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!

Twenty tips to help you get the most out of Twitter

Here at Sage Pay we are avid users of social media, and we know that many of you lot are too.  But once you’ve got your account up and running, what happens next?  We’ve been in contact with the team at MarketingDonut.co.uk for their top tips on how to make the most of Twitter.  Sonja Jefferson is owner of Valuable Content Ltd and an expert contributor to Marketing Donut, the marketing advice website for small businesses and she’s given us some invaluable advice below on how to get started:

Twitter is a remarkable social media platform for businesses. We love it as a way to connect with new people, keep in touch with those we know, find out what’s going on in our world and get our message out there. And all in 140 characters too!

But if you’re new to Twitter it can be more than a little confusing. You’ve set up your account but just exactly what do you say? What sort of information should you share? What rules do you have to play by?

Here’s a quick guide to the type of Twitter activity that works best:

1. Fill in your Twitter profile properly. You’d be amazed at the amount of people who don’t put any effort into their profile information. You have about three seconds when people check you out so make sure you write it well.

2. Have a good icon or image. Photos work best for a personal feed. Professional shots are best of all.

3. Include a link to your website or blog. This is VITAL if you want to be trusted on Twitter.

4. Find people to follow. Connect with others who you find interesting, people you know, clients, organisations you rate, authors, commentators in your field or journalists you admire. What type of Tweets do you respond to best?

5. Follow back. If people follow you and they look interesting, follow them back and see what they’ve got to say.

6. Be polite. Thank your new followers, acknowledge those who mention you or ‘retweet’ your posts.

7. RT, @, #, DM? Get up to speed with Twitter lingo. Learn from Twitter’s glossary here – http://business.twitter.com/basics/glossary.

8. Stay on message, most of the time. What do you want to be known for? Put thought into what you want to talk about. What’s the “red line” that runs through all that you do? Have an opinion. A strong theme to your Tweets really helps.

9. Write for your particular clients and customers. What do they want to know? What do they ask you? Educate, inform and entertain them. That’s the point.

10. Share valuable content. Post information you think they’d find useful or interesting – links to articles or video, share quotes, relevant news, books you’ve read, opinions, tips.

11. Make sure it’s not all about you. Me, me, me is seriously off-putting.

12. Use shortened links rather than full blown URLs. Bit.ly is good for this.

13. Don’t sell. This is not the place for a stream of high-pressure sales messages. Think of it as an online networking event, if you like that sort of thing. Promote your services occasionally but this should not be the main event. Far too many people get this wrong.

14. “Curate” good content. Share posts and articles by others that you think your readers will find valuable or back up your approach.

15. Engage. Talk to people directly by using @theirname. You’ll be surprised by the depth of relationships you can create here.

16. Ask questions. You can learn a lot from your followers (we’ve learned loads!). It’s incredible how supportive and useful this platform can be.

17. Tell them a bit about you. What are you up to? What’s news? Your choice about how much personal information you feel comfortable to share. You’ve got to find a voice that feels right for you.

18. Recommend others you rate and say why. Twitter is a trusted referral engine. Recommend suppliers, clients, commentators, friends, other Tweeters.

19. Organise your connections into lists. This will make it much easier for you as your Twitter connections build, and enables you to check into conversation on a particular subject.

20. Show up regularly. It doesn’t have to be every day (although that helps). Consistency is all. Check what people are saying about you often and reply promptly.

Whether you’re new to Twitter or you’re a Twitter pro, we’d love to hear from you about how and why you’re using this channel, so drop us a note below or send us a tweet!

You can find our accounts at:

Amy_Sagepay – Industry news and updates, events, press and PR, general chit-chat

Kay_Sagepay – Partner queries, new products and bolt-ons

Adam_Sagepay – Technical/Sales queries

System_Sagepay – Sage Pay’s live system feed

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

A model business…

We have many customers who have grown with us, right from the very first day they began trading.  Many of them have gone on to become well-established brands.  Missguided is one company who has been with us since they set up shop in March 2009 with just one employee.

Over the last year they have experienced huge growth of 474%.  An amazing achievement when you think about how tough it’s been for businesses since the end of 2008.  We wanted to take a further look at how they’ve achieved this and spoke to managing director Nitin Passi for his top advice to see what his secret is.

Nitin told us “ Our growth as a business is down to a number of things working together as opposed to just one magic solution”.

Understand your market

Since it’s early beginnings, the Missguided team realised the importance of marketing. They did their research to find out where they would be most visible to their target market.  They recently sponsored MTV’s Pretty Little Liars and regularly advertise in women’s weeklies to get attention from fashion conscious young women.

Knowing your target audience is a massive factor here.  And Missguided knows that it’s target audience of 16-35 year olds is a fickle one!  Throwaway fashion needs to be low-cost and styles come and go quickly so they need to stay ahead of the game with new products.  Working with local and overseas suppliers means they can design a new style and have it available to buy from the website within days.

 Keep your products new and exciting

When Missguided first began trading it had just 60 products on the site.  Now there are over 1600 – providing plenty of choice for customers.  They also add 100’s of new products every week.

Embrace new technologies and keep your website fresh

“Staying ahead of the game in terms of technology is really key to our strategy at Missguided. “ comments Nitin.  Missguided is launching a brand new website in September, which is fully optimised for mobile and iPads.  A quick and secure checkout is really important to the Missguided team, so they’re currently looking at Sage Pay’s Token system.

Missguided uses social media to communicate to it’s customers and has over 18,000+ followers across their Twitter and Facebook pages. They are launching a Facebook store later in the year. Nitin also said “In the coming months we will be continuing to innovate by looking at how we can use social commerce to our advantage”

 Make your offering competitive

In our 2010 E-Business Benchmark report, we found that retailers who don’t offer any value-added features are twice as likely not to complete the sale.  Missguided is one of the few fashion retailers that offers free delivery on all goods with no minimum order value plus a free next day delivery on all orders over £45.

We’ve chosen Missguided as our Business of the Month not only for it’s amazing growth in just one year, but also for sharing their top tips with us.  Well done to the Missguided team!

A Token Payment

This month I’ve been thinking about PCI compliance (I can hear the widespread groans from here!).  Not a popular topic I’ll admit, but one that is crucial to online traders.  Payment Card Industry compliance is infamous for being a costly overhead, both in time and money.  But more than anything it’s a burden.  The responsibility of storing or transmitting data can be a huge worry but many vendors feel that they need to do so in order to provide their customers with a slick payment process.

But this doesn’t need to be the case!  Using our newly launched Token System, e-tailers have the ability to offer a super quick, single click payment process for customers, without actually storing or transmitting personal information such as credit card details.  This means that you can maintain great customer usability whilst ensuring that you won’t encounter any data security issues.  Hurrah!

So how does it work I hear you ask?  Well, the Token System gives merchants the ability to convert credit card numbers, which are given directly to Sage Pay by online shoppers and stored within Sage Pay’s secure systems, into a token or card number ‘alias’.  The tokens can then be safely stored by the merchant and are used to process transactions as and when required, without incurring high level PCI DSS compliance costs.

One company that not only takes their business responsibility very seriously but also their customer experience, is Crooked Tongues.  They are now fully integrated with our Token system solution and their customers are already benefiting from a quick and easy checkout.  Maintaining customer usability whilst ensuring sensitive data is secure has always been crucial to Crooked Tongues, so that customers feel confident in their online store and want to revisit again and again.

Gary Warnett, Content Manager at Crooked Tongues, sister company to ASOS.com, says of the innovative system: “This is exactly what we’ve been looking for – a safe and easy way to store our customer’s details so they can come back and enjoy the Crooked Tongues experience time and time again, without the hassle of keying card details in every time.  It’s win-win, especially since we’re saving on PCI costs and its great value for money”.

We’re pleased to announce that Crooked Tongues has been crowned Sage Pay’s July Business of the Month for taking the protection of customer card data seriously and fighting the good fight against fraud!

More information on the Token System

New blog, new everything

Welcome to my first blog! 

The Sage Pay team will be working really hard to improve everything we do this year. I want to highlight some of the things I’m most excited about and will do that in several blog postings over the next couple of weeks.

The first is around how we communicate with customers, partners and developers. We have significant plans for this year which incorporate a new website, the relaunch of our partner programme and an overhaul of how we engage with developers including providing them with new style kits. When we rebranded last April as Sage Pay we launched a new website as you would expect.  However, we’re not satisfied with it’s capabilities and so our marketing and development teams have been working for some time now to design and build something that will enable us to provide a lot more value. The change involves moving from an Adobe content management system to Drupal, an open source platform and we’ll also be integrating it with a  new knowledgebase. So this is more than brochure-ware we’re talking about!

It will mean that we can communicate and connect in a much more integrated manner and cater for you, whatever your preferences. So for example, while our telephone support is unsurpassed, sometimes you prefer to quickly go online and get the answer yourself, rather than make a call.  In fact the personal example I give, is that I often want to resolve a query on a companies website using self-service because I’m on the phone to someone else at the same time, usually my Mum! We’re looking to go live by March and it’ll be great to see your feedback. It will also be the same time that I take my first steps with Twitter….

 Best,