Dec04

Ecommerce vs The High Street – A Few Statistics

In my inbox today I received an email from a North East business news website called bdaily.info. It has some rather staggering facts on ecommerce that I thought I would share with you all, as it certainly makes for an interesting read.

Last Christmas over 42% of consumers from the North East chose to do half or more of their shopping online.

Fast forward to December 2008 and online shopping looks to be hitting record levels all over the country and the world. On Monday 1st December industry analysts estimated that a whopping 4.6 million online shopping transactions were made. With customers spending roughly £300 million on the 1st this averages to just under £65 per transaction.

Retail Decisions, a card transaction firm, have predicted that the busiest minute for online shopping will be 1.21pm on December 8th – with over £980,000 predicted to be spent by consumers in this minute.  How they have estimated the figure I have no idea but it is certainly impressive!

Now forgive me for mentioning the ‘crunch’ as I’m sure we’ve all heard and talked enough about it, however its comforting for retailers who have invested in ecommerce to know that the market is certainly bucking the current decline in high street spending where consumers are choosing to keep their hard earned money firmly in their pockets.

Of course the ecommerce boom must certainly be adding to the decline to high street sales, which recently showed a 3.5% fall during the last week of November compared to same time period a year ago.

These figures show in the past couple of years there has been a huge cultural shift in the way consumers purchase goods. Retailers without ecommerce stores would be wise to take note of the current state of the music industry, which failed to adapt quickly enough to the evolving buying habits of their customers and are suffering the consequences for it now.

Posted in Ecommerce
Tagged Comment 1
Nov26

Could the end of IE6 finally be in sight?

If you design standards compliant websites on a daily basis then you probably have first hand experience of just how ugly Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) can be. There have been many discussions in various blogs suggesting that it is our responsibility as web developers to stop supporting IE6 to encourage users to upgrade. As you can imagine this philosophy tends to be far more popular with designers and developers than it is with clients, many of who still use IE6 themselves.

As we move into 2009 I decided to do a little research, and looked at 3 of our most popular clients sites to see what the actual browser share was looking like.

End Clothing

These guys are one of the top men’s fashion websites in the UK. Definitely worth a look if you’re looking for some trendy new threads this Christmas!

Overall browser share:

As you can see Internet Explorer counts for 62.34% of End’s traffic. That’s pretty much what I’d expect but let’s take a look at the breakdown of IE by version.

Internet Explorer breakdown:

IE6 accounts for only 25.29% of IE6 users. Very encouraging! That means that approximately 15.5% of all of End Clothing’s users are on Internet Explorer 6.

Visit End Clothing at www.endclothing.co.uk

Magicbox

Magicbox are one of the UK’s leading suppliers of magic tricks, books and DVD’s to professional magicians and the amatuer market.

Overall browser share:

Magicbox have a slightly higher share of Internet Explorer users – 70.71%.

Internet Explorer breakdown:

For Magicbox the story is very similar, with 24.07% of all Internet Explorer users on version 6. This puts the total for the site at around 17.5%.

Visit Magicbox’s website at www.magicbox.uk.com

ICP

ICP are a division of Wordsworth Technology, and are one of the UK’s leading suppliers of industrial and embedded Mini-ITX motherboards.

Overall browser share:

For ICP we only have a 46.06% share for Internet Explorer. This is probably due to ICP being in the technology business, which typically has a much higher share of Firefox users.

Internet Explorer breakdown:

Out of those 46% of IE users we have 26.94 on IE6 – a very similar story to the other two sites. However for ICP their overall share of IE6 users is very insignifigant – only 13.75%.

Visit ICP’s website at www.icp-epia.co.uk

Conclusion

This has been a very interesting little exercise. It puts the share of IE6 users on all 3 sites at around 15% on average. It actually reminds me of a conversation I had a couple of years ago with a client regarding Firefox. They were dismissive of the browser because (at the time) it had around a 10-15% market share. However the same client seems far less dismissive of IE6, still seeing it as the most important web browser to optimise for. Yes, you read that correctly, they feel that IE6 is the most important web browser. I have even had another client recently quote to me that 80% of web users are using IE6. It just goes to show!

Looking forward to 2009 I would expect these figures to drop even further. Internet Explorer 8 is released early next year, and the flood of new computers being purchased at Christmas (all coming complete with IE7) should put a bit of a dent in those IE6 numbers. It makes me feel much more comfortable about winding down support for IE6, and hopefully next year we can stop pulling our hair out trying to support a hideously outdated web browser!

Posted in Web Standards
Comments 2
Nov18

10 Things We Love About Magento

With over half a million downloads in less than a year since its official release, the new Magento ecommerce platform is certainly taking the open source world by storm. I thought now might be a good time to go into the features we love most about Magento…so here they are – 10 things we love about Magento!

Multi-Site Functionality

A surprising number of our clients have more than one website. Often they are similar products targeted at different groups of customers, or related niche products that would sell better from a more specialised online store. The ability to run multiple sites from the same back-end, and to be able to manage orders and customers from the same place really makes life easier. Magento also allows you to generate reports based on individual sites, or the business as a whole, which I’m sure you’ll agree is very useful indeed!

Layered Navigation

Now that we have a few Magento projects under our belt I am starting to wonder what on earth we did before we had this very cool feature. It really streamlines navigation and improves the user experience. The ability to drill down through a product range using a series of useful attributes really makes browsing a site, especially one with a large product range, far more intuitive. Once you have a feature like this on your ecommerce website, you too will find yourself wondering how you ever lived without it!

Re-Ordering Based on a Previous Order

It may not be a huge feature, but I always feel it’s the little things that make life better. Call me sad, but being able to login to your account, find a previous order, and re-order it at the click of a button really gets me going! A huge part of ecommerce – and one that is often overlooked – is making life easier for repeat customers to keep them coming back time and time again. And this is one area where Magento flourishes!

One Page Checkout

I am always sceptical when I see “one page checkout” in the feature list of an ecommerce platform. Usually it means they’ve simply taken their 5 page checkout, and built it into one page with some fancy AJAX effects. Well you know, it’s still a 5-stage checkout process even if it is all in one page. I had a similar attitude to Magento, until I played with it some more. When ordering as a repeat customer I noticed vast improvements in the flow of the checkout process. I also love how each stage is added to the side bar as you progress, so you always have a clear summary of the information you have already entered.

Order Management

When it comes to ecommerce platforms, order management tends to be what separates the men from the boys. You can have the coolest front-end features but if the back-end can’t stand up to the day-to-day operations of a busy ecommerce website, administrative tasks can become something of a headache. Magento’s order management capabilities are by no means perfect, but it is certainly on the right tracks. All orders can be edited, part-shipped, credit memo’s can be applied, items can be backordered, notes can be added to orders; and so on and so forth. Also, batch management of orders is a real time-saver. You can print invoices, packing slips and credit memos (or all of the above), cancel and hold orders in bulk with the click of a button. Oh, and did we mention the great support for telephone orders, which can be easily added to the Magento system. But by far my favourite feature in terms of order management has got to be the new orders RSS feed. No more clogging up your mailbox with all those “new order” emails. Just subscribe via RSS. Genius!

Google Integration

Google has become a way of life for most of us. And for ecommerce website owners, Google Adwords and Analytics are essential tools for effective marketing and monitoring of their sites performance. Magento integrates seamlessly with Analytics and Adwords (for conversion tracking), and also has the facility to generate Google Sitemaps to help search engines index your website more effectively. There’s also complete integration with Google Checkout, because we all know Pay Pal sucks (it supports that too, if your so inclined!).

Reports Gallore

Magento’s reporting is thorough to say the least. Sales reports include breakdowns of shipping, tax, refunds and coupons. There’s also shopping cart statistics (abandoned carts, etc), product stats, customer stats, and reports detailing product reviews and search terms. All reports can be customised by date, and as previously mentioned can be refined to include only one Magento website or all of them (assuming you are running multiple sites). You can also export your reports to a CSV file, for use in Microsoft Excel.

Live Currency Update

Most of the lower-end ecommerce platforms that feature multiple currencies require you to manually update the exchange rate. Especially in today’s economic climate, with exchange rates varying daily, this is quite an annoying thing to have to do. Not with Magento. It links directly into WebServiceX and updates exchange rates automatically. As I said before, it’s the little things…

Promotions and Special Offers

I was a little overwhelmed by this at first, and, to be honest, I still am! Magento offers a wide range of rules that allow you to create special offers and discounts specific to either products or cart totals. Want to offer a 10% discount, but only on a certain brand? No problem! Want to make it so that the user can only get the discount if they spend over £20? Not a problem at all! Want to only allow a certain customer group to use the discount code? It’s all here baby! Although the rules setup takes a little getting your head around, it’s incredibly powerful and offers an endless selection of promotional options to offer to your customers.

It’s Open Source

Last but by no means least, the fact that Magento is available freely as an open source product is breathtaking. OSCommerce has for years dominated the open source ecommerce market, spawning tens of thousands of identical online stores, each one as ugly as the last. I love the fact that Magento is a high quality open source product that wipes the floor with OSCommerce. But what I also like is the fact it’s not aimed at beginners. It’s enterprise level, and while I’m sure we will still get a stream of very similar Magento websites, all based on the default theme, hopefully their mark on the web won’t be anywhere near as ghastly as that of other open source ecommerce solutions. But for established ecommerce businesses looking to take their site to the next level, Magento is by far the best open source product on the market and definitely worthy of your attention!

Find out more about Limesharp’s Magento solutions.

Posted in Magento
Comments 9
Nov11

A sneaky look at WordPress 2.7

After reading about the new version of WordPress on Web Monkey, I couldn’t resist grabbing a copy of the beta release and taking a look for myself. Now, I’m always impressed with WordPress. It’s one of the few CMS platforms out there that I’d truly consider a joy to work with (MODx is the other). The thing I love the most about WordPress is the level of thought and attention to detail they put into usability. Where other content management systems would throw in feature after feature to try and pad out their feature lists to impress nerds among us, those guys at WordPress have always shown restraint and concentrated on doing what they do better than anyone else.

In the new version the team at WordPress Central have given the back end a complete overhaul. But amongst the super-cool use of AJAX, slick gradients and curved corner form fields, the new administration area screams of WordPress usability. It’s so simple and intuitive, after just a few minutes of poking around you’ll instantly have your bearings. Yet under the hood it has a level of flexibility we haven’t really seen in previous versions. You can customise the dashboard any way you want to adapt it to your own workflow and productivity. It really is quite magical!

The full release is scheduled for the end of this month, but in the meantime here are a couple of screen shots to keep you going till then!

Posted in Uncategorized
Comments 2
Sep17

Christmas Ecommerce Tips

With Christmas rapidly approaching in just over 3 months, it’s the perfect time to think about gearing your site up for the festive season.

It is well documented that in recent years consumers are choosing to shop online over the high street and this looks certain to carry on again this year.

Here are a few hints to get your site and customers in the festive mood:

  • It is good to start planning for the Christmas season by October at the latest as you will want to be able to cope with the higher demand. An average ecommerce site see’s a 30% order increase over the festive season.
  • With the current offer on to upgrade to Premium Hosting, now should be the time to do it. After all, you wouldn’t want your current server running at snails pace around what is arguably the busiest time of year for online retail.
  • Consumers traditionally shop quickly online and at Christmas even more so. They do not like to have to look for what they want any more than they like the site to run slow. Make it easy for them to find what they are looking for. It might be a good idea to create a Christmas gifts section and feature it prominently on your site.
  • In the mass panic leading up to Christmas it is inevitable that people will leave their purchasing to the very last minute. You should clearly show delivery times and emphasize the urgency. People are far more inclined to buy if they know exactly how long it will take for delivery. Also by showing what is in stock, and what isn’t, you are far more likely to generate those just considering buying into actual customers.
Posted in Tips and Advice
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