Updated e commerce

4 ways to improve online sales with updated e-commerce

On 16/04/2010

In New and updated features

It's been a busy week here at doomby, and not only for our awesome website development team, fantastic support staff and brilliant managers. Even Starey the cat has been out and about, celebrating the end of a long winter (though it may actually have been fear of the great Icelandic ash cloud of 2010, or the substantial volume of fresh neighborhood roadkill, that did it).

Most of the productive buzz emanating from the far side of our offices these last few days has centered on the latest updates to our e-commerce website solution. The focus of these updates has been on improving the online store experience for your e-commerce clients, and on facilitating store management and layout to better leverage sales opportunities. As always, the goal of these latest additions is to provide new ways to create a website to really maximize revenue growth and opportunities.

The first of the additions to our e-commerce module is the availability of additional online payment options for clients, including direct handling of all major credit cards (MasterCard, Visa, Amex, Diners, JCB …). For a while, we also handled the mysterious and very cute-sounding Dinners Club, but due to a lack of interest by sufficiently intelligent (and wealthy) evening meals, we decided it was best to wind it up. These new card-handling services are provided in partnership with Paybox Services, to provide transparent, secured online transactions directly from your doomby online store.

The Paybox system is available to bank account holders in 39 European countries and valid for transactions in more than 50 different currencies. Adding Paybox payment handling requires a monthly subscription and a one-time setup fee, together with a variable transaction fee for non-French accounts. For more details on integrating Paybox with your online store, just contact the online support team.

The second of our new e-commerce features deals with cross-selling – suggesting related products to customers as a way of boosting sales and per-transaction revenues. Cross selling is also a great way of ensuring customers leave your online store satisfied – if you're selling flashlights or cameras, your clients will really appreciate you doing the thinking for them by suggesting batteries as well. Or alternatively, if a client has selected then rejected a product, cross-selling provides a way to suggesting an alternative choice and turn that lost sale around.

Our third major update involves product ratings and comments. Your customers can now interact with your online shop or store by leaving comments, and rating products directly from your store product pages. Commenting and rating items improves visitors' experience of your online store, by encouraging meaningful interaction and repeat visits (and sales!). You can choose whether to restrict commenting to registered customers only, or to open it up to all your store visitors. Comment moderating can be handled independently of your page comment moderating settings too if you'd like, and activating comments is a one-click process, done directly in your e-store manager.

A fourth and final update gives you a whole slew of new ways to promote your store from within your website, together with new ways of improving your customers' online shopping experience. By adding one or two (or all) of the new menu elements, such as listing most-commented or highest-rated products, you can better position and showcase your articles to boost sales. Or you might like to add ready-made payment type logos, to quickly indicate to clients that you're ready to handle their preferred online payment card. And all your clients – potential or otherwise – will really appreciate the new search box, providing quick site-wide side menu access to any product by keyword (tag) searching. To make it even easier for them, the auto-complete feature will suggest tags as soon as clients start typing.

All-in-all, it's been another winning week for the developers, and an even bigger win for you, our budding entrepreneurial webmasters. Like all our constantly improving features, these latest additions your favorite free website builder are all included as part of the service we provide to help show you how to make an online store, easily and successfully. Think of it as our way of making sure you can make a website the best you can, just the way you want to. And if you've got any other feature suggestions for our e-commerce solution – or any other of our website builder tools, just let us know (I'm pretty sure the team is free this weekend ...)!