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AnOther Mag Shop

2010-09-02T13:00:00Z

Shopify Photowalk

2010-09-02T12:37:00Z

With one of our out-of-town developers visiting the head office, a bunch of us went on our first Photowalk around the Market after work. Unfortunately, we went out on the hottest and haziest evening of the summer, but we still had a great time.

We walked to a great lookout that overlooks Parliament and the Ottawa River, ended up having great fun 'light painting' on the wall of the National Art Gallery. Luckily, no permanent damage was done.

Some of us take our Street Fighter seriously

You can view a few more photos on my Flickr photostream
Here's Daniel's photostream

Raw Crunch

2010-08-30T13:00:00Z

Bing Bang

2010-08-26T13:00:00Z

Occulter

2010-08-23T13:00:00Z

Good As Gold

2010-08-19T13:00:00Z

Mac Create

2010-08-16T13:00:00Z

RAD

2010-08-12T13:00:00Z

Little Bare Bear

2010-08-09T13:00:00Z

RYZ

2010-08-05T13:00:00Z

The Heads of State

2010-08-02T13:00:00Z

5 Steps to Jumpstart eCommerce Sales

2010-07-30T17:35:00Z

When the e-commerce model exploded onto the market, the ability for small businesses to open their doors to the world 24/7 revolutionized the retail industry. While that’s still true, the spread of e-commerce means that online retailers go above and beyond to stand out from the crowd. Beyond rock bottom pricing, there are several easy ways online retailers—both startups and established stores—can jumpstart their e-commerce sales.

1. Put your best face forward with a top-notch storefront. As the old adage goes, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and this is particularly true among the often-fickle online shopper crowd. Whether you’re just beginning or looking to revamp an existing site, do not skimp on quality design. Create a storefront with a look and feel that will appeal to your customers, with superb navigation and exceptional usability. Use only high-quality photographs of your products to maintain a professional image.

At one time, developing a slick storefront required shop owners to either invest in costly web design software and training to try and build the site themselves or hire an expensive web designer to do it for them. Now, with professionally designed theme stores offered by the leading e-commerce platform providers, it’s never been easier to build an attractive, sleek, contemporary site in a matter of minutes.

2. Make it easy to buy. Ease of navigation is critical—the more complicated it is for your customers to find the products they want (and even those they didn’t yet know they wanted), the more likely they are to pass through without a purchase. Consider how your customers would shop for your products—by style, by application, by size, by feature or some other attribute—and organize your products in a way that most naturally aligns with their shopping style.

Don’t miss the opportunity to up-sell, offer add-on accessories, package promotions or “often bought together” products. Especially for stores offering non-essential or leisure items, this opportunity to capture an impulse buy can be a significant source of revenue. By offering discounts on bundles, you can make the customer feel like they’re getting a great deal and demonstrate that you appreciate their business.

Keep the checkout process as simple as possible. Avoid overwhelming shoppers with too much data input to reduce the number of abandoned shopping carts.

3. Be responsive to customers. While it should go without saying, maintaining exceptional customer service is vitally important in jumpstarting e-commerce sales. Besides processing orders quickly, make it easy for customers to contact you for help or to get their questions answered. When contacted, respond promptly and thoroughly to customer emails and phone calls with a personalized response. While a canned email to confirm receipt of the inquiry is okay, be sure to follow-up immediately with an actual, detailed reply. One shop, Callie’s Biscuits, has found a unique way to engage with even those customers who didn’t make a purchase: by following up on abandoned carts. Each week the store compiles the e-mail addresses of customers who abandoned orders and sends a personal message thanking them for their visit and asking whether they had any technical trouble in completing their order. As a result, many customers who’d forgotten about loading their cart often proceed to placing the order. It also provides an opportunity to gather customer feedback—if there was a specific reason they didn’t place the order, Callie’s can talk with the customer to resolve the issue and possibly turn the problem into a sale.

This kind of “unexpected” responsiveness can be quite refreshing to online shoppers who are more accustomed to being “out of sight, out of mind,” especially with larger retailers.

4. Add a personal touch. Certainly one of the key benefits of e-commerce is the automation factor. The ability to receive and process orders over the web can be a tremendous time and money saver. However, it’s important to maintain a personal touch with your customers that will help them to feel more connected with and appreciated by you and your business. Simple things, like a personalized hand-written note in the shipment box, can go a long way toward maintaining a personal connection with your customers without a significant time and cash investment.

5. Leverage social media. Integrating social media networks with your e-commerce presence is one of the most powerful ways to maintain customer engagement and drive sales. Aside from being extremely cost effective (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace are all free services), it allows you to engage in and maintain a dialogue with your customers—and potentially reach an even greater audience through the social media connections of your existing customers.

It’s easy to begin driving sales with social media by posting to your networks about new products, services or other store news. Social network-exclusive discounts can also make your social media fans feel special and encourage them to share the “secret” of your business with their network.

Beyond direct sales, though, social media outreach can serve to position you and your company as an industry expert, a trusted resource for information about your niche market. By building this kind of relationship with customers in an indirect and comfortable way, you can build a loyal and lucrative following and grow your customer base exponentially with ease and relatively little investment.

In today’s crowded e-commerce marketplace, it’s crucial to leverage every available opportunity to differentiate your business and spur sales. With the right tools at your disposal—including a feature-rich, flexible and affordable e-commerce platform that can grow with your business—and creative ways to personalize your offering to truly speak to your customers’ desires, it’s never been easier to jumpstart sales and grow your e-commerce business.

Zoku

2010-07-29T13:00:00Z

Designing Obama

2010-07-26T16:54:00Z

5 Rules For Choosing A Memorable Domain Name

2010-07-22T19:34:00Z

Shopify provides you with a free “yourstore.myshopify.com” domain with your ecommerce store, but you can also use your own domain name like “yourstore.com”. Having your own domain name is more professional and makes it easier to promote your brand.

Storeowner Addison from DrChristophersHerbs.com agrees:

Choose a good domain name for your store. Having your own domain rather than using the subdomain supplied with your store adds credibility and professionalism. Choosing a good name can also increase visitors to your store. When I registered DrChristophersHerbs.com I saw an increase in sales due to the keyword density of the name itself. In fact, 66.74% of my traffic comes from search engines, most of them searching for “dr christophers herbs” which corresponds with my domain name.

With so many websites already on the internet, you often need to be creative to find a domain name that isn’t already taken. Smashing Magazine wrote a great article to do just that and we have highlighted some key points:

1. The essentials – Be short, catchy and memorable! You should also make your name easy to pronounce and spell.

2. The unspoken rules – Avoid something too similar to competing domain names and make sure not to violate someone else’s trademark.

3. ”.COM” – The ”.com” is the most popular top-level domain and it can be hard to find one that is available. In most cases, you should favor a ”.com” however if you are planning to sell in a specific country only you should consider a country specific domain such as “co.uk” for the United Kingdom.

4. Discoverable vs. Brandable – What’s your strategy? Solely relying on traffic from search engines? Then you should use real words and phrases like TopTvMounts.com that people are searching for to increase your search ranking. If your marketing focus is on paid search listing, banner ads and buzz building, you should come up with a brandable name like Insiders1.com that people will remember.

5. Be creative – Most single-word domains are taken and you might need to create your own word. Try compounding two whole words (YouTube), using a phrase (Six Apart), blending parts of two words together (Microsoft), tweaking a word (Flickr), affixing a word with a prefix or a suffix (Shopify), or making up a completely unique name (Odeo).

For more explanations and examples read The Effective Strategy For Choosing Right Domain Names.

Here is a list of tools to help you brainstorm names:

NameStation – Generates a list of available domains based on a submitted word.
Domaintyper – Checks domain name availability instantly.
Domain Pigeon – See what others are looking to register as a source of inspiration.
Domainr – Type a work and it will find “domain hacks”.

Most likely you will not get your first pick; don’t let that discourage you. You will find a great domain name to represent your store.

PS: Go here to learn how get your own domain name working with your Shopify store.