Following usability guidelines for your eCommerce site are obviously important. Design aspects of your website such as quick downloading, easy navigation and interaction with no ambiguity trigger sales, however selling to foreign markets requires extra consideration. An eCommerce site that only focuses on their target audience in one country cannot exploit the internet’s global reach [...]
Competitor analysis involves learning more about the businesses that function around the same target demographic as you enabling you to assess their strengths and weaknesses whilst identifying opportunities and threats to your own business.
Often businesses become obsessed with competitor analysis whilst others can ignore what their competitors are doing completely. A healthy medium would be [...]
On Monday 29th June, Justin and I spoke at the SuperMondays event held at Newcastle University about the eCommerce experiment to a crowd of approximately 40 people. Thanks to Ross Cooney for inviting us to take part.
We are lucky to already have a web developer on board for this project (me ), but if we didn’t have this experience in house, then we would need to look elsewhere. Choosing a web developer will depend quite heavily on your budget, expectations and the scale of your operation.
Once you know what your [...]
If you are building your own eCommerce site, then very early on, you will make a decision on the technology that will make the basis of your site.
Your first decision is to determine if you wish to develop your own system from scratch, or do you want to use readily available open source software and [...]
In order for our eCommerce site to run smoothly and have good load times, we need to start with a good infrastructure to work with.
We will be using our own hosting solution, which will be hosted in a Data Centre in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. The hosting infrastructure comprises of the following:
Mail Server: This [...]
Content management within an eCommerce site is often quite difficult to get right.
We have always used our own software for our ecommerce sites from the beginning. Since then the system has been added to and modified as and when required to add or improve functions on a very ad hoc basis. We had been planning various upgrades to the system in order to improve it’s functionality and [...]