A good product page layout is absolutely essential in designing your ecommerce website, as it can make or break an ecommerce website. A good product layout will be simple in design and clearly show the buying area (buy button), as well as this the information must be laid out clearly with a very clear image of the product, many good websites are failed by poor product images.

Top 10 Great Examples of Well Designed Actinic Product Layouts

 

1. Mower Magic – Has a simple product layout with checkboxes for upselling products

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2. Gift and Wrap – Has a simple product layout with very clear and large product images

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3. Name Art – This website has a really nice product layout, very good use of images and the information is clear

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4. Pour Les Enfants – This website has a great product layout with good use of social media

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5. Cartridge Co – A simple layout for a lot of information, everything is separated into its own area to enable the product layout to be as clear as possible.

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6. Polished Bliss – Again a very clear product layout with good use of images

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7. The Cake Store – A well laid out product layout with clear product options

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8. Nigel’s Eco Store – A clear product layout with a lot of features such as social media and  multiple images

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9. Just 4 Baby – A stylish overall design which delivers a punchy mix of product and sales based information in a very competitive market

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10. Cheeks and Cherries – A product layout that shows a good quality image really does sell the product.

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We often recommend email marketing to our clients and customers. It is often touted as the most cost effective way to market to your customer base to grow your online sales.
To demonstrate this we undertook a recent survey from a sample* of our customers which yielded some powerful and  interesting statistical results.

• Over 65% of businesses see up to 10% of their sales being generated by email marketing
• Average email marketing conversion rates are between 3-5%**
• Over 75% of businesses utilising email marketing use 3rd party software to manage their email marketing
• Around 50% of businesses send newsletters on a monthly basis
• Targeted “Seasonal offers” and “Price discounts” were the most successful marketing messages communicated
• Only 30% of businesses send an email in a  “text only” format

Whilst these results reinforce many common held beliefs regarding email marketing it is still a powerful reminder of how effective email marketing can be when it is correctly targeted, effectively managed and thoughtful deployed.

The power of existing customer details:
It is much easier to convert your existing customers than the new ones because you have already sold them your services and they are more likely to trust you. This trust must be honoured and NEVER abused.

Conversion rates higher:
For an average ecommerce site the conversion rate typically starts from 1% , email marketing conversion rate is much better between 3%-5%. Email marketing is  likely to gain you core sales.

Timing is everything:
Timing of sending the email campaigns and the timing of the offer itself is very important. Aim to capitalise on seasonal offers and “offers of the moment” wherever possible, targeting those customers to whom this kind of message will be most effective e.g. customers who bought around the same time the previous year.

Make it easy on yourself:
Use the most powerful, cost effective tools available to manage your email marketing campaign. Email marketing tools can take care of unsubscriptions, campaign management, statistical reporting on previous campaign successes and many other otherwise time intensive tasks.
We recommend Interspire Email Marketer as one of the best email marketing platforms around.
These tools will save you time and help increase your effectiveness at growing all aspects of your email marketing strategy.

Just do it – and learn as you go!:
Whilst we all want to send the “perfect” email newsletter to our customer base, sometimes in striving for perfection you can miss the simple opportunities that present themselves to you.
Use common sense and start sending emails now to your customers. Monitor their success. Make slight changes each time to strive for improvements. Discard what does not work, improve what does work.

 

*a sample of 1149 ecommerce merchants was selected for this survey.
** view statistics on conversion rates by industry here

There are thousands of Actinic sites out on the inter-web but how many of the have taken advantage of great design techniques, usability, accessibility and functionality.
Being experts in working with Actinic Ecommerce we have complied a list of Actinic sites that we think really do seem to stand out above the rest.

http://www.mensgiftshop.co.uk/

A new Actinic version 10 website that uses a large number of custom features to improve the usability of the site, such as gift idea slider, custom search, mega menu, product image zoom, to name but a few.

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http://www.amplifydconcepts.com/

A very modern looking Actinic Ecommerce website that makes good use of a wide selection of techniques such as rotating banners and ‘also bought’ gallery

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http://www.mowermagic.co.uk/

An ecommerce store that takes advantage of an imposing design, and has multiple custom features such as drop down menu, image lightbox, auto price calculation and more…

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http://www.appliancehouse.co.uk/

A really nice crisp and clean design that really allows the products to stand out. Navigation throughout the site and continuity is one of the best.

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http://www.giftandwrap.co.uk/

A jewellery website that adds a touch of class, uses a great example of a Jquery slider image, with the option of displaying text in the slider. It also takes advantage of the Codepath Product Reviews Plugin.

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http://www.rannochscott.co.uk/

A fantastic innovative design and quite unusual. Product image displays are done very well on this website and the product page really does sell the product.

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http://www.just4baby.co.uk/

A really clearly laid out website that combines vibrant product images with multiple marketing offers and features well.

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http://www.chewbz.com/

A really fun looking website that does well at getting the site’s message across. Good use of the Actinic search feature on the homepage and nice Jquery slider effects

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http://www.printonblack.co.uk/

An edgy design that has very nice design effects such as on the header, nice tarnished look and again a great looking and very usable product layout takes it to the next level.

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http://www.stormbathrooms.com

This site definitely does not look like a standard Actinic site, although a very clean/simple design it shows its products off very effectively.

If you are interested in taking your Actinic site to the next level, please call on to discuss what options are available to your online business.

From last couple of years, the Social Media is becoming more and more prominent in the marketing  mix. There are many social media sites and it can make one feel overwhelmed. There are some which have more power than others, Twitter being one of them.

Twitter is becoming a very effective platform for getting engaged with your target audience. Below are some of the key benefits of using Twitter for businesses:

1..Engage with your target audience

2..Provide Customer Service

3.. Promote your Products / new products/ product launches

4..Protect your brand & market your brand

5..Follow industry leaders and keep your knowledge up to date

There are several resources available which give you a lot of information about how to use Twitter, Twitter etiquettes, useful Formats & twitter tools.

The other advantage of using Twitter is your tweets may appear in Google’s Real Time search results, giving you more exposure in Universal Search Results. You can also link your Tweets to your content or the content that you like, now although these links are not passing any link advantage, it still helps with SEO in some ways.

Retweeing

One of the great features of Twitter is “retweeting”.

This is a great way to share information, pass it on to your followers.

What’s a Retweet? Well if you like someone elses Tweet and you would like to share it with your followers, then you would retweet it!

How to Retweet

Here is the format of a Retweet – RT @teclantweet “here is the tweet text, or via @teclantweet

The RT obviously stands for “retweet” and lets your followers know that the following is someone else’s content.  Next you put their username with the @ so that you link back to their profile and give proper credit. This is one of the very important etiquettes that you must follow.

The Advantages of Retweeting

Retweeting is not only a nice thing for you to do, it may also increase your follower count.  Retweeting puts your username in other peoples Twitter streams.  The more you retweet others the more likely someone will retweet your content. Once your content is retweeted by someone else, you get more exposure as they will have followers who do not follow you.

 

What do I do now?
You can start by simply following teclan today.
What do I get?
We post “Twitter only” offers and discounts to our followers which you will gain access to. We also use Twitter as the first port of call to broadcast important information about everything ecommerce related.
What else do I get?
By following teclan you will also get teclan following you. We will also retweet at least one of your tweets to our growing  twitter network thereby increasing the exposure of your twitter profile immediately.

Selling online potentially opens your business to a global market as well as your local, regional or country specific market. With such a massive increase in potential customers the voracious competition also expands and increases with equal ferocity.

How can you ensure your products reach the largest audience possible?
Submitting your products to Google Base is one of the things online merchants MUST be doing, however you need to be aware of some impenging changes to the format for Google Base submissions.

What is Google Base?
When you perform a search on Google for a product and you click on the “Shopping” link at the top of the Google menu (see Fig. 1) you are viewing results of products uploaded to Google from internet retailers via Google Base.

Google Base (originally Froogle, then Google Products) delivers a global market place for consumers to view, compare and search for the best priced products, the best reviewed business and the nearest shops to you. (fig 2)

 

It returns results in a similar fashion to Google’s standard web search results however the browser is presented with only products that can be purchased from participating online stores. It is possible to sort by price as well as relevance and you can also identify those stores who have received favourable and not so favourable reviews from previous shoppers.

Do you need to use Google Base?
Yes. It maximises your products exposure, it’s free and it helps generate traffic to your website. If your products are particularly competitively priced then Google Base, like other price comparison sites, can further generate traffic, business and ultimately sales.
If you are not already using Google base then sign up here.

Using Actinic Ecommerce software?
The Actinic ecommerce software comes with a Google Base export utility already built in (from V9 onwards) which allows the merchant to quickly export all the relevant product information into a CSV file for simple upload submission to Google Base.

From 3rd May 2011 Google Base submissions are subject to new requirements. This means that all Actinic Google Base feeds will begin to be rejected as they will not meet the new required format standards set by Google Base.
To address this Actinic are releasing a patch to their version 10 (10.0.4) before the end of April which will contain the new, required additional fields: Brand, ISBN, EAN and UPC. (more information can be read about these fields here)

If you have Actinic V10 already then you should be able to simply update to the latest patch when it is released.
If you have an earlier version of Actinic (V9,V8,V7,V6…..) then you will need to upgrade to V10 to take advantage and be able to upload to Google Base.

You can upgrade through our website – simply click here to upgrade your Actinic version.
And remember……
Use your Google merchant account to register and associate your Google analytics and Google PPC accounts and you can link the statistics produced by Google Base to your other statistical tracking tools within Google to monitor and check on the traffic generated by Google Base. Price changes for example can lead to a significant increase in traffic from Google Base, however close monitoring can ensure you get the maximum return on investment in your time and effort in using this free online market place.

For more help and advice on Google Base and other issues surrounding online ecommerce marketing and search engine optimisation simply get in touch with the teclan team or visit our website for more information.

 

On 17th December 2010, HMRC announced their intention to roll out a programme of Business Record Checks in the second half of 2011.
As of today there have already been some recorded cases where HMRC have investigated business’ accounts and records.

HMRC intend to raise £150,000,000 annually from penalties brought about by these record checks. With a maximum initial penalty of £3000 this equates to 50,000 businesses being “caught” with sub-standard records and book-keeping.
This 50,000 figure is also the number of businesses that the HMRC will be targeting each year! This is worrying as it indicates they are planning on charging every business they inspect!

Currently HMRC are training a team of inspectors who will start targeting businesses to try and identify sub-standard or dodgy record and book keeping. Many accountants and other financial industry experts have cast doubt on the skill and knowledge level of these inspectors stating that only a fully qualified accountant can fully identify issues within a companies financial record keeping.

The double whammy here for small and medium businesses is that should the inspectors find anything suspicious then they can enforce a penalty onto the business AND there is the possibility of additional penalties through subsequent PAYE/NIC or VAT audit checks for instance.

The HMRC inspectors have the power to enter your premises. Note: “premises” are defined as “any part of premises that HMRC believe are used in connection with business”, meaning they can enter your home as well is deemed necessary. The can perform announced and unannounced visits and whilst you can refuse initial entry under the terms of the Human Rights Act to privacy they can then subsequently obtain the courts permission to enter.

What records should I be thinking about keeping an eye on?

• VAT account records
• Copy sales invoices (unless retail)
• Purchase invoices
• Import & Export documentation
• Details of all payments made to contractors and sub-contractors
• PAYE records – all records
• Records sufficient to show and explain the company’s transactions
• Records sufficient to disclose with reasonable accuracy the financial situation of the company
• Records sufficient to enable the directors to ensure that any accounts comply with the requirements of the Act
• A record of all the assets and liabilities of the company
• Records to establish the statement of stock at the financial year end

Areas to watch out for:

• Unexplained receipts and payments
• Missng invoices
• Estimates
• Cash differences
• Dividend documentation

What should you do?

The import point here is that if your records are up to scratch and you can deliver all

• Examine your business records
• Get an external accountant to review your records
• Invest in investigation fees protection

 

Additional information:

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/ria/business-record-checks.pdf

 

Are you using Actinic?

Do you have a PCI DSS Compliant Payment Service Provider?

If you are one of many Actinic ecommerce website merchants who do not currently use a Payment Service provider (PSP) then we recommend you read this case study to find out why you should. Put simply, using a PSP can protect your online business from bank charges and fraudulent transactions.

Which PSP to choose?

There is a minefield of choice when it comes to PSP’s. Each with their own different features, benefits and most importantly different pricing structures.
Only one PSP however offers a dynamic, efficient and streamlined integration directly into the Actinic software:

Actinic Payments offers the best features for Actinic merchants. Since it’s most recent upgrades and relaunch the Actinic Payments platform, provided by CreditCall, has taken huge strides forward in becoming a serious competitor in the PSP market.

Simply Email or call teclan today and we can set you up with Actinic Payments today!
Call 0845 868 9380 or Contact us via our online form

Benefits:

Easy to use and set up

• All you need is a merchant account number, then just follow the simple set up instructions and you’re ready to go.

Affordable

• Competitively priced with packages available from £100 per annum or £20 per month

Unique, time saving functionality for Actinic users

• Refund, void, commit pre-authorised payments and take additional payments without needing a virtual terminal
• Take mail or telephone (MOTO) orders without going to a virtual terminal

Highly secure with sophisticated fraud screening

• Full PCI-DSS Level 1 compliance
• Sophisticated fraud screening enabled through The 3rd Man, 3D Secure, CVV2 and AVS

Reliable

• Powered by robust and reliable infrastructure, carrying millions of transactions per month with 99.998% up-time since 2005

Actinic Payments offers a unique way for Actinic users to process and handle their credit card transactions online and directly through their ecommerce software.

See more here:

We create hundreds of great designs for our customers but we have always stressed that in the construction of what is beneath should always be at the forefront of thinking when embarking on a new design.

The future months and years will, inevitably, see competition for consumer spend heating up and functionality will be key to more, smoother and larger web transactions.

We have no doubt that the trend for new design will be about making it easier to access through both mobile and traditional browsers and to seamless connection to social media – and not just Facebook and Twitter, but also a range of other channels. Being permanently “on” but without having to give up valuable time will be the trick that 2011 design will answer.

Colour Schemes:
Simple colour schemes and bigger buttons Read more about what will become important in Web Design this year

The key to opening the door to your store
Douglas Adams once said: “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.” And the author of the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” was way before his time in predicting how an electronic device could hold the answers to just about everything.
He didn’t mean it in the context of internet shopping, but, hey, it works anyway, certainly in the hopes of many online retailers so let’s consider some jargon that is used to explain the process of getting to the top of search engine listings – then get rid of it as none of it matters.
Think instead, about your army of potential customers. It is important to note that there is no “golden bullet” for getting terms right, but it can be done with a lot of careful thought or experience.

What does matter is getting an understanding what you have to do to get buyers to your online store – Getting sufficient numbers of people to click the links to your shop so that a higher percentage of those visitors will become buyers. Read more…

A cautionary tale to online retailers

It came to our attention that banks are more frequently putting pressure on SME merchants with ecommerce websites to become PCI compliant.
In fact, several banks have “threatened” merchants with additional charges for failure to comply with the PCI DSS standards.

What shocked us the most is that these banks are referring customers to a paid-for “security” scanning service of the website in order to identify “threats” and “risks” even when there are some instances no need for PCI DSS scanning of their website!
A case study to demonstrate this issue will help here:
- Merchant has an ecommerce website and uses a payment service provider (e.g. SagePay, WorldPay, PayPal) to process online card transactions.
- Merchant’s bank gets in touch to “warn” them of pending charges should they not be able to prove PCI compliance on their ecommerce website
- Merchant’s bank recommends a 3rd party, paid-for, security scanning service provider to scan to enable PCI compliance to be achieved
- Merchant pays for security scan and then spends time trying to sort through results and reports to try and comply.

The primary problem with this scenario is that the merchant is using a PSP (Payment Service Provider) to handle all credit card transactions and details. This means that the merchant only has to ensure the PSP used is PCI compliant. i.e. the merchant’s website does not need to be PCI compliant as it does not handle card details.
(note: virtual terminal transactions still require regular internet connection scans)

The instruction from the bank and the security scanning company both failed to take this into account. This costs the merchant in time, worry and most importantly in money and ties them into a 10 monthly contract to a security scanning company’s service when it is not required.

Now, teclan take online security very seriously. Implementing the correct procedures to ensure maximum data security for card details is paramount, however knowing the correct procedures and processes required is the main hurdle for merchants.
NOTE: All of teclan’s ecommerce hosting platforms adhere to the most current PCI compliance requirements, however individual merchants may have to look to their own internal PC’s and network infrastructures as well – see below:

A quick PCI compliance sense check:

Do you…….
- … process card details yourself, in your place of work, on your local system/network?
If yes then you need to ensure that your local systems are compliant – check here for simply steps to do this

- … only use an online Payment Service Provider to handle all credit card transactions?
If yes then it is your responsibility to ensure that this PSP is PCI Compliant. If they are then you’re compliant! (view list of compliant PSP’s here)

- … process card details internally AND online?
If yes then you need follow the steps for both of the above.

The above checks are a simplified ready-reckoner for merchants to guide them through the PCI Compliance issues.

Conclusions:
Credit card data security is vital. Having the most reliable, secure and updated hosting platform for your website is vital.
Knowing exactly what your responsibilities are for PCI compliance is vital i.e. ensure you do not get pressurised into a paid for service that you may not actually need!