SMART Ecommerce Blog

You don’t have to be an artist to find an effective and appealing color scheme for your site. There are many tools available to help you ranging from a simple color wheel to online color scheme generators. One that we utilize for our own sites is an easy to use, feature rich, online tool called Color Scheme Designer 3. This tool can help you find a simple, visually appealing, color pallet along with a range of useful tones and a fitting contrast color (for making certain elements stand out).

There are a wide range of features included like the ability to quickly switch between standard color schemes like mono and complementary, find and change hex colors, view your colors on a…

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If it fits your ecommerce strategy you may consider having an End of Year or New Year’s Sale. This could be a final chance to boost revenue and clear out part of your inventory to make room for next year.

Below, you will find a few examples of sites that are advertising an End of Year Sale.

Land’s End® has a Winter’s End sale featured prominently in red on their home page.

landsend.com

Espirit® features a large 30% off New Years Sale ad on its home page. The sale runs from Dec 30th to January 4th, 2009 and includes a real-time countdown showing when the sale ends. This can be a great way to instill a sense of urgency in shoppers.

espritshop.com

Spiegel® features an After Christmas Sale…

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While having a Coupon Code field on your site seems like an obvious promotion there are times when it may become a barrier to conversion. Many savvy shoppers will leave your site in the middle of checkout and search elsewhere for a code. Some may abandon the sale because they feel like they are not getting the best possible value from your site.

I noticed recently that Macys.com has an interesting strategy for keeping shoppers on the site and confident they are getting the best deal possible.

Next to their promo code title ‘HAVE A PROMO CODE?’ there is a small link to ‘find one now’.

Once you click to find a code, you get a popup window with an extensive listing…

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Although tax planning should be a year-round process, a number of year-end considerations can reduce not only this year’s tax bill, but future tax bills as well. This is a great time to reflect on ways to improve our accounting tools and organization for next year. In addition to last minute write-offs, consider how other factors will affect your tax bill.

Take an End of Year Inventory

Every retail business has inventory. Inventory is important in determining your profit – and profit determines your tax bill. Although it is an expense to the business, inventory is not a deduction until it is sold. Until then, inventory doesn’t affect profits and is considered an asset.

The cost of the inventory that you have left…

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Returns and exchanges are typically viewed as a hassle for everyone—both customers and merchants, alike. While they can create an opportunity for you to show off your customer service skills, they can also create a potentially bad experience for shoppers. For merchants, they create more work to do, and in the worst cases, actually cost the company money in the form of lost shipping fees and lost wages paid to workers to handle a return or even exchange. However, returns and exchanges are inevitable. Your best bet is to make the customer’s lemons into lemonade.

Here are some tips to help minimize returns and exchanges during the busiest of seasons:

1. Head Them Off Early—You don’t want an order that will cost…

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Fire up Google® Analytics, folks. It’s time to make some money!

One of the best things about owning an online business is that the direct path to you is found via keywords. Every visit to your site leaves an important trail of visitors who drop important keywords along the way. When you type words on your site in the form of product descriptions or content, you will invariably rank for keyword terms or phrases that you weren’t expecting to. Even better, there are hidden opportunities in these keywords, both in expanded advertising efforts and product lines.

The first place to start is with your orders—the people who actually bought from you. If your shopping cart software (such as nsCommerceSpace™) tracks referrers, then…

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I was browsing orvis.com recently and found it to be a great holiday merchandising example. It displays many tips we have suggested in recent holiday articles such as:

1) Make it Easy to Find Gifts

Orvis® does a good job of categorizing their gifts, making them easily accessible and reminding you that they are the place to shop for the holidays with their ‘Ultimate Gift Finder’.

They also do a good job highlighting Gifts in the top navigation.

2) Highlight Gift Cards and Certificates as a Great Gift Option

Gift Cards are prominently displayed as an option in the header.

3) Reassure the Customer

In the bottom left column they remind potential customers that they will receive their gifts on time.

They also attempt to further increase holiday shopping confidence…

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This ecommerce website review will focus on BillyTheTree.com, an online specialty jeweler. We’ll focus on 5 points to help BillyTheTree.com increase conversion and average order value.

1. Increase Online Credibility
   • Increase the size of the phone number, and move it closer to the logo. Only the toll free number is needed. Be sure to include the words “toll free” next to the phone number, as sometimes customers don’t know it will be a free call. Also, try not to surround your phone number with too many words of the same color. It should stand out on every page (as well as stand out in the footer of your site).
   • Add more testimonials—everywhere possible: to the bottom of the product description, header, right navigation,…

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J. Crows Marketplace (http://www.jcrowsmarketplace.com) is one of our ecommerce clients that have volunteered for a site review. Listed below are key areas we would consider improving on the site.

Overall Design

Overall the design is simple and attractive. I like the crow and the old style look of the logo. I would prefer to see it more precisely centered in the header.

Due to its brightness my eyes seem to be more drawn to the background color than the rest of the site. A more subtle background color could help make the site stand out while not distracting the eye.

Consider using a few well placed graphics or adding a tagline for instant recognition of what this site is about and what is sells.…

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For many online retailers, the holiday season is the most productive time of the year. It is also a time for seasonal site updates, increased marketing and experimentation. We’ve compiled a list of ecommerce holiday ideas that can be tried and refined to benefit you for years to come.

Get Them in the Store

If we think of visiting a home page as similar to seeing a weekly ad or the outside of a retail store we realize we are still faced with the same challenge: getting them in the store to start shopping.

One effective strategy many big box retailers use year after year is offering loss leaders. A loss leader is a product sold at a significant discount (sometimes for little…

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