Archive for the ‘eCommerce News’ Category

Are website designers providing the right service?

Wednesday, February 16th, 2011

We have been doing a lot of thinking about the way websites are sold and built and think changing times call for a change in the way websites are sold. Companies now need to focus on publishing content such as blogs, videos and knowledge bases on a daily basis. Gone are the days when you could afford to invest a lot in a fancy website and leave it alone

For these reasons we are changing our selling model to providing free setup and configuration on all template driven websites that way we can integrate all the useful updating tools in a customer website, help with marketing ideas and generally add value on an on going basis.  Our customer can then invest the same but see a clearer return on their investment and hopefully everybody is happy

The website whether marketing / catalogue or ecommerce is now so important for every business you just cannot afford to leave it alone and you have to keep adding valuable customer centric content

Take a look at our Magento and WordPress catalogue pages for more information on the new pricing model and to find out how we think websites should be sold

Voucher Codes for Viral Marketing

Wednesday, January 12th, 2011

Despite the tough economic climate websites offering people great deals like Groupon.com have grown dramatically in popularity

This success should make any online traders look more closely at the use of voucher codes. They are actually very under used by most smaller ecommerce sites but as Groupon have shown can produce some great results

Here are some ideas of how they might work in your business

  • Put codes on social networks like Facebook to spread the message
  • Reward customers with vouchers for introducing new customers
  • Allow customer to purchase vouchers – let them buy a £30 voucher for say £10
  • Limit great deals to the first XXX orders to encourage people to visit now
  • Use vouchers to cross sell they are great for getting people to try new products or increase order sizes
  • Use redundant or slow moving stock to offer some very cheap deals it will help you shift stock and delight your customers

Most Open Source websites have decent functionality built in.Magento is my personal favourite and we have just written a bulk code upload routine for a client

3D Products on the web are now affordable

Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010

We are really pleased to announce that bNetCentric has become the first UK web development company to start building websites using embedded flash 3D Product images. The technology is really exciting and enables companies to display their products in real 3D not just rotating on a turntable. You can also

  • Turn the product using your mouse
  • Use the simple navigation control to manipulate
  • Zoom in on any area
  • Auto rotate
  • Reset back to the starting image
  • or even upload images onto products – ideal for the promotional products and personalised gifts markets

The fact that a product only costs £9.99 to setup means that this is affordable for almost any company selling products online

The technology has been developed in the UK by Easypromo 3D Ltd – take a look at the example below to see 3D in action for yourself

Integrating your blog with your ecommerce site

Friday, December 3rd, 2010

There is no doubt that a blog is a great way of communicating with your customers and potential customers. Modern blogging platforms like WordPress can also be used to create great marketing websites however if we are honest they do not make great ecommerce websites or product catalogues. That is why at bNetCentric we have come up with a great way of integrating your blog and ecommerce website

Our own website uses Magento for the product database and WordPress for the blogging platform – to the website visitor this appears seamless and gives us the best of both worlds

We have now started to use this approach with our customers and by setting up categories in wordpress that are the same as the product categories in magento so we are able to make news stories appear on both product and category pages that are relevant to that product or category.

This helps your website in many ways

  • Improves the SEO
  • Improves the user experience
  • Help get your blogs read
  • Gives you a controlled way of adding website content fast

This is just one of many ideas we are pioneering at bNetCentric