4 Smart Ways to Keep Your Brand’s Design Consistent

Branding is essential in ecommerce website, and consistency in it brings instant recognition. In precise, consistent branding means higher click-through rates across channels.

Well having said so, to have a recognizable brand is actually a big challenge. Successful branding is achieved over time, not overnight, and consistency is the key.

1. Narrow Your Niche- A Clear Design With A Message

Working off your brand’s vision, it is imperative to establish a design scheme that complements it. This comprise what type of images will you use which includes high-quality photography or illustrations but limiting to colors and font palette. Not to forget, don’t complicate your brand with indecisive design. And this usually happens when you start to go overboard.

2. A Design Partner Is Vital
Building a consistent, cohesive brand is a full-time job besides simply developing a ecommerce shopping cart. Those designers who are trained to know branding will help you stay consistent which will save you both, time and money.

3. Train Your Team
Whether it is an in-house team or outsourcing, consider those who are in charge of the project: web designers, developers, marketing coordinator, and others because all of them have a powerful impact on your brand. Again, the sales people and, project managers have the power to change how others would view your organization. Creating a unique design is not just the concern of the creative team but that matters to user-engagement with the right information and tools.

4. Everything Needs A Design Review

As is obvious, your website is your backbone and everything else should reflect back to the site. Say for instance, that includes your twitter background, website design, and eBooks, the way you present your proposal, or even videos?

Small projects are sent off to different departments or to a designer without proper branding guidelines. But not to forget, the marketing materials you use shows your brand goes beyond just a first impression.

Brand consistency is consistently matching to customers perceptions, essential to building brand equity and ensuring your brand’s success.

Why Retailers Should Waste Money on Apple’s New Mobile Payment System

No. You shouldn’t waste money if it doesn’t worth for it. But the ongoing hot talk is, “if Apple Pay is a hit, ‘BYOD is dead.’”

Apple CEO Tim Cook was proud to reveal a frictionless reality that makes paying completely seamless unveiling the first step with Apple Pay. Building a payments business is HUGE RISK but then, why payments incumbents and innovators should take chance in installing this new terminals?

Summary: Technology Embarking the New Payment System

The prevailing opinion among analysts and experts in the payments industry is that Apple is turning a Smartphone into an in-store payment device. A crucial enabling wireless technology named Near Field Communication is used that will enable the chip in an iPhone to pass payment card data to a store terminal without needing for a shopper to swipe her card.

Close news from the provider of proximity marketing, loyalty and contactless payment technologies says, “This will ignite the mobile payments market globally, especially in the U.S. where adoption has lagged”.

How Apple Pay Works

Apple Pay can accept transactions through their iTunes credit card details or take a photograph of their card in order to add a credit card. The good news is that the payment information is not stored on the phone but only a 16-digit device identification number is combined with a one-time payment number with a dynamic security code for each payment whilst the consumer’s identity is verified using the Touch ID biometric fingerprint scanner.

The end result is that, Apple Sustains To Be The Secured Way To Pay With A Smartphone In Stores.

Other Benefits Include:

• Backed by American Express, Visa and MasterCard and card-issuing banks Apple Pay is incorporated into the Apple Passbook mobile wallet for or 83% of credit card transactions.

• NFC- that which mentioned earlier uses the iPhone’s Touch ID biometric fingerprint scanner and encryption to enable in-store payments by holding the iPhone close to a payment terminal.

• Also, its finger print scanner let the owners to make purchases inside applications on the iPhone.

Howbeit, winding up, the consumer adoption of Apple Pay will depend on how easy it is to use and with insouciance- the merchants can sure start to commit!!!

Why Would Your Customers Backslide When it Comes To Mobile Shopping

Very recently, a global survey for etailoring happened which showed 40.3% of ecommerce site traffic in the UK is from Smartphone’s- yes, a phenomenal growth. And 60% of shoppers have clearly showed their interest to BUY it via their phones. However, they aren’t sure if they can- why is this repulsive still happening in the digital world has become a serious problem of the hour.

Growth of e-commerce - via iTunes, iBooks and the app stores via Apple's products were up 19% to $4.4 billion in Q1 2014. Some say, perhaps the tiny keyboards might cause difficulty to enter Credit Card, Billing and Shipping information which, as per Google, comments Smartphone shopping cart abandonment is at 97%. Some others say it’s because of the significant gap arising between what the market wants and what is provided by the eTailers.                 
                                                                       
Let’s see how to make mobile shopping experience a pleasant one:

• One prominent solution is using trust-able payment gateways like PayPal, Authorize.net, Cyber Source, and Google Checkout which store your credit card number and process your payment after an authentication process.

• Instead of over typing 150 characters on a tiny keyboard, letting customers to enter email address on the average 22 characters.

• Usage of password of minimum 8 or 9 characters containing numbers, upper and lower case characters and a symbol- perhaps a safer and longer password.

• Since Smartphone’s can become our digital identity, automatically authenticate us and make payments for us on our command.

Our phones know who we are and it always requires a feature to authenticate us. If they have such capability to remember our credit cards and shipping addresses in our hands, why are we being asked to type 150 characters on tiny keyboards every time we buy something? Apple is simultaneously building a mobile retail marketing infrastructure across the U.S. Like I said, mobile shopping carts are to become a lot bigger business than wristwatches ever will be.

How Important To Count on SEO When Developing an E-Commerce Site

A great deal of importance should be put into considering search engine optimization for a business site, especially in an ecommerce shopping cart where competitors are pretty a million. As is obvious, it determines the overall ranking of an ecommerce site on various search engines.

Compared to the ordinary content sites, SEO keywords will lead customers to their site with ease. Those who develop the sites should make a point of having the objectives well defined to get your website ranked highly.

How SEO Impacts Ecommerce

Designing an ecommerce website should be in such a way that they are easily perusable and well organized. Only then it supports SEO practices to enhance clarity for everyone who comes into contact with the pages. If you wanted to obtain maximum functionality, it is vital to consider things such as Classic ASP Ecommerce and SEO Friendly ASP.Net Ecommerce during the development stage itself.

Aside from the pages being designed with usability in mind, the shopping carts are to be added to the site. This provides the pages a well organized and designed look that suits the purpose- right SEO-friendly ecommerce site. 

 SEO To Drive Major Traffic for The Ecommerce Website

Ecommerce is gaining popularity worldwide as businesses willing to make sales easily over the internet. Always make a point of getting the right site developers who will provide the necessary services if the business cannot manage to develop the site itself. Only those with the skill and knowledge of how to develop the site will give the business what it needs the most in terms of improving search engine traffic.

This is the takeaway: Google reports that 97% of consumers search for local businesses online. Make sure you’re taking advantage of tools they offer like local listings and G+ for business for a great SEO.

5 Fatal Mistakes to Avoid in Drupal Website

Using any Content Management System (CMS) software, in first place, there is no silver bullet for creating a site that can fully survive an upgrade with no developer assistance needed. It’s the same for Drupal website as well.

This is why certain things to be taken care of when planning a Drupal website development project that can save maintenance time down the road.
  

Mistake#5: Keeping Extraneous File In The VSC Repository.

Image asset files, holiday pictures, or database dumps are generally pushed to the repository which is very unhealthy practice. Try to keep the VCS as clean and small as
possible

Mistake#4: Missing Out Of Date Development And Staging Environments.

Say for instance, developers conduct testing only in production because the other environments have old data or no connection to an external service. Ensure to maintain testing environments as similar to production as possible. This way you can easily copy from production and execute tests to assure that changes will work when moved to production.

Mistake#3: Out-Of-Date Code For Core And Contributed Modules.
At times, businesses prefer out of date code thinking to save some money. But keeping all modules and core as current as possible saves you in a long run.

Mistake#2: The Thought- Repair Better Than Maintenance

As a matter of fact, Drupal is a well-architected CMS that will continue to perform for a long time. However, keeping things up to date ensures a good experience for your visitors. If unnoticed, chances are there for site to get hacked which is much more costly

Mistake#1: Less Security During Deployment

Any developer can take a snapshot of production to install on their laptop which means anybody can misuse it. Allow developers to take snapshots and have other access to development and staging environments without giving access to the production environment only for the most trusted users.

Summing up, Keep your code under version control and review all logs periodically, including Apache, Drupal, and MySQL.

5 Shortcuts to Better Fraud Protection for Online Store

It is been evident that small businesses do not use enough fraud-prevention measures for the cause of cost-prohibitive. Yes, developing a risk management infrastructure is complicated and nuanced to meet today’s savvy and, technologically advanced fraudster.

Here are a few key practices merchants of all sizes can put in place to better identify fraud and prevent charge-back. 

 
Address Verification Service (AVS)

One of the best strategies to evaluate the validity of an order is using AVS data in conjunction with IP address, or other data points. How does this work? An IP address that is geographically close to the AVS address could be a sign that the order is valid. Not to deny, AVS matches can sometimes be misleading but essentially a full AVS match with a different shipping address is essentially meaningless.

Data Linking

A recent study confirms that “Big Data” is the best way to combat online fraud. This is why linking data is vital to protect a shopping cart. To brief it, it’s a simple method that can provide valuable insights about a customer’s order pattern and help you notice negative indicators: changing credit cards, order velocity, machine ID, and IP addresses that may have been used with other customer IDs.

Proxy Detection

Proxy detection is a very important first step in evaluating an order for fraud and such services are the most accurate way to detect a proxy. If you don’t plan to use such a service, simply doing a web search for IP address alongside keywords, such as “proxy,” will allow you to see if it is a current proxy on any public warning lists.

Geo Location

Geo location is a second data point that helps identify fraud. The endpoint of an IP address can tell you the location of the customer placing the order. Amidst the many free online services that can identify IP location, using it in conjunction with other data points like shipping or billing addresses and AVS results is preferable.

Hire an Expert

Hiring a third party expert can save you a lot of time and money. There are even a number of tools in the Magento app store, doesn’t matter whatever the size of your business or budget be.

As a whole, implementing these tips will help you protect your store against chargebacks and fraud.

6 Ethical Ideas to Improve Your Online Business Productivity

If you're running an e-commerce operation, it’s obvious you need to get customers on your website in the first place. And how much does it cost you- A LOT.

Owing to which, successful entrepreneurs are here sharing a few advice for generating high-quality, organic search traffic to their business websites.

Producing Quality Online Content

The more experience you are in creating quality content, the higher chances you have to pop up in search results. Starting a blog or churning out a bunch of articles and keeping those activities going for years as opposed to months makes a huge difference.

Link Building

Ask vendors, partners, and clients that you interact with to embed hyperlinked keywords back to your site. If the referring source has a high page rank, then it won’t be any difficulties in reaching the desired ranks.

Add Amazing Value to Your Readers

Content marketing through blogging or guest posts is the fastest way to build great traffic. Therefore, when it comes to content don’t ever compensate on quality. If you haven’t, then you really need to look at your content strategy again.

SEO as an Opportunity to Create Value

You want Google to deem your content search-worthy? Make it valuable. Visitors are more likely to share content and will stay on your site longer while bloggers and the media might use your site as a reference. This enhances more organic links.

Create a Company Blog

Instead of overwriting on your homepage and various other landing pages, initiate a separate blog for additional SEO work. The popular more search terms within your niche, the more organic leads will be generated. The blog will increase your visibility.




Don’t Underestimate Google

To increase organic search traffic it is not a good strategy for the long haul. Check the Google Keyword Tool to make sure you're using the correct terminology that the general public is using when they're searching.