May 2016 - QL Tech

Magento is a leading eCommerce platform, helping millions of online retailers generate higher revenue. It can be used for businesses in all shapes and sizes. On Magento, you do not need to be worried even if you are just a new kid on the block. The platform offers complete scalability and offers optimal performance for all types of business websites.

There are two versions of Magento: Enterprise and Community, the latter being free while the former comes at a price. There are numerous tweaks and modifications that you can do both on the frontend and the backend of the platform to optimize marketing and analytical techniques to improve your administration options. It offers several features for improving the shopping experience of your customers.

Here are some of the main aspects that you need to know before you get onto the platform:

Available for everyone

– With the help of Magento, anyone can open an eCommerce store as it is an open source platform. This means that anyone out there can modify or update the customizable features on the platform owing to the complete access that has been provided for the users.

– It will help you to set-up and maintain the website very easily. However, if you need to hire a developer to build your website, Magento can help you to run estimates to see if the cost of a developer is cheaper over time as compared to the cost of a hosted eCommerce solution.

Customer Support

– Magento is the best solution as compared to other eCommerce platforms, owing to the fact that it has all the necessary resources that can help you get started on the platform and create your own website.

– The platform houses numerous resources like blogs, forums, customer support teams etc., to answer questions and provide all kinds of services for customers and developers.

– Stay up to date with the latest features in technology as well as security. Magento keeps updating its existing features and also adds new features, modules and security applications, thereby keeping the playing field constantly versatile and exciting.

Performance

– Magento will help you get more attention from potential customers by ensuring circumstances that guarantee high performance as well as tailored solutions for your customers

– It is very important to understand that the speed of your website can easily affect the rank of your page in Google search results. Moreover, a slow website can adversely impact the user experience. Today, if a page takes long to load or fails to perform to the user’s expectations, it will certainly face the wrath of low traffic and considerably lower conversions. In order to ensure that a business website does not have to go through this, Magento constantly updates the features on the platform, thereby providing businesses with the required solutions and the necessary parameters for taking care of problems.

Third-Party Integrations

– Magento can help you use other tools, databases, extensions or custom modules. It has a great third party interface which can help you in faster development of your eCommerce site as compared to other websites.

– You can explore various databases, search engines, applications, shipping methods, and even payment gateways, with the help of various third-party integrations that can be used very easily with Magento.

– Owing to the considerable freedom that you have on the website, you can personally introduce your own database onto the platform, including elements such as external payment sources as well as new shipping methods.

Search Engine Optimization

– You would certainly want your page to be on the top of the list of search results. Well with Magento, it just gets easier. Magento is search engine friendly and has inbuilt structures and checks which are essentially designed to optimize your web content.

– It comes with a bucket full of preloaded features to make adding keywords to descriptions, URLs, sitemaps, rich snippets, etc very easy and convenient.

How does it do all this? Well, each category and product has a unique HTML URL, keywords and Meta tags. This will give you a higher search engine ranking as major search engines are not able to crawl through the dynamic URL. The purpose of dynamic URLs is to create a temporary page on the basis of the dynamic navigation that is a part of the Magento platform. For instance, if you enter a product called Acer in the category “laptop”, Magento creates a dynamic page for the query, owing to which the search engine takes it as a unique page even though it does not exist in online reality.

Magento for Mobile

– Mobility is one of the hottest business characteristics in today’s world. Every retailer would certainly like to keep their customers’ convenience very high on their wish-list, which in the case of mobility is quite high. Well with Magento, building mobile compatible web sites becomes very easy. With Magento, integration of features with responsive design is much easier as compared to integration of websites through other platforms.

– By utilizing the powerful customizable features of the platform, you can make sure that your customers are able to access your website through various mediums PC, Laptop, Smart Phone or a Tablet.

“According to some major stats, it was found that Magento as a platform is being used by approximately 26 percent of all the sites which are in the top 1 million categories.”

Flexibility

– The amount of flexibility that Magento offers you as an eCommerce platform is unparalleled to anything you can experience on any other platforms.

– The numerous extensions, as well as the heavily customizable features on the platform, can help you literally design your own “Magento”. What we mean by this is that the degree of customizability is so high on the platform that it can allow each and every business to create its very own unique brand or experience with relative ease.

Multi-Lingual, Multi-Stores and Multi-Website

– Magento is the online platform which provides you with a single admin dashboard from where you can manage multiple ecommerce stores, in multiple languages, as well as multiple websites, with convenience and ease. This can make you feel like a supreme being controlling the workings of numerous sections of the online world through a touch a few buttons,

– The backend system in Magneto empowers webmaster to make necessary changes in catalogue items, and make required updates across multiple eCommerce sites. It will help you to track inventory, billing, product updates, customer info, and many more from a single administration panel.

– The scenery from this central point of control is beautiful, especially because it can help you integrate and manage third party interactions with the multiple websites and the stores that you manage.

Scalability

– Magento can be used without the fear of having aspects like the traffic volume and quantity of content affecting the performance of the website.

– Magento can handle the change in traffic volume in your website with ease, allowing you to add features without taking the entire system completely offline during an overhaul.

Content Management System

– Magneto is the most flexible and feature-rich of all the content management systems available in the market.

So, if you want to be in total control, managing multiple e-commerce stores, tracking their growth and development, and literally changing the online landscape in order to facilitate upgrades in their functionalities and features, you know where to go. Are you up for God Mode?

The internet has not just been a tool for easy communication in the modern world; it has become a place for businesses to thrive and grow. As the internet becomes available to more and more people, and they learn about the things that can be done with it, the competition gets tougher. There are millions and billions of websites out there, and you need to get people to visit yours out of this vast sea of content. Well, does not seem like a simple task does it?

Why work on Landing Page Optimization?

Your landing page is the first impression that the audience receives your website. This means that the prospect of the visitors exploring further reaches of your website is almost entirely dependent on the way the landing page is structured, designed and tailored. It is like judging a novel, where, the cover page is your landing page.

How can you optimize your Landing Page?

There is a process called Landing Page Conversion Optimization Process a.k.a. LPCO Process, which acts as a guide to improve the conversion rates of your website.

Conversions

Requirements:

Before you actually begin to sit down and design the landing page, you must have a detailed draft of what exactly you need on the web page.

So, how can create this draft?

The draft should give a clear idea of your business goals as well as the user’s goals. For this, you first need to have clarity as to who your target audience is. Once the target audience is defined, you can add to the plan by asking questions like, “What is the target user looking for?”, “What will appeal to the target user?”, “Will the target user understand it?” and so on.

“When a man walks into a room, he brings his whole life with him. He has a million reasons for being anywhere. Just ask him.” – Don Draper, Mad Men.

2)Design:

Once you have the matter written down, then the next step is to design it in the most appealing manner.

In the fast-paced world, remember the principle of “Less is more” while designing the layout.

So, there are certain specifics that you need to put in the layout, which include the following:

Reasonable Header: The keyword here is reasonable, so do not overcrowd the top of your page with loud designs and content. Try and reserve not more than a quarter of your page for the header.
Headline: Everything you are in five words or less.
Subheader: An elaboration of the above in eight words or less.
Image: People believe what they see, and besides, images attract attention.
Call –to action: This is essential as it tells the target user what he/she needs to do to have a fuller experience of the website.
Trustmarks: These include reviews, testimonials and space for suggestions and discussions, in order to create a bond of trust and understanding with the user.
List of Key Points: Quick summary of everything without stalling too much on the intricate details.
Social Proof: things like social media post, the number of shares, case studies and reviews from other users so that visitors to your site know that you are doing something socially intriguing.
Reasonable Footer: Same as the header

3) Implementation:

Once you are done with visualizing and mapping down the above two points, you have essentially created the design of your page. This design now needs to be implemented in the online space, whereby you use the backend tools and processes to make your design come to life the exact way that you had visualized it.

4) Verification:

You need to verify the design that you implemented to make sure that everything is functioning smoothly. Go to the landing page, take the conversion – not just as yourself – but channelize and recreate the persona of several target user types, so that you see and utilize your design from their perspective. Create custom reports to analyze the success or failure of the new design.

5) Maintenance:

Based on the verification results, changes need to be made to optimize the webpage in the best possible manner, utilizing the best options from the point of view of your target audience.

Even with a successful implementation and verification, your job is far from done. The Internet is a constantly changing environment and upgrades periodically. Your web-page needs to be in tandem with these updates so that you are not left out in the mix.

A dose of insight: according to psychological terms, the Reptilian Brain or the most primitive part of the brain is responsible for making the decision to click through to your landing page or any other part of the website. Hence, it pays to be as simplistic and direct as possible when designing necessary parts of your landing page.

Optimization

In order to optimize your page to the fast-paced world of your consumer, you may find these techniques to be quite helpful:

Pre-populate cursor: If the landing page has form fields, then one of the quickest ways to reduce frictions – facilitating a higher rate of conversions – is by pre-populating the cursor to the first field. This essentially involves the cursor blinking at exactly the place or blank that you need the visitor to fill or consider first. In this case, the cursor acts as a guide for the visitor when he/she comes onto the website. Seems simple, but actually, this slight change can cause a significant difference.
Eye Tracking: Eye Tracking tracks the movement of eyes of the visitor when he/she comes onto the landing page. Implementation of such technology and feedbacks on the same help you decide what is working, that is, what grabs more attention and what does not. This, in turn, will help in the improvement of the page by telling you what needs to be changed or improved.
Measurement:

This involves the testing and overall understanding of which aspects of the website work well and which do not. Some of the essential elements that can be tested and improved accordingly include the following:

Layouts
Language and wording
Heading length
Font and type size
Amount of copy on the page
Web Design

But these seem so minuscule and hard to measure, especially regarding how exactly this is affecting the conversion rate.

For this, you can use the A/B Test.

It is simple. You have to first create two versions of your landing page, A and B. One of the pages, say A, has the essential changes and improvements in the above-mentioned aspects, while the other page, B, does not.

Randomly, some visitors are redirected to page A and some to page B; the conversion rates from both can help decide which measurements are working for your page and which need to be discarded.

Conclusion:

LPCO shows vast scope for improvement for the majority of pages out there. Statistics speak that that landing page conversion varies by 2.4% for average pages, and by 5% for top-performing pages.

This just stands as a reminder that the degree to which you can exalt your website with regards to landing page optimization is limitless. You can be one of the first people to create optimization standards that have not been explored yet. So, what are you waiting for? Go, experiment!

Month: May 2016

Top 10 Things: eCommerce store owner should know about Magento