Online shopping cart software and ecommerce shops

One of the first questions any potential online shop owner should consider is whether to make use of local or international hosting for their site.

There are various pros and cons to both options, and careful evaluation of your shop’s requirements is needed before you make the choice.

Yesterday I came across this absolutely brilliant article on the requirements of a good online shop. I was looking for tips on what an online shop should offer in terms of usability and design.

I stumbled onto Rand Fishkin's SEOMoz site. Rand Fishkin is very well known in SEO circles, and he has even been on Oprah!

He wrote an article on best practises for online shops, and these include:

1. Telling the user exactly where in the shop he is
2. Allowing flexible search and sorting options
3. Displaying cost and savings clearly
4. Show if the products are in stock
5. Provide many photos of the products
6. Clearly display delivery options
7. Send confirmation e-mails and any additional info

I found these tips really useful, and will attempt to incorporate them in all the shops we build. You can check out the article on SEOMoz here: 17 Rules for successful ecommerce websites

We have just included a new online shop into the Wooza Mall. TechMall is a South African technology company selling hi-end computer and software solutions online. They offer a huge variety of products - if your looking for anything technology related you'll probably find it here. According to TechMall they pride themselves in selling top, quality products at very competitive prices.

The online shop wasn't created by Wooza Shop, but we have looked at the site in detail and found that it meets the quality requirements of the Wooza Mall. Head over to TechMall and have a look at their site and the products they offer. 

One important way of improving your search engine rankings for your products, as well as converting more customers, is by writing your own unique product description for all your products.

Generally people cut and paste the product description from the supplier’s website. This results in everybody selling that particular product having the same product description in their online store. The search engines see this as duplicate content, and may actually penalise your site for this. If your users have been shopping around a bit for the product they are looking for, they will also most likely have come across the exact product description you have on another site.

By writing your own descriptions you can customise you keyword usage to get the best search engine results. You can also inject you own style and the philosophy of your online store into it. It will seem much more professional to your users than simple pasting the supplier’s product description.

Here are a couple of tips on writing good product descriptions:

Describe the basic features that people are interested in

Describe what you like about the product

Explain why this product is better than others

Describe how the customer can benefit from the product

Give fitting alternatives to the product

For a more detailed analysis of product descriptions, check out the e-commerce blog’s article Showing passion in your product descriptions