Web Shop Manager News

Jan

2012

Google Analytics Update: Where Does Tracking Go Anyways?

Here at Web Design Solutions our primary goal is to help you be successful in your online ventures. Whether this is through industry tips, superior customer service, or quality website management, your satisfaction is of the utmost importance. Recently we posted an article explaining the importance of a Google Analytics account, and some basic information to get yours up and running.

Have You Heard The News? Analytics Tracking, In The Header Is Better

One of the most crucial steps in properly using your Google Analytics account is adding your tracking code into the template section of your site. The format for this widget code is {{google_tracker id='UA-XXXXXX-X'}}, with the X's being replaced with your unique UA number. With Web Shop Manager this is extremely easy, as you only need to enter it once instead of on each and every page. Previously we had instructed you to enter the code towards the bottom of the text on the page, right before the </body> tag. A recent article on Google, however, informs us that the most effective place to put it is near the top of the JavaScript code, in the <head> section.

Further information on the topic can be found here, in the Google help article itself. If you find any of this hard to understand, or have any questions at all, please feel free to give us a call. We are always more than happy to assist you in any way we can!

Dec

2011

A New Website For The New Year?

The holidays are over and now existing and aspiring eCommerce business owners are thinking ‘what can I do to different in 2012?’ A new website can be just what is needed to take advantage of the booming eCommerce web sales. The US census bureau reported that in the 3rd quarter alone, e Commerce sales hit $48.2 billion dollars! A new web site design or a brand new website could be just what you need to get your part of the pie. With the economy on an upward trend and eCommerce showing greater growth than retail sales, new websites have an amazing chance of being profitable in 2012. What type of new website are you looking to launch this year? A New WebSite For The New Year

What Type Of New Website Do You Wanted Designed?

A new Automotive Website using a year make model look up can help customer find parts that they are looking for faster than ever. Do you have all of the product information for your new automotive website? No, not a problem! WSM can help populate your new website with millions of parts. A new website needs to be using the latest website search functions and all of WSM new websites are designed to offer the latest and greatest features out there. No matter what part of the automotive industry you are a part of, Off Road Websites, Truck or 4x4 eCommerce or Power sports & Motorsports e commerce WSM has a content management system that will easily work with your new website design!

Do you have an Action Sports eCommerce business that you want to expand with a new website? Specializing in skateboard ecommerce, WSM can create a new website that is edgy and appeals directly to your consumers. Skateboard websites are booming and surfboard sales are on the rise. Transworld surf reported that in just the first half of 2011 action sports sales had a 9.4% sales increase! Get your new website started by contacting us today!

Travel booking eCommerce websites have been using WSM for years! Everything from helicopter tour companies to Segway tours companies have been booking travel & tourism online with an amazing website from the WSM team. Looking to start a new travel website? You can easily promote your business using our blog feature , integrating with your social media sites & allowing customers to reserve directly online!

If you are looking to grow your restaurant or bar business next year, how about a new restaurant website? More and more people are looking to a venue’s website prior to committing to visit even if a they were referred by a friend! It is great if your company is being listed by companies such as Yelp! or Yellow Pages, but with no website to link it diminishes your brand image! A new website design can be built quickly and affordably by the WSM team just for you.

As you can see no matter what business you are in a new wed design can help promote sales and make you more successful in 2012! But how hard is it to get a new website up and running? So easy! Most of our new websites are built and live on the internet in only 60 days. After the new site is up and running you are in complete control of your site. If you can write a word document and attach it to an email, you have all the skills you need to control and maintain your new website. This is so amazing because this means that you do not need to pay anyone to make small edits to your website, add new products, or write a new news article.

While there are a lot of companies out there that can design you a new website, we have found that our customers are so happy with the speed that their new site is done and the amount of customer support that is available to them after their site goes live. See some Web Shop Manager reviews and learn how others felt about their new website design! Want to learn more about getting a new website? Contact us and someone will be in touch with you within hours.

Fill Out This Form To Take The Next Step

Nov

2011

PCI Compliant Hosting At An Affordable Price!

Web Shop Manager offers a cost effective solution capable of 100% PCI compliance to anyone looking to start up an online business. Most small business are left to figure out how to be PCI compliant on their own, but here are Web Shop Manager (WSM) we can guide you to operate a successful PCI compliant ecommerce store. Shopping online should be easy, fun and productive. When consumers have to worry about their personal information, it takes away the allure of shopping online. This the basic premise of why you should choose a ecommerce platform that is 100% PCI compliant.

What is PCI compliant hosting?

If you are running an online business it is crucial that you have your shopping cart PCI compliant to ensure that you are helping promote a safe and secure outlet for shoppers. When shoppers feel safe to check out online, the entire e-commerce industry benefits!

Payment Card Industry (PCI) mandates that any ecommerce transaction is completed over a PCI compliant server in addition to all credit card numbers being stored on a different server. Web Shop Manager works with Authorize.net and Sage payment gateways to allow credit card numbers to be store on a different server, making sure your ecommerce website is PCI compliant. Two of the major rules of being PCI compliant is that you 1) do not store CID numbers and 2) you do not store the full credit card number anywhere. WSM ensures that these rules are followed!

PCI online rules and principles are set in place to provide a standard of safety for online consumers. It is beneficial for the ecommerce community to follow and participate in the rules set forth by the governing body to help encourage shoppers to trust online PCI compliant shopping carts.

Easy PCI Compliance With Web Shop Manager!

With Web Shop Manager you not only get our established software that is PCI compliance ready, you also get the knowledge and support of our team that is well versed in how to be PCI compliant. We continue to strive to become experts in complianing with PCI online standards. So what exactly do you have to do to be PCI compliant with us? Make sure to get a free quote from our PCI compliant expert business development team. Once your site is hosted with us, all it takes is your unique Authorize.net or Sage account pin inputted into our system, and bam! you have an e-commerce store that is PCI compliant!

Need Help Checking If You Have A PCI Compliant Website? Complete This Form To Learn

Aug

2011

Product Descriptions' Effect on Marketing eCommerce Products

There is so much that can be done on the web to promote your eCommerce site and your online products, but often business owners will forget one of the easiest and most cost efficient product marketing tactics. So what is the simple way to sell more products on your website? Write original, keyword rich and unique product descriptions. Although the effect of these changes may not be as instant as putting up some pay-per-click ads, the effect is a proven, long term online product marketing solution.

Why Product Descriptions Are So Important For Online Sales

Product Descriptions Important For Online Sales If you are selling products from a manufacture then you probably have available to you the product description provided by them. It is tempting to populate your site the fast way, simply copy and paste the description into your product page. However, when you take a minute to think about it you will realize how many other online store owners are likely to follow this same path. This results in hundred if not thousands of online stores with the same product description. Google and the other search engines do not look favorably on those who use what they call ‘duplicate content’. Even if you are successfully gaining traffic to your site and obtaining inbound links, you will have a hard time getting your product pages to rank without original descriptions for a product.

Now getting ranked higher on the search engines is an obvious goal of re-writing some product descriptions, but do not forget about your customers. Writing informative, descriptive product descriptions and adding product videos will help your customers feel more confident about the product that you are selling. They will know that they are purchasing the correct product lowering your time spent on processing returns and answering questions on the phone. Saving time and making more money! Who’s in?

A Strategic Plan for Re-Writing SEO Rich Product Descriptions

First you need to decide what products you would like to focus on first. This decision can be based on a few factors: largest profits, highest in-store sales, easiest products to ship or any other metric that you would like to use to prioritize the list of products that you would like to start with. With Web Shop Manager you can simply add these products to a ‘hidden category’ to help you organize which products that you are working on. Take a snap shot of where these products currently are on the search engines rankings so that you can measure your efforts and results, if they are not on the first three pages you can simply mark them as ‘not ranked’. Strategic Plan for Re-Writing SEO Rich Product Descriptions

To help you draft content for these product descriptions, I would suggest answering these following questions for each product…

What are the benefits of this product?
What is the product made out of?
What options are available for the product?
How does the product work? Are any instructions needed to use the product?
Who should buy this product?

Now that you have answered these questions about your product, you should easily be able compose a small paragraph for your new product description! Within WSM you can either manually add the product descriptions to your products or you can import an entire file of new online product descriptions. Web Shop Manager will automatically update your Meta Description and Keywords based off of your new description saving you even more time. Learn more about WSM automatic product SEO.

Looking to start an online store with these new ideas for product descriptions? Request a Free Quote and one of our very knowledgeable Business Development experts will contact you.

Aug

2011

Products With Videos on Page Will Increase Sales

Adding Videos to Your Product Pages Is Easy & Effective

As eCommerce website developers, we often get asked the question, “What can I do to make my website stand out from the competition?”. While there are many ways that we can suggest for our clients to proceed in differentiating themselves, we often suggest that they add videos to their product pages because of its effectiveness and relative ease. However, we find that this advice rarely gets acted upon! My assumption is that many people think that adding a video to their product page is something very technical that they would not be able to do. Well, my goal of this blog post is to have you posting videos in your sleep.

What Can Product Videos Do For My eCommerce Sales?

Before I proceed with the explanation of HOW to add videos, I think I need to start with the WHY. Here at Web Design Solutions, we know that product videos will help your sales because we have seen it work for many of our clients and friends. But here are some cold hard facts if you don’t believe us…

Customers that viewed a video on a product page are 85% more likely to buy (Internet Retailer, March 2010)
YouTube second to Google as the largest Search Engine. Two million video’s are viewed per day (blog.shop.org, Jull 2011)
eCommerce giant, Zappos, reported a 6%-30% sales increase on products where videos were added (Reel SEO, August 2010)

Obtaining Videos for Your eCommerce Website

Now that you are officially convinced of the potential power of adding videos to your site, your next question is “Where do I get these videos?” There are a couple ways that you can precede, but the most important step is to set up your own You Tube channel so that you can organize your videos (both borrowed and original). To set this up, please visit this YouTube page.

Now the next step really depends on what types of products you sell. If you feature products from a manufacturer that already has videos created, then most of the work is done for you! Simply search You Tube for the product videos and add them to your Playlist, by clicking the +Playlist button under the video (you must be logged in to do this).

Learn more about adding Playlists and Videos to your Playlist. You will want to avoid using videos that are created by competitors because it may direct traffic to their site (not what you want). I would suggest using manufacture’s videos or creating videos yourself.

This is the other option for adding videos to your YouTube playlist, creating and upload videos yourself. This avenue is much more time consuming, but it holds a lot of SEO value for both your product pages and your YouTube account. If you sell your own unique products or the manufacturers of your products do not supply videos via YouTube, this is the way that you will have to go. There are many inexpensive HD video recorders that come complete with software, such as the Flip video camera, that you can use to simply shoot and upload to your YouTube account with no editing required (a couple takes may be necessary).

Embedding a Video to Your Product Page

However you choose to acquire videos to your YouTube account is up to you, but regardless the next steps is so easy you will wonder why you waited so long to add a video to your product page. Here is the step by steps to embedding a video on your WSM product page…

Find the video that you want to embed from your channel , click Share, then embed
Copy the code that was created for you. It will look something like this...
iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Yn99OnNhGfw" frameborder="0" width="560" height="349">iframe
Log into WSM and navigate to Catalog > Products. Search and find the product that you have a video for
Edit your product and scroll down the Extra Details section of the page
In the Title field type in ‘Videos’ in the Description field paste the code that you copied from YouTube
Click Save Changes!

You can now view your product on the front end of your site and see your Videos tab added. Here a customer can watch a video on that specific product without navigating away from your site!

Since metrics are so important in eCommerce, I would highly suggest testing videos on a few of your most popular products and monitoring the effect that adding a video has had. Once you have confirmed that videos have positively affected your product’s sales, then continue with adding videos to more and more products.

If you have any questions on adding videos to your products pages, please submit a Support Request and someone from our Customer Experience team will gladly provide more direction on this topic.