Create A Website » ecommerce

Reducing Shopping Cart Abandonment Rates

create a website — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 21:22:39 +0000

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) …

Offer alternative payment methods.
State your shipping prices or rules upfront.
Offer exclusive products online.
Put your nav bar to work for your cart.
Promote your promo codes.
Plug in a progress bar.
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!

Improving an Ecommerce Product Page

create a website — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 21:43:36 +0000

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.

Questions to Answer For Customers When You Build an Online Store

create a website — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 22:37:25 +0000

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 …

Do you offer alternate forms of payment (aside from credit card)?

Are you safe and secure?

Why are you asking for this information?

Do I have to set up an account to buy?

Do I get to review my order before we transact?

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

Generating Barcodes with PHP

create a website — Wed, 14 May 2008 08:10:27 +0000

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!