Create A Website

I have been posting a few bits and pieces about best practice building online stores recently, partly because I have built a huge number of stores the last few years.

I have always been a keen follower of marketingexperiments.com. They recently blogged on things to test to help reduce shopping cart abandonment rate:
What else can I test … to reduce shopping cart abandonment rate?
Here are some suggestions from the article (of course test) …

1. Offer alternative payment methods.
2. State your shipping prices or rules upfront.
3. Offer exclusive products online.
4. Put your nav bar to work for your cart.
5. Promote your promo codes.
6. Plug in a progress bar.
7. Brand your checkout process

Definitely read the article. There is more detail there. In fact their whole site as a whole is worth a look!

Via GrokDotCom: How to Improve a Product Page …

Ralph Wilson interviews Bryan Eisenberg on Product Pages. Using examples from Lands’ End and Amazon.com Bryan provides some very practical tips.

Worth a watch if you are involved with operating or building ecommerce sites.

It has been a while since I last posted. I have been building a few online stores lately and came across this article via osCommerce Watch (Questions to Answer for the Online Shopper) that I thought was worth sharing for anyone who owns or builds online stores:

The Shopping Cart: How to Answer the 5 Unanswered Customer Questions

Besides questions related to shipping costs they identify five questions that are commonly in the minds of online shoppers …

1. Do you offer alternate forms of payment (aside from credit card)?
2. Are you safe and secure?
3. Why are you asking for this information?
4. Do I have to set up an account to buy?
5. Do I get to review my order before we transact?

A good list and definitely worth reading the discussion in the comments too.

Note: if you are going to use the barcode class I mention check out the comments from Zech below. He found a bug

see below for the translation of the barcode

PHP Classes is always my first stop when looking for PHP code, no matter how advanced (or easy to be honest).

I have recently been working on a shopping cart system and implementing barcode generation, as well as allowing a barcode scanner be used as an input device to speed up aspects of order management and data entry.

There are a number of barcode generation classes at PHP Classes. Harish Chauhan’s Barcode Class has been very useful. His class supports a number of barcode standards and allows generation at various sizes. There is a simple form provided to allow generation of barcodes and demonstrate the features of the class.

I will update this when I have finished all the functionality.

The barcode scanner arrives in the morning!

Oh - and the barcode above says “www.createwebsite.info” in the code128 format.

UPDATE: here it is with the font uploaded for the text!