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Welcome back brand builders this is Rediscover Your Brand™ podcast episode #15 brought to you by ArtVersion Interactive Agency. I’m your host Kip Russell. I’m a social media manager ArtVersion and other brands as well as marketing enthusiast and I’ve even written a TV theme song.
This week on Rediscover Your Brand™ podcast we are talking about the importance of eCommerce websites.
An eCommerce website to dumb it down is basically an online digital storefront for your brand. Some of the most well-known E-Commerce sites in the world are amazon.com, Zappos.com, and even broadway.com which sell tickets to shows and upcoming shows on broadway. These websites are designed with the simple yet complex task of marketing new products and then selling them efficiently online.
The first step in building an e-commerce website is developing the user interface design. User interface design is crucial because this is what your everyday visitor to the site will see. If the site design is sloppy or doesn’t function with ease the consumer can become frustrated or worse lose trust that their payment and delivery will occur so they lose value with your online store. We stress that you keep it simple and organize your products into categories that will be familiar to your consumer.
The best resource to build the framework for e-commerce sites is either Drupal or WordPress. I say the majority of e-commerce sites we develop are with the Drupal platform because the backend is easy to update and creates a lot of flexibility for design.
If your company is smaller with a limited budget and you will need to update your site yourself Drupal is very easy to learn. It will be important that you can create new categories or products for existing categories.
Once you’ve picked out the layout and user interface design of your website you will need to then work on the branding and graphics of your site. This is where you pick out the colors, fonts, pictures, and wording you want your site to have.
You’ll want to consider your brand voice meaning
The tones, language, persona, and purpose your site will have. There are no rules to this part of the presentation you can be as creative as possible. This will allow you to stand out from the crowd or your competition. Zappo’s is a good example of strong branding. They let their customers know that for every pair of shoes bought on their website they would in turn donate a pair. That’s a double wow factor on the path to purchase not only to you get a rush from buying a show you really want you to put a pair of shoes on someone who really needs them.
This is where you’ll pick out photos, logo placement, and catchy category names and illustrate to your consumer your brands mission.
Let’s talk about how you take payments online. After your store is designed and products are plugged into your store the next step is setting up your transaction software.
The 2 most popular services to complete your online transactions are paypal.com and authorize.net. They both have integrated services that allow you to take credit cards, PayPal payments, and bank transfers. I recommend PayPal because they have more flexibility when it comes to receiving your money. You can have it deposited directly into your account, directly into a checking account or onto a credit card. This allows a business various ways to control their funds. Both have extremely high trust and value with most online consumers and they both fluidly integrate well for web designers to connect with your e-commerce site.
The final stages after you’ve tested your website to make sure everything is working in terms of payment and structure. The final step is marketing your website. You should have a PR team send it out to all relevant areas and mix in an email to your current subscribers, reaching out to social media sites, and so on. Pinterest is a great new platform to market e-commence based products such as clothes, food, and tech gear.
I hope all this has made the world of e-commerce sites clearer and give you a good template to get started. For any further questions on e-commerce sites please contact us.
That’s it EPISODE #15 of REDISCOVER YOUR BRAND. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a minute to rate the show on ITUNES.
Also, don’t forget you can follow us on TWITTER – twitter.com/ARTVERSION or connect with and LIKE us on facebook.com/artversion.
If you have any suggestions or comments, feel free to send us an email, we would love to hear from you. To get more information on ARTVERSION, visit our website at ARTVERSION.COM.
Next time on the REDISCOVER YOUR BRAND podcast EPISODE #16, we’ll be discussing blogging. That’s next time, until then, Thank you for listening – I’m Kip Russell helping you REDISCOVER YOUR BRAND.