Step-up your eCommerce website for Black Friday deals

 Thanksgiving Day is around the corner and I bet all of you must be equally excited about the festival. What sets our pulse racing equally is the Black Friday sale that follows consecutively to the Thanksgiving. This year's big sale is on 25th of November and is being anticipated with eagerness. The Cyber Monday sale follows this event on the consequent Monday. These two are the big events for both the customers and the eStore owners.

It's time for all you online store owners to buckle up your laces to provide an exhilarating experience to the customers and to make the maximum profit out of it. As always, the sale will start early morning and customers will be flocking to the online store till midnight.

Preparing your eStore for an exquisite Black Friday Sale

Just like every year this year's sale is going to be a super hit as 2015 witnessed a massive revenue of 1.66 billion US dollars. You can increase your eStore's revenue by adhering to certain guidelines. Hiring an eCommerce Website Designing Company could reap amazing benefits for any online business.

Main points you need to focus during  this year's sale would be:

1. A mobile-friendly website: The users of mobile devices are surging by each passing day because of its portability and ease of usage. Around half of the overall traffic on eCommerce sites come from smartphone and tablet users. So if your interface is mobile-friendly, there is a higher chance of customers placing the order rather than switching the website.

2. Ensuring proper speeds: It is really frustrating to navigate on a website that offers higher page loading time and lags in between. So keep your website up and running by using performance enhancers. Test the server load capacity frequently to ensure a flawless performance of the website.

3. Butter smooth Order processing: The user experience is equally essential in all sorts of business. Let the customer experience a smooth and quick transaction while placing the order. Include an option of Guest checkout and integration of multiple Payment gateways for a wonderful user experience.

4. Solid online marketing for a wider reach: Advertise your product in an efficient way such that the customers come to know about it. Integrate helpful keywords in your content and assign a team for enhanced Search Engine results. Run a publicity campaign about the offers and coupons available for different products on your website. Choose stunning images that are also informative to attract the customers in large numbers.

5. Tweak your home page theme: Customize your home page and other web pages with respect to the Black Friday sale. Hire some developers to assist you with the customization process. For example, if your website is based on Magento, you can hire a Magento Web Development Company from India to expand the eStore as per your needs.

Thus, following these points you can prepare an store to perform in a sturdy and jovial fashion this Black Friday Sale. So optimise your website and have a good social-media promotions along with email marketing for a rock solid performance this month.

Improve Your Magento Store’s Design & Speed To Increase Converts

You could be having the best prices for your online store products but still fail to generate a significant conversion rate. Despite offering better rates than your competitors, what could be possibly driving your customers away? The answer could be a bad user-experience or simply put, a bad online shopping experience. A bad user experience implies poor performance and a poor user-interface design. Let us see how to ameliorate these two aspects for a Magento store:

Improving The UI Design
Ideally, the UI design for your store should be a mix of what is ‘in’ these days and your own unique store requirements. A unique store requirement could stem from the kind of items that you are selling. For instance, if you are selling items for teenage girls, then a relevant girlish design theme becomes your store’s unique design need. But, in addition to addressing your store’s unique design need, it is important that you check if your store looks on par with the looks of your competitor stores. Does your website give a fresh and modern look? To enhance your store’s look, you must consider incorporating some of the latest e-commerce design trends such as the use of hover effects, flat design, grid layout, white space, and large background images.

In addition to the look of your store, you must check if its layout offers a simple and intuitive user-experience. Ask yourself: can you find call-to-action buttons such as the buy button easily? Can you figure out what an icon means within a microsecond of you looking at it? Is the check-out process streamlined or complicated? Does a user have to invest a lot of time to find what they are looking for? In addition to addressing these questions, you could also perform an A/B test for the elements of your store. Is a green buy button more effective at converting a visitor or a red button? Answers to such questions can be found out through A/B testing.

After figuring out what kind of improvements your store needs, take the help from an experienced ecommerce website designing company which can implement improvements.

Improving The Performance
The performance of your store can be improved by adopting a variety of measures such as:

1. Caching: Caching is the most popular means to improve the performance of any website. The process implies delivering a saved copy of a page every time a visitor returns. It is worthy to note that Magento makes an extension available that especially serves this purpose. The extension is named Full Page Cache Extension.

2. Maintain Store Database: A Magento store records user action in the form of a database that must be cleaned regularly in order to ensure quality speed. Fortunately, a Magento web development company in India can perform such regular clean-ups on your store database and thus, help you achieve performance.

3. Use Compressed Product Images: While quality product images positively affect a store’s success, it is important to note that heavy images can compromise store performance. So, make sure that you use compressed product images that are also not weak in quality. Both attributes can be ensured by using a relevant image compressing module.

4. Update To Latest Version: Updating your store to the latest Magento version is one of the most effective ways to improve performance. Update as soon as a latest version is available.

By improving the design and performance of your e-commerce website, you can render an optimum user experience, which can further help you win more converts. Just make sure that you avail the services of an experienced Magento website development company for improving both of these aspects.

5 Measures That Can Boost The Performance Of A Zencart Store

An online store despite a wonderful UI and amazing features can drive customers away if it doesn't load fast enough. So, even if you have created an e-commerce website using a feature-rich platform such as Zencart, it would be necessary for you to optimize the store’s performance. Let us look at some of the significant measures that can boost the performance of an online store built on the Zencart platform:

Upgrade Zencart To The Latest Version
An updated software version is always better in terms of quality and performance than its previous version. So, make it a point to check upon new releases and upgrade your Zencart store to the latest version. It is noteworthy to know that upgrading requires some amount of technical knowledge and skill and therefore, it would be advisable to avail the services of a Zen cart development company in India or elsewhere for store upgradation.

Deploy Dedicated Hosting
The performance of a website depends greatly on its hosting server. Out of the kind of web hostings available, a dedicated hosting is the one that renders the best performance. So, if your budget allows so, make sure you deploy it for your online store.

Deploying Fewer Add-ons & Reduce HTTP Requests
Lesser the number of data files of your online store, lesser would be the number of HTTP requests required to upload the store from the server, and higher will be the store’s performance. Now, in order to reduce the number of HTTP requests of a Zencart store, avoid deploying add-ons in a large number. For building a Zen cart e-commerce website with the minimum number of add-ons possible, make sure you hire a team experienced in delivering Zen cart development services.

Optimize Images
Use of large images can adversely affect the speed of an e-commerce website. It is therefore, important to optimize the images of an online store for its optimum performance. For optimizing the product images of a Zencart store, the Image handler 4 add-on must be deployed.

Make Sure Your Server Is Installed With A PHP Accelerator
A PHP accelerator optimizes the speed of any PHP application. Now, Zencart being a PHP application can also be optimized by ensuring that a PHP accelerator is installed in the server deployed for the online store.

By the implementation of the aforementioned measures, we can ensure that a Zencart store is optimized for performance.

How To Secure Your Prestashop Store From Potential Attacks

Securing your online store from hackers and attacks is a foremost priority that every online store owner must attend to. A security lapse in your online store can gravely damage your store’s finances. If you have an online store built on the Prestashop platform, following are the key measures that can keep your store safe and secure:

Employ Different and Strong Passwords For Every Level
Handling an online store requires setting up a username and password for different levels such as FTP and platform database. It is important that you create different and strong passwords for every level. Make use of a password manager that can store your multiple passwords and also help you suggest strong ones.

Deploy A Secure Payment Gateway
It is important that you deploy a secure payment gateway for your online store. If you do not wish to deploy a third-party payment gateway and want to opt for a non-hosted payment gateway, then you need to give special attention to website security. Perfect security in this case can only be achieved by a Prestashop development company reputed for secure and flawless code.

Deploy Updated Versions For Your Prestashop Store
Prestashop releases minor versions of its shopping cart software in regular time intervals. These versions can be deployed for your online store with automatic updates that Prestashop provides for. Every update comes with bug fixes, that ultimately enhances the security of your online store.

Deploy Security Plugins
There are a host of Prestashop plugins that render security to your online store. Some of them are-
Protect My Shop: The plugin protects your store from all kinds of injections and data thefts. Moreover, you can activate or deactivate a protection based on your needs.

Ban IP Address: The module allows you to black-list suspicious IP addresses and re-direct banned users to another site.

Login Protector: The module allows you to control the access of your store by the use of a login password which only selected people have. The module is especially useful when you want to sell your products to a specific set of people or company.

Block Bots: The module allows you to block your store’s access from particular IP addresses, users from a particular country, and even user-agents.

Download Secure Plugins & Themes
When you are installing themes and plugins from an external source (ie non-official Prestashop source), then make sure that you scan them for malware before use. Additionally,in order to prevent attacks on your store, you must test these third-party plugins and themes for vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities can be checked by a team rendering Prestashop Development

Services.
With the implementation of the aforementioned measures, you can secure your website from potential attacks with appreciable success.

Contact us:
321, Tower B4, Spaze iTechPark,
Sector 49, Sohna Road,Gurgaon
Website: http://www.ecommercedesign.co.in/
Email ID: sales@ecommercedesign.co.in

Must Have Shopify Apps For Better Online Marketing

An essential factor that contributes towards the success of your online store is a sound marketing strategy. An online store can be effectively marketed online by obtaining better search engine rankings for your store’s domain, an optimal social media presence, an effective e-mail marketing strategy.

Different e-commerce platforms offer different plugins that can be deployed for marketing it effectively. Since Shopify Development in India and across the world is taking to new heights, it would be worth knowing how its applications can be used for an effective marketing strategy. Therefore, let us know about some must-have Shopify apps for better online marketing:

1)Apps For E-mail Marketing: E-mails are the most regularly read items by internet users. You can tap this widely used medium for letting customers know about near future discounts and sales, and new products by employing a regular e-mail marketing strategy, which can be actualised with the use of suitable apps such as MailChimp. Moreover, you can also engage with first-time customers by the use of happy mail app, that sends a thank you e-mail to first-time customers.

2)Apps For Better Search Engine Rankings: With apps such as SEO Manager, you can optimize your store’s search engine rankings with a set of features, which includes SEO scan and suggestions, editing titles and descriptions, and etc. Moreover, with the SEO image optimizer app, you can optimise your images of your store, consequently allowing better search engine results for your product images.

3)Apps For Social Media Marketing: With the social sharing buttons app, you can share new products on your store’s official social media accounts easily and let your customers popularize favourite products on social media too. Moreover, with the social media marketing app, you can schedule product and content posts for a week. Additionally, the app allows you to search for GIFs and interesting content for sharing as well.

In addition to the above-mentioned apps, you can deploy customized apps, built as per your visual and functional preferences, and built by a reputable Shopify App Development Company in India or across the world. Thus, with the aforementioned apps and/or customized ones, you can market your online store with success.

Contact us:
321, Tower B4, Spaze iTechPark,
Sector 49, Sohna Road,Gurgaon
Website: http://www.ecommercedesign.co.in/
Email ID: sales@ecommercedesign.co.in

The Advantages Of Using Zencart For Your E-commerce Project

ZenCart is a shopping cart with the GNU General Public License. It offers a host of features that make it an ideal choice for an e-commerce project. Let us delve deeper into its features and know some noteworthy advantages of using the shopping cart. Here follows a list of its top advantages:

1)Free and Open-Source: The online store management system provides its source code in an open source format. Thus, you can build a unique shopping cart by customizing the freely available source code.

2)Easy Customization: Zencart provides an override system that allows easy customization of your shopping cart. The override system describes the collection of files required to customize the look of your cart. These files are added to the custom folders that are provided in the module and template folders. Moreover, the override system helps in retaining cart customization during new patches and upgrades.

3)Wide Range Of Modules: Basic e-commerce modules relating to categories such as marketing, shipping, payment, admin tools, product types, troubleshooting tools and etc. are available for free. Moreover, paid modules come at relatively low prices. The availability of a wide range of modules at a free or low price implies that the online store management system can prove to be an ideal choice for ventures with a tight budget.

4) Simple Hosting Requirements: The cart requires very simple hosting requirements. An e-commerce store running on ZenCart just needs a standard LAMP stack to operate. Moreover, the online store management system can run on different platforms (ie Linux/ Mac/Windows) with the same hosting requirement.

5)Availability Of Skilled Talent: One of the major requirements for accomplishing an e-commerce project is skilled talent. The online store management system is based on the widely popular PHP language, which is an easy language to learn and work upon. This automatically creates a huge availability of skilled talent that can render Zencart development services.

6) International Reach: With the language pack modules of major languages, including French, Spanish, German, and etc., you can make your store in any language, for customers based in any part of the world. Moreover, with the cart’s support to multiple currencies, you can accept transactions from any part of the world.

With the aforementioned advantages, it is a must for any e-commerce venture to consider deploying Zencart. Additionally, it would be necessary to employ a suitable Zencart web development company in India or across the world so that the online store management system can be used to its full potential for your project.

Contact us:
321, Tower B4, Spaze iTechPark,
Sector 49, Sohna Road,Gurgaon
Website: http://www.ecommercedesign.co.in/
Email ID: sales@ecommercedesign.co.in

Important Things That Should be Known About Magento Development and Customization

Today there would be very less people in the world of ecommerce who have not heard about Magento as it is the most popular platform in the industry for the development of online stores. The popularity is mainly because of the power, feature-rich, robust in nature and open source. All these facts have made Magento ecommerce website design services unavoidable for the companies.
However, it is important for every business to know the basics things about their requirement to get the maximum benefit from the platform.

• What is your requirement from the eCommerce site that you are going to develop?
• What all features or functions of the Magento platform will benefit you more?

If you have answers for these questions then it is ensured that you can develop a great online store that will have all the powerful features of Magento platform.

Read More: https://www.apsense.com/article/important-things-that-should-be-known-about-magento-development-and-customization.html