3 Traits of Highly Effective Shopping Carts to Adopt

The mere mention of card abandonment scares e-retailers off and having to go through it virtually is a complete nightmare. All the efforts and time you put in optimizing web pages, writing keyword rich descriptions, pricing products and positioning products come undone when potential buyers leave the store at the finish line. 

If even with the best designed product pages, informed descriptions, quality images and superior quality products themselves, your prospects tend to vanish right when they are a click away from completing their purchase, there’s certainly something wrong with the checkout. 

The latest studies show the average shopping cart abandonment rate as around 68.63%, which apparently means ecommerce stores are bleeding prospects at a rate higher than their conversion rate. 

This needs to be fixed. You can’t put in a whole lot of hours in attracting visitors and persuading them to commit to the purchase only to abandon their cart filled with items at the final stage. 

While several e-retailers drive hundreds of their visitors away daily, a few got things under control with effective shopping cart solutions. Want to know exactly what those high converting shopping carts are like? Go through these common qualities of checkouts that lure buyers into checking out successfully. 

Effective shopping carts offer free shipping

You know what’s most likely to sway your potential buyer into revealing their credit card details? Free shipping. So much that they often ditch discounted products for items that have no shipping costs. But unfortunately, start-ups and small businesses can’t see free shipping as a profitably viable optional. 

However, they can make a free shipping offer that is profitable to not just their buyers but their own business as well. You can fix a certain purchase value (total price) above which buyers can avail free shipping. This way, you can encourage them to buy without hurting your revenue. 

Effective shopping carts love their buyers hassle-free   

Anything from painful account creation to never-ending checkout forms that is likely to make the checkout process mundane and kill user’s patience or interest is a strict NO for promising ecommerce business. 

Rather, they choose to display customer’s purchase summary, a purchase progress indicator, time-saving buttons like Go, Proceed, Back and Apply, quick forms etc. that makes the purchase easier and faster for customers. 

Effective shopping carts sort out costs smartly

You can’t probably do much about hard-core penny pinchers but those who aren’t afraid to spend on quality products can be charmed easily. Mostly cart abandonments have to do with costs. How you display prices near the products, the size, use of symbols and positioning, can even make buyers who aren’t price-conscious think twice about their purchase. So, making prices (wherever they are) appear trivial and less impressive is main the objective here.    

Seeing prospects leave at checkouts can come too hard on ecommerce retailers and retaining them to complete their purchase is difficult either. However, cart and website optimisation can almost solve your problem and treat you to improved conversion rates.

Furthermore, if you ever shop for shopping cart solutions in Sydney, make sure that your provider is familiar with these traits and other effective techniques that can help develop a highly functional shopping cart. 

4 Magento Extensions to Reinforce Your Online Store in 2015

  

Huge popularity in the digital market for its advance features, enterprise-level functionalities and flexible performance wasn’t the only thing Magento gained as soon as it came into existence. But, it became the most celebrated platform to rule the hearts of developers and ecommerce businesses for changing the way online stores set up and operate on the web.

While the software comes with plenty of rich features and professional extensions, there are some that just can’t be passed up when it comes to building a Magento website design. Here are top 4 Magento extensions that not only improve the performance of web designers and developers, but also supercharge your online stores.

One Step Checkout

Checkouts are inevitably the most complicated stage of online shopping that often make consumers abandon their order. One Step Checkout is a Magento extension thoroughly designed to simplify the entire check-out process. The extension combines all the check-out steps on a single page making it simpler for shoppers to purchase thus, leading to immediate increase in sales.

Full Page Cache

When people shop online, it really matters to them how slow or fast an ecommerce website loads. Full Page Cache extension helps to keep hold of the visitors to your online store by speeding up page load time. What’s more, you can boost your website ranking and increase your sales conversion with the help of this extension.

Magento SEO

It doesn’t really make much of a difference if you have an intriguing web design and state-of-the-art functionalities, if your website isn’t visible to your target audience. SEO & PPC is what ecommerce businesses look for in order to enhance their visibility on the web. As the name suggests, Magento SEO extension helps your ecommerce website to rank among top search engine results and remarkably increase traffic to your store. Creare SEO and Rich Snippets are the go-to options if you are looking for the best SEO extension to build a robust foundation for your ecommerce website.

WordPress Integartion

When it comes to driving traffic through content, ecommerce stores don’t have much to do. Product descriptions aren’t the sort of content that attracts viewers and prospects. That being said, integrating WordPress and Magento gives room for content publishing on an ecommerce store. Fish Pig WordPress Integration extension is a great approach to integrating a WordPressblog with an online store in order to strengthen blog or other content on the website.  

Avail Shopping Cart Solutions for Improved Functionality of Your E-Store

Recent growth in the e-Commerce sector has shown the enormous significance of having an online presence. Getting found on the web isn’t an easy job as you need to take care after a zillion other things like SEO, ORM and website content. It’s definitely crucial to sustain in an environment where your competitors keep pushing you down and your rankings drop by just one negative feedback. To avoid this hectic work, a web-store should be made using highly effective marketing tools in order to reach out to a wide audience.

So for the entrepreneurs, starting an e-Store, get top-notch quality and full-featured online shopping cart solutions that can fight half the battle. A complete e-commerce platform like Magento, Shopify or Joomla will get you the top-notch quality and a full-featured platform. With such a platform you can make e-commerce solutions of any size by delivering the best shopping cart solutions.

The retailers lose around 67.45% of sales because of shopping cart abandonment which is a major issue store owners face. There can be any reason for this:

• Misleading information on webpage
• Product listed with inappropriate rates
• Complicated website navigation
• Customer found a better price elsewhere
• Webpage taking too much time to load
• Delivery options are unsuitable
• Privacy concerns and payment being declined

Shopping cart solutions are tailor made; a web developer can implement certain features which will minimise the risk of shopping cart abandonment. As long as your customers are on your website many things can go wrong. Hence, earing customer loyalty is extremely important.

You can display security logos on each transaction page, ease the options to edit the shopping cart. Test single page vs. multi-page checkout by including a progress bar that shows how many pages there in total. Also, get in touch with a certified developer who knows how to provide these solutions that offer support, and can also imply little features on the website which will prove to be helpful.

After availing shopping cart solutions, you will notice the gradual change in the sales graph. Also, it will give you an idea about the areas of concerns where changes need to be made.

Explore the most powerful ways to improve your business operations!

Selecting Shopping Cart Solutions, as easy as a breeze!

As soon as you design and build a website, you cannot expect getting online business instantly. Either selling a product or service, income needs to be generated. And your income cannot be generated without an e commerce solution that fulfills your requirements. But, the greatest difficulty faced during the process is choosing the right shopping cart solution appropriate for the sector. A shopping cart software makes or breaks your site. Choosing the wrong shopping cart and hinder your profits in the short term and your growth plans in the future.

How to choose your shopping cart solution?

Check Features: Go for advanced features that not only make shopping easier, but also helps you manage orders easily.

Design shopper friendly Cart: Try getting a shopping cart that looks good, but at the same time is extremely user friendly. If a customer visits your page, allow them to use your site features without complications. Make the navigation extremely shopper friendly to avoid confusions leading your client to other sites.

Ensure secure shopping: Shoppers demand security while shopping online to share the financial information. In this regard, try choosing a solution that uses stringent security standards.

Be credible: Design of your shopping cart should promote credibility. When customers visit your site, the presentation needs to be best assuring trustworthiness of your site without any doubts.

Budget Oriented: Choose a shopping cart solution that enhances your e-commerce website, but that also keeps your budget in mind.

Sigma InfoTech develops compelling and engaging interface designs converting visitors into repeat customers. Essential and effective planning, customer acquisition, strategic marketing techniques are the main tools helping it reach its customer goals and making it the best shopping cart solutions in Australia!        

Web Design Trends Are Changing. Is Your Designer Keeping Pace?

Web design trends change at the drop of a hat, no doubt. While solid icons were all over the place till a few months back, they have now been replaced by their hollow counterparts. In fact, hollow icons are a hot favourite among web designers right now, because it enables them to add versatility to the menu tabs, and also make it easier for them to come up with a flat web design. But the question is: does your designer use these icons? More importantly, are they aware of the other ongoing trends, or have they been following the age-old conventions, depriving you of the opportunity to compete?

Here’s how you can find out: 

• To begin with, gone are the days of 200ppi. Retina displays have taken over, forcing every web designer out there to take the resolution of their design(s) a notch higher. Unless those working on your web design are doing pretty much the same, you must hire some fresh talent ASAP.
  
  
  
  
  

• Also, mobile versions of websites have now made way for responsive design, and that’s what the users prefer, especially for its ability to provide them with a contextually optimised experience, irrespective of the gadget type.

Questions that follow:

• Have you been told that you need two different sites (and designs), one for the desktop users, and another for those with handheld devices?
• Would the second one also serve the interests of users who prefer tablets?
• Are your users comfortable with the idea of switching between sites?

      Responsiveness does seem like a better choice, right? Moving on, side bars, though not completely out of the picture, are no longer as popular as they used to be.  The users now consider these bars as mere distractions, which prevent them focusing on the content of your website. And if you don’t want them to lose focus, you must invest in a full page layout, and give the left and right side bars a miss, if possible. Can your designer do that for you? If not, it’s high time you look for a better web designer in Sydney, or wherever you are.

Look Beyond Contextual Advertising for an Effective Pay Per Click Campaign

The goal of a typical Pay per Click (PPC) campaign is to get you the maximum number of clicks. However, these clicks are only beneficial if they are from people who are actually interested in your products and services. People who just click on your ads out of curiosity may not bring you more business. This is what happens when you rely on contextual advertising. This advertising model may get you several clicks, but most of them are likely to be “curiosity clicks”. To get business, you need qualified clicks from people who are looking for whatever it is that you offer.

You can get these clicks by:

• Creating a landing page – if the page addresses the specific needs of the searchers, it can fetch quite a few clicks. Just make sure you keep your keywords in mind while designing the page. These should preferably be the same keywords that you need to bid on as a part of your Pay per Click campaign.
• Targeting specific ad groups – if your audience comprises several small groups, you can get them to click on your ads by acknowledging their existence. For example, people who are looking for “messenger bags for women” may be different from those who need “messenger bags for men”. If you only offer messenger bags for the ladies, there is no point in targeting the latter.
• Investing in location-specific campaigns: if your business is based out of multiple locations, you should preferably have a different campaign for each of them. Otherwise, you may unknowingly compete against yourself.

A good Pay per Click agency in Sydney (or wherever you are based) can also help you in increasing the number of qualified links by making the necessary changes to your existing campaign.

Here’s Why Just About Any Node Js Developer Won’t Do (and Why You Should Look for a Fast Learner)

Node.js development is undertaken for the creation of scalable server-side and networking applications. However, if your developer doesn’t keep track of the changes that the node.js libraries go through, almost every month, and is unable to address the version issues, if any, can he/she still develop the desired apps for you? The answer is no. For better results, you must hire someone who knows that node.js libraries have an active development cycle. It is also important for the developer to ascertain the platform’s feasibility so that you can take a look at other options, if the need be.

For instance, if you need to get some CRUD (create, read, update and delete) applications developed, he/she should be quick enough to tell you that node js development is perhaps not one of the best options for you in this case and that you should rather consider Ruby on Rails. But what if the node js developer is not willing to accept the platform’s limitations readily? Now, that can cost you a fortune, in terms of money as well as time. So it’s better to avoid hiring any such developer.

That being said, you may also want to look for another node js developer in Sydney, or wherever your business is based, if the one available for hiring is yet to learn the event-driven, functional programming aspects of the platform. He/she must move up the learning curve really fast.