Magnolia Blog

£100k Award for Magnolia Box & Artistic.ly

2011-08-15T14:57:00.004+01:00

The team got some good news last week when it was confirmed that we've been awarded £100k match funding from the Technology Strategy Board to help us develop a new website called Artistic.ly.

Artistic.ly will be a social marketplace for artists to connect with consumers. It takes all of our experience of working with large institutions and opens it up to the individual.

Artistic.ly will allow artists to upload digital images of their works and transform them into high quality prints. Our team will take care of everything else from marketing, manufacturing, fulfilment and customer care.

In terms of content, Artistic.ly will initially be focused on street art and illustration and we already have a team of ‘Artistic.ly Ambassadors’ working to ensure that the right artists are involved from the start.

You can read the full TSB’s announcement to find out about the other great companies they are also funding.

New delivery note functionality

2010-11-18T16:53:00.005Z

Announcing the release of our much anticipated PDF delivery note functionality. Now our much loved manufacturers can quickly download delivery notes with every order by simply clicking on a link within their order notification e-mails. The delivery note will contain all of the elements expected of a white label system including the store logo, address and order information.

Match art to over 4,000 paint colours using our new Colour Search

2010-09-30T09:18:00.012+01:00

We have recently upgraded the colour search functionality provided to all Magnolia Soft stores.

Instead of the previous colour picker, where you needed a PhD to select a colour choice, we now have a predefined grid of colours with a much clear UI to help speed up the consumer's colour selection.

We have also stored the names, codes and RGB values from the world's most popular paint manufacters. There are over 4,000 different paints stored in the system enabling a wide variety of colour searches:

Using the paint tools you can find matching, contrasting, toning and harmonising artwork for your home. It's perfect for interior designers or those wishing to find some artwork to compliment their latest Farrow & Ball colour scheme.

To try out our new search facility visit http://www.magnoliabox.com/colourSearch.

It can also be found in our advanced search section under Colour Search.

New sub-category menu format

2010-06-08T15:45:00.006+01:00

We've recently updated the way sub-categories are displayed on category pages. Sub-categories were previously shown as a simple list, but are now arranged in columns for better readability.

Up to 16 subcategories are shown initially (4 rows of 4 columns). For those categories with more than 16 subcategories, a simple "More categories" link is included so that customers can view/hide the full list.

Sibling categories are still shown, although since sibling links tend to be of secondary importance, by default they are still formatted in the old "list" style which saves space on the page. We use the term "siblings" to describe the categories that at the same level of the category tree as the currently viewed category.

This is purely a user interface change with very little change to the underlying semantic mark-up. SEO should not be adversely affected.

Both of these groups of sub-category and sibling links on the category page can turned off through your admin's store settings if they are not required or relevant to your store.

New Print on Demand Product Videos

2010-05-21T15:06:00.003+01:00

We've just released a series of product videos to help provide more information to prospective customers about our print on demand trade and retail products. We have an overview of our print on demand facilities in the UK. There are also product videos for our major lines:

You can check them out all the videos on either You Tube or Vimeo.

Cooliris Now Available as Embedded Wall

2010-03-30T16:01:00.005+01:00

Alfa Romeo Official Fine Art Prints is the first of our stores to benefit from the embedded version of the very cool Cooliris wall.

We have long offered the full-screen Cooliris image browsing experience through the "Start slideshow" button and Firefox plugin on sites such as Bridgeman Art on Demand. However, we can now offer the same interface within just a small area of your site. Customers can quickly scroll through many images, zoom in, go to the product page, watch a slideshow, and so on.

The image selection shown on the wall is entirely controlled through your store admin site.

If you're interested in embedding a Cooliris wall into your MagnoliaSoft store, just get in touch.

Delivery Pricing

2010-03-30T13:58:00.009+01:00

We have recently rolled out an updated delivery administration tool, so this a good time to recap how delivery works and how you can manage your prices.

How is the total delivery price for a basket calculated?

In your MagnoliaSoft store, you may have products fulfilled from multiple sources. For example, you may have framed prints shipped by Printer A, pre-printed products shipped by Printer B, and canvases shipped by yourself.

Because of this potentially wide range of products available from each printer, we use "per-shipment" and "per-item" charges to calculate the basket total; the same method as many other online stores that have a large and varied catalogue.

For your customers

Your customers pay delivery according to the following:

[Maxiumum per-delivery price of the items in the basket] + [Per-item charge for each item of that type in their basket]

For example, consider the following charges:

Product type	Per-delivery charge	Per-item charge
Large canvas	£5.00	£2.00
Medium framed print	£3.00	£1.00

For a basket containing 1 x large canvas and 2 x medium framed print, the delivery amount payable by the customer would be:

£5.00 per delivery charge
£4.00 per item charge
Total of £9.00

This is calculated from the biggest per-delivery price in their basket, which is the large canvas charge (£5.00), plus the per-item charge for each item of that type in their basket (1 x £2.00 plus 2 x £1.00)

For you as a store owner

Potentially, a customer's basket may contain items shipped by different printers, so as a store owner you need to be aware that you will be charged for each item separately by each fulfillment partner. In other words, you will be charged whatever per-delivery and per-item cost prices are applicable for each item in the basket.

Using the above prices and basket as examples, then, you would be charged £12.00.

Managing trade/cost prices for items you ship yourself

As the fulfillment partner for these products, you can input your own trade delivery prices. To do this, you will need to use the Edit by country page in the admin:

As a printer, you will want to look at the following editable columns on this page:

Delivery time (in weekdays)
Cost prices (both per-shipment and per-item)

Some points to bear in mind:

If you do not deliver a particular item to a country, do not enter any prices/delivery times for that item. If there is no delivery price set, then customers will not be able to complete their order - the country will not appear in the dropdown list of possible delivery countries, and they may see the message "Unfortunately, we cannot deliver your order to this country".
Delivery times are in weekdays.
If you do not know the estimated delivery time for any time, leave the delivery time empty or enter zero.
Any selling prices left blank will be assumed to be "sold at cost".
All prices exclude tax.

Not only are these cost prices your own cost price when we calculate your order margins, but if you also fulfill orders for other stores on the MagnoliaSoft network these prices are those stores' cost prices for your delivery service. This is, in effect, what you "charge" these stores to send out the items.

You can of course edit the selling prices of your own delivery charges on this page too, in much the same way as if the products were shipped by another fulfillment partner. Which brings us to...

Managing selling prices, or products shipped by others

You may also have products in your store that are fulfilled by other partners on the MagnoliaSoft network. For these items, you use the same delivery admin page...

...but you will only be able to edit the two right-hand columns, in other words:

Selling prices (both per-shipment and per-item)

Again, some points to bear in mind here:

Any selling prices left blank will be assumed to be "sold at cost". (See below)
All prices exclude tax.

Sell at cost

Selling at cost is the default setting for all stores - delivery charges are passed on to the customer at zero margin. You can enable/disable this for any product item by clicking the checkbox on the main form.

As for previous functionality updates, we never "release and forget". We already have some plans to make bulk editing easier for both printers and store owners, for example, so watch this space.

Splash Pages Are Bad

2010-02-16T09:13:00.008Z

Ten years ago, when you visited a website you may remember having to sit through an animation or intro page before you were allowed to get into the main site. These so-called "splash pages" were all the rage, but these days we've all matured as web users and now only two people tend to care about a splash page: the person who made it and the CEO.

There are lots of reasons why splash pages are such a bad idea. This excellent article explains why, and:

Bad for SEO
It's futile to get in the way of what the customer wants. Everyone knows how to use the back button - it's easy for people to go somewhere else in a second.
Does your beautiful page/animation still create a good impression of your brand when it's viewed over a slower connection or on a mobile device?
Most users will skip an intro anyway.
Whatever message you want to convey can be done through the homepage much better, within the consistent navigation/layout of the site.
Did I mention they're bad for SEO?

Of course, these reasons are compelling enough on an information-based site; on an ecommerce site, all these reasons are magnified...

Wishlists get a makeover

2010-02-12T16:09:00.006Z

Wishlists, lightboxes, customer galleries...whatever name they go under there's no doubt that they are a useful feature for returning customers, interior designers or those people who just can't make their minds up. Shopping baskets expire after a time, but with a wishlist a customer can save a list of images/products in their account permanently.

Up to now, the wishlist feature on our stores has been fairly basic, but we are pleased to announce some major improvements today.

What's new?

Wishlist images now include the print option. Prior to today, the wishlist only remembered the image. Now, if the image is art-on-demand or has extra print options (e.g. framing), then the selected print option is also saved to the wishlist.
Multiple lists. Customers are no longer restricted to a single wishlist. Customers can create as many lists as they need.
More control over wishlist labels. Customers can now rename their wishlists to be something more memorable or useful, and also add a small paragraph of further notes for each list. For example, a label like "Bedroom" or "Ideas for dad" is more useful that just "My wishlist".
If a store utilises the slideshow feature, customers can view their wishlist as a slideshow using the CoolIris plugin.
The concept of a default wishlist has been retained. A customer can nominate one of their lists to be their "default" - this is the list that the item is added to if the customer clicks "add to wishlist" without selecting a particular list first.

What does it look like?

For customers without accounts, the process appears unchanged. The "add to wishlist" button adds the item to a temporary list. If the customer wants to save their wishlist permanently, they are prompted to create a new account or to log in. (This is where our recently added simple registration is useful as it makes saving wishlists much more appealling process for new customers.)

However, once registered, hovering over the "add to wishlist" button exposes more functionality:

Clicking the "add to wishlist" will add the item to the default list, as usual, but clicking the "more" link offers the customer more choices:

Anything new for store owners?

As a store owner, you can now view any saved wishlists through the store admin. This may be useful when dealing with a enquiry from a customer about a particular item on their list, or about the list as a whole. To view customer lists, you must first find their account. You can search accounts using last name, email address, and/or date and country, by clicking under "Accounts" and the choosing "Registered users". Under the customer's account details, any wishlists are displayed, and you can click through to view the entire list.

More to come

There is almost an endless list of possible features that can be added to wishlists (making them "public", pdf generation, and so on), but we are acutely aware that adding too many features is going to be counterproductive. Most people are happy just to have somewhere to save items for later and that's all they will ever need. Like the updates we've just announced, though, we are keen to implement new key features as the usage demands. We have our own ideas about what we can do with wishlists in the future, and we are always happy to hear feedback from both end-customers and store owners.

Simple registration now available

2010-02-12T15:44:00.001Z

Store owners can now choose to allow visitors to their site to create an account with only their name, email address and password.

Why use simple registration?

The first thing to remember is that simple registration is not the best approach in every case. Ensuring you have full details for registered customers may be key to your business. The bulk of your marketing may be offline, for example, so you need a mailing address. This is why we have implemented this as a simple on/off setting that you can just adjust for your individual store(s).

Having said that...

Generally speaking, people are only willing to provide enough information to complete their particular process or transaction. Asking for additional information makes people suspicious. ("Why would they need a postcode from me? I only want to save a wishlist...") Unless you can offer something compelling in return for all this information, fewer people will bother to complete the form.
If you do ask for apparently extraneous information, most of the data will be junk.
Bear in mind that many of the visitors will be on your site for the first time. It is much better to ask for a little information at the start, and ask for more information later on after you have built a relationship with the customer.

Login and registration pages have been merged into a single page

Regardless of whether your store allows simple registration or not, login and registration has been merged into a single two-column page. This page takes up the full width of the page, which means that any left/right navigation on your store is removed on this page. This is by design. Not only does it give the forms plenty of space from a layout point of view, but the act of registering/logging-in is highly task-focused. As a store owner, you just want them to finish filling out the form without being distracted by anything else or navigating away from the page.

When can I use this?

This update is available immediately for all stores on the Magnolia network, and is of course free of charge.

The default setting for all stores remains as "full registration", where customers have to supply a mailing address to create an account. To update your store to use simple registration, adjust the "Allow simple registration" setting under Store Settings -> Accounts.

Champagne Winners

2010-01-22T17:10:00.005Z

Hi there Just a quick note to thank all clients for their recent efforts and to announce that the 3 lucky winners of the fantastic Ruinart Rose champagne are:

Luke Hollingworth - www.artbypeople.co.uk

Catriona Nason - www.artyprints.co.uk

Alex Sharp - www.watergatestreetgallery.co.uk

Happy boozing!

James

Christmas Opening Times

2009-12-17T13:52:00.006Z

Just to let you know our office opening times over the Christmas period. We are all going to be downing tools from close of business on the 23rd December until 4th January. During this period the usual out of hours remote support will be provided for any critical issues.

Have a fantastic holiday and happy New Year.

Fix your estimated delivery date for the Christmas period

2009-12-07T14:16:00.005Z

Customers are provided with an estimated delivery date during the order process, in the basket and the checkout. We realise that this can cause some problems over the Christmas period, so we have added a way for you to easily override this estimate with a fixed delivery date.

Log in to the MagnoliaSoft admin
Select the store you wish to edit (only required if you have more than 1 store)
From the left menu, click content and then click the snippets button
Scroll down to the basket snippets and click edit next to the Estimated delivery date override snippet
Click in the snippet content box, click the Source button and provide the exact text you want to display as your estimated delivery text, for example Tuesday 22 December
Click save, and reload your store using the link in the bottom right of the screen

NB: Any text you enter in this snippet overrides the estimated delivery dates, until you disable the snippet again. So don't forget to disable it when you want to revert to automatic delivery estimates!

You can update this as often as you require.

You may want to see what other snippets are available, they are an easy way to replace or add content to predefined areas on your store.

SEO first steps

2009-09-17T14:59:00.005+01:00

There are a number of very basic SEO steps that we recommend clients perform when starting their SEO strategy. None of these activities are going to revolutionise your rankings overnight but they do form a small part of established SEO best practice:

Submission to Yahoo! Directory Submit. For web sites that do not feature adult content or services, the Yahoo! Directory Submit service costs US$299 (nonrefundable) for each Directory listing that is submitted. For each listing accepted into the Directory, there is a recurring annual fee of US$299 to maintain the listing in the Directory for the subsequent year. You can begin this process by clicking here.
Submission to the Annual Business.com Directory Listings. Annual Directory Inclusion listings are a simple way to list your product or service on Business.com for an entire year for just $299. You can begin this process by clicking here.
Submission to Gimpsy for $49. If the site is not approved, you will be refunded 20 USD. You can begin this process by clicking here.
Submission to Zoominfo for Free. You can begin this process by clicking here.
Submission to DMOZ for Free. You can begin this process by clicking here.

Grouping items on the product picker

2009-09-10T15:40:00.003+01:00

We recommend that you offer simple choices to your customers, otherwise sales can be affected. However, if you choose to offer a large selection of printing options, then you may want to 'group' them into logical categories, to make them easier to find.

For example, if you offer 30 different types of frames, you may wish to group them into 'wooden', 'classic', 'modern', 'light', 'dark', etc.

Magnolia Soft allows you to group sizes, frames, mounts, glazes and finishes. An example can be seen here, where the different size options have been 'grouped' according to the number of panels it is made out of.

This is easy to achieve:

Log in to the admin tools
If prompted, select the store you wish to edit
From the left menu, select printing options, followed by the publisher which offers the print options you wish to group
Select the component type you wish to group (size / frame / mount / glaze / finish)
Using the check-boxes, and the 'New tag' input, tag the components with the group names you wish them to appear in. You can use any names
Test your changes by visiting a product on your store

Additional Artist Search Functionality Released

2009-08-14T17:34:00.008+01:00

As promised, we've improved the Artist search functionality further, allowing you to rapidly narrow down your search results using the artists surname.

The following screen grab highlights the new functionality:

So, if I am searching for an artist called Thomas Bewick, I begin typing his surname and the results are all reduced as follows:

The results then continue to filter, until there is only one possible option left.

This functionality will help improve the speed with which users can navigate through your artists profiles.

New artist page layouts designed to improve SEO

2009-08-06T14:48:00.011+01:00

We've recently redesigned the way our core application handles the display of Artists, their biographies and their artworks.

Our primary objective was to improve the SEO of each artists name, boosting the page rank and link juice that each artist passes through to their specific works of art.

We were also keen to improve the usability and searchability for web browsers, removing the automatic pre-fix filtering we previously used.

The following screen grabs highlight the ways in which we have developed the application:

You can visit this page here.

Once you click through from the main search page, you are now presented with an Artist Summary page containing Biographies, Popular Keywords, Categorisation of works, Popular Images:

You can visit this page here.

Joe does the Fastnet

2009-08-06T14:39:00.004+01:00

Joe will be setting off on the prestigious Fastnet race on Sunday 9th August.

The Fastnet race takes place every two years, and starts at Cowes on the Isle of Wight. From there, it's round the Fastnet rock off the soutwest coast of Ireland, and then back into Plymouth for the finish - a total of 608 miles.

We will all be tracking Joe's progress from the dry, warm and safe Magnolia Box office using the Fastnet Fleet Tracking site, which allows you to follow every boat throughout the race. If you want to follow Joe, he's aboard a Class40 boat called "Spliff".

The potential for severe weather means that the Fastnet has a justified reputation for being one of the most challenging offshore races. The tragedy of the 1979 race has been well-documented, and in 1985 Simon Le Bon was famously trapped under the hull of his boat "Drum" after her keel sheared off.

We obviously wish Joe all the best of luck. We are sure it will be an amazing experience, and we hope that he gets back to Plymouth speedily - but most of all that he just gets back.

Magnolia Soft have just launched in Australia

2009-07-24T16:20:00.006+01:00

We've recently been very busy customising the Magnolia Soft platform for launch into the Australian market in coordination with our partners Marks & Co. We've put together the following microsite for all Australian Framers, Australian Artists and Australian Photographers that are seeking to sell fine art prints and photographs online:

Email Newsletters Made Easy, and Fun!

2009-06-24T10:07:00.007+01:00

Email newsletter services such as MailChimp and Campaign Monitor offer a highly effective way to send out mass emails:

Automatically managed unsubscribes/subscribes
Track deliveries, click-throughs, unsubscribes, forwards, etc
Create and manage reusable email templates
Automatic spam filter detection
Avoid bulk-email sender warnings and bans from your ISP

If you are looking to send email newsletters, services such as these will make it a far simpler, and more enjoyable process, and the costs are low.

Customers Can Be Overwhelmed With Choice

2009-06-21T16:03:00.004+01:00

A common problem with e-commerce, especially art, is the ease at which we can overwhelm the customer with too much to choose from. More often than not, a customer's response to this situation is to choose nothing; not the result we are looking for!

This short article suggests that customers given too many choices are 10x less likely to buy. This should be considered when selecting both images, and printing options for your store.

Google Analytics: An Introduction

2009-05-15T12:18:00.006+01:00

When you get a new Magnolia store, we will always set up a Google Analytics account for you. Google Analytics is our preferred web analysis tool, and its job is to track visitors to your website. It collects a huge amount of data but it makes it easy to see which pages are popular (and which are not), which countries visit your site most often, and exactly how your visitors are finding your site. To use Google Analytics, you will need a Google Account. These are free to set up, and if you have a personalised Google search page (iGoogle), or have used any of Google's other products (Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and so on) you will already have one. If you need to create a Google Account, visit https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount. Then simply send us the email associated with your Google Account and we will take care of the rest of the process. Google Analytics is very powerful, and future posts will go into more detail about some of the more advanced techniques available, but to start with, let's go through some of the basics.

Some key terms

Visits - A visit is a single session on your site. It is not the number of pages viewed - this is called "pageviews" in Google Analytics (and is also often referred to as "hits").
Average time on site - The length of time a visitor spent on your site. A visit starts when the user first arrives on your site and ends when the browser is closed or shut down, or if the user has been inactive on your site for 30 minutes.
Average pages/visit - The number of pages that each visitor looked at on your site before leaving.
Bounce rate - The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who visited only page on your site. There is no real guide as to what is a good bounce rate. A more detailed description of bounce rates will be in later post, but for revenue-generating sites it is a good idea to get your bounce rate as low as possible.
Unique visitors - The number of unduplicated visitors to your site over the specified time period. Google uses cookies to remember previous visits.
Source - How your visitors found your site. At the top level, the main types of (unpaid or "organic") sources are:
- Search engines. The visitor typed something into a search engine and then followed a link to your site from the search results. This statistic includes all search engines, not just Google, and it can also include the exact phrase that was used in the visitor's search.
- Referring sites. The visitor followed a link on another site which pointed directly to a page on your site.
- Direct traffic. The visitor either typed in your website address, or they used a bookmark.

Getting information about a particular page

By using Google Analytics, all the above stats are available for any individual page and over any specified time frame, so you can drill down to see very precise data. For example, if you click one of the pages listed in the "Content Overview", you can see all the above stats for just that page. And by adjusting the timeframe graph at the top of the screen you can alter the length of time covered by the report. Want to see how people found this one particular page? Just click on the Navigation Analysis links on the right-hand side.

Is absolutely every visit logged?

It's usually not a big issue, but you should be aware that not all visitors to your site will be included in the reports. The following types of visitors are not recorded.

Visitors who do not have JavaScript enabled on their browsers. By default JavaScript is turned on in most modern browsers; however, some people do choose to disable it. Since GA uses JavaScript to collect data, such visitors will not be logged. The exact percentage of non-JavaScript visitors will vary according to the demographic of your site, but as a guide across the web as whole approximately 5% of visits will not have JavaScript enabled.
Search engine spiders (since spiders are not JavaScript-enabled). This is definitely a good thing as you would not want your reports muddied with 100s of automated spider requests. You just want to see what real people are doing.

It is also possible to omit visits from certain computers (IP addresses). The main reason for doing this is to exclude your own visits from skewing the data. For example, we tend to exclude any visits from our Magnolia office. If you would like to exclude your own range of addresses, get in touch with us and we'll set it up.

Give your Online Store Some Bite

2009-05-06T12:02:00.007+01:00

This short article gets straight to the point, and offers some great advice on running an e-commerce business.

Web safe fonts

2009-03-16T16:57:00.002Z

Web safe fonts

When designing a website, it is important to use standard web safe fonts to ensure that the website will display correctly on any pc or mac. The table below outlines the website fonts that will safely render on any machine:

Arial	The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog...
Arial Black	The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy...
Comic Sans	The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog...
Courier New	The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy...
Georgia	The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog...
Impact	The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog...
Times New Roman	The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog...
Trebuchet MS	The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog...
Verdana	The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog...

Magnolia Box Clients in Sunday Times

2009-03-02T10:34:00.005Z

Art by People got a small feature mentioned in 'The Sunday Times' home magazine on one of their pictures 'Darwin Was Wrong'. Good work Luke! We also have The Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Centre appearing in the next couple of weeks with an article in the Style section, advertising their Warhol Art on Demand Prints.