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The Adeo Group Blog

Keep up with our latest news, industry insights, website launches, and general chitchat all in one place.

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Archive for the Ecommerce Websites Category

Responsive Web Design

Monday, June 10th, 2013

Website design and development have come a long way from the static HTML website to websites that are highly dynamic and responsive to varying platforms. Nevertheless, the underlying question is what are responsive web designs? Well! A responsive web design refers to a website design that responds appropriately to various dimension of the screen. Essentially, when developing a website to be a responsive, dimension such as the height and width are taken into consideration and the web layout is adjusted accordingly to fit to the viewable area appropriately. These responsive designs permit the production of websites that are independent of the viewable area.

Nowadays, it is no longer sufficient to design a website for desktops and laptops. It has become essential to consider designing websites for multiple platforms in order to enhance accessibility regardless of the device or browser the user will be using when accessing your website. Therefore, your design should put this into consideration in order to allow users to access your website effortlessly.

Integrating images on your website can prove to be a challenge in responsive designs. Consequently, by using images that are flexible, and automatically resizeable is more appropriate for your responsive website. Therefore, as you consider this, you should Program your images in order to resize and fit in properly according to the limitation presented in a mobile layout. RedBack content management software developed by Adeo Group handles all the responsive image resizing automatically and doesn’t require any programming knowledge. It is a brilliant solution for managing ecommerce websites and driving profits online.
Although it is a growing trend, the use of responsive designs needs to be constantly checked to ensure proper functioning, especially on the mobile platforms.

The use of internet on hand held devices such as smart phones is increasingly becoming popular in the recent times. As a result, it has become more important to pay more attention to creating a responsive web design for your website in order to keep up with these rapidly changing trends.

ecommerce product descriptions: Key Words are the Key

Thursday, May 23rd, 2013

The internet has become one of the most popular product information search platforms. Search engines such as Google and Bing are now storing vast amounts of data that can be reached with just the click of a mouse. Today’s consumers can spend less time searching for their wanted items than ever before. As a result, it is vital to make your brand digitally available and findable. If you already have a website this might be reasonably easy to achieve, however, if you are selling through eBay or Amazon you might need to put in more effort. A well-written product description mixed with specific key words can help to sell the product and boost your search engine optimization (SEO).

Research undertaken by Ofcom revealed that internet shopping in the UK is more popular than in any other major country. UK consumers tend to spend an average of £1,083 per year each on online shopping. In order to get a fair share of that annual spend it is important to establish strong brand presence and make it more desirable to the target market. One of the ways that can help you to achieve this goal is by telling your brand story through the product descriptions. Story telling product descriptions help to engage with the customers on a personal level, because consumers can relate to the brand and express their own identities through it. As it can be rather complicated to convey key benefits and a marketing message for a product within 60 or 70 words you need to consider the main factors.

  • Know your industry and key competitor offerings. What do they do better than you? What can you learn from them? What do your customers like about competitor brands? Learn about the industry and adapt the best of it to your business.
  • Research your target market. Find out all you can about your target audience in order to identify their needs, wants and demands. Only by knowing your customers you will be able to communicate with them at personal level and create a dialogue that will essentially help you to sell
  • Tell the story of your product in order to relate to your consumer needs and make it irreplaceable. In other words tell you customers how your product will fit into their lives and make it better.
  • Make the text quite simple and don’t use elaborate words to explain the concept of your product.
  • Use bullet points to describe key product features. Always think about your target audience. Do they value that particular benefit? What features do relate to the target market? What are they looking for?
  • Be accurate in your product descriptions. Make sure that the information about the product or service is correct. Don’t make mistakes.
  • Fill the content with the key words that will help to boot your SEO. Imagine that you are a customer and you are searching for a new pair of glasses. Which words are you the most likely to type into Google? Glasses, shades, sun glasses, Ray Bans or any other brand?

One of the best examples of an engaging, ‘storytelling’, product description is Aussie shampoo. Aussie is a famous hair care brand. It is marketed as a product of Australia, but in reality it is an American brand manufactured by the multinational Procter & Gamble company. It is fair to say that the hair care industry is saturated with millions of products and yet the Aussie brand has recently managed to stay different and on a spotlight. The success of the brand lies within the ability to relate to the target market and tell the brand story as unique as the ingredients of the shampoo itself. The brand represents the key personality features of the target audience; including traits such as practical, witty, smart and down to earth. The Aussie shampoo is more than just a simple hair care product offering the same features as other shampoos. It is branded with its own philosophy, values and beliefs. This is exemplified in the product description (below), which contains the key words that link the product to the key target market.

aussie shampoo product page

 

Kelvin Power Tools

Thursday, February 28th, 2013

@adeogroup have launched a new website for @kelvinpowertool full of great new features including geo tagging, multi currency, active filters on category pages, one page checkout, postage calculator based on your actual post code and a fantastic new design to help customers find their ideal power tool. Visit http://www.kelvinpowertools.com

Why mobile commerce, why now?

Thursday, February 7th, 2013

Shoppers are becoming more mobile and want to shop from the comfort of their arm chair or sofa.

Over the last few years, smartphones and tablets have been the catalyst for a fundamental evolution of shopping behaviour.

Buying on the move has got a whole lot easier. In fact, 38% of mobile users already use their phones to shop with when they are away from their computers. It’s not surprising, given that 92% of the UK adult population have mobile phones.

If your business isn’t ready for mobile, you could fall behind in the race to access the £5.8 billion that’s expected to come from m-commerce in the UK by 2016.

Adeo Group have mobile commerce solutions to meet the ever demanding needs of the modern etailer, features to help conversion, usability as well as direct integration to exiting back office solutions.

Contact us today to see how we can take your website forward with mobile commerce.

Tel: 0845 241 8228

Google Trusted Stores Coming Soon

Friday, January 25th, 2013

A great exciting feature called #trustedstores from #google has been launched in the US, I cannot wait for this to become available for our UK eCommerce clients. Looks like it helps both conversion and overall sales value. Watch the video at http://www.google.com/trustedstores/merchants/

Sage 200 Integration

Sunday, January 13th, 2013

We can provide you with an ecommerce site that links to your Sage 200 back office, simple effective solution. Contact us to find out how we can work with you, 0141 218 4422.

E-commerce web design

Monday, January 7th, 2013

Are you looking for an e-commerce website that integrates into your business and delivers results?

We have build many successful e-commerce sites that are feature loaded that concentrate on customer usability and conversion.

We work with our clients to help them deliver results for their business.

For an informal chat, call us today on 0141 218 4422.

Recent Website Launches

Friday, July 20th, 2012

It’s been a very busy couple of months here at Adeo. We’ve been hard at work on several websites which have launched over the past few weeks (with more due to launch imminently):

Aable Wooden Floors
Leading hardwood flooring company, they count the Scottish Parliament amongst their clients.

TEC Group International
Global recruitment specialist for the oil and energy industries.

Churchill Opticians
A long-established Glasgow high street optics retailer.

First People Solutions
Recruitment consultancy with Aviation, Construction, Energy and Technical divisions operating world-wide.

Nutrition Maniac
Online retailer selling thousands of health food, vitamins & supplements and sports nutrition products.

Client wins Online Retailer of the Year 2012

Wednesday, July 4th, 2012

Congratulations to Allflex, who won The Scottish Farmer’s Online Retailer of the Year 2012 award at the Royal Highland Show.

They are renowned within the agricultural industry as one of the world’s leading suppliers of livestock identification tags and their website is built on Redback, our e-commerce platform.

Paul Brisbane, website administrator, had this to say: “[On] behalf of Allflex Europe (UK) I would like to say a BIG thank you to everyone at Adeo!”

www.allflex.co.uk

European Cookie Law, will your site pass the test?

Wednesday, March 7th, 2012

So the countdown is on and on 26th May 2012 all UK websites must offer users opt-in consent tools to allow cookies that pass information about your browsing activities to 3rd parties.

What does this mean for your website?

Well it’s been a very grey area and getting the correct answer as to what will make your site legal or not has been tough.

We still think it’s not entirely clear, but what we do know is that 3rd party cookies must be declared, so if you use the likes of Google analytics, Facebook plugins, Twitter plugins, any analytics programs or anything else out with your site then you need to let your visitor know what you are using.

Then you need to offer them the option to accept these or reject them.

This is going to bring a whole host of issues and the following will explain the process of what could happen.

The user arrives at your site and is presented with a message, possibly at the top of the screen like this site

http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_organisations/privacy_and_electronic_communications/the_guide/cookies.aspx

so you have two options here.

  1. Do Nothing or
  2. Click Accept

So choosing option A will stop any 3rd party cookies running, this means if you use analytics for example to track users, this won’t work and the figures will be skewed essentially meaning you won’t have that valuable data you rely on to make decisions about your website.

Choosing B, well this will let things happen in the normal way, but you will notice that people can select cookies for individual elements, so they may say yes to Facebook, but no to analytics.

The consequences could be high.

The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) is the body responsible for enforcing the UK law, with powers to fine website owners up to £500,000 for serious breaches in the law.

I think the next year is going to prove very interesting to see how the larger ecommerce sites battle this.

There are companies out there offering solutions to make your site compliant, but that’s only one element, you could still miss out on that valuable analytics data.

I’d say one of the most important elements in any website is being able to track visitors and what they do while on your site. Fortunately Adeo have integrated an analytics platform that doesn’t include 3rd party cookies and this means we don’t have to ask for permission, so our own analytics won’t be skewed.

If you would like any more info, feel free to contact us as we will be integrating this in to our CMS and Ecommerce platforms.