It seems to me that we’ve reached a point where small businesses all over the UK are realising that if they don’t get online, they’re about to be left behind. They might survive on the high street for a while yet, but their competition is starting to sell online, and that slice of the pie is being munched at a scary rate!

I’ve written this article for anyone that wants to start selling online but doesn’t have a clue where to start, or how much to spend. Well, there’s a lot to it, but I’m here to help! To start us off, the big decision is at what level you want to dive in. When getting started in online sales (often called eCommerce), there are a range different levels, all with different costs, strengths and weaknesses. Let’s have a look through them all, and see what would suit you.

Existing eCommerce Marketplaces

The first level is using an existing marketplace, such as Amazon, eBay or Etsy. Generally these are really low-cost. Amazon, for example, doesn’t charge a regular fee for listing items on it’s shop – it just takes it’s cut when you make a sale. eBay does charge a monthly fee to have a listed shop, but you can also just list products for free as a normal user. If you’re serious about getting started in eCommerce though, you’ll want to pay the monthly fee (currently around £15) and create your branded presence.

This approach is the ecommerce equivalent to renting a market stall in a shopping centre.

One of the main benefits of this approach is that it’s a great way to test the demand for the products you’re planning to sell. There’s a really low cost to entry and you wont have to invest in a proper website, so if you discover that the competition is very fierce or the demand isn’t there then you haven’t wasted your money.

Next, using these platforms puts you right in front of the customer straight away. Imagine your market stall in that shopping centre – people come there anyway, and you can take advantage of all the customers just passing by.

Amazon sees millions of visitors every day, and eBay is the same. As soon as you list your product, it’s available to those customers, and they can find it just as easily as any other product on the system. You’re playing on Amazon and eBay’s popularity to sell your own products, and so it negates the need for marketing and promotion.

On the other hand, the downside of this is that you can easily be lost in the crowd. Many others will most likely be selling the same thing on both platforms. It’s a rare product indeed that you’re the exclusive supplier of. And prices are generally driven really low on Amazon and eBay, just because of the competition, so margins can be pretty low. Imagine that market stall again – you’re usually in with a whole load of other stalls. It’s hard to get noticed! Then again, if you match other supplier’s prices, or beat them, you can certainly attract customers to your stall, and easily test out your product range

A further disadvantage to using only these types of platforms is that you’re really not building your own platform for the future. That market stall is always temporary, it can move around, and it just doesn’t look as professional as the shops elsewhere in the shopping centre.

Because you’re piggy backing on Amazon, or others, you rely on them for sales. They could suddenly start to charge more, or they could shut off external suppliers altogether. It’s unlikely, but it could happen.  In the long term, you want to build your own property,  which loyal customers will keep coming back to. Amazon, eBay or Etsy do not provide this to any great extent.

Hosted eCommerce Platforms

The next level of online sales is the Hosted Shop. This is for those that want to set up their own eCommerce website, but, again, need a really low cost to entry.

The principle behind a hosted shop is this: one company sets up their own eCommerce website and uses that to host a very large network of shops. They take care of the technical side, the payments and the design, and you just rent space with them, managing only your own products and sales. One example of this type of company is Shopify.

Looking again at real-world equivalents, this is akin to you moving on up from your market stall and renting a real commercial space in that shopping centre, joining the ranks of the proper shops.

The big advantages of this approach are that these type of online shops are quick to set up, easy to configure and often quite cheap to run. That space you buy in the shopping centre will already be set up as a shop, so you can get in there quick!

The downside is that with this ease of entry, there comes a lot of standardization  You wont have much room to maneuver in a shopping centre, after all. The shop will be set up in a certain way and you wont be able to change it. So, no chance for customised approaches, or tailoring the shop to your products – you have to take the hosted shop’s tools and use them, as best you can.

Also, the design of your shop can sometimes be a little limited on these platforms. You’ll have the option of choosing from a range of existing templates, all of which will look great no doubt, but they’ll still be generic. They also could be used by other shops, so you certainly wont be unique. You can normally add your logo in, change the colour scheme, so you can definitely get your branding in there, but it wont be as flexible as a system you own yourself.

Some platforms will allow you to use your own designs, but this is will add a great deal to the cost and generally will still come with some restrictions. You’ll need to employ a designer to create the look and feel, and then a developer to code it up for inclusion on your site. By the time you do that, sometimes it’s best to move to the next level, your own eCommerce system.

And lastly, it’s a similar problem to the market stall, you don’t own it. If the hosting company that you work with goes out of business, then your site goes down with them. Shopping centres come and shopping centres go, to the detriment of the poor shops inside. Relying on someone else comes with a big potential cost.

On the other hand, there’s a lot to be said for letting someone else take care of the technical issues. You’ll never have to worry about crashes, down-time, upgrades, payment problems or anything else on a hosted eCommerce platform. That’ll all be taken care of for you, included in that monthly fee.

Building From the Ground Up

The final level is to go the whole hog and build your very own shop! Imagine graduating from that shopping centre, finding a nice piece of land and designing your very own place. The possibilities are endless… You can tailor the aisles to best display the exact products you sell. You can use a checkout system that perfectly suits your requirements, making it easier for people to buy, and so generating far more sales. You can design it down to the last nut to meet your needs, and keep changing it over time as your products, customers and systems change.

Now, in the online context, this in itself comes with a few different options, so I’ll go through them all in order of potential cost.

Employing A Default Existing eCommerce System

There are a lot of shopping cart system out there, starting with a raft of free products and moving up to very expensive, industrial grade software. It doesn’t take too much effort for a good developer to grab one of these systems and deploy an online shop that belongs solely to you. When I say not too much effort, we’re still talking installation, configuration, testing, deployment and a whole lot of small tasks in between, so you’re still talking about a chunk of time. And good developers don’t tend to come cheap.

The first level in owning your own shop is to use one of these systems off-the-shelf, with the default template. We use Opencart quite extensively at Wild Trails Media. It’s an Open Source piece of software, so is free to use, and comes with a decent default template which can have logos added to it quite easily. This means that with just a few day’s work we can have a working shop up and running and ready to make sales.

The downside to this is that the default template is a little uninspiring, and it certainly isn’t unique. And that’s generally the same no matter what shopping cart system you use. You’ll see default Opencart front pages, for example, all around the web if you look hard enough. What you can do, though, to get around this, is spend a small amount of money (from $20 to low $hundreds) and buy a professional shopping cart template.

There are a number of shopping cart template retailers around the web. A template is simply a design that someone has created for a shopping cart system like Opencart, but instead of selling it to just one person, they’ve saved it as a template and released it to the public. Some of these templates are really good, some are really bad, but it’s likely you’ll find something you like if you look around.

Again, these aren’t unique – there will be others using the same template – but you can add logos, images and colour changes to disguise it somewhat, and it’ll certainly be more inspiring and less common than the default system template.

Employing a Designer to Create a Custom Design

Next up is using one of the aforementioned shopping cart platforms, but employing a designer to create a completely unique look and feel to your shop.

This is where you start to look like a professional outfit (although, with a designer, you can make some of the hosted platforms mentioned above look just as good). You can fully integrate your branding, and you can create a completely custom layout that suits your product range and categories. You can appeal directly to your ideal customer and most likely make far more sales and encourage customers to return to your shop.

This adds a fair chunk to the cost of your store. To create a design for a website, a designer needs to really understand your brand, your aims and your company message. Then they need to work closely with the developer to make sure that the design ties in with the functionality required to make the site work. Then, once the design is complete, the developer needs to turn that design into a website. They essentially need to code up a completely custom template based on that design, and make it work with the shopping cart system you’re using. This all amounts to many days of work, and certainly into multiple weeks.

But, for the long term, this is the minimum viable option, and is the level that most smaller online shops will run at. If you’re a smaller retailer it’s likely that you’ll never have to go beyond this. You can run happily at this level, making small customisations as you go to suit your products, sales and style.

Even if you’re a big retailer, this level could be for you. Magento is one of the most powerful open source systems and it’s used by companies like Nike, Paul Smith and the North Face. Magento is a huge step up from the likes of Opencart though, and that power makes for a far more complicated build, and so a much higher cost.

The downsides at this level start with just that, the cost – you’re looking at thousands for a simple Opencart store, and tens of thousands for a more complicated build with the likes of Magento.

And secondly, you’re still tied into a way of operating by using an existing shopping cart system. It might be that with Opencart, for example, you don’t like the way it handles special offers, and you’d prefer that you could have a different special offer price for each size of shoe. Because you own the shop, however, you can get around this by employing a developer to make customisations. They can change the programming and create extensions which add extra functionality. Again, though, this comes at a cost…

A Fully Bespoke Online Shop

Now we’re at the top level of eCommerce, the level that Amazon and eBay themselves operate at, along with many of the retailing giants that we see on the high street.

This level is often reached when a company starts with an existing eCommerce platform, such as Opencart or Magento, and then finds that they’re customising it so heavily to fit their products and process that they might as well build themselves something from scratch.

Now, as you’d imagine, this is a very expensive business. Building a new application from scratch takes months of a full development team’s time. And testing and maintenance then goes on top of that. Can you imagine how many developers are working at Amazon right now maintaining, updating and refining their platform?

But, this is the only way that a big eCommerce company can have complete control over how their shopping cart works. And when you’re making millions every day, you need that control.

Conclusion

I hope this has given you a good insight into the eCommerce life-cycle. You can jump on the ladder at any level, but most companies start at the bottom and just start climbing. When profits start to grow in your Amazon store, you can justify the expense of setting up a shop on Shopify, or jumping right to a default Opencart shop. You can adapt as you go, changing your design, adding functionality, and soon you’ll find yourself at the top, with a completely custom eCommerce shop making thousands every day.

Well, that’s the dream anyway. And why not!

The post Choosing the Best eCommerce Platform For Your Business appeared first on Wild Trails Media.

First things’s first though, I can almost hear you from here: What on earth is a Chiasma…?

Going Further Back: Design in Action

Well, to start with, let’s explain Design in Action, the catalyst of the Chiasma. The Design in Action (DiA) project is primarily centred around the promotion of innovation through design. This process begins with the Chiasma. Chiasma events are based on the sandpit model developed by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

The EPSRC events are designed to be high level, long lasting, residential interactions between really diverse groups of researchers, practitioners and consumers. All of this is intended to promote radical and innovative thinking around a research problem.

What is a Chiasma?

Chiasmas are condensed versions of the sandpit model, running for 2 or 3 days rather than 5, and intended to achieve the same goal – the promotion of innovative solutions to pre-set problems. Small businesses are invited to attend a specifically themed event, for example ‘Wellbeing’, and form teams with other business owners and designers. These teams work together over three days to formulate ideas and solutions to a problem in the sector, resulting in a new product or service which will then be developed in collaboration.

It’s the combination of both business experience and design expertise that sets Chiasmas apart from similar events in the past. We’re hoping that combo will produce disruptive thinking in all of the sectors involved.

So, What about the Competition?

Other live collaborative problem solving events do exist. One brand of events which provides a really useful comparison for our project is the famous Startup Weekend.

Startup Weekend has a very similar goal in that new products or services are created over one weekend by newly formed teams of individuals, all with different and complimenting skills. Freedom and creativity are encouraged, and a winning concept is judged at the end of the event, in a similar manner to the Chiasma events.

What Does This Have to Do With the Web?

So, why is this crossing over with my web design work, and why should you care? Well, I think it’s a really good confirmation on why it’s worth involving designers and developers in your business development process. I talk to small business owners every day about developing their business – how to create new products, new services, all in a digital context – and the Chiasmas are confirming to me how valuable it is to get people from different backgrounds together to encourage innovation.

If you’re looking to grow your business, develop a new product or create a new service, give us a shout. The combined design knowledge, development expertise and external viewpoint of our team, joined with your expert industry knowledge, can create a really powerful catalyst for innovation. It can get you started on a new path, or give you a new viewpoint on an old one.

Going by the great results we’ve seen at the Chiasmas, it’s well worth a try. Drop us a line!

Image Credit: GangplankHQ on Flickr

The post Chiasma Events: What Are They & How Do They Kick-Start Innovation? appeared first on Wild Trails Media.

There are a large range of shopping cart systems out there, and while some have their limitations, there are a number of great options to choose from. Let’s have a look at the options and see what benefits ecommerce could bring to your business.

Developing Ecommerce With Opencart

Opencart Development – Lawn For You Ltd.

At Wild Trails Media, Opencart is our go-to ecommerce platform for any small business. Opencart is an established open-source shopping cart platform used on thousands of shops around the web. Opencart has a lot of advantages, not least of which is it’s adaptability. Opencart is designed to be… you guessed it… open! Templates are easy to create in Opencart, allowing us to skin the platform to fit your branding. You can get an Opencart shop looking just how you want, and keep adapting it in future to meet your customer’s needs.

Underlying our Opencart Development is our reliable Opencart Hosting. Our hosting is optimised to support your Opencart shop and allows us to enable the growth of your online business. Opencart hosting is available to any of our Opencart development clients.

Adapting the Opencart Ecommerce Platform to Fit Your Business

Opencart is not only adaptable in looks, it’s also really flexible in functionality. No matter what complications your products pose, we can adapt Opencart to fit. A recent project of ours involved developing a shop section to deal in Articificial Grass. This is a pretty tricky little product as it comes in 2m widths, but sells by the square metre. But, due to Opencart’s adaptability, we could shape the product pages to make it really clear how the purchasing process works, and make it obvious what the customer was ordering.

Managing Your Online Shop

Opencart SEO – Pampeano Leather Goods

Opencart also has a great range of management tools, and the room to create many more. If you want to feed products straight to your Amazon or eBay store, then we can do that. If you want to track customers through the checkout and contact those that bail out before purchasing, we can do that too. Opencart offers a ton of flexibility in how your shop works, making it easy for us to create a really effective online sales machine for your business.

Find an Ecommerce Option to Fit Your Budget

A basic Opencart shop will meet the needs of a many small businesses. You can stick with a minimally customised template (a template determines how your shop looks) and keep the costs down. This will include your logo, your colour scheme, but stick with the default Opencart layout. And, often, this will do the trick.

Or, you can go with a more customised template which raises your shop to the next level of professionalism and allows it to stand out from the crowd. This obviously raises the budget a little, but for any small business serious about their growth, it’s well worth it.

The next level includes product page customisation, and advanced admin and management tools. These turn your basic shop into something far more professional, suited to your product range and set to manage a large number of orders and sustain growth in the longer term.

Opencart SEO and Digital Marketing

The top level of Opencart development that we offer is a full marketing customisation. This is where we look at your shop, your categories, your products and implement corresponding Opencart SEO so that it has the best chance of achieve top search rankings. Search engine optimisation (SEO) is key to a successful shop, and includes a large amount of what we call on-site optimisation. This involves playing with your site structure, navigation, sales copy, page layout and much more, to make sure that your products are seen by the largest amount of people possible.

There’s more to search engine marketing and SEO than that, including an endless range of off-site techniques, but we can talk to you about that at any point once your Opencart site’s set up.

Talk to Us: Developing Your Own Opencart Shop

We’re always happy to talk to small businesses about what would suit them best in the world of ecommerce. If you want to get yourself set up to sell online get in touch – there are endless possibilities and we’d be glad to talk through them all. Whether it’s Opencart Development, Opencart SEO or you just want to chat about Opencart hosting, drop us a line.

I hope you found this helpful and you feel inspired to start selling online. If so, good luck out there and have fun!

The post Opencart Development: Adopt an Adaptable Ecommerce Platform appeared first on Wild Trails Media.

The Beer Vault – eCommerce & Branding

This project involved branding, ecommerce development and a great deal of internet marketing consultation and development continues right now. The Beer Vault should be released to the public very soon.

The post eCommerce, Branding and Internet Marketing – The Beer Vault appeared first on Wild Trails Media.

The Podcast Host – Content & Media Management

We were tasked with designing a new Podcast Hosting platform which used cutting edge technology – the WordPress platform – and the main aim was ease of use and transparency. Support materials were developed and we’re pleased to say that they are getting excellent feedback, helping beginner podcasters make their first foray into web broadcasting.

The post Content & Media Management – The Podcast Host appeared first on Wild Trails Media.

Managing Together – eLearning, Design

The post eLearning & Design – Managing Together Training Suite appeared first on Wild Trails Media.

QRDP – Content Management, WordPress Templating

The post Queens Road Dental Practice – Content Management, WordPress Templating appeared first on Wild Trails Media.

Someone had told me that they had bought various domains for their business which did nothing more than redirect to their website, so if a popular search term was ‘blue widgets’ then bluewidgets.com could be a good site to get hold of. I wondered if 1) you think this sort of thing is any good and 2) if worth a little investigation what are popular searches and then 3) that are cheap!

The answer to this depends on quite a few factors, but it’s a good one to talk about because it’s a common misconception. Let’s look at the different aspects.

There are only three possible benefits of having a domain redirect to your website.

Direct Domain Type-Ins

The first is if someone just randomly types in the domain, thinking it might take them to a relevant site. So, they type in bluewidgets.com, not even knowing what site occupies that domain, but wanting to take the chance on finding a great blue widget site. If this happens, of course, you might get a visitor.

But, that’s not likely to happen often, and it’ll certainly only happen with very short keyphrases, such as bluewidgets.com.

Redirecting Link Juice to a New Domain

The second benefit is that you gain some of any link authority that is currently pointing to that domain. So, any links that currently point to bluewidgets.com, now suddenly point to your domain, in a slightly roundabout way. You wont get as much benefit as a direct link, due to that roundabout route, but you will gain some link juice.

Redirecting Traffic From One Domain to Another

The third, and probably greatest benefit, is that you gain any traffic that is currently coming through the links we mentioned above. If there are a lot of links pointing to the domain you plan to buy, and they’re on decent sites, then there’s likely to be reasonable traffic coming through them. Plus, it’s likely to be pretty relevant traffic if they’re clicking a link related to one of your main keywords, and so it’s traffic worth trying to capture. So, that’s definitely a bigger benefit, most likely, than any link juice you might gain.

New Domains Versus Established Domains For Redirects

So, essentially, buying brand new domains for this purpose is a waste of time. The 2nd and 3rd benefits depend on existing links, and that’s not likely to exist for a brand new domain. Unless you somehow stumble on a 1 or 2 word keyphrase .com that’s relevant to your site, then the first benefit is also very unlikely.

But, if we’re talking established domains, then there could be some benefit. If you find a domain relating to your keywords that’s a few years old, has decent authority and a good collection of backlinks, then it could be very valuable to you for all of the reasons above. Unforunately, this isn’t a brand new market and sellers know this. Domains are valued accordingly and a good one like this is likely to cost you a fair bit.

Buying Established Exact Match Domains

You can research domains like this on common domain sales sites like sedo.com and GoDaddy auctions. Sometimes you might pick one up for a good price, but it’ll take a fair bit of searching and research to find a good one for a good price. But, for a good domain, it could be worth it.

The Google Exact Match Domain Update

A complicating factor to this is that, very recently, Google implemented an update aimed directly at domains that exactly match keywords, so many of the search ranking benefits that exact match domains used to enjoy have disappeared now. The update was made live in September 2012 and it caused thousands of low quality exact match domains to drop out of the rankings for the phrase that their domain matched.

Again, this only affected low quality sites, so many authority sites still do very well, but it’s something to watch out for.

Buying an Full Website that Matches Your Keywords

Now, if you manage to find a domain that actually hosts an established website, that introduces other factors. Firstly, it could link to your own site, passing on a certain amount of link juice. The value of this depends on the authority of the purchased site, of course.

Next, the site could be used to pass on buyers, and quite targetted ones at that. People searching for Blue Widgets find that site, and then they’re referred to you to actually buy the product. You could also set up mini stores on these newly purchased sites, and actually sell blue widgets direct from there. This could be quite highly converting since the whole site is about Blue Widgets, can explain the benefits of them, and offers no nasty distractions. Your customers will be highly focussed on that product

Beward Low Quality Niche Sites

But, it’s worth watching out when looking at purchasing this type of site. There are plenty of low authority, waste of money sites of this type – and even more now that the Google Exact Match Domain update has killed quite a few previously profitable sites.

So, the benefits would depend on how established a site is, what that site’s authority is and what amount traffic it enjoys. If all 3 were of a reasonable level, then the site would definitely be worth owning, so it would be worth approaching the owner to see if they would sell, and for how much.

The Simple Rule

In the end, it turns out that the answer is pretty common sense. It’s worth buying good quality, established domains or websites, if they’re related to your keywords. And it’s not worth buying crappy, new domains or site. Who would have thought…?

I’d love to hear what you think about this, or whether you have experience in using purchased domains or sites for this purpose. Let me know in the comments below.

The post Is it Worth Buying Domains That Match My Keywords? | SEO Q&A appeared first on Wild Trails Media.

Following the site launch, however, our work with Pampeano wasn’t done. Jennifer called us back to run the digital marketing campaign for the website, with the aim of growing sales from organic search traffic.

Pampeano embarked on an ambitious digital marketing campaign, which has produced great results so far.

We work with Pampeano to implement a range of internet marketing and search engine optimisation techniques to increase the online visibility of the website. Pampeano currently enjoys very good rankings on a number of it’s core search phrases thanks primarily to great writing, great content and a highly effective digital marketing strategy.

Our off-site marketing approach is primarily to get the Pampeano name out there, creating great content and networking with others in the same industry, building great partnerships as we went. The site also benefited from a great deal of on-site optimisation, cutting down on duplicate content, improving category and item descriptions and making sure that the site was very easy to navigate, both for the user and the search engines.

Another key point in the Pampeano story is our extensive use of analytics and search data analysis. Pampeano already had a steady stream of traffic, and this data was invaluable for picking out products and categories to optimise. Add to that an extensive analysis of search trends in the sector and we were able to concentrate on keywords and products that Pampeano could really make their own in the search results.

If you’re interested in working with Wild Trails Media on your digital marketing campaign, get in touch today.

The post Pampeano – Digital Marketing Campaign appeared first on Wild Trails Media.

It’s a pretty isolated person who has managed to avoid the rise of social media in the past decade. Social networks have come and gone (Bebo who…?) but the concept is certainly not going away, and clear winners are emerging.

Every business can benefit from social networking, no matter what they do. Social networking is about engaging with customers, and customer engagement is rarely a bad thing.

Social networking allows you to meet your customers online and chat with them. It allows you to find out what they want, what they need, what problems they’re experiencing. It allows you to reach out to them, sending them offers or telling them about new products.

Most importantly, it allows you to grow an army of free supporters and promoters. Your happy customers will ‘like’ your material, and that will filter out to their friends. And marketing these days is about trust – what better way to build trust with new customers than via a referral from their friends.

This course will teach you how to use social media to your advantage. It will teach your how to grow a network. It will teach you how to keep that network happy and how to utilise it. It will teach you how to use social networking to get more people through your door, or clicking the buy button online.

Join today to take advantage of the social networking revolution.

The post Social Marketing: Using Social Networks to Win Customers appeared first on Wild Trails Media.