Reasons to Use Customer Photos in Online Photo galleries of Ecommerce Sites

10% photos taken since the inception of this world appear during the last 1 year and presented in Image Gallery. Isn’t it an amazing fact? To your surprise, it has become the game of pictures now, converting individuals into big brands. Jammie Oliver, a celebrity chef, utilized the power of photos at instagram, and is running a Jamie Oliver brand now. Better photo means attract more visitors and experience more of their engagement. For an eCommerce site, attracting and engaging the prospects is the ingredient to experience more sales.

Importance of Images for an eCommerce Site

Images are considered now as the universal language. For an eCommerce business owner, the significance of online Photo Gallery increases many folds. Better presentation of product photos in photo galleries online means attracting the customers, giving them a clear view of what they are going to buy. If it’s said that a professionally designed images gallery helps increasing conversions, it’s true indeed. Here are given some major reasons behind importance of images for an online store.

More reviews for articles carrying images: Stats reveal that articles to support an eCommerce site have 94% more readers, provided there are website image gallery in the content.

More views for press releases carrying images: If you publish press releases for your eCommerce store, include snap galleries or videos related to your business. There are 45% more views for such press releases.

Images click the searchers: If images appear in local search results, 60% of the consumers try to contact a business.

Image quality helps buying decision: The quality of the images displayed in online photography gallery helps 67% consumers in reaching the buying decision. The image quality takes precedence over the product information, product description, ratings, and reviews.

Reasons to Use Customer Photos at web photo gallery

Displaying real people using the product attracts more prospects and helps quick conversions. It will let them realize how other real people feel about the product. Here are given some major reasons behind using the customer photos to help an eCommerce site in more conversions.

Customer photos on product pages increase conversions: Stats given in Olapic whitepaper reveal that customer photos on product detail pages help increasing the conversions by 4.6%. If the customers are allowed to interact with these photos, the conversion rate doubles, which was 9.6% for Olapic clients.

More visitors with more Smartphone usage: As the Smartphone usage is on rise, the number of browsers is increasing tremendously. It means a website should be capable of attracting the smart browsers with smart photos in the art photo gallery. In 2015, the camera-carrying phone sale is expected to be 2.25 billion, which means the photo-capturing trend is on rise. These photos could be of your customers, carrying your products. Why to ignore such a great opportunity of product marketing and grabbing the real customer photos for your photo gallery.

Online photo posting on rise: Stats show that 54% US adults post their original pictures online. 47% users re-share those pictures. What does it mean? Your product pictures could be shared if taken perfectly and displayed properly in the photo galleries online.

Customers trust customer photos: Believe it, 66% UK online consumers and 63% US online consumers think about buying confidently after looking at customer photos. They feel reluctant to make a buying decision if see retailer photos at an eCommerce store.

55% UK and 54% US consumers reversed their buying decision just after looking at the non-supportive product photos. It’s enough for the store owners to think about better product photo display in the image gallery.

Quality compromise isn’t tolerable: Presenting better product photos doesn’t mean giving a superficial glimpse to the prospects. It can be hazardous for the business. 33% UK and 32% US consumers returned the product just because there was a quality gap between the photo displayed and the product received.

More buying for customer photos: If a real customer models a product, 32% US consumers will think about buying. They don’t want perfect-figured models displaying the products, but the people looking like them.

Free online photo galleries are not just meant to present the products in front of the customers, but to leave a brand image for the business, to help achieving customer satisfaction, and to see a sharp growth in business sales.

What’s your opinion about images, particularly the crowd-sourced images to be used at online store?

How to Implement Advance FAQs in Magento

FAQ section is the most important part of any website.  It serves as a customer service tool by answering most important and frequently asked questions of customers. Imagine, you are on a website looking to purchase a product, but with many important questions in your mind you move back n forth trying to find help in forums, by calling customer service helpline whether the product fulfills your requirements.  How many such customers are there on the eCommerce websites who are stuck, confused and cant make up decision to purchase an item. This significantly drops conversion rate on such websites.

In this article we are not talking about all the plugins and custom development solutions that can help you to create an FAQ page, but we are highlighting an FAQ plugin for Magento. Magento is a famous shopping cart and a choice of millions of merchants. It definitely has a potential to grow as its community is expanding at unimaginable rate. There are dozens of Magento FAQ Extensions out there but only one of them offers supreme features. Everything, from design point of view to functionality, here is the live Demo.

Advance  Features – Magento FAQ Extension

• Adds FAQ on product pages (landing pages)
• Creates a separate landing page for FAQ which can show general Q and A.
• Categorize your FAQs in to different topics so that customers can find answers easily
• Ask a question form is available on product page. Customers can use this form to quickly post their inquires
• Magento rating, like/unlike functionality is also provided
• Accordion style
• Customers can post comments and reply to others on FAQ page.
• Latest Google reCaptcha included
• Multi-Store supported
• Sort FAQs by rating or latest ones
• Separate page for each FAQ topic
• FAQ block can be placed anywhere on your website such as on home page, left nav, and CMS pages.
• Advacce FAQ Searcg

And there are many more features that are included in this wonderful plugin. If you require more information, please check live Demo to test all these features.  You may also check more Magento CE plugins on FMEs store such as events manager, split payments, quick checkout etc. Don’t forget to share your feedback with us.

Advance Magento FAQ Extension Features

The Advance FAQ Management Extension is developed by FME Extension. This extension enables your users to view the most frequently asked questions. Todays’ world is very fast everybody want each and every thing quickly. When users want to purchase any product,  many questions come in their mind. They want answers right on the spot. Now they don’t have to email or call you for asking such questions. This FAQ Magento Extension by FME helps users to get their answers  on the FAQ page.

This extension enables admin to create catagories/topics for FAQ. Questions and their answers can be created and assigned to these topics. You can set out the position/order of questions as you require.  By changing the orders you can set most frequently asked questions on the tops. You can enable or disable accordion style . If accordion style is enabled you can set which questions to be opened up automatically  within a topic.

Another  feature of this FAQ Magento Extension is that your customers can rate the FAQ.  Admin has the option that either registered or guest users can rate FAQ. You can enable or disable  FAQ  Block and FAQ Search block. If you enable “Read More” link it will take your customers to a new page and will list all FAQ related to that topic. With all these features this extension is very  comprehensive and  useful solution for your store to host FAQ.

You can also find reviews on Magento FAQ Extension at Magento Commerce.

Online Bookings and Reservations Made Easy

It is always important for business travelers and vacationer to reserve their rooms early to be able to receive best room prices. These days, it is much easier to book your room in advance, so there should be no need to arrive at your destination and still be looking for a place to stay. By using FMEs Booking and Reservation Extension you will be able to select the exact room type and the amenities that you desire to make your hotel stay comfortable and enjoyable.

Using this extension you will be able to know that if there is any customer who wants to have an appointment with you or he is looking for booking any room. it will give you edge of ordering your daily routine. This FME extension is especially for those vendors who offer online bookable services for their customers. In the online reservation system there is less chance of losing your customers.

If you don’t have a staff to look after your appointments or your managers were not on duty when some customers came in for booking room or to have an appointment with you, what will happen? Your customers will wait for your Manager? Or they will leave?  The answer to all three questions is yes. Your customers will leave and will go to somewhere else. The best solution for getting rid of this manual work is to have FME Magento Reservation system Extension. You can put all your information regarding your hotel management room prices discounts and all other feature that you are giving to your customers

Microsoft and Google’s Monopoly break-up

 

Monopoly is something a devastating factor causing troubles to entrepreneurs. Something extraordinary has to be achieved by these new comers to the market to get their work up to some level. In the presence of monopoly competition does not grow and customers have to pay more and compromise with the quality of products, because they don’t have any other choice. They would have to accept whatever the products are in the market at whatever rates. On the other hand if the completion grows, more and more products would be available in low prices.

In the 20^th century, AT&T ended up its dominancy when Justice Department battled with them for 1974 to 1982. More than a decade in 1980s went through in similar fight between IBM and Justice Department because IBM had the hardware monopoly. In 1998, Justice Department started a case against Microsoft as due to their monopoly new firms found hard to come into the competition. Several restrictions were applied on Microsoft. Microsoft also faced several acquisitions in Europe.

And one of the latest Antitrust proceedings made by European commission has been started.  According to the commission Microsoft has failed to the commitment it made in 2009 to start a browser market so as to let new firms come in to the competition.

According to the contract, Microsoft was supposed to display BSC that is “Browser screen choice” on windows PCs in Europe where the default browser is Internet explorer. Most of the companies which exercise monopoly are the tech companies. Microsoft fed the market with its highly popular OS in 80’s and got hold of the market since then. Now most of the necessary tools are built-in by default in its OS. On the above allegation Microsoft’s response was as bellow,

“We have fallen short in our responsibility to do this. Due to a technical error, we missed delivering the BCS software to PCs that came with the service pack 1 update to Windows 7….”

If lost this battle, Microsoft could face many sanctions and penalties. They already had escaped a fine in 2009 when they opted to use BSC allowing users to select any internet browser of their choice on their PC instead of IE. Microsoft offered a fix that will be sent out to all the users about 28 million who were affected.

Negotiations with Google are also underway to prevent the only dominance of Google in Internet search and marketing which is the soul of eCommerce business.  If any lawsuit is brought against Google, it might be dead. According to some reports, Federal Trade Commission is planning to bring legal actions against Google.  They have been monitoring Google for antitrust concerns.  The most important thing is the loss of power, fame, and appreciation when facing such lawsuits irrespective of winning or losing. Microsoft battled for around 4 years which made them lose their focus. Other competitors took benefits of this situation and thus Google became the master in search engines and Apple in music.

It’s not the free internet world today as it was back in 90’s, Google’s crawler might not catch each and everything. In order to compete with Facebook, Google started its own social sharing network Google + which has not been much successful. At the same time Google has wisely stepped into the new era of internet browsing and that is mobile internet. It has launched Android which is a free platform for application development. Microsoft has already been stumbling to get hold of the market and on the other side, Google the market leader in internet search might be pushed into the same situation if faced a lawsuit……..

User Friendly websites with Previous Next Magento Extension

As a user you might see some sites which might look appealing to site administrators or owners but not to you. Designing a site should hold consumer friendly features instead of owner oriented. There are two main goals of any eCommerce site.

1)      Grab potential clients:

Surfing internet and enjoying in this way is now a hobby of many people. Especially if somebody is looking for online shopping, he would search many sites to select a best one based on many metrics such as better look, better information, better features, best tools and excellent customer services etc. In this huge eCommerce market it’s important to at least incorporate those features which can attract these site walkers.

2)      Retaining Existing customers:

Since these are the customers who already are inspired by your services, retaining them could be a challenge because they would expect more enhanced services frequently.

Let us see now what elements are important to fulfill above targets,

1)      Site Load speed

This is probably the first and the foremost element that can send your potential customers away in seconds. Most of people today have now access to high speed internet but still in many areas there exist slower internet connections. You can use tools such as Google Analytics to analyze from where your customers are coming. If most of your customers are using slower speed channels you would need to work hard on speeding up things by keeping your site simple. You would not want to add flash contents, excessive code etc.

2)      Accessibility:

Your site should incorporate features which should allow customers to easily browse and access your site such as by using alt tags, valid HTML and CSS coding and incorporating user friendly tools such as Previous Next Magento Extension which allows customers to quickly navigate to products while staying on the same page.

3)      Navigation:

This is one of the most important elements of your site success. Once visitors arrive at your site, they would hunt for products they are looking for. If you have buried deep down somewhere these products, it would repel customers away. You should provide clear and easy navigation such as Layered Navigation, Ajax add to cart, and as we mentioned above Magento Previous Next Extension. There are many more tools to be utilized.

4)      Proper and related information:

People might come to your site for number of reasons such as to find good news at your site, visit blogs, or looking for products. Those who are looking for products would be eager to see detailed product information that is easily accessible and product images to see how the product looks like actually. Again there are several Magento Free & Paid Plugins available in the market to help you implement these options.

Keeping your site up-to-date with these options ensures your chances to catch more customers hence increasing your sales and business…..

Dynamic websites with Background Images

Whichever business you intend to start there might be different approaches to follow. Some may lead to prosperity very soon while some might work but will involve time delay or other complications. Having a website to start an eCommerce business is a wonderful plan to follow. Among several strategic factors, a very important one is which eCommerce platform to chose? The layout of your site, what functionality it will provided etc.  It is hard to imagine someone using static website today. Let us see how dynamic sites can help up,

1)      Content Management System:

CMS is a great tool to manage your site data. It allows non-technical persons to easily handle it. All the data is stored in a database server. Whenever a user requests a file, it is generated on a real time.  It is also a secure form of managing content because not everybody can edit. You can assign rights as you desire. You can quickly publish your data and eliminate the need of extra resources.

2)      Faster response time:

CMS comes with server side caching engine.  It increases the page generation time for users by temporarily keeping the copy of site pages that are accessed.

3)      Dynamic News and Blog Engine:

Displaying news and articles requires a dynamic website. You can easily add this content in a database through CMS and display it according to your choice on your sites along with user comments.

4)      Server Side scripts:

Due to the availability of database, you can build strong scripts to capture and utilize data effectively e.g. obtain related content from the database to link to your unique content pages for SEO propose

5)      Dynamic Product Listing:

With few and simple steps you can create or edit products, assign them to any categories and display them dynamically on your site.

6)      Search:

From simple to complicated queries, you can easily obtain results from the database.

7)      Dynamic Background Images.

You will see many sites today changing their look or will display specific messages in anticipation of some events such as charismas. It is a marketing strategy as well. Business owners in order to please their customers around the world and show closeness with them update Background images of their home page or whole of site. It also reflects to customers that your site is constantly being maintained and checked. So they stay confident shopping at your site. If we talk about Magento a leading eCommerce platform, there are number of such plugins for magento based stores which allow us to manage these background images automatically. You just have to upload your desired images and define rules. Rest of the work is automatically maintained.

Today most of the sites need to update data automatically and frequently. This can only be achieved with the help of dynamic sites. There are hundreds of tools available for Magento such as Magento Background Image Module and other ecommerce platforms for different purposes which can only work for dynamic sites…..

Magento Background Image Module

Online Marketing and Product Labels

If you have worked hard to produce some great products according to the requirements of your customers. The next step is to inform them about your products. You would be eager to let them know how well your products are as compared to the competitors. This certainly is accomplished by marketing effectively. There are several techniques that can be used to deliver updates to customers such as email marketing, telephonic advertisement, Ads, social media etc.

The base line of all online marketing starts with SEO. You must have a SEO friendly site or a blog. A separate and effective landing page for products must be created to drive traffic to your site. It should have a unique URL, properly coded, photos, Meta tags, unique content and title tags. Having all these in place ensures that your site will come up in search engines effectively.

Another way of marketing is email marketing. You can send special deals designed only for email receivers. It also increases trust and good relations with customers.  Online marketing involves Google AdWords, PPC, social media, forums, blogging etc. Online advertisement allows you to influence customers in very effective manner.

Above mentioned strategies are all related to market your product, but you can adopt certain strategies that be used to advertise the product itself such as by using product labels. Labels are very effective in telling customers what the product is about or any sales offer quickly and concisely. Combining all these great strategies ensures more chances of catching customers.   If your store is based on one of the leading eCommerce platforms like Magento, osCart etc you can easily find plugins for product labels. Because Magento is the leader of all, there are many great Magento free and paid plugins already in the market to advertise your products…..

Product Labels Pro Magento Extension – Create your Custom Labels

Product labels are one of the very strong marketing tools that most of the internet marketers use today. They give quick information to customers and encourage them to buy your products. A flashy image on your product can advertise its quality, uniqueness, “why choose it” or any of its other attributes. It allows you to compete with established competitors. According to Amber Waves (U.S. Department of Agriculture’s website), %66.5 billion was spend just on packaging in 2005 just to do better marketing exceeding the amount the industry spent on advertising.

Definitely packaging is not something that can be done for eCommerce but the concepts of marketing are important. Product Labels Pro Magento Extension uses this great strategy without any cost to help increase sales by catching visitor’s attention with your own uploaded images and your custom defined text.  Let us see some of the ways Product Labels pro can encourage customers to buy your product,

1 Consumer Choice:  It is the most effective way of informing customers about different choices they can make. They can discriminate among products hat which one better suits their needs. Therefore your product must be labeled in a way that it can attract more and more customers.

2. Economy Friendly: You don’t have to spend any amount on packaging and labeling physically. Place any type of Magento sale labels, special prices labels, new products labels or whatever by creating custom images and text. You are free to choose any size and form, put stunning effects to give your customers a pleasurable browsing experience.

3. Continuous improvement and competition: Product labels will also serve as a metric for product improvement. If a vendor uses any promotion like product labels, naturally competition will grow and other vendors will try to take lead by making improved products.

4. Outlining Key Features: Labels can serve the purpose of defining key features of the product for which a group of people has been looking for in a brief and quick view. So without wasting any time customers quickly understand if the product suits their needs.

5. Promotion: as stated above, most of the labels are utilized for running effective marketing campaigns e.g. a label with text “50 % off” will attract more clients than a product without label.

But choosing a right label is extremely important; it should be user-friendly, and   adequately informational.  You should find below information in order to effectively use labels,

1.       Information your customers will find useful

2.       Suitable colors and content

3.       Effective promotional appeals that can attract customers

4.       Where to put your labels

5.       Do you want to use text, image or both as a product label?

6.       Would you like to have multiple labels on category and listing pages?

7.       Do you want your labels to be automatically applied on products based on certain conditions (when talking about eCommerce).

Products labels Pro Extension allows you to do more than that with its rich backend functionality. It allows you to create countless rules with comprehensive set of conditions to apply them on products. Based on these rules, labels will automatically be applied. So no worries for you, this plugin gets the work done for you amazingly.

Magento Modules and Widgets Part – 3

In the previous post we developed a basic Magento module and a widget. We saw all the stuff dealing with configurations, blocks etc.  Today we will add this widget on the frontend block created earlier.

But first let us see how we can create static block from the Magento admin panel as previously we had created it by using our code.  Login to the admin panel and then navigate to CMS and then select Static Block,

–          CMS -> Static Blocks -> Add New Block

 

1. Enter the Title of the block
2. Enter the identifier for this block
3. Select your desired store view. In Magento you can have multiple store within a website such as a store for China, another store for Europe etc.
4. Select “Enable” from the drop down to activate this block
5. In the WYSIWYG editor, you can put HTML or PHP code. We will see this part later. 

Adding our first Widget to CMS Page:

Navigate to CMS->Pages from the admin panel and then select Home Page. Next on the left column select “Content” section which shall appear as below,

Once you click on the highlighted icon in the above image, you will be given a popup choice as below,

 

 After selecting the widget from the popup:

 

Refresh your page on the front-end and you will something like as below,

 

 

 You also can create Widgets from the Admin Panel as well such as mentioned below. Let us see below.

Creating Widget from Admin Panel:

Navigate to CMS->Widget and then click “add new widget”. You will get something like below,

Select the type of this widget such as CMS Static Block and choose the design package/theme accordingly. After you press continue, you will see below,

You can give here widget title, store view and sort order in case there are more than one widget defined for this block. In the layout updates section you can define from the broad range of locations where exactly you would like to place this widget,

You can select your static block to be shown on all anchor categories or just specific ones on the very left side. From the Block reference you can chose the position of static block such as on left column or footer etc.

Now finally chose the static block for this widget from the widget options (in the left menu) and there you go.

So that we have completed this tutorial, we will see in future some more implementation of Fme’s magento services and these widgets. In case you need any information on particular topic, do write to us…..