This is my journey as an E-commerce Consultant
Posts tagged website-design
Createyourtemplate, Channeladvisor Catalyst and Pimp my Shop
1491 days
Mathias and I under the Createyourtemplate banner moseyed on down to ChannelAdvisor Cataylst at Vinopolis in London.One of the features of Catalyst was a ‘pimp my shop’ session for ChannelAdvisor Stores, taking an existing CA customer with no current design. So let me run through the features of our tender:
Running down the design we start with the logo, branding is very important to a customer. Its something they recognise and trust. A consistent branding is essential so even though this is a design for the ChannelAdvisor Store, this design will also translate to eBay. We pushed the fact that the seller sold socks and underwear in this logo design, making a clear distinction between the main product types.
The top navigation was designed to hone in on the popular categories of products and also provide extra navigation for the customer. This tender design was based on the socks category page to show the kind of detail and functionality you can have with a CYT (Createyourtemplate) design.
The seller was famous for his branded socks and underwear, especially in the children’s cartoon sector. This scrolling character sorter provides a very visual link between the products and the characters. 
We also implemented a further shop by character, in the left hand side navigation. You find that when you are shopping for items you do place some recognition on a brand logo, in this case a cartoon character but you might also know exactly what you are looking for so using this further character search will refine your choice.
Being still a fan of the ‘above the fold’ concept, and customers need to be able to find the main product they are looking for on the page without scrolling. The socks by size and type product sorter is placed above the fold to enable the customer to effectively navigate to their desired product. You might notice also a test location path so the customer knows where they are in the grand scheme of the site. In the main content of the page you will also find sorters for children’s socks:
Teaser sections to promote key products are great for promotion of your best items, as with all CYT designs we like clients to be independent of us when we have finished the designs. The designs can be easily edited to change various sections and text within the design. This would be an example of an ever changing section within the design.
Your basic left hand side navigation is a standard. Our navigation sections are dynamic….
Designing a ‘Storefront’ – Channeladvisor
1717 days
by Liz
in Web Mastering
Designing within the constraints of a store front (notably Marketworks and Channeladvisor in the UK) can be tricky, but some designers don’t let anything get in their way:
http://www.cybercheckout.co.uk/ is a channeladvisor store designed by Sell-it-smart who have made this table based basic store look and feel like a real website.
More examples are Grapevinehill who have used a splash page integration to make sure their store front looks and feels like a real website. Hagchairs uses a similar method.
Can’t should never be in a development or design firms mentality, as you can have fantastic websites using store front systems if you try and push the boat out.
On further digging I also found Junction Quest who also manage ChannelAdvisor Store Design and the site Exclusively Home designed by Rick Wells Ltd.
Email about E-commerce Platforms – GoECart.com
1742 days
As I don’t have my comments on as default I occasionally get emails!
One such email in response to : What functionality to make sure you have when investing in an e-commerce platform…
was:
Hi Liz,
I really enjoy your blog.
I read your post today on e commerce platforms and I wondered if you knew
anything about goecart.com? Is it a worthwhile option?Thanks for taking the time to read this
Dave
and i said….
I have not heard of them but as there were a codie finalist they can’t be
half bad! It includes a one page shopping cart (marvellous, better for
reducing cart abandonment) and also CRM tools, which is a nice added
feature for customer support and after sales marketing. It all depends
whether you need all these nifty features for your business and whether it
justifies the price. As it has a 30 day trial you have nothing to loose
trying it out.
I took a look at http://www.bridestuff.com/ and they have SEF URLs (text
urls) and I had no loading problems either whilst accessing the site.
So what has http://goecart.com/ got that stands out to me?
- One page checkout ( the holy grail of all checkout formats, why would you want anything less?)
- CRM tools – The CRM tool Salesforce tracks everything in my work life, so it would be great for an e-commerce set up to track customer questions, website support and also drive marketing campaigns and track their success.
- They are thinking about SEO, with the text urls and the site mapping for Google and Yahoo.
- The ability to automate shopping comparison feeds and also set up your own affiliate schemes.
- Many payment integrations ( but no mention of paypal pro in the website? Surely not?)
- Using excel to manage your inventory
and many more features. They seem to be dotting every I an crossing every T with and ERP like coverage with regards to e-commerce. They also have a free trial available.
But go on…how much does all this cost?
$1799 (£906 at time of publishing) a year for the basic subscription of up to 1000 items, but bear in mind that does include the hosting, disk space,emails and support.
…..so for what £75.50 a month. Not a bad deal really. I would recommend this for existing businesses thinking of going global with e-commerce from about £2Kto £30K GMS (Gross Monthly Sales)
Now, onto the Design….
Design is extra, their design services are an extra $1250 (£630). They boast the system is fully customisable so design is what I would shop around for. You could probably save on the design element, or find a design team that suits your tastes more as everyone is different. No point putting all your eggs in one basket when the market is so large and fruitful!
