Why to have a Ecommerce Website

“Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce or eCommerce, or e-business consists of the buying and selling of products or services” From: Wikipedia

 

There are many good reasons of why having an ecommerce website for your business, but I would like to draw a few benefits out of them:

IF you are into a product or services selling market, than I would highly recommend you to have an ecommerce website for you:

Reasons of having an Ecommerce website:

1.      Competitive Advantage: Having an ecommerce website give you a competitive advantage over your competitors, as you can target a big segment online in comparison of your competitors.

2.      Cost effective: If you are opting for an ecommerce website then you can save money by not opening a store for you, as you don’t need to have a physical store if you are opting for a  website.

3.      24 X 7 Open: With an ecommerce website you are available for your customers 24 hrs, which improves the chance of earning more and more. They can come any time and shop form your site, no time limits for your shop.

4.      Expand targeted segment: By having an ecommerce website you can increase your targeted area geographically, as people can access your web site anywhere in the world, the only thing they need is an internet connection.

5.      Better Customer Service: Ecommerce website gives you a better and quicker opportunity of serving your customer or prospective customers as you serve your customers directly. This saves time and money.

6.      Higher Margins: If your are into manufacturing and selling of goods than your profit margin will increase significantly as you are directly selling to the buyers, so there will be no additional charges to pay to dealers whole sellers or other people who come in the traditional sale channel. This will decrease the cost of your product but will raise profit margins.

These are a few but there are many other benefits of having a ecommerce website, will discuss more about the benefits of having online shopping portal, how to chose the best ecommerce website design and how to chose the best ecommerce website development company.

Headway Web Solutions

Choosing an ecommerce development company

Earlier we have discussed about why to have an ecommerce website and about choosing the best ecommerce design, now we will discuss about, what are the things to be kept in mind before choosing an ecommerce development company.

How to Select the Best ecommerce development company?

Your Requirements and Vision: Convey your requirements and vision to your development company and try to find out how much they understand your business because a clear understanding of your business model will help them in reflecting the same in your ecommerce website design. Such as how many pages you require, how many of them would be dynamic or static, what functionality you require in your ecommerce website, payment gateway integration and many more.

Experience: A well experienced company with ecommerce website development can provide you great output with simple and minimum inputs, the experience that the company should hold is about 2 to 3 years and must have handled similar ecommerce projects earlier. So that you can cross check the work.

Online Marketing Strategies: Just by providing a very good and highly functional ecommerce website dose not means that it will start getting prospective customers, so it is very important from business point of view that the website development company that you have hired should be specialist in creating, implementing and analyzing internet marketing strategies, so that your website can serve the purpose for what it is been created.

Customer Support: once your ecommerce website is online and you started earning form it, it dint mean that you don’t have to take care of it further, as there are a lot of changes which occur on product or service selling site, like uploading new products and services, changing or upgrading price list and many more, so you need a development company that can give you online support for a long term for proper functionality of your website.

Web Designing Company's Portfolio: This section of your development or designing company will show how good they were with their prior customers, as you can have a look of their work and relationship with current or prior clients.

Work strategies: The best way to save time and money both is to ask your development company to provide you a time and goal sheet which will cover that what part of project will take how much time, say the designing of your ecommerce website will take 10 days then it should be done by that time, this will help you in tracking the project and will look after that there are no delays.

Reputation: Before handing over project to your ecommerce Development Company make sure to do a quick research about the company as how good they are in the market, this can be done by asking them for reference work check of their previous or current clients

Cost Effective: Just hiring the best ecommerce designing or development company will not serve the purpose, but you should hire a company that provide you the best ecommerce development solutions with maximum (ROI) Returns on investments. It should be very cost effective.

Programming Languages: Ask the company that what platform they are opting to create your ecommerce website, my personal suggestions would be to opt for a company that offers wide range of platforms so that you can chose the one you think is the best, as at headwaywebsolutions we provide a Variety of platforms for developing your ecommerce website like wordpress, Joomla, oscommerce, opencart, megento and custome shopping cart (PHP, cakePHP, CI)

Thanks for reading the post will keep on sharing more about ecommerce web development and ecommerce web designing tips and tricks.

 

Headway Web Solutions

How to get attention of Visitors on Ecommerce websites

WordPress Plugin Development

WordPress is a free CMS (Content Management System) and open source blogging tool; it has totally changed the look on the internet, whether we are talking about software or website development.

Now in this part we will be discussing how to create a wordpress plugin with our simple but effective steps. when we talk about plugins, then most probably the non tech guys will think of a complex function, followed by the knowledge of lot of tech languages which is just a myth and this is what we will show here, that how easy it is to create a WordPress plugin, all you need to know is a bit of PHP and a basic understanding of WP file structure and Admin panel.

Now before starting up with how to create a WP plugin, We would first like to discuss why to develop a wordpress plugin.

Why to have a WordPress plugin?

In simple words if we want to define plugins, then we can say that these are same as addons added to your browser for making certain things simpler for you.in the same way Plugins are added to Wordpress for making things easy and simple.

Example:

All in one SEO plugin from WordPress is a plugin that help you in optimizing your site and making it search engine friendly with it simple but effective features at a single place, some of the features provided by. All in one SEO plugin are:

• Google Analytic support
• Support for Custom Post Types
• Advanced Canonical URLs
• Fine tune Page Navigational Links
• Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality
• ONLY plugin to provide SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites
• Nonce Security
• Support for CMS-style WordPress installations
• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
• Generates META tags automatically
• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
• For beginners, you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
• For advanced users, you can fine-tune everything
• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
• Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.

Now this is what a simple Plugin can offer you.

And developing a pluging will give you a better understanding as how things work at the backend and another benefit is that being a developer you can have a complete control over the function of your plugin.

Steps of developing a WP plugin:

1. WP Folder Structure

The wordpress folder structure will show you the basic application directory within wordpress, in here you will find a Plugin directory where you can find all the plugins installed,

For smaller plug-ins which only requires a single .php file, you can place them directly into the plug-ins/ directory. But when you start creating more complex applications, it is a better option to create a sub directory named after your plug-in where you can assemble all JavaScript, CSS, and HTML along with the PHP functions.

Figure 1

Figure 2

And if you want to provide your plugin to others for download, so that others to get benefited from it, then these are the simple things that you need to keep in mind before providing a readme.txt file, this file should contain your name and functionality of the plugin and further if you want, that people should know about the updates in the plugins then you should provide details about each revision.

2. Starting Your PHP File

Start with a simple PHP file while creating a new plugin. This should be your plug-in’s official name. For example I have created base code and have named the file quick-subscribe-now.php.

The first lines of your plug-in must be comment. This is extremely important as WordPress will be unable to process your file without it. Below is an example code snippet you can copy and mold towards your own.

3. WordPress Naming Conventions And Best Practices

While writing code it’s best to follow regulations and guides set up by WordPress. Since there are so many functions defined already, you can avoid duplicity by providing prefix label to all your variables and function names.

1. <?php  
2. function Subscribe_Widget() {
3.                  $widget_ops = array( ‘classname’ => ‘subscribe’, ‘description’ => __(‘An example widget that displays a quick subscribe now form.’, ‘subscribe’) );
4.                  $control_ops = array( ‘width’ => 300, ‘height’ => 350, ‘id_base’ => ‘subscribe-widget’ );
5.                  $this->WP_Widget( ‘subscribe-widget’, __(‘Subscribe Widget’, ‘subscribe’), $widget_ops, $control_ops );
6.      }// the code
7. }    
8. ?>  

In the above examples we prefixed all our setting names with quick-subscribe-now. This can be replaced with any keyword of your choosing usually related to your plugin name.

4. Filters and Actions

Filters and actions are two completely different concepts which relate deeply in the ways they manipulate plugin data.

Understanding Add_filter()

A filter is used on a bit of text or data being passed into WordPress. With filters you are quite literally able to filter content through your own custom written functions to change data in any way.

Understanding Add_action()

Actions are similar to filters in that they don’t work on bits of data but instead target pre-defined areas in your templates and admin panel.

Example you can apply an action whenever you update or edit a page’s content. A small list of example actions:

• publish_post – called when a post is published or when status is changed into “published”
• wp_head – called when the template is loaded and runs the wp_head() function
• trackback_post – called whenever a new trackback is added into a post

Installing And Running The Plugin

I’ve created a sample file for the plugin to demo if you’d like to skip the hard coding. Simply download this file (rename it to .php) or copy/paste the code into a new PHP document and upload this to your /wp-content/plugins directory.

Once completed you’ll want to access the WordPress administration panel and browse your current set of plug-ins for the demo just installed. Once you activate nothing new will happen, not until we manually add in our function call. To do this simply navigates Appearance -> Editor and look forsingle.php.

These are some of the basics to get you started working within WordPress Plugin development. 

Referred By : Headway Web Solution

7 Social Marketing Strategies For Ecommerce Website

The growth of ecommerce world has created it tough for ecommerce website to attract the visitors in business.

With the help of this post, I’m going to discuss with you seven different strategies which help you to grow your online presence and increase your daily traffic.

1.      Daily Content Posting

 

In social community easiest way to grow up is to post your content frequently or daily. It should be minimum once day on Facebook & 2-3 times on Twitter. Timing also matter, timing of social media is also very important because if you targeting the US Nations then it were useless to post in day, for posting on Facebook 7 pm and for Twitter 6pm is best.

You can also use apps to save your time, there are many free apps are available which help you in schedule posting on your social networking sites.

 

2.      Use Images Posting On Facebook

 

By adding images to your posts you can increase the visitor’s traffic. You can generate more than 50 % likes than the average post by adding photos on your facebook post. When you want to promote anything or want to announce something then you can add your link with photo on your post.

View the example below:

Text-based images are far more effective than normal links or normal images.

 

3.  Social Buttons increase visitors

 

You can increase the number of visitors by embedding social buttons on your site. Social buttons are used to encourage visitors or readers to share the post, article of blog with others. You can use social buttons at different places of your site or blog.

• Footer of your website and blog
• In your newsletter
• In your email signature
• Within blog post
• Header of your website and blog

 

4. Create Micro Content

 

Some time long content or long post are very time consuming, because visitors have very less time or patience to check those content, they are surrounded with overloaded information. So for that we have to use bite sized of content for easy and quick delivery.

You can also use software to create video clip, which can be easily shared on social networking sites. Some mobile app available in market to create and post video clips. Try Vine, it is a new tool for creating content.

5. Start Twitter Q&A

 

Twitting on twitter is the new way of doing micro blogging. Instead of writing full post you can give the major information of your blog post, because in twitter we can only post 140 characters of content.  Readers use twitter for giving quick update at any moment.

To get the more visitors interaction you can use simple trick by starting weekly Twitter Q&A.  You have encouraged the visitors to ask about your blog, business or website. And you give answers to their questions; you can also use their question as your blog post.

In Twitter Q&A use #tag in your tweets for tagging, it also helps in branding.

 

 

6. Pins you products on Pinterest

 

Now a day’s Pinterest is one largest social network in the whole world for using of their marketing strategies.

Pinterest is a photo sharing site that allows users to create and manage their image collections such as events, interests, and hobbies.

You can make social button of pinterest on your blog for branding of your products.

 

7. Use Different Titles on Your Blog Posts

 

To get the much attention on your blog post, you have to use attractive title for your blog post to attract the visitors. Follow some tips regarding title optimization:

• Use everyday language
• Keep it short & attractive
• Use common traits (urgency, fear, desire, etc)
• Start the title with how many links you’re going to make, if you’re post in a form of list.

Conclusion

 

Strategies which are defined in this post is useful for your business development, these marketing strategies are tried and tested; you can utilize the above information for making yourself socially connected with online marketing.

Referred By : Headway Web Solution