Monday 15 September 2014

10 Best Practices to Design a Better Mobile Checkout

The US market saw an 81% spike in mobile ecommerce sales in 2012, comprising a $25 billion market and the numbers keep growing with years. This rate has influenced retailers to fuel by creating seamless, user-friendly checkout processes that inspire trust and that make full use of all of the advantages the medium has to offer. 

This post compiles 10 best practices for mobile checkout and how it really helps both business as well as the customers.

1. One Cohesive Page with covered Essentials: A responsive mobile checkout process succeeds by reducing the fields to the bare essentials, condensing the entire process into one cohesive page.

2. Provide An Option To Check Out As A Guest: This should be one of the standard practices across media but sadly 24% of ecommerce websites don’t. By removing the “Register” button a user is more likely to complete an order.

3. Mobile UI Elements: Instead of a user being prompted to select quantities using a typical drop-down menu, a responsive design prompts to update quantities using increment selectors- a speedy way.

4. Content Shouldn’t Be a Distraction:  A content-rich checkout page might seem like a good idea but they aren’t. But then, never neglect content part for answering about shipping guidelines, delivery, terms and conditions and more.

5. Watch the Loading Speed: Your mobile website needs to be light weighted and not to take more than five seconds to load.

6. Progress Bars Alleviate Anxiety: Although many implementations leave much to be desired the majority of major e-tailors show a progress bar until they are done.

7. Security Reassurances- A Biggest Reservation: Designers needn’t be subtle when it comes to security. Using iconography, SSL certificates and dedicated callouts in copy resolves this.

8. Checkout via Payment Gateways: Rather than fumbling through checkout forms, use a trusted service such as Google Wallet, PayPal and Amazon to get users two taps away from completing their payment.

9. Use Geolocation and One-Touch Calling: Through these, Google will automatically retrieve the nearest location and provide directions to make an in-store purchase successfully.

10. Don’t Neglect Mobile Testing: Though it is difficult and time-intensive, this would make sense to choose between a native app/website, cross-browser experience, and a native aesthetic.

The promise of mCommerce is assured but only with retailers offering a clear, focused, streamlined and lightweight path to making their purchase.

Friday 12 September 2014

How Bold Enough Are You When Branding Your Website?


This question sometimes shakes everybody. Website design is daunting as it requires a lot of efforts to stand apart from others. How much ever hard you try, there is one thing that could possibly be missing from a website crafted by a developer? - Your brand.

When it comes to your branding, only you will be evident throughout the pages on your site? Compiled here are some undeniable truths about branding your website:

LOGO + WEBDESIGN = IDENTIFYING MARK

While it is obvious that your logo is the face of your company, it should never be the sole identifying factor. Even before an audience has been properly conditioned a logo will do its job immediately. Your audience need to catch hold of your brand the moment they arrive on your home page, starting from the colors used to the content you share. Plan your website design around that brand strategy.

The Question Of The Hour Is: will your visitors know what you selling, how you selling it, more importantly, why you sell it?

Static Websites Never Grow

When designing a website, make sure it turns out to be a dynamic one with a great content that tells your brand story. Stories need to be posted occasionally in the form of frequent blog posts, landing pages for lead generation, and even videos and images that share your products and company culture.

Aside from content gearing up the interest of your buyers and solidify your brand message it also helps you with search engine rankings.

First Impression Happens Only Once and You Need to Win That

Potential customers will determine the worth of you website in their first impressions itself. Believe it or not, 80% of US consumers have admitted to leave the shopping cart if doesn’t load in 5 seconds. Elegant design can get these standards across to your buyers to see if your company’s purpose and value fulfilled immediately.

If you’re not sure of your brand standards, take website design and development slowly and be meticulous. “Your Each Word Can Spell The Magic Of Your Brand Story”

Wednesday 10 September 2014

What Type of PHP Application Is Good For Your Enterprise


Mostly, businesses and developers of the most successful applications and services use a rigorous performance testing and optimization process to choose the right instance type(s) for their application.

It’s nowhere a surprise if you have already heard PHP is one of the hotly pursued platforms out there. Those software development enterprises who haven’t adopted it yet are grappling with the temptation of introducing this technology.

Different Types of PHP Applications and What Suits you the Best

PHP facilitates creating a myriad of software applications perched in an ideal zone of top-notch quality and complete control.

The Desktop Applications

Having been in the loop from times immemorial now, these windows-based applications help in more user-friendly operation of the computers and enable the users to perform certain tasks on their systems with more ease and speed. These applications are mostly free of cost, and it’s not hard to locate them on the Internet.

Web Based Applications

Creating web applications that do not let the issues of compatibility crop up and render your efforts fruitless is a speculative. PHP development is supported by several browsers and operating systems and for the record the various libraries and scripts let the applications personified by quality and responsiveness. Hire a reliable PHP Developers to help you achieve this.
 
Java Applets in PHP Scripts

So far in the popularity of applets, it has enhanced by PHP scripts ensuring to add a lot of dimension to the interactive-levels of a web page. There are a few applets so immaculately developed that nothing enters their frame that is not designed to be there. There are even the small program bits rather known as Java byte code can be deployed to the end user without any fuss at all.
 

PHP-Based Mobile Application

Zend recommends using HTML5 and JavaScript as your primary mobile technology. People expect mobile apps to be updated all the time and agile development aids to be very scalable. As a matter of fact, organizations need to take that trend into consideration as they develop mobile apps.

Running business-critical PHP applications in the cloud is trending but need to efficiently deploy and manage them.

Tuesday 9 September 2014

What Brings Responsive Design to a Great Investment Factor?


There has been an explosion in the use of responsive web design when developing any website that use one base of code and one base of content that are optimized for the devices they are displayed on. In this age of burgeoning smartphones and tablets, the value of this technique is increasing in proportion adapting to changing user behavior. Let’s have a few reasons compiled here to why a online business lead should invest in responsive design?

Google Recommends

Google owns more than 70 percent of the search engine market share and they are telling us that responsive Web design is the industry’s best practice. Not only that it allows search engines to crawl faster and easier but also to indexes multiple versions of the same website.

The Most Cost Effective Option

Regardless of the device you can contact your designer/developer to fix any issue across all platforms. Can you ever imagine another method to ensure a website that works beautifully across multiple device platforms with less maintenance costs?

Good for SEO Efforts And Social Sharing

Not only that it is cost effective but the combination of all traffic into one domain results in one site with larger traffic. This increases search engine appeal which theoretically improves its ranking to be applied across all versions of your site in one unified process.

Easy To Focus Target Audience
As a matter of fact, every website is developed for some targeted group. Adopting to responsive website design and UX remains paramount which means a visitor surfing from their laptop, tablet, and mobile will have the same great feeling every time. Incompetent user experience!

CMS Platforms Support

Millions of websites are hosted on Content Management System like Joomla, Drupal or Wordpress which you might be already aware of. And, these CMSs have extended their support to responsive factor as mobile computing is going to be the integral part of Consumer level UX.

In a nutshell, Responsive is the future…and present of Web Design.

Friday 5 September 2014

The 3 Newest Drupal Modules That Every Business Should Give a Try


Drupal- one of the best content management systems has a lot of really cool modules to develop stellar sites for clients, worldwide. It has been a core competency among popular web development companies, USA and remains a cornerstone of development, design and consulting efforts to this day. Guaranteed for security, scalability, modularity and, most notably, rich features, it helps you built high-performance site far beyond your expectation.

In this post, we've compiled this list of three newest modules that we have found particularly helpful, and to help ensure that they don't fall through the cracks.



3 New Drupal Modules That You Must Use

Vimeo Video Uploader:

This is the best module in case you website requires to host videos. Known for its stand-alone capability, this module integrates with your site so easily. While it lets you upload videos from your site to Vimeo, it makes your video publish the workflow a little bit smoother.

 
Slick Carousel:

A simple, lightweight module yet very powerful- this is what we say when talking about carousel. Known for it’s fully responsive and swipe enabled features it lets you save some development work. Slick Carousel works with or without Views integration!

 
Role Export:

This module has been around for a few of years now. In a nutshell, Role Export allows roles to have a machine name which can be used to generate a unique role id. When working with different developers in a project, this is handy during development. Plus, it let you have a unique id different from other developers to ensure effectiveness. With it, there is no way for conflicts when multiple developers export role configuration.
  
If you need experts at anything Drupal, hire only those who can work with you to shape the right engagement model, delivery method and custom solution to meet your unique needs besides providing an open communication line, anytime.

Thursday 4 September 2014

70% Customers Of Online Shoppers Walk-Off Without Buying- Guess Why?

A recent study say, one of the biggest reasons why shoppers leave an online store without buying isn’t because of price. Perhaps, you don’t get what they really want. It is not one or two but many features that assure a GENUINE seal.

Where Do We Start?

It is said increasing sales and conversions means increasing traffic volumes, which fails in this digital era. Getting visitors to your online store is really only the first step in the conversion process.

The more you evaluate and optimize your entire shopping experience before implementing and optimizing promotions, starting from server performance to site design to product descriptions to checkout can have a tremendous impact on conversion rates.

Help Your Customers Find What They’re Looking For

Two easy ways to help your customers find the right products:

Search: one of the best ways you can increase your conversion rate is improving your product search. Your search bar should be large enough so that it’s easily visible.

Faceted Search: This help customer narrow their searches according to various products attributes, including category, size, color, etc

Merchandise and Sell That Product

There are three simply steps to achieve this

• Using quality images featuring zooming, detail views, and even video to give customers numerous ways to view the product

• Canned or pre-written product descriptions.

• Tailor product descriptions to your specific target audience.

Never Underestimate a Fast Loading Site

Shopping experience goes for nothing because of pages that are slow to load. It’s found nearly 25% of online shoppers abandon a page after 2 to 6 seconds of wait time.

• Enable caching (including query and full-page caching)

• Clean up any inactive CMS pages and remove out-of date promotions and products

• Limit the number of concurrent promotions, and disable any functionality if kept unused

Ensure Mobile Friendliness

If your customers are waiting for image-heavy pages to load or struggling to view pages optimized for desktop or laptop screens, count that person is no more your fan. Images should be optimized for mobile so that they load quickly

• One way to optimize your site for mobile is to automatically detect mobile browsers and display a mobile-optimized version of your site.

• Another solution is to create a separate mobile app for your store that helps customers locate products more quickly, without affecting the speedy payment and checkout.

Want to maximise your success? Magento Enterprise Edition gives you the tools you need to take complete control of your online channel.

Why Say Future Lies in Mobile Commerce: 5 Intense Reasons

Both online and offline retailers are shifting their businesses from native web to mobile web. A recent studies say 85.9 million Americans aged 18 or elder shop online from a mobile web browser or an application running on android, iOS or other operating systems. Guess what? Mobile payments totalled $235.4 billion worldwide last year alone. This isn’t.

Here are a few awakening pointers that would assure a safe run with your Mobile Ecommerce business in the future.

Small and Mid-Size Retailers Can Make Higher Traffic

Apple had almost covered 30 million mobile visitors so far and the number keeps going up. Doing some kind of mobile optimization of your websites makes sense that as mobile grow retailers too grow.

Economic Assurance In Future

Be it for branding or marketing for the future, it should directly help you in business development, eventually increasing profitability. A handy device can do that well but aware not to get lost in designing plans that are blind to the current reality. It requires thorough research.

Trending Future’s TV

Currently, mobile has become the TV, laptop and media to several millions will surely reach greater heights in coming years. The end result is using of automated content recognition, TV ad detection applications, TV messaging or similar other latest technology.

Stay Ahead Of Your Competitors

Mobilizing your sites before your competitors will attract your customers and help you stay ahead of them. Those websites taking long time to load eventually leads customers to neglect the idea of making a purchase. A few includes: banking, ecommerce, car and electronics manufacturers.

Discounts and coupons

This is one of the smartest ways to pulling in more customers. Now that people come to know these discounts on email/ TV ad, it won’t be taking too long to reach the mobile website panels. A new discount coupon mobile apps or a pick and pay concept are also chances to integrate mobile sites with some kind of mobile special offers or coupon third party aggregators.

Summing up, if you are best aware of how consumers are engaging in mobile shopping DON’T WAIT. Make a steadfast move and design according to their strategies.