Web design tips to keep customers coming back…

Your website is fundamental for your online business.  Our Business of the Month for March Biscuiteers was a great example of how an effective website should look and operate.  But poorly laid out products and a difficult to use navigation system can spell disaster for your conversion rates.

Whether you are in the process of building your website or simply thinking about giving it a refresh, here are our top tips:

-Filter your products-Displaying products under age groups, best sellers, etc, will make finding suitable products much easier for your shopper

Retro sweetshop A Quarter of.co.uk

-Make sure your calls to action are clear-Also try to keep these above the fold.  How can your customers get in touch if they can’t find your contact details?

-Links are important -Link your company logo back to your homepage

-Never assume your shopper is done.  Once your customer has placed a product in their basket, redirect them back to the product pages

-Consistency is key. Keep font and text copy regular.

-Don’t make your pages too wide and keep content above the fold.  Your customer should be able to view everything without having to scroll around too much

-Have a maximum of four product pages per category.  Any more than this and your customer will quickly get bored of scrolling through pages

-Include lifestyle imagery.  Allowing your customer to imagine a product in their home is a great incentive

Not on the High Street

-Try to replicate the face to face purchase. Include rollover zoom to allow your customers to view products in more detail and provide colour swatching

-Test, test, test-Do some usability testing on your site or at the very least get some friends to have a play around on your site.

Tempt your customers with a breadcrumb trail…

In our most recent issue of Moving Money, we have included a round-up of the results of our 2011 e-business benchmark report as we prepare to survey e-businesses for the 2012 version.

As I was reading the article, I was thinking about how important the first page of your website is.  It really is fundamental in terms of encouraging potential customers to part with their hard-earned cash.  E-commerce is a competitive market with consumers increasingly likely to shop for comparisons before completing their purchase so when a shopper first hits your site, it needs to keep visitors interested, assured and enticed enough to get them to the checkout.

This month, I’ve picked out Sage Pay customer www.Biscuiteers.com as a great example of a website. Its welcoming, easy to use and exceptionally well thought out.  The business behind the site was set up by Harriet Hastings and her husband Stevie Congdon. They came up with the idea to set up a biscuit gift business online with a difference.  With the tag line “Why send flowers when you can send biscuits”, Biscuiteers craft beautiful hand iced biscuits delivered in gorgeous illustrated keepsake tins.

And as a solely online business, the Biscuiteers team know the importance of providing a rich, interactive shopping experience.  Along the top of the Biscuiteers site, there are clear links to the contact details, account log in and basket.  One of the things we found in our e-business benchmark report is that displaying a shopping basket on your home page and across your site is no longer a differentiator; it’s an absolute must.  Likewise, displaying your contact details clearly helps to reassure your customer that you are easily reachable should you not be happy with your purchase or if you have any queries regarding the service.

Always one for a bargain, I quickly spotted a special offer on the homepage of the Biscuiteers website.  We found in our e-business benchmark report that 76% of top performing businesses are using special offers to entice browsers to convert into browsers.

It’s good practice to display your security policy on your website to show customers that you take their personal data seriously and will use it responsibly.

We found that many top performing sites are differentiating themselves in their use of social media but there’s marginal difference between them and the lower performing sites we looked at.  This point is really important, as it’s not necessarily what you do, but how you do it that will make a difference.  It’s no surprise then to see over three quarters (76%) of our top e-tailers regularly luring visitors to their site through the use of social channels.  Biscuiteers are using Twitter and Facebook to engage in real dialogue with their customers, let them know about new products and when to expect a bargain.  They are also using YouTube to post lessons on baking and icing for anyone who wants to have a go at home!   Biscuiteers display these links as icons to aid navigation.

Top sites are recognising more than ever that customers not only want a good deal, they want it quickly.  Offering next day delivery was the most popular service offering.  If your business is able to offer this, don’t hide it away; it’s a great way to get ahead of the competition.

With a multitude of delicious products available, Biscuiteers have made navigation around the site as easy as possible for their customers by filtering all products, making finding suitable products easier for customers to find.

They keep this up to date with latest events so if you’re looking for some Olympic themed biscuits, then you know where to go – unfortunately they haven’t included the occasion ‘I just love biscuits and want to buy some for myself’ which is generally what I would be searching for!

Founder of Biscuiteers, Harriet Hastings told me ‘We’re really pleased to have won Sage Pay’s business of the month award.  It is a real tribute to the team at Tom&Co who have worked so hard on our website and the re-launch last September.  As an online retail shop, our website is our real and virtual shop and the heart of our business.  Customer experience  is critical in building sales and improving conversion rate.’

‘We didn’t use third party user testers but we did spend a lot of time testing the customer journey and functionality among ourselves before we launched the new website.  The biggest questions we had to answer were around navigation and visibility of our growing product range.  The most important decision we made was to make search by occasion the primary search tool.  We looked at best practice on other sites to make sure our social media strategy was up to date and appropriate to our business model.’

Well done Biscuiteers for being awarded as our Business of the Month.  As websites go, theirs really takes the biscuit and of course, the proof is in the pudding!

Game On…

This year our company resolution is to take the pressure out of getting set up online and to really champion those start-up businesses. So we recently announced an overhaul of our Merchant Services package for new e-tailers.

From speaking to hundreds of new businesses every month, we’re all too aware of the high set-up costs and lengthy approval processes which can make acquiring a merchant account, one of the most painful parts of setting up an online business.

David and Ben, co-founders of Pucket

We found in our 2011 e-business benchmark report, that the average time for a merchant account set up through external providers is seven weeks with one-in-ten internet business owners saying they pay over £500 in initial set-up costs.  And we think that’s too much!

The new and improved offering from Sage Pay and leading merchant account supplier Elavon, aims to provide merchant accounts in an average of four weeks, with no set-up costs, no monthly fees and no long-term contracts.  We now have thousands of business using our Merchant Services package and Pucket Enterprises is just one of them.

Pucket Enterprises is a company created by David Harvey and Ben Lewis.  After seeing two old men playing the traditional game Passe Trappe in a southern French town, David and Ben headed straight to a local DIY shop to buy the materials to make their own updated version of the game.  Pucket was born.  Several years and many, many games of Pucket later, the two-man-team decided that it was just too good to keep to themselves- they had to bring the game to the UK- and were inspired to start up their own online business.

Sage Pay modelling the Pucket Board

The Pucket game involves catapulting wooden ‘pucks’ across a handcrafted wooden board and on to your competitor’s side through a small hole. Any ‘pucks’ that arrive on your side must be sent back before you win.  Right, got it?

No longer making the games by hand, Pucket’s founders sourced skilled woodworking craftsmen based in India to handcraft the games out of Sheesham or Haldu wood and as part of their working ethos, they are proud to support Indian Handicrafts and ensure their workers receive a fair wage.

Originally using just PayPal to accept payments on their site, David and Ben struggled with the amount of queries that it raised.  “When we used PayPal to handle payments, my personal phone number was on the website, and I would receive countless calls from people who had forgotten their PayPal password, or couldn’t change the delivery address, etc.” says David.

Deciding to move their gateway to Sage Pay, The Pucket team chose to take advantage of Sage Pay’s Merchant Services package too.  Although taking them awhile to build and test the checkout functionality on their website, Pucket Enterprises are really happy with the solution.  David told us “The business has grown more than we dared hope. Most of our business is direct-to-consumer, through our website. Sage Pay was recommended to us by our web developers as being good to work with, and they worked out significantly cheaper than PayPal. They were very helpful at getting things transferred smoothly, and now we can take payments by phone too.’

Pucket Enterprises have stuck to selling just their core product-the game of Pucket- but it’s now sold in Selfridges and the Conran Shop, as well as two dozen independent shops.

We’re all huge fans here at Sage Pay HQ and can often be found holding Pucket competitions during our lunch hours!

We’re proud to announce Pucket as our February Business of the Month for their entrepreneurial spirit by having a vision and taking a chance, which is well and truly paying off!

For further information on Sage Pay’s Merchant Service package, please visit: http://www.sagepay.com/merchant-services

Game On…

Well that’s it, Winter is well and truly drawing near.  Fights over the optimum office temperature have already broken out at Sage Pay HQ meaning the central heating is on/off/on/off all day long.  Everywhere you look, desks are filling up with Lemsip, packets of tissues and enough vitamin C tablets to open our own online store.  Tis the season of the dreaded cold, but also the season of the sickie…

Figures released earlier this year by PricewaterhouseCoopers reported that ‘sickies’ cost the UK economy a staggering £32bn each year.  Perhaps more surprisingly another survey reported that one in ten British men would pull a sickie to stay home and game, with one in a hundred doing so on a monthly basis.

With Sage Pay’s move into supporting online gaming, of course, we’re not condoning that!  But it does seem that the online gaming sector is going from strength to strength.

Since integrating this solution, Green Man Gaming have seen their Token usage increase by an average of 523% per month.  The Green Man team are working really hard to ensure the customer journey is quick and painless and this has a real effect on building a loyal base of returning customers.

Well done guys for making the payment process slick, quick and reliable (unlike the 1 in 100 who won’t make it into work this month!)

If you’re looking for more information on our Token system, you can find it here

Selling like hotcakes…

With over 30,000 customers, I often stumble across a business idea  that I adore.  And October’s Business of the Month is one of them.  Vintage Patisserie is a web based sales and events company specialising in tea-parties with a difference.  The first-stop is the dress-up trunk where your guests can revel in the decadence of vintage glamour, adorning themselves in feather, pearls and fascinators.  1920’s style hostesses serve a variety of tea and home-made cakes in the finest vintage china whilst you listen to 1940’s jazz on an old fashioned radio.  Every party is completely bespoke so you can even include dance lessons to complete the bygone era experience. 

Slightly reminiscent of the Mad Hatter’s tea-party but with an eloquent spin, this is a tea-party you won’t forget.

Having been featured on Dragons Den and The Sunday Times, Angel Adoree founder of Vintage Patisserie is passionate about everything vintage and she has the creativity and business acumen to make it a success.  She started off being a collector of all things beautiful, lining her house ceiling to floor with hats, scarves, coats and capes.  In 2003 Angel opened up her first business ‘The Vintage Experience’ where she threw  open the doors of her home and welcomed in fashionista’s to help them find the perfect look and offer her expert advice.

Angel decided to move her business online and set up the T-Shirt Patisserie, selling customized clothes which were beautifully wrapped and delivered with a home-baked treat.  The treats went down, well… a treat, and from this the Idea for Vintage Patisserie was born and Angel now sells customized cakes, chocolates, clothes and ceramics, as well as running her famous tea-parties.  You can follow them on twitter at vint_patisserie.

I think that Vintage Patisserie is a well deserved winner of October’s Business of the Month and I’ll be racking my brain trying to think of as many reasons as possible to have a tea-party!           

P.s You can  find out all about what Vintage Patisserie have been up to since their Dragons Den appearance on Dragons Den-What They Did Next, 17th October. Don’t miss it!                 

  

Like a duck to water…

I love anything that’s slightly wacky and out of the ordinary and this month’s Business of the Month is just that.  What would you think if you were taking a stroll by the Thames and you suddenly saw 250,000 plastic ducks floating towards you?  For most people this would be a surprising sight but for local residents and supporters of The Great British Duck Race, this is an annual event (although I’m told that this year the ducks are getting a rest).

 The Great British Duck Race raises money for charity by asking supporters to sponsor rubber ducks and set them free along a stretch of the Thames, where they float off towards the winning line, as quickly as the current will carry them.  The event has been running for just 3 years but so far over 700 charities have benefited from the scheme.  There’s a prize for the first duck across the line and every duck that is sponsored is entered into a monthly virtual race to win cash prizes.

 Using Sage Pay, The Great British Duck Race allows people to sponsor their ducks online and make a donation to charity quickly and easily, which is exactly how it should be.

 Mike Scott, organiser of the Great British Duck Race, said: “The Duck Race is a fantastic opportunity to have some fun, raise some serious money for a range of good causes.  By running the charity online, it’s really accessible.  More people are able to donate and we don’t have to deal with any payments ourselves and can get on with fundraising ideas.”

 I love the innovative idea of this business that makes donating to charity a fun and social activity and turns into a great family day out.   These guys have even set a world record.  And that’s no mean feat!

 So I’d like to congratulate The Great British Duck Race on being Sage Pay’s August Business of the Month!  Keep up the good work, guys!

 And if you would like to read more on how charities can make use of online payments, you can read more in the next issue of moving money magazine.  Sign up here to receive a free copy hot off the press!

Getting your ducks in a row…

One of my pet peeves is a badly designed checkout process.

It’s a terrible thing to spend hours searching for the products you want, get them all in your shopping basket in the right size and colour and then have to re-search for the product when it incomprehensively disappears from the basket or puts in 10 of the same product.  Then when you try to find your basket again, it’s completely vanished!  After searching the site for your basket, you find it.  Oh, you mean this miniscule icon in the bottom left hand corner that doesn’t even resemble a basket?!

Once you’ve gone through all this trauma, just wanting to pay, you’re hit with pages and pages of garbled checkout.  Enter your address.  A seemingly simple command but nowadays customers want goods delivered to their work address where they’ll be able to sign for their package, or to a friend or family members house as a gift.  You continue through the payment process only for your payment to fail because your delivery and billing address do not match.  Arrrggghh! Just let me pay!

The checkout process is such a fundamental part of running an online business.  Mess this up and your dropout rates will be sky-high.  Theres some pretty obvious things you can do to avoid high dropout rates at the checkout.

1. Keep things simple, don’t overload your pages.

2. Have a clear link to the shoppers basket on every page of your site.

3. Provide your shopper with an order summary before asking them to pay- Nothing makes customers cancel the process like confusion over how much they will be paying.

4. Keep your payment pages down to a minimum -The less pages, the less obstacles the shopper has to overcome in order to pay you.

5. Inform your customers of how far they are in the checkout process and whats coming next with a bread crumb trail If you have 3D Secure set up, it’s a good idea to let them know what it is and when they will encounter it.

So on my quest to find the Sage Pay Business of the Month for June, I’ve decided to focus on the checkout process and one e-commerce site that’s got it all wrapped up is Bombay Duck.

Their payment process is simple, uncluttered and comprehensive.  You don’t have to be a genius to manoeuvre through the site and their customised pages incorporate all of their branding so you don’t realise you have been redirected to Sage Pay to collect your sensitive data.  What’s even better is that if you are an existing customer, you can simply log in and find all of your address details stored so you don’t have to re-enter them every time you want to pay!

I’m sure my bank manager wishes my drop-out rates were higher but with companies like Bombay Duck making the checkout process so easy, it would be rude not to buy!

Congratulations to Bombay Duck for being Sage Pay’s June Business of the Month!

If you’d like to know more about optimising your checkout pages, download our E-Business Benchmark Report here.

From cupcakes to chicken coups

From working at Sage Pay, my eyes have been opened to the changing trends of online retail.  Innovation has always been key to us and when we come across businesses that dare to be different and strive to innovate, we love to celebrate them.

In the past years the e-tail space was very much owned by electrical companies and travel.  But times are a-changing.  We’ve recently seen a huge surge in websites selling the weird and wonderful.  The online marketplace is now a wonderland of the exotic.  Fed up with your usual mid morning nibble?  You can now order snack size boxes of fresh fruit, nuts, seeds and dried treats online to arrive directly at your desk.  Graze.com has seen the demand for this and with all their food 100% natural, our office has been busily snacking their way to 5 a day.

Speaking of snacking, who would have thought 5 years ago you could have fresh cupcakes bought online and delivered directly to your door.  At Buttercup cake shop you can order every type of cake from chocolate peanut butter to banana split.  And because you never know when a cupcake craving might hit, you can place your order through their website in the morning and (if you’re in London) they’ll be zoomed over to you, by…well…later that morning!  You can even order an extra shot of icing (which makes up for not being able to lick the spoon!)

Fancy living The Good Life?  How about joining the urban farming trend by ordering a few hens online.  Relax by watching them potter about your garden whilst you enjoy fresh eggs on toast.  Or perhaps you like more excitment?  The latest buzz is Beekeeping.  Why not purchase a swarm of bees over the internet to begin your new hobby as an urban conservationist.

Omlet allow you to do just this and we think they are a true pioneer of the online space and this is why they have been chosen as our second Business of the Month!  Their innovative products are perfect for city dwellers who fancy a taste of the rural.  Their website is a complete knowledge base of everything and anything you need to know to become an ‘eggs-pert’.  They also have a fantastic community forum where they actively encourage discussion on a number of topics.  Through the Omlet website you can pre-pay securely by card and then your bees are sourced locally and delivered to your door. Companies like Omlet prove that shoppers are demanding more from e-tailers and their sales are soaring.

Well done Omlet for ‘bee-ing’ Sage Pay’s March Business of the Month!

P.s Our friends at Graze.com are offering a free snack box and your second half price!  Simply enter the code SAGEPAY to take advantage of this yummy offer!

Santa finds Sage Pay’s Business of the Month!

At Sage Pay we like to think we know our customers.  But with 27,000 of them, it’s pretty challenging for us to get to know them all.

In the run up to Christmas, I set the rest of the Sage Pay staff a challenge.  I asked them to buy their secret santa gifts from websites that use Sage Pay as their payment service provider (PSP).  And while they were at it, complete a quick survey about their shopping experience.

Our staff are a seasoned bunch of online shoppers and pretty hard to please, but here’s what they had to say…..

Though they hunted high and low, 46% of our staff were unable to find a security policy anywhere on the sites they were using and on top of that 38% were only able to find the security information tucked away in the far corners of the website.  One of my colleagues did find a great example of how to subtly include the security element on their site- Blissett Photo Books.

We were pleased to find that over 50% of the sites we used had 3D Secure set up as an additional fraud prevention method on their payment pages.  These lucky people are probably benefiting from lower rates with their merchant bank.  It also means that if they are defrauded, there’s a good chance the banks would take liability for those particular transactions too.  Read more about 3D Secure here

What I didn’t tell people was that they were helping me search for our very first Business of the Month.  After we pulled together all of the results, we realised there was a clear winner in terms of customer experience.  So we are pleased to announce that Henleys have been chosen to kick off Sage Pay’s Business of the Month!

Our staff were really impressed by the usability of Henleys site.  Being able to narrow down a search by price or filter products by colour makes their website extremely easy to use.  Our Marketing manager Charlotte said “Their checkout process was seamless and the best bit was….free next day delivery!”

When we told Lynsey Emersic, Henleys e-Commerce manager of their award here’s what she had to say…

“We are really pleased to be voted the first Business of the Month by Sage Pay.  The success of the Henleys Clothing website is largely down to the ease and usabililty of our site.  That said, usability is something that we are always looking to improve upon to ensure that our customers get the best experience whilst shopping for clothing on the site.  Having Sage Pay integrated into the basket page of the site helps us to provide as smooth a transaction as possible for the Henleys customer, which is the most important thing to us.”

Well done Henleys….and I wonder who will be our March Business of the Month…