Images on the home page Your home page is generally the first landing page for a new visitor, or at least a page they will visit to better understand who they’re dealing with.   These days, with so much competition, a common path for potential customers is to price match a particular product. This doesn’t mean, lowest price wins, this is simply a first step to make sure they’re not wasting their time. I’ll go through steps for improving product pages shortly.   The home page should represent your overall company, products you sell and identify your brand, all in a glance. Long text on your page can look daunting to most visitors and often turns them off, while a clean, emotional and descriptive image can work wonders.     An emotional image should establish a quick and simple connection with your visitors. For example, a shoe company might use images of famous athletes crossing the finish line wearing a shoe that is sold in store. It might have a title like “We create the advantage, the rest is all you”. This image doesn’t focus on your company or a particular product, this image is designed to make the visitor excited about entering the store and looking for products. It’s a good start, better than reading a paragraph about your company history… No offense!   Another fantastic option is a slideshow. The first frame can be emotional and the following frames can offer matching products nested a similar banner design so the feeling continues on to those products. It also provides an opportunity for the visitor to click and continue deeper into your store. Emotion used in a slideshow http://www.rei.com/adventures Here’s an example I found today were the first image on the home page is two guys living the dream. They’ve hiked to a basecamp, all set up for the next climb. It’s exciting and I would love to be in their shoes. Below that are recognisable brand names they sell and below that is another emotional image from a supplier. These are clickable directly to those brands or products.      Our next post will detail how to improve product page images.

We've put together a very brief summary of the most important steps you should take when starting your SEO campaign for your new online store. This is simply to head amateurs in the right direction. If you're after the full story in detail, click here for more    Keyword Analysis Choosing the right keyword is pivotal to your SEO campaign. If you're opening a new online store, stick to longtail   phrases rather than main keyword phrases. e.g. "Flower shop" is too competitive; try something like "Yellow long stem  roses" This will be less competitive and more targeted. Your chances of a visitor who will convert to a sale is much  higher. Each of your longer phrases should still contain your main keyword "flowers". What do your visitors really want? When choosing what to write about in your site, think about what your visitor would like to read and how it can help   them. For example, if your product page is selling "yellow long stem roses", include some useful content about how to  preserve them, cut them, where to place them, arrange them or what other flowers they look nice with. Write or get good content articles Useful, unique and well written content not only helps your visitors, but also search engines. The recent Google Panda  update focussed on web spam, getting rid of or demoting sites with poor quality or duplicate content. If you simply  write generic product info or copy from your manufacturers website, don't expect great SEO results. Google recently published an article about writing good quality content for your website. Site Map & webmaster tools Upload your sitemap to Google webmaster tools. You store's sitemap is auto generated after your domain name e.g.  http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml. The same can be done for Yahoo and Bing. This basically tells search engines all your pages it can index. Link building Build some quality links. Quality is a broad definition and to describe this briefly, it referrs to related links from   related sites with good quality content. i.e. not spammy sites with loads of outbound links. Some examples just to get  your started are; Paid, related directories Well established and related Forums (get involved in discussions in your industry and place a link in your signature) Article submission services like ezinearticles.com Social book marking sites like http://www.delicious.com/ and StumbleUpon.com see more

For the last month the team have been working on a new type of Facebook Store integration.  Previously, the definition of a Social Store in Facebook referred to a simple data feed where there was a product list with links back to the product on your normal store. This is a standard operation for most shopping cart software's, however with the recent release of another company making complete stores within Facebook only, Ashop chose to take this to a new level.   This time we've created a complete store with order processing and store navigation all within you and your friends Facebook profiles, all for free! The Ashop Commerce Social Store is a clone of your normal store except for the template which is governed by parameters within Facebook. All your categories, brands, custom pages, products and more will all be accessible to show off.   How do customers purchase from my Social Store? Your Social Store is an App that you need to create within Facebook. Your App can then be added to any Facebook profile, where your customers then purchase from. It's similar to all those games you see in Facebook that you add to your profile to play. It takes a matter of seconds for anyone to add your store app to their profile and continue to a purchase anytime, anywhere. Customers who are your biggest fans no longer need to purposefully visit your online store, they are delivered your store every time they log into Facebook. What better advertising is there than that?? You can advertise your App within Facebook, or you can simply invite friends to install your App. Each time a friend installs your App or purchases from it, a post will be made on their wall. More fantastic marketing exposure for your store and brand name. Here's a preview of a mock-up store. (logo is customisable)   We hope the new Social Store App brings your store to a new level in social networking. Please feel free to leave some feedback on your experience.  

Google recently released it's new +1 button. It's a little like a simplified "like" button where you can recommend webpages to your friends when logged in to your Google account. The button will appear on Google search results, adwords listings and on your website if you choose. Visitors who are not logged in to their Google account may still see the +1 button results, but not be able to use it for recommendation. What does +1 mean for you? Google has stated that the +1 will also be used in their search ranking algorithms, so you now have an on-page tool where your happy visitors can directly impact rankings positively on the Google search engine. With Google trending more and more toward social media in their listings and algorithms, the +1 button is their next notable step to filtering out link farm usage. With less ranking manipulation, your popular site has a better opportunity to rank where it's meant to. Similar to the "like" button, the +1 button only registers when the clicker is logged in to their Google account, thus reducing the likelyhood of spamming. Implementation Placing the +1 button on your site is easy with Ashop Commerce. First gather the codes from here. http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/ The first code group can be placed to your footer via your theme editor. Open the edit view of your theme and click the "footer" button in the left column. Then click the "source" button at the top left of the new window. Now paste the Google +1 code to the end of the exisiting code. Apply and close. The second code is the actual button code. For this, you need to decide where your button will appear, a popullar one might be a product page. Under your design top menu, select product detail design. Since this section is for advanced users only, if you're not comfortable in selecting where to place the button code please request help from your Ashop Commerce representative, or your designer. +1's Future With Google's +1 button on your product pages, your store visitors can directly signal Google that a particular product is worth recommending to others. This power should boost your products rankings, which is where the real conversions start from. The +1 still has a few kinks to work out, however it's only at the baby stage, so it's true impact is still to come. +1 FAQ's http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1140194

Moving to Rackspace Hosting 2011 is certainly a year of change. Now that version 2 has been rolled out, we're making our next big move to Rackspace Premium hosting. Rackspace is known for its Fanatical SupportTM, Zero-Downtime Network and being the world's best in IT hosting. They have earned Microsoft's coveted Gold Certification and have been recognised three times as its Hosting Provider of the Year. We've partnered with Rackspace for peace of mind. Reliability is a key factor in ecommerce and Rackspace are simply the perfect base for this. Their reliable platform also means Ashop Commerce can focus on better your features and growth, without taking our attention away on hosting issues. Our skills are in software, not hosting, so our range of fileservers, database servers, webservers, load balancers etc deserve to be nurtured only by the best. Start Date/Time of Event: Server changes will occur at the following time; Please note: The change will be fairly instant, however DNS updates may take roughly 2 hours or more for some internet connections, meaning all stores and emails will be offline during this period. As Ashop Commerce is a worldwide company, we've done our best to allocate a changover time based on the lightest server traffic. 22-05-2011,  04:30 - Sydney time  .................................................................... 21-05-2011,  19:30 - London time .................................................................... 21-05-2011,  14:30 - New York time Important Changes | Please Read You may ignore the following details if you have never made any changes regarding IP's in the past. New IP's - Some gateways require our range of checkout IP's be added to their admin console in order to allow access and complete payments. Known gateway company's with this requirement have been updated by Ashop staff, however if you have previously notified your gateway of our IP's, please have them add the following now (keep the current ones too). 50.56.22.178 50.56.22.179 50.56.22.182 50.56.22.183 50.56.22.184 The subnet Mask for all these IP's is 255.255.255.255 If you have manually found our current IP's and pointed your domain to one of them, please change your setup to use our cname (store.shop033.com) instead. This would have already been done when you transferred to the V2 platform for 99% of you and will not be affected. Emails will be transferred over the following day, so if you find some are missing from your webmail account, they will be returning over the following 12 hours and should all be accessible by the Monday morning.   Please don't hesitate to contact Ashop Commerce support if you have any further questions. Kind regards Your Ashop Commerce team..

This month we wanted to let you know a little more about the new module currently in test phase, "Google Adwords". Google Adwords is an invaluable tool for helping to get a new business marketing off to a start. Marketing a new site can be a laborous and confusing task, which often fails for any range of reasons. Adwords is one of the most commonly used marketing platforms in the world, simply because it brings targeted visitors to your site instantly. You choose the keywords and you set the spend amount. Ashop Commerce has a goal to bring as many main services like this to your admin panel as an all in one ecommerce solution. No running around different admins, it's all together. In this case we've now built all the basic functionality of your Google adwords admin into your Ashop admin, plus so much more! With The Google Adwords module you can easily and quickly manage your account directly from your Ashop admin panel. Features include; "Instant Start" Automatically imports your existing adwords account data after login. "Product Automation" Automated keyword ad pause when product becomes out of stock or offline "Campaign Overview" You can more easily see the stats of your active campaigns and current spend amount. "Optimiser" Create your own rules or use the automated Taguchi methods. Integrated technology like this would otherwise cost you a minimum of $500/month through a professional Adwords authorised agency. Now you can manage it yourself instead. This first of its kind integration to a shopping cart software will be coming out within the next month!  

We're looking for testers for the new seamless MYOB integration software. This software directly integrates so your sales data is fed to and from MYOB accountright and accountplus packages. All customer, product and sale information is updated along with stock levels so managing your business accounts is made fast and easy. Pricing is still in discussion. If you have either the accountright and accountplus MYOB packages and you are interested in using this software with your store, please contact Brian via your admin dashboard tickets so we can set you up for initial testing. (You must have an active store with sales history.)

On December 1st 2010, Ashop Commerce partnered with our new friends at Ezidebit payment processing services. Who is Ezidebit? Ezidebit is a Company that enables Australian Businesses to process online credit card payments. (US and UK partnerships are currently in development) Ezidebit has over 40 employees and is Australia’s leading provider of outsourced payment solutions.  Established in 1998, Ezidebit offered the first specialised automated Direct Debit and Credit Card transaction service in Australia.  Currently, Ezidebit processes in over half a million transactions per month on behalf of businesses from multiple industries including childcare, health & fitness, property management, tourism and finance.   What can Ezidebit do for you? To benefit Ashop Commerce merchants, Ezidebit has placed a 48 hour turn-around on application approvals. This means, once their 10 minute application form is faxed in, your may be able to start accepting credt card payments from your Ashop store in just over 48 hours. (A big difference from the banks 2-6 week wait) Another huge advantage are their fees at almost half of most banks and gateways. Please contact Ashop Commerces sales to request an application form and pricing. Click here to contact

If you're one of the thousands of current and potential customers who have been on our waiting list, now's your chance. The new Ashop Commerce [www.ashop.com.au] website is now live and all new trial and signup accounts are running Version 2. This is literally day one of release, so if you have any questions of difficulties in registering for a new account, please let us know immediately via live help. It's been a long time coming, but considering the initial feedback, we hope you all enjoy the new platform and it brings your ebusiness to a new stage of growth. Many of the new features have already been implemented and there are loads more planned to take effect over the coming 3 months and beyond. The wishlist for the Version 2 platform is over 75 points long, ranging from postcode zoned custom shipping to Ebay integration. There are over 20 new innovations that you'll only find with Ashop in 2011 and we can't wait to present them to you. Keep an eye on our Facebook page, Twitter and this blog for release announcements. Any feedback on the new site and platform would be greatly appreciated, your comments and ideas are what drive Ashop.

.CenterSection {padding-top:0px;} .CustomPageBody {padding-top:37px;} As part of the release of Version 2 this month, Ashop Commerce has started to expand its marketing into Facebook with the new fan page http://www.facebook.com/ashopcommerce. Stage one was a simple goal of 25 fans in 25 hours, thankfully met with some excited fan's in the first 7 hours of opening. Being new to the platform, we felt like we were trying to run in thongs (Flip Flops for UK and US readers!), not knowing what to expect and just jumping in, praying that the community would want to be involved. Whilst 25 fans was a small goal and by no means impressive, all new marketing models need to start somewhere. Whether it be social networking or traditional advertising, it's important to touch your toes into new things and find what works best for your business. For some products, you might find a different medium works better purely based on the customer type you're trying to target e.g. B2B rather than B2C customers. Only time will tell if Facebook can expand our market and build a stronger community, but from our initial feedback, we're at least heading in the right direction. Social Networking Tip: Link all your social communication platforms together. i.e. If you have newsletters, blog, Twitter and Youtube. Make sure you feed posts and info between each platform to maximise exposure for each new update.