Your product descriptions, along with their essential partner-in-crime – killer images, are the heart and soul of your online store. Unique and compelling descriptions can help you sell more goodies, whilst dull and badly written ones can have potential customers heading for the hills (or rather a competitor!).

A product description fulfills two essential requirements for your online business:

1. it attracts relevant search traffic to your store, and
2. it encourages the visitor to buy the product from you.

To achieve the first objective, you need to include the keyword phrases that people use when searching online for products like yours. These could be very specific, like “red patent leather high heeled shoes size 8”, or the less focused “Christmas party shoes”. (Tip: the more detailed the search phrase they use, the closer they are to making that purchase). Use keywords in the product page title and the image title, and weave related words through your copy too.

Enticing a visitor to buy requires a more engaging approach. You need to create vibrant and “chatty” copy that relies more on creative writing. Don’t be lazy and just paste in the manufacturer’s description – there are likely to be other places your visitor can buy this item, and this is your only chance to convince them to buy from you!

In addition to the specific descriptors, like sizes, colours and materials, try to explain the value of buying this product, how it works, how you can use it and the problem it solves. You might want to try suggesting other products you sell that would go with it as part of the product description.

Sound daunting? Try this. Imagine how would you encourage someone to buy this item if you were talking to them face-to-face. Picture them as you write, and explain to them why they should buy this wonderful thing.

It’s also worth checking out how your competitors are writing product descriptions on their sites. Shoppers are constantly checking different websites for the best deals and you need to stand out.

When you’re done, read it over again and again for flow and any spelling or grammar errors before you launch it online – you don’t want to appear unprofessional. Try and get someone else to read through it too.

When you are selling to such a huge, distracted and time-pressed market, you have to grab attention quickly and create the feeling “yes, that’s what I’m looking for!”. Focusing some of your precious time on creating beautiful photos and enticing descriptions is hugely important to the success of your online store.

I’ll write another post about creating your own great product images soon. Stay tuned!

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The Bushcraft Oz store is filled with products which have been hand made by local Australian craftsmen. Many of them are regular and well known members of the popular BushcraftOz forum.

They don’t just sell gear that looks pretty (although much of it is) and they’re not interested in selling products that they wouldn’t use themselves.  Their products are tested under Australian conditions, and many of the items on sale are the result of extensive research drawing on the generous experience and knowledge of others in the Australian bushcraft community. If it’s on sale there then it works, and works well!

Check out their Spiffy Store at http://www.bushcraftozstore.com.au

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What are you selling through your online store? Stationery? Clothing? Art?

Think again. In your customers’ eyes, you’re providing a solution to fill a need, and to feed an emotion.

You’re not selling sweaters, you’re providing warmth and comfort, style, and protection from the cold.

You’re not selling quality wallpaper, you’re bringing beauty to a boring wall, allowing someone to express themselves and helping them create a home.

The key to creating compelling and engaging copy is to understand the problems your product solves and to tap into the emotional connections to it.

When you develop your brand and write content for your online store, don’t think in terms of selling goods. Think about solutions to problems, that’s what you’re really selling.

Want to learn more? My next post is all about nailing those fiddly product descriptions.

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The whole concept for Styled Sealed Delivered is based on the concept of a one-stop shop where thry provide a style sheet to guide you, as well as all the elements for the table, so that you can “style” it yourself.

Their collections are combinations of beautiful and bespoke pieces all designed so that they have many applications and can be re-used, built upon and styled by you.

Check out their Spiffy Store at http://www.styledsealeddelivered.com

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Have you just set up an online store? Or do you have some great news about your business that just begs for a wider audience? Then how about sending out a press release!

Press releases were originally written for journalists, to get them to write about your news in the popular press. But since the advent of easy online PR distribution channels, the humble press release now has a wider audience and can drive traffic to your retail website.

It’s not difficult to write a press release, but they do have a specific layout, tone and written content, so here’s how to
go about it…

The hook

You first need to have something interesting to announce and a ‘hook’, or angle, to grab the reader’s attention and reel them in. Popular hooks include:

• tying into a topical subject such as a current affairs item, holiday or event
• announcing the release of a new product or collection
• sharing a human-interest item, such as an inspirational story from one of your customers
• winning new business or an industry award
• participating in an event or charity fundraiser.

The content

As you compile your press release, it pays to remember that you’re telling, not selling. The content should contain factual information, backed up by quotes from relevant people. Minimise any technical or industry jargon so you don’t put off readers who are not familiar with your terminology.

Always write a press release in the third person (they, them and their) and use keyword phrases to optimise the release for search engines. If you have an image, you can attach or include that too.

The layout

Release information – Write “Media Release” at the top of the document. Follow it with release instructions like “for immediate release”, or if it’s time sensitive “release after 12pm, 10 April 2013”, for example. Add today’s date and your city location.

Headline – Just like in blogs and emails, the press release headline is hugely important. Spend time creating a strong headline that captures the crux of your story and compels the reader to explore further.

Summary – The lead paragraph should lend more information to the headline and, again, keep the reader interested. It should contain the “who, what, when, where and why” of your story.

Body – Go into further details in the main body of the release, such as the background of the story and any statistics. Break it down into short sentences and paragraphs, and add quotes from key people such as a customer or even yourself!

To finish – At the end of the news story, write “————ends———-“ to signify that the news item is complete.

About – After the story, add a short profile of your company.

Contact details – At the foot of the page, add the contact details of the person who is happy to handle any further enquiries.

Check and check again

Once you have drafted your press release, print it out and read through it for correct use of grammar, readability and any typographic errors. Give it to someone else to look through too – I can’t tell you how many times a fresh pair of eyes has caught something I missed. Your final release should be polished, error-free and easy to read.

Now spread the word!

Old school media relations are still important, but a lot of small business owners don’t have relationships with individual journalists that they can send releases to directly.  An online press release distribution service such as www.PRweb.com, www.prlog.org, www.newsmaker.com.au or www.clickpress.com will publish and push your press release out to news sites for publication, sometimes for free.

This attracts a wider audience of both journalists and anyone searching online.

Need an example? Keep your eyes open for a Spiffy Stores press release going out soon!

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Don’t you just LOVE hot chocolate! Whenever I go to a cafe, while my friends are ordering strange sounding fancy schmancy coffee varieties… I’m ordering hot chocolate!

At Hot Choccy, they’ve sourced the best tasting, healthiest ingredients to make their range of lush drinking chocolate. They have milk and dark chocolate varieties for the traditionalists… and they’re amazing by the way… but they also have some incredible flavours – caramel, orange, strawberry, cappuccino and lemon!

Take a look around their store… choose a 250g or 70g bag, or a 100g jar, and enjoy their delicious flavoured Hot Choccy range!

Check out their Spiffy Store at http://www.hotchoccy.com.au/

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If you’ve signed up to an email marketing service like MailChimp, Campaign Monitor or Mad Mimi to help you promote your online store – nice work! You’re on your way to creating a relationship with your customers and subscribers.

But as you flick through all the email templates and designs available to you, you’re probably wondering which to use and how to do a good job. For example, did you know that email design is being influenced by the massive uptake in mobile devices? Around 35% of your emails may be opened on the move, so a mobile-friendly email is essential.

Here are my tips for creating good emails…

Choose a simple HTML template. I’m in favour of one-column layouts as they render well on all kinds of devices and are much easier to read on a smart phone.

Personalise the email. Insert a greeting field into the email so you can address each person by name – research shows personalisation increases response rates. Be friendly too and sign off as a person, not the company.

Try 14pt type for the body copy. It’s easier to read on screen.

Don’t add a lot of images. Images slow down the rate at which an email loads and are often blocked by email services. Use one or two good ones that help you get your message across.

Put the most important information in the first paragraph. It will show up in the preview pane, where most people look to decide if an email is worth opening.

Incorporate a ‘call to action’ (CTA). Don’t be vague. Add an instruction that tells the reader what to do next (ie: “view our autumn sale here”).

Make your CTA buttons big. They need to be large enough to accommodate a thumb click on a smart phone. Try making them at least 44 pixels high.

Use text links as well as graphic buttons for your CTA. That way, if the images don’t appear, the instruction can still be read.

Don’t place buttons or links too close together. It’s really frustrating trying to hit the right one when you’re using a smart phone.

Include social media share buttons in your email. It encourages readers to share the online email with their networks, giving you some free promotion.

Display your physical address and an unsubscribe link at the foot of the email. Most email templates will have this as standard, but do check it’s there.

Put your business name in the ‘from’ field. Your subscribers need to recognise you straight away or you could end up in the trash. Send from an individual email address like sally.brown@prettyfrocks.com, and not a generic department like sales@prettyfrocks.com

Write a really good subject line – it’s the most important element of your email. Its job is to stand out from all the other emails in the inbox, and make the recipient want to read the contents. Be relevant to them, specific and make the value of the contents obvious. Don’t mislead the reader or they might be tempted to unsubscribe!

As a general rule, avoid using ALL CAPS and clichés, keep it short and get straight to the point.

Proofread and test your email before you send it to your list. Send it to test accounts in Hotmail, Outlook and Gmail etc to ensure it looks OK and your links work. Check how it downloads on a smart phone and a tablet, as well as your PC or Mac.

Work out the best time to email your list. Think about your audience. Are they more likely to read it at work, or at home? Most emails get read in the first hour after sending, so pick the time wisely.

The fun has just begun!

Finally, keep testing and learning how your emails are performing so you can constantly improve. Try splitting your list into two and sending out a slightly different version to each half to find out which one works best!

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Running a successful e-commerce business requires more than fresh web traffic and a groovy online store. You need to start a relationship with your web visitors and customers so they will come back again!

Used properly, email marketing is a key tool in your marketing arsenal. Use it to keep connected to your audience and drive sales by occasionally sending them interesting information and special offers. Be mindful of the SPAM Act before you start though, and read about the requirements here.

There are five important elements to good email marketing:

1. A permission-based email list
2. Relevant and valuable content
3. A professional email marketing service
4. A well constructed HTML email
5. A specific landing page

1. The list

Your list can be put together from email addresses given to you by people who want to hear from you. This might include current customers and your enewsletter subscribers. Make sure your list is cleaned of bounced or unsubscribed email addresses on a regular basis.

If you have enough information to segment your email list into sub groups (customers, Sydney subscribers, shoe buyers etc), write specific email content for each group. The more relevant the message, the more likely it will be read.

2. The content

What is the reason for your email?

There is no point emailing everyone just to tell them you’ve got a new desk (you can use social media for that!). Only send out emails if you have something relevant and valuable to share. It could be your cool and interesting monthly enewsletter, a special discount, a sale, a customer event or you may even be running a competition.

3. The email marketing service

Sign up with a professional email marketing provider like MailChimp, Campaign Monitor or Mad Mimi. They have all the tools you need to carry out professional-looking email marketing campaigns, such as designer HTML templates and post-campaign activity reports.

4. The HTML email

Your email marketing provider will offer lots of different tested email layouts, so you don’t have to worry too much about the design and if it will work. However, there are a lot of ways you can increase the chances of your email being read and acted upon.  My next blog post will be full of great tips to help you make the most of your email communication.

5. The landing page

Where are you sending people when they click on your links? They need to be on a logical trip. Remember to be specific, so if you’re promoting a new collection, the link should go directly to that collection, not your homepage.

If you need to make a new page of information to send you readers to, you can read how to do that in this Knowledge Base article.

Keep improving!

Your email marketing service will automatically track the number of emails successfully sent, bounced, opened, forwarded and the number of clicks on a link, and provide this in a simple report. Use this information to learn what worked and what didn’t so you can improve your next email. As a benchmark, an average email open rate is around 22% and click through rate about 4%. Better than this and you’re doing well!

You can see how many website visits came from the email and even resulting sales if you have set this up in Google Analytics, so you can form a whole picture of the effectiveness of the campaign.

My next post will be full of great tips to help you make the most of your email communication…. so stay tuned!

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At suzy hausfrau they’re passionate about the handmade movement and being creative in the home. They believe that by sourcing quality products they’ll act as a source of inspiration and enable you to undertake your own creative journey. We hope that you take up the challenge to create something for yourself… because it is not just the end result that is important, it’s the journey!

Check out their Spiffy Store at http://www.suzyhausfrau.com.au/

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It’s tough I know, but most of your web visitors won’t buy on the first visit.

They’ll check you out, flick through your products, perhaps compare prices, scroll through your blog and then they’ll be off again. Like ships in the night.

If you’re lucky, they might bookmark your site for a later date, but mostly they will disappear and get on with their busy lives. And bang goes all that time, cost and effort it took to drive them to your store in the first place. Grrrr.

But you can do something to improve your chances of a revisit. If you make it easy for interested visitors to stay in touch with you, they can get to know you a lot better and you can be there when they need you. With a simple but planned communication strategy, these strangers can become brand friends, and friends can become customers.

Be visibly sociable

One way to encourage visitors to stay in touch is to install ‘follow me’ buttons to your social media accounts (twitter, facebook and Pinterest etc) on your web pages. Social media is a great channel for offering followers useful information, special deals and even customer service assistance, thereby creating trust and a bond with your brand. Pretty much all of our themes include social media links, and these can be enabled in the “Design & assets -> Theme editor” section of your store’s Toolbox.

Email still rocks

Even better, add a simple sign up form on your website to collect email addresses from interested visitors. Some themes have this built-in, but if you use MailChimp or Campaign Monitor, you can use a “Web Hook” to add people who’ve ordered in your store to your mailing list.

Despite the rise of social media, email is still a reliable and cost effective way to keep potential customers informed, deepen your relationship with your subscribers and remind them what you offer.

But you must get their permission to begin emailing them and a sign up form on your website is the way to go. If they are not already a customer, they must have ‘opted-in’ to receive your communications as this is a requirement of the Spam Act.

Be prepared – plan your calendar

Once you start to collect subscribers, you’ll need to plan a calendar for your emails. This way you’ll know what you want to prepare, to whom, and when. The top reasons people will unsubscribe from your emails are;
1. too frequent emails, or
2. irrelevant content.
…so don’t be too zealous with your communications, and only email information or offers that make sense to the recipient.

Start by plotting out ‘shopping’ events that you want to promote like a new fashion season, Christmas and Mother’s day. Then fill in other regular communications like a regular newsletter. There will always be new opportunities so leave some breathing space in your calendar. That way you can send out announcements like a new product or special offer or tie in a promotion with some topical trend or news story.

One last word on email lists here. Don’t be tempted to buy or rent a list of email addresses. It’s inefficient, irritating to the recipients and contravenes the Spam Act. Grow your opt-in list over time with people ho have a genuine interest. Quality over quantity.

In another post soon I’ll provide be a tips sheet on creating killer emails to drive traffic to your online store. Don’t miss it!

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After many hours rummaging through markets and trailing through the internet, the folks at Antipodean Love have brought together some amazing Australian and New Zealand designers under one store… for your ease and shopping pleasure!

Check out their Spiffy Store at http://www.antipodeanlove.com.au

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How many times have you looked at an e-commerce service like Spiffy Stores, and wished the fixed plans on offer really met the needs of your particular online business?

For example, you might be just starting out, so you want the Basic plan, but you have more than the maximum number of products that the plan allows. You don’t yet need the larger volumes of the next plan up until you really get going, so what do you do?

We often get questions like this from new start-ups, wanting a customised Spiffy Store plan to meet their specific requirements. Up until now, we had just the three standard plans to choose from (Basic, Business and Enterprise), so we decided to do something about it!

From today, all our Spiffy Stores e-commerce plans can be customised to add-on extra functions or resources to meet your needs. Yay!

We’re kicking off with two new add-ons – one that will add an extra 100 or 1,000 SKUs to your existing plan limit, and another for an additional 5 email addresses. Each add-on can be purchased multiple times, so you can choose exactly how many products or email accounts you want to support.

Add-ons can be purchased at any time for a small extra monthly fee, and cancelled at any time too, so you can keep your monthly costs at a minimum and grow when you need to. They can be added and removed in the “Accounts -> Add-ons” section of your store’s Toolbox.

Say no to old-fashioned fixed price plans and save money! Our new add-ons are the ideal way for you to customise your plan for your super Spiffy online store.

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From time to time we like to share technical tips when we’ve uncovered a solution to a problem that might help other Rails developers.

Spiffy Stores is written using the Ruby on Rails framework, and we encountered a glitch with the Rails3 layouts. Basically we couldn’t get the layout to display, even though all the syntax was correct. Others have experienced this sort of problem. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6605716/cant-render-layout-in-rails-3 for an example.

After lots of digging around and tracing, the answer became clear. The AbstractController::Layouts module has an initialize method, but this method was not being called when a new controller was created.

If you experience this problem, then check any modules that you have included in your controller, as one of them has an initialize method that doesn’t call ‘super’.

If an included module needs an initialize method, then it needs to follow this pattern:

def initialize(*)
  # Module initialization code here
  super
end

If the call to ‘super’ isn’t included, then the initialization chain stops, and your controller won’t be properly initialized. You can find out all the included modules for a controller by executing this code from the console:

MyController.ancestors

In part one, we covered the first two subjects in our online retailer’s guide to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), using your keywords effectively and producing regular, quality content.

In part two, we will cover two other important aspects of SEO, social media participation and link building, and how to tackle them with confidence.

Dive into social media, and keep swimming.

One of the most recent Google updates increased the amount that social media activity counts in search engine rankings. Now, your engagement in social media will enhance your SEO efforts as well as increase your reach and popularity.

Put your best business hat on and go forth and participate in social networks such as twitter, facebook, Google+ and Pinterest. Set up accounts under your brand name and share images and stories, ask for opinions and comment on other people’s posts. Retweets, shares and comments on your social media content are taken into account in search rankings.

Link, and link again!

Linking is the last and possibly most important SEO element we will cover. Search engines use links to not only find your online content but also to judge its relevance, importance and how trustworthy it may be. So linking should not be overlooked.

Create links from one page to another within your online store and include the keywords for the page you’re linking to (not from) in the text for that link. For example, a link worded “our new red wrapping paper” would link to the page for which the keywords were “red wrapping paper”.

The hardest links to get, and therefore the most valuable, are those pointing into your web pages from other popular, trusted and relevant sites. There is no easy way round this, it takes a bit of time and effort but it will be worth it.

First up, check your competitors’ website backlinks. A great tool for doing this is www.opensiteexplorer.org . This will provide a list of web pages linking back to their store, which is a good way to discover where you might also get links back to your own content.

Try emailing your partners and suppliers directly to request a link from their website and send a request to other relevant sites such as retail/lifestyle blogs (giving your reasons why they should link to you).

Investigate listing your site on relevant online directories. http://www.seomoz.org/directories is a good place to start looking for directories relevant to online retailers like yourselves.

We should add a word of caution here… don’t be tempted to pay for “hundreds of links” from “SEO specialists” who may email you. Such links are usually poor quality and you will be penalised by search engines. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

So there you have the basics. There are plenty of free resources on the web if you’d like to learn more technical SEO techniques. We recommend the SEOmoz guide http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo (NB: we have no affiliation with them, they are just a great resource!)

Good luck, keep at it and it will make a difference.

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Like most people setting up an online store, you probably know you should be optimising for search engines to get more qualified traffic. The trouble is, you may not know where or how to start.

Never fear! we’ve put together this two-part blog post to get you up to speed in no time.

Let’s kick off with a quick refresher on why Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is so important.

SEO is not paid search marketing such as Google AdWords. We will look at that in a separate post. SEO is a bunch of techniques that you can apply to your web presence to help you get into Google search results without paying for advertising. It’s commonly called ‘organic’ search.

Search engines send out ‘robots’ to find your web content and index it so they can refer to it quickly during search queries. Once your content is indexed, the search engine can then list it in the organic search results for the relevant search query. The whole process is very complex and highly automated – it relies 100% on the information the robots can find.

Therefore the ‘trick’ to good SEO is for your content to be easy for the robots to find and highly relevant to the keywords your target audience will use to search.

Luckily for you, your Spiffy Store is already brilliantly formatted and coded to be search engine friendly, but you will still need to use your keywords in the right places, create interesting content, embrace social media and build links to your site to improve your search engine ranking.

We’ve broken four basic SEO principles down into manageable techniques that you can do yourself. In this post we will cover using keywords correctly and creating quality content. Using all four elements will make a real difference to your search engine rankings, pushing your pages further up the results listing towards that coveted first page position.

Use your keywords in the right places.

If you’ve read the last blog post, you’ll know how important keywords are and how to choose the right ones for your online store. Now here’s how to put them to work on your site.

You will have different keywords for different pages of your site. For ecommerce stores, it’s usually the product name. Spiffy Stores will automatically use the product title or collection title you enter in the url and the product page’s title meta tag, but you should also repeat it 2-3 times in the page copy (especially in the first paragraph and last sentence of the page). Ideally, use variations of the keyword term to keep a natural flow for reading.

Keywords should also be used in the file name of an image on a page and its ‘alt’ tag text (the text that will display if the image doesn’t download). Again, clever Spiffy Stores will do this for your product images from the product titles you input, but you should add relevant alt tags to pictures you use on other pages like your blog posts.

Meta tags of your product pages are also automatically added for you, but you can override this and add your own custom keywords and text to the title, keyword and description meta tags (the description meta tag is sometimes the snippet of text people will see on Google search results) of all of the pages on your store. Check the knowledge base at http://www.spiffystores.com/kb/Creating_custom_meta_tags for details. If you do write your own meta description, keep the copy under 160 characters as anything longer than this will not show up in search engine results and vital information may be lost.

And lastly, use keywords in the text of links coming into that page.

Create quality content. Lots of it. Regularly.

Google has placed much emphasis on fresh and frequent content in its search algorithms, so be prepared to keep generating new content if you want to be found online.

Make use of the blog built into your Spiffy Store and update it every week with a new article. Stuck for ideas? You could write about a new product, a popular trend, company news or respond to a frequently asked customer question. Don’t forget to add an image too, like we have done here.

Try to put out a press release about once a month. You might have hit a new sales record, launched a new product, hired some cool people or perhaps you are attending a local event. All of this can be used in a press release that you can easily distribute through online services like www.prweb.com or www.newsmaker.com.au  If you’re new to online PR, stay tuned for our upcoming blog post on how to create a professional press release, coming soon.

You could also write an information page that your customers would find useful. For example, if you sell fine china, you might like to explain how best to look after fine china.

In general, aim for your articles to be 300 – 500 words in length and remember to use your keywords when writing as we’ve described.

And whatever you do, don’t duplicate substantial amounts of copy from other places on the web – including your own site! Google will penalise you for it, and the ranking of your site will likely suffer as a result.

I think that’s a good place to pause and let you catch your breath! Our next post will look at two other techniques – social media and linking – to help drive traffic to your fabulous online store.

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“Keywords” are the words and phrases people type into search engines to find the content they’re looking for. As this is how most people will arrive at your online store, you need to spend time choosing the ones that will get you the most relevant traffic. Then you need to use them on your website.

You may have a good idea of the phrases people use when looking for your products or services on the Internet, but it’s important to use some proper research to back up your hunches. And anyway, you can uncover some fresh ideas.

Here’s how to get started…

Take a moment to be your own potential customer.

Begin by making a list of the words and phrases that you would use to search for your products online. If you sell notebooks, good keywords might be “buy lined notebooks online”, “designer journals”, or even “stationery gifts”. The more specific and detailed your keyword terms are, especially if they include “buy”, the closer they are to the decision to purchase, so it’s a good idea to get into the results for this type of query.

Ask around to get other people’s input. Don’t just approach it from one perspective (yours), ask friends, colleagues or current customers what they would search for to find your products. You might be surprised at some of the answers.

If you use Google Analytics, check the traffic reports for your retail site to see which keywords were used to arrive at your web pages.

Check out your competitors’ websites to discover what keywords they are using. There are a couple of ways to do this.

In Google, type your keyword phrase in “quotes” followed by site: and the website you want to search, eg: “designer journals” site:www.thecitynotebookstore.com. You will get a list of the pages where those words appear. Interesting, huh!

You can also find keyword clues in the source code of your competitors’ store. Access the source code by right-clicking on their web page and choosing “view page source”. Don’t worry you can’t break anything like this. If you look at the top section of source code for “meta name” data, you may see the keywords and description tags containing the keywords they are targeting on that page.

Once you have done all the above, you should have a good list that contains overall keywords for your online store, and ones specific to certain products and pages of your site.

Now head over to Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool for some search insights. This is a good way to help you narrow down the right keywords for your business. It will give you an estimate of the volume of traffic you’d get for each of your terms and offer you alternative keyword choices.

In the search box, add your keyword phrases and choose ‘exact’ match from the left hand menu. Select the region(s) you are looking to target using the location button, complete the “CAPTCHA” security check (the oddly formed words) and hit search. The results that display will give you an idea of search volumes, how competitive the term is and a list of alternatives to consider.

Pick keyword phrases instead of just one keyword as there will be less competition for them and there will be more relevance to your content. The best keyword combinations are those with high traffic but low competition.

Now you’re almost finished!

Use the insights you get from your keyword research to finalise the list of keyword terms for your online business. Don’t go mad – one or two per web page is enough.

These should then be applied to your website copy, page titles, product descriptions, product tags and image file names as relevant.

My next post will look at how you apply these keywords to encourage more traffic from search results to your Spiffy Store plus a bunch of other search engine friendly tricks!

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We’re happy to announce that we’ve completed testing of the Fastway Couriers shipping module, and it’s now available in all stores based in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland or South Africa.

To activate it, go to the “Preferences -> Shipping and handling” section of your store’s Toolbox, and click on the “Add a shipping agent” button in the top right of the screen.

You’ll need to click the “Activate” button under Fastway, and then choose which services you’d like to offer to your customers. Whether or not you’re entitled to the Frequent User Rate depends on your account standing with Fastway, so you’ll most likely want to contact them to either set up an account or find out if you’re eligible.

After you’ve activated the Fastway shipping agent, you’ll the need to add a weight based shipping rate for Fastway. Further instructions on how to do this are located in our knowledge base.

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“How do I save money by minimizing my shipping costs?”

That’s a question we hear all too often as our store owners stuggle with the problems of shipping their goods to customers.

Setting your shipping costs is one of the most important aspects to running an online ecommerce business. If you charge too little, then you may lose money on each order and if you charge too much, you may lose sales as customers go elsewhere.

Other Shopping Cart Software Fails to Deliver

As incredible as it sounds, the popular ecommerce software packages available today are of little help, with most offering no more than simple flat-rate shipping schemes. If you find a service offering real-time carrier calculated shipping rates, such as from Australia Post or New Zealand Post, then the chances are that if your customers order more than 20kg of items, they’re out of luck as that’s the maximum weight that you can send using these services.

This means that you could lose customers or risk going out of business because you’re not making enough profit. What’s worse is that you may be losing valuable orders where your customer wants to purchase a large number of items and your shopping cart software says: “Sorry! I don’t know how to handle that many items. It’s all too complicated for me. Please take your business elsewhere.”

Large shipping companies pay $100,000s for software to help them optimize their parcel packing because it saves them money. It’s expensive because it’s a very complicated problem and requires a lot of advanced mathematics to solve.

Spiffy Stores Advanced Packing Algorithm Software Solution

At Spiffy Stores, we’ve solved the packing problem and we’ve added our advanced parcel packing algorithm to all stores at no extra cost. Every Spiffy Stores plan includes real-time carrier calculated shipping rates, and all orders are processed by our advanced packing software.  This means that the cost of shipping every package is minimized, and that means you save money!

Our Advanced Packing Algorithm software is unique to Spiffy Stores and you won’t find it anywhere else. Our range of shipping options is unmatched by any other vendor, and every one of our shipping features is freely available to every store on every plan. Other providers charge extra for basic carrier shipping apps, plugins and add-ons that we provide for free!

There’s simply no competition. Have a look at what the others offer and you’ll see the advantage in choosing to build your business with Spiffy Stores.

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We’re always on the lookout for more options for our store owners to accept payments online.  Last week we integrated the Fat Zebra payment gateway into Spiffy Stores, which is now available to all online stores in Australia.

This week, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve joined forces with the Card Access Services payment gateway to provide real-time payment processing.

This means that you now have even more options for accepting credit card payments directly in your online store.

Our current direct payment gateways available to e-commerce stores in Australia are:

• Advam
• ANZ eGate
• Bendigo Bank
• Camtech
• Card Access Services
• Commonwealth Bank CommWeb
• eWay
• Fat Zebra
• NAB Transact
• NetRegistry
• PaySecure
• PaymentExpress (Australia and New Zealand)
• SecurePay
• Suncorp Bank
• Westpac PayWay

These are in addition to our support for PayPal Website Payments Standard, PayPal Express, and the ability to accept credit card payments manually using your own credit card processing facilities.

More information about Card Access Services, and instructions for activating the gateway can be found in our knowledge base.

We’ve always believed in pushing the technical envelope to provide advanced technical solutions to make life easier for our store owners.  This is way more important to us than the hype and gloss that you may find in the rest of the industry.

Over the past year, we’ve been talking to loads of web designers who use Spiffy Stores to create online stores for their customers. Although they love creating new e-commerce shops using our software, the resounding feedback we’ve been getting is that whilst the current Theme Editor in the Toolbox is great for small changes, it get’s a bit more difficult when designing an entire theme for a store.

For larger theme updates it’s really necessary to download the theme files to your computer, edit them and then upload the new files to the server. Using the Theme Editor to do this is a bit cumbersome, and makes the design process more difficult than it should be.

We’ve listened to these concerns, and have spent considerable time and effort working on a solution… so today we’re very proud to announce a major new capability which allows all your theme files and assets to be edited directly from your computer using WebDAV enabled editors such as Adobe’s Dreamweaver, and Panic’s Coda.  If you’re on a Mac, you’re even luckier, as WebDAV is built right into OSX, and can be used in conjunction with TextMate and Taco.

To use this new feature in Windows, all you need is a WebDAV enabled editor or a utility such as NetDrive which allows WebDAV files to be mounted on your computer as a local folder. This means that you can use your favourite editor to edit your store’s theme files directly from your computer.

If you’re using a WebDAV enabled editor such as Dreamweaver, you also have access to some advanced features such a file checkout and locking so that you can work in a team without having to worry about whether someone else overwrites your changes.

If you’re a web designer and your current e-commerce software doesn’t support WebDAV, then you should seriously consider Spiffy Stores for this feature alone, as you’ll find your theme development time slashed significantly.

For more info about using WebDAV to edit your store, head over to the WebDAV section of our knowledge base.

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