http://www.tullibardine.com/

In the first year trading the site has almost made the 2 million turnover mark. We have been constantly developing this platform with features both from an admin perspective and front end user experience.

Read the story published here

http://menmedia.co.uk/manchestereveningnews/news/business/enterprise/s/1457170_a-healthy-first-year-for-konrad-

We wish Konrad all the success in the future and are excited to be working on this project in the years to come.

It’s a pretty big decision to move on to a new platform and generally means the company has outgrown their current platform. For start-up businesses you tend to opt for a cheaper platform and then as the site grows you eventually have to move on to something that’s more suitable.

Hopefully the next few tips will help and aid your migration process.

1. Domain Name Problems

One of the main problems I come up against is transferring the domain or pointing the domain to a new server. In many cases the client doesn’t control the domain themselves and they generally have to involve other people to make this happen. So firstly you need to make sure you have control of the domain or if you don’t have then start planning to have this brought under your control.

A useful tool for this is http://whois.domaintools.com/

You can search your domain, find out what registrar hosts your domain and who owns the domain.

2. SSL Certificates

If your current site uses an SSL certificate then you will have to have this moved to the new server. Generally most SSL vendors will have instructions how to carry this out and your web developer should have a pretty good idea.

You can check if your site uses an SSL certificate by going to https://domainname

In the address bar on IE for example it has a padlock; click the padlock to find out if there is a certificate in your domains name, if not then this may be a shared certificate if the web server has any at all.

3. Organic Search Listings

So probably one of the biggest concerns is what about my organic listings, generally most existing successful sites will have good organic listings. I would say this is one of the most important things to consider. Generally the new site that’s being created will have different url’s for products, categories etc if you can have the same then that’s great, but generally that doesn’t happen so time must be spent mapping the old url’s to the new ones which improves the chances of your site losing any ranking at all. The handy 301 redirect will sort this out for you and let Google etc know where the new url’s are.

below shows how this may be laid out

redirect 301 www.domain.com/oldurl.html    -  -   www.domain.com/newurl.html

This is handled different ways between apache servers and windows servers but if you get an excel sheet or something similar and have one column for old url’s and one for new then your new web developer should be able sort this.

4. Moving Data

Data is hugely important and you have to go out your way to get as much data transferred over to the new platform as possible, not only will this save a huge amount of time, but will also maintain order history etc which is invaluable information.

The main things you need to consider here is how easy is it to access the database on your existing site and then get an export of this in a suitable format to be imported in to your new system. Generally if you can export in a CSV format then your new developers should be able to create an import script and get this up and running on the new site.

If there is information that’s not required for the new platform then this could speed up the process of the build and also the costs may be kept down.

5. Email

Email is highly important so any loss on this service could be hugely detrimental. The fact of the matter is that moving your website shouldn’t really interfere with email unless email is hosted by the existing web company. If you are moving to a new web platform you have probably reached a size that pop3 email isn’t suitable and you should possibly be looking to a hosted exchange service, in house exchange server or what we recommend if you don’t require a huge amount of email functionality then Google apps is a great way to set up your email and very portable with a lot of good features.

If your web company hosts your email, it may be a good time to consider doing a move to another type of email hosting service and any good web company should have suggestions on this.

6. Activating the New Site

When you decide to go live on your new site, you need to allow some time. Even up to 48hrs in some cases, but over the years I have noticed that this has come down and sometimes the action can take effect pretty much immediately, but there is no guarantees of this so make sure you allow for this. Also it’s a good idea to put up a maintenance page on the old site so you don’t get orders on the old site from users who’s DNS hasn’t updated. We have also found launching a site on a Friday as a bad idea as generally the support team on at the weekend are reduced and you may find some minor issues after the new site going live.

7. Full Testing

I can’t stress how important this is, you have to try come up with every imaginable combination of ordering, returning, setting up a new account and testing new features. Usually a major fault may lie in cross browser testing, where it works fine in IE, but not in Firefox, so make sure all tests are completed before launching. Generally you won’t find everything but make sure you iron out all the major bugs.

8. New Features

Migrating to a new platform is a great time to implement some new features, its important to take note of your competitors and what they may have and listening to the needs of your customers who may have identified something that could make the site run smoother. However make sure these are planned out properly and that the developers understand exactly what’s required.

9. Don’t delete the old site

Its worth while keeping the old site running on the old server for a few weeks just in case there is data missing or you need to refer back to something. If you require longer don’t be worried about keeping it on longer until you are completely happy the new site is running correctly.

Hopefully some of these tips should help with a smooth transition to your new platform.

The PDF is only 5 pages, quick to the point and covers some very useful tips to consider when looking at your online presence.

ATG have a large client list and some large brands, however looking at their platform there are a number of improvements that could be carried out to the architecture to make it more SEO friendly. I suppose for many of their sites the search engine friendliness of their cart doesn’t matter so much as they are big brands that don’t require much SEO as the brand really drives the traffic.

The development that went in to Adeo’s RedBack ecommerce software was extensive as we wanted to make this one of the most indexable platforms around the globe and the feedback is good from top UK SEO Companies.

SME-Guide-to ecommerce

We have recently been introduced to a great new App for your desktop or Mac called Shopping Genie. When this app is downloaded you can search and compare from the likes of Google, Kelkoo and shopping.com. The shopping Genie will show you the best prices from across the web for your chosen product.

The great thing about this app is that it doesn’t annoy you all the time it only comes up when you search for a consumer product in your search engine.

This app is also free to download and we believe that this will be a great addition for households across the UK, with more and more people shopping online and with the current economic climate everybody is looking for the best deal.

Here’s some Stats:

64% of consumers use a price search to get the best price for a product

10% retail sales are online.

$320B spent on online advertising

$130B spent via ecommerce online, which is expected to rise 14% annually.

Why don’t you try out the my shopping genie app today at http://www.myshoppinggenie.com/unlimitedleads

Click Get the Free App

Selling tags for sheep and cattle visitors can order various tags for their animals via a fully featured front end.

RedBack eCommerce has been fully integrated into a Sage 200 back office system.

Visit Allfex at www.allflex.co.uk

The individual country statistics showed that Belgian, Danish, Italian and Swedish users accessed their email most and Belgians were also the most likely to use search engines. Consumer confidence had gone up and a major factor in this has been Online Banking with Norwegians leading the way while Romanians trailed at 19% uptake.

The UK showed a preference for “real” news and still preferred traditional print with the lowest uptake at 68%, however with many new mediums coming online ie the Apple Ipad we have yet to see how this will impact printed newspapers in the coming years.

Still the Ecommerce Market is thriving with 57% of Europeans having made an online purchase in the last 12 months. Eastern Europe again showed hesitancy with only 24% making online purchases.

Year on year we see rises within this market and with the many benefits of trading online and the audiences you can reach its little wonder why it’s doing so well.

Success in ecommerce is not a given though, it still takes a lot of hard work and working with the right partners and having the right platform to deliver results.

Clients are now receiving letters from their banks, streamline to mention one, stating they have to signup to the compliance management program.

This is so they can manage the process to make sure online traders are PCI Compliant. In 2009 Visa Europe saw a 75%  increase in data compromises compared to 2009. Larger organisations have now tightened up their security and hackers are now turning their attention to smaller merchants to harvest data.

This is now quite in depth and every security loophole must be plugged. Many web development companies are not PCI Compliant.

Is Yours?

Dont be caught out and incur hefty fines!

If you would like to find out some more information check out our page on PCI Compliance or get in touch if you would like to discuss your website and PCI Compliance.

The first seminar will be held on the 12th of February 2010 and will be addressed by one of the worlds top SEO experts, Rand Fishkin (seomoz)

Visit OnlineXcellence to book your place.