any other shopping cart, make sure Magento verifies your hosting environment. Else, it may not be enough for what had been sufficient for your earlier shopping cart.

Complex Shopping Cart:

In terms of complexity, there are no other shopping carts to compete in terms of options, data, features, functionalities etc and hence, chances issues are more while data migration. This is why you need to hire only professional magento web developers who have hands on experience in the platform- able to predict and prevent these issues.

Multi-language Store:

One of the intense features in Magento Shopping Cart Development is its multi-store or multi-language management. For instance, to add new language, create a new Store View in System > Manage Stores. But for multiple store views, the orders will be considered for each one of them separately.

Date Indexing:

Generally, data entities for categories and products are indexed once it’s updated. As such, this ecommerce shopping cart is gifted with a data indexing system with an objective to display the updates on the store faster.

Each ecommerce solutions are packed with a whole bunch of benefits, features and functionalities, sometimes even bitter cons. Howbeit, you require expert developers to do migration work simpler and accurate.

 

Open Source Web Designing – The Best Bet to Meet Online Presence

The growing number of online products and services has certainly caused a huge impact on every business player. Ecommerce Software Solutions needs to be both user and search engine friendly that appeals to grab good sum of customers. This invites to open source methods that takes various forms from blogs and CMS, WordPress to comprehensive ecommerce platform, Magento.

How Modern Web Design Works?

Available for large-to-medium-to-small business enterprises, it offers an ease to go for an open source customization.

Flexibility:

Licensed software does not allow users to alter and the task for bringing flexibility becomes tedious. Whereas opensource like Magento Ecommerce provides the ease of alteration for users to change the software specification according to their business. It even let you customise and integrate with other technology and tools.

Quality and Cost Effective:

Unlike proprietary solution, Open Source Web Developers are constantly working on innovative aspects to enhance the functionality of their products. And the good news is with no licensing fees, it cost you a minimum amount which is why people are shifting from licensing software to open source software. Though it can be installed manually, for better result, hire experienced developers from an outsourcing company.

Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design is a technique for building websites that work on mobile devices, tablets, and desktop screens, without having to worry about screen resolution anymore. This involves three main principles that come together to form the whole that is responsive design. They are:

* Fluid Grids- responsive websites are built with relative units like percentages, rather than fixed units like pixels

* Fluid Images- images shrink within the confines of a fluid grid.

* Media Queries- used to detect the site width and serve CSS that appropriately rearranges the site’s content.

Hiring Magento Ecommerce Website Development gives you a huge advantage in a competitive market as they work towards your business objectives and satisfy global customers.

 

Have You Done These Mistakes When Developing an Ecommerce Website?

The main aim of ecommerce website development is to gain online visibility and reach out to as many people around the globe and offer the visitor with a fruitful experience.

However, to achieve this there are several common errors that should be avoided during website development.

Common Website Development Mistakes

Mistake 1-Navigation:

The website navigation should be organized in a manner that is of a standard convention- nothing more or less. If only your ecommerce web developers stick to the proper standards and trends and use good graphic interface elements, it wouldn’t be hard for the user to find the ‘home’ and ‘contact us’ links.

Mistake 2- Graphics and Flash:

Flash is one good technology to get the message across graphically and attract visitors during ecommerce web design. But when the websites use very big flash files (big in size), it takes longer time to load. Besides, they do not even have a loader informing the visitors of the fact that something is being loaded.

Mistake 3- Accessibility:

The basic requirement of your website is its accessibility to enumerable web browsers, devices and operating systems that are being used.

With smart phone on the rise, if they are unable to view the website made for the desktop on their small screens then they tend to get irritated quickly and ditch the website forever. Go for Responsive web design to overcome this mistake.

Mistake 4- FAQ:

It is still a puzzle why many web developers neglect FAQ section? But forget not, this can be one of the most frustrating times for a user who expects to have everything available to him to have a fruitful experience. Plus, good relevant information provided on strategic and functional topics will counts towards gaining a new customer.

Mistake 5- Contact Details:

One of the most visited pages of any given website is its “Contact Page”. Obviously, one first checks the contact page prior t to making a purchase in order to check credibility. Besides, users are usually curious to know where the ecommerce business is located.

Have you done any of these mistakes? Don’t worry. Go for redesigning your website that functions perfectly with Openwave Computing Services, NYC. We are experts in various web development services but majorly focused on ecommerce solutions.