Top 5 Features Every Product Page Must Have

In terms of design, product ages are equally important and the same amount of thought and effort should be put in designing them too as much as the homepage or other landing pages. This is because the product page is where the transition of a user converting to a customer happens. Thus each product page should be carefully designed.

Although, a lot of creativity can be put into a product page, there are some very basic and incredibly important feature each product page must have.

High Quality Product Images

When buying something online, product images help establish credibility of a product and make the user want to buy it. Hence, there are no two ways about the importance of the images that should be used. It should be made sure that the images are clear, able to be magnified and in the right contrast with the background colors. Taking it a step further, you could also hire some eCommerce designers and have them include 360 degree views of your products allowing users to have a much better idea about it.

Elaborate Product Description

Another aspect of your product page that will help establish the product's credibility is the product description. The product description is what defines the products in text and helps users understand it better. Since they can't touch the product, the description is what helps them understand the product, its benefits and hence convinces them buy to it. Apart from this, your product description is also incredibly important for SEO purposes. If you have a well written description, your products will be visible on the top of search queries of that product which automatically will increase your sales. If you're unsure about it, you can hire eCommerce data entry experts to help you out with this.

Unbiased Product Reviews

Now product reviews are another aspect that help establish the user's trust over the product. Users always tend to prefer buying products that have been bought earlier by other people and has been rated well by them. this makes them more confident about the purchase. So make sure to include elaborate and unbiased reviews for your prospects to see. They will feel more compelled to buy the product after reading them.

Distinctive Add To Cart Button

The Add To Cart button is obviously the most important part of your product page. However, the more important part of it should be that the button should be distinctly visible. the page should be designed in such a way that the Product image and the Add to Cart button are the first things a user notices. Plus, its always a great way to ensure that the button is always clear and visible even if the user scrolls down the page to read the reviews and other details. You should make sure that the button is available for every split second the user is on the page as one of these might be the ones they might click it.

Comprehensive Product Comparison

Now this is a feature that not many stores pay attention to and they couldn't be more wrong. Your prospects come to your store hoping to get the most at the least price possible. A product comparison table is the best way to help them ensure this. Plus a comparison table also enhances their shopping cart experience and allows them to view products they may be considering to buy side by side instead of having to go back and forth through multiple pages. Sweeping through multiple pages and being confused about a purchase often leads to users exiting the site without buying anything. So if you don't have this feature, it's at best that you hire experienced eCommerce developers and integrate it to your store.

Have anything to change on your site? Get in touch with us to hire eCommerce developers and get started on your project today.

How to beat large eCommerce businesses like Amazon: A checklist!

The eCommerce industry is a multi-trillion dollar industry with a plethora of opportunities. As of now, the eCommerce industry is one of the most lucrative ones that is easy to get into. However, this ocean of opportunity is dominated by a few big fish like Amazon, Alibaba, Walmart etc. This makes it a little bit of a bigger challenge for smaller fish to come out on top and get a bit of that opportunities.


However, this doesn't really mean that it is not possible for newly launched stores to acquire large profits in any way. they just need more smarter ways to compete with established businesses like these. Given below is a checklist of five smart ways you can enhance your potential.

1. Content Personalization

Personalization is crucial not just for eCommerce stores but for any kind of business that functions online. Content personalization not only engages users better but also helps business create a more efficient customer journey map that leads to a purchase.


Personalizing content is simply a matter of writing extra lines of codes. You first divide users into various categories based on their history and behaviour and then create a customer journey map. This will look something like this:

Based on this, you can modify the code of your platform display content in a way that engages the website visitors and guides them towards the purchase. Personalization doesn't just stop at the content of the website but also extends to the content of the email newsletters, social media posts etc. With a few extra coding or a custom plugin, all of it can be personalized.

2. Don't Sell through Marketplaces

Conventional methods dictate that you should sell your products through all marketplaces to reach out to a large number of audience. This definitely is true if your sole aim is to make money. However, to increase your brand's awareness, you should stick to selling products only through your site.

Marketplaces work for their own profit and not yours. they definitely expose your products to many but never your website or your brand. If you analzyze the way the product pages of such marketplaces are designed, you'll notice that your website is not as conspicuous as it should be. This way, a lot of prospective audience won't even come to realize your website and will ultimately refer the marketplace to buy your product.

3. Include a Unique Functionality

There is one flaw that large eCommerce businesses can't do with ease and that is implement a new and unique technical functionality on their site. This is because of their large customer base, they will initially have to go through an extensive amount of beta testing, work with the variety of customer feedback to ensure whether the functionality works well etc. However, with small stores, this doesn't pose much of a problem.

Small eCommerce stores can easily create and launch custom functionalities such as AR product view, virtual try on, product customization etc. Such features will ultimately become a unique selling point for businesses to market on. With an efficient strategy of marketing, this feature alone will be able to attract a plethora of customers to your store and establish an impactful presence in the market.

4. Make Something Exclusive

To stand out of the crowd, small stores should try to create something exclusive to sell. Something that connects with users more deeply and is available solely on your store.

For instance, one of the clients at an eCommerce development company: Matrid Technologies, was an online clothing retailer. He collaborated with a Non Profit Organization to help them sell their merchandise through his store. He also promoted his store by stating that all the proceeds from the merchandise of the organization bought exclusively from his store are donated. This helped him create a product that was exclusive to his store. It also resulted in a significant upsurge in traffic and conversions.

A unique method of selling or creating something unique from an existing product is all you need to make something exclusive to your store. With a little work put in, the rewards can be substantial.

5. Go Mobile

Although this is a pretty obvious strategy, there are still a vast number of small stores that ignore this. Mobile phones contribute a significantly large market to eCommerce businesses. This why all major stores have their native mobile apps.

A custom mobile app for your store is a highly beneficial strategy that opens up another medium of sales and another point of marketing. Reaching out to customers through a mobile app becomes a lot easier thereby making it easier for you to promote your products. A mobile app shortens a customer journey from visiting your store to a sale which directly increases your sales. So no matter the reason, always have a mobile strategy for your store. If you don't have the budget for native apps, hire xamarin app developers to launch a cross platform and then later launch native apps when it fits the budget.

Conclusion

In the end, we can say that competing with large and established eCommerce stores won't be as hard as it may seem. Sure going head to head competing with them won't is not possible in early stages. But it isn't necessary as well as you're not aiming to be exactly like them.

So with just a little smart work, no matter how big the other fish are, nothing will be able to stop you from getting a significant chunk of the prize.

Top 6 Payment Gateways in used in United Arab Emirates

Payment gateways are what drive the eCommerce economy. There is absolutely no question in the importance of payment gateways in the eCommerce industry. However, with the plethora of options available worldwide, it can often become difficult to choose the gateways that cover majority of your audience. 

So if you're planning to launch an eCommerce store in the UAE, you can choose the following gateways so that all your target audience can be catered to:

1. Telr

Telr is also known as Innovative Payments. Telr covers more than 120 currencies worldwide. Their service charges are divided into categories as mentioned below:

- Telr Entry: This is a decent plan for startups. In this plan they charge a flat monthly fee of AED 349 without any transaction fee.

- Telr Small: In this plan they charge a flat monthly fee of AED 99 + 2.69%+1 AED per transaction. This plan is best suitable if your sales are between 20,000 to 50,000 AED.

- Telr Medium: In this plan they charge a flat monthly fee of AED 49 + 2.49%+0.5 AED per transaction. This plan is best suitable if your sales are above 50,000 AED on average.

2. CashU:

CashU offers Zero setup fee and also has the lowest maintenance charges of $1 per year. Initially they charge 2.5%-3.3% + 2 AED per transaction. You can have a look at a complete list of their charges here: https://www.cashu.com/site/fees.

With their recent collaboration with MasterCard, CashU has also started the virtual credit card services. UAE residents who have registered with CashU can create their Virtual Credit Cards instantly and make payments on all eCommerce portals that accept MasterCard.

3. PayFort:

PayFort is one of the most popular payment gateways in UAE. PayFort offers installment payments, which is a great advantage for those who sell high cost products. PayFort also offers Fraud Protection at an additional cost. Their service charges are as mentioned below:

- PayFort Starter: No setup fee & Monthly charges under this plan. They withhold a transaction fee of  2.99%+1 AED.

- PayFort Medium: In this plan PayFort charges 99 AED per month with commission rate 2.65%+0.75 AED.

With the collaboration of online eCommerce giant in UAE, Souq, they launched their Card On Delivery (COD) service. In this service, with the help of mobile machine delivery agents, they are able to process all major credit & debit cards for transactions.

4. CC Avenue:

CCAvenue was started in India but became a popular payment gateway option in UAE. They do offer Zero setup fee but with a large monthly maintenance fee of 200 AED. CCAvenue is an expensive option but they do offer a couple of free services such as fraud protection and 24/7 on call support and they also support all the major ecommerce platforms.
CCAvenue charges 3% + 1 AED per transaction.

5. CyberSource:

CyberSource is fast, reliable & secure. They provide their services in more than 190 countries. Cultivating their idea from expert android app developers, CyberSource also began to support digital payment methods like Apple Pay & Android Pay and regional digital wallets like Alipay & KCP. CyberSource charges a monthly fee of 75 AED as a follow up to the setup charges which ranges from 0-200 AED. Their transaction rate is 0%- 1.3 AED.

6. PayTabs:

PayTabs has topped the best startup business in 2016 which was complied by Forbes. PayTabs offers their services in 168 currencies. It does not charge any monthly or annual fee but they do charge a setup fee which is 1470 AED. With PayTabs you can setup your services within 24 Hours. 

Some of the ways in which you can integrate PayTabs on your store is by using a Plugin, iFrame, SDK or direct integration using their API.

Currently PayTabs charges 2.85%+ 1 AED per transaction.  

To integrate these gateways, you'll need the help of developers that are experts in the technology your store is based on. For instance, you will have to hire Dot Net Developers to integrate the gateway with an Asp.Net based eCommerce store using its API. 

Now you can easily launch an eCommerce store in UAE and ensure that none of your customers abandon you due to the inability of being able to easily make payment.

How a Product Configurator can help your eCommerce Store flourish?

The eCommerce industry is worth a trillion dollars and is growing exponentially. This figure gives you a brief idea of the number of eCommerce businesses that might be running and it definitely is a very big number. Due to the intense competition, eCommerce businesses are forced to offer something very unique if they want to get ahead of the others.

A product configurator is an eCommerce extension or module that allows online stores to provide customizable products to their customers. Customizable products are great way for your business to gain competitive leverage over others. Apart from this, given below are 5 ways how a ready-made product configurator module can help your online store flourish;

 1. Less Competitive Market

The demand of customizable products is extremely high. However, not a lot of people actually offer these. This is primarily because of the complexity of implementing such a functionality on their website. However, our Multi-Step Product configurator is actually incredibly easy to install and use. So this gives you a golden opportunity to reap the benefits of a very lucrative market with really little competition.

2. More Repeat Sales

Customizing a product is a very fun and engaging activity. If customers get to experience this in your store, they are bound to return to it repeatedly to get more of it. Being able to customize the products gives them a range of new possibilities. This also makes them eager to try these out and hence drive a lot of repeat sales.

3. Greater Customer Loyalty

Its not just the whole process but the fact that they are able to buy exactly what they want from your store rather than having to settle for something that's just remotely close is also what drives them to come back. Your products automatically become a lot more valuable to them. Your products start to reflect their personal requirements a lot better than other stores. All of this collectively drives them to become more loyal and frequent to your online store.

4. Direct Touch with Customers

Another advantage of having a custom product builder is that you are able to eliminate the middle men and directly connect with your customers. This helps you streamline the process of ordering in a much better way. Being in direct touch with them also gives you an insight of what your target customers are looking for in your products. This in turn is beneficial to help you improve your product specifications.

5. Better Online Presence

A Custom Product Builder Feature for eCommerce stores is a rather unique functionality. As mentioned earlier, not a lot of people provide this. This means that with this feature on your store, you are bound to drive a lot more traffic to your website as you engage with new customers. Creativity always draws a lot of attention online and a product builder is quite a creative functionality. Such a creative feature will engage users better compelling them to share about it in their social circles. This will in turn drive new customers to your store everyday.

Business Benefits of Hiring Remote eCommerce Managers

eCommerce is the fastest grwoing industry that amounted to a total sale of $1.86 trillion in the year 2016. The trillion dollar industry is faciliatated by a plethora of small, medium and large businesses spread across the world.

However, managing an eCommerce business is not as easy as it may seem. A lot of effort and work has to be put in to make an eCommerce business successful. This is why the demand of demand of developers of various technologies like Magento developers, nopCommerce developers etc. is on the rise. Apart from these, the demand of eCommerce managers too is growing significantly and so is their compensation. But over the past few years, another great alternative for eCommerce managers has come up which is: Hire a Remote eCommerce Manager.

Although there are a lot of benefits  of this, given below are the top 4 benefits of hiring remote eCommerce managers.

1. Cost, Cost and Cost!

Any operation that is carried out remotely always has a major cost benefit. In these cases, the cost benefits are incredibly high as a remote eCommerce manager costs only about one third of an on-site eCommerce manager. This obviously saves up a significant investment allowing you to use your finances in expanding and growing your business.

2. High Experience

A good experience is always a preferred characteristic of any job. The same applies to eCommerce managers. Majority of the times if you go to hire a remote eCommerce maager, you will always get someone with a significant experience in the field. Another plus point in this is the fact that if you're just starting out, there is a lot the eCommerce manager will be able to teach you about the business.

3. High Range of Expertise

Most of the times, when you hire an eCommerce manager, there are only a specific set of skills that they bring along. However, remote eCommerce managers, are usually complemented by a team of expert eCommerce developers. This means that they will be able to help you out with a lot more thigns than you usually expect from an on-site manager.

4. No long term contracts

Another great advantage of remotely working eCommerce managers is that you aren't bound to them with a long term complex contract. You can hire them on a temporary basis and then remove them whenever required. You will have to pay them only when you have a lot of work and are not bound to the same commitment in the opposite situation. This again helps you significantly save up on costs, avoid having to go through complex procedures, provide employee benefits etc.

there are a lot more benefits to an eCommerce manager working remotely. However, these wer the ones that have the most impact on the growth of your eCommerce business.  

How is Web Scraping beneficial for Ecommerce Companies?

Web Scraping and its benefits for eCommerce Companies | Making the eCommerce Development the Best

Web scraping is the process of accumulating and organizing data from a variety of sources. Majority of the times, there is no facility to extract this data and you would have to consult a professional web scraping company in order to execute it. In the age of the internet today, data scraping can give you a competitive advantage over others. Business data is a gold mine and accumulating and organizing it can benefit your eCommerce store in a number of ways.

Some of the ways how web scraping and the data collected by it can benefit your eCommerce store are as follows:

1. Scraping Product Data from Merchants 

If an eCommerce store sells a variety of products from a number of different merchants, manually entering each product in your database is not a viable option. It requires a lot of manpower, time and hence a significantly large investment. Scraping all this data using a simple web scraping tool can help you save it all. The whole process becomes more seamless and even eliminates the possibility of human error. To implement this, you could either consult a web scraping company or better yet, an eCommerce development company as this would be more of their specialty.

2. Scraping Competitor Pricing 

As an eCommerce store, there are quite a few techniques that can help you show yourself better than the others to your prospects. The most effective way, however, is showing how you provide your customers with a better priced product. A web scraping tool will simply collect the pricing data  from various competitors and display them on your website. You can even choose from which sites you need the data to be collected.

3. Scraping Customer Review Data 

Customer feedback and review is crucial for any business. Its important for any business to know what their users are saying about them to others. Web scraping can help eCommerce store owners to collect this data from numerous sources to analyze their presence on these channels.You can then respond and bring about changes accordingly.

4. Scraping websites to generate new leads

Scraping is used to collect data and one of the types of data you can collect is customer information. You can target a website or channel where you could find your target audience. Then with the help of a professional web scraping company, you could extract customer information to further target them with promotional offers.

Apart from the ones given above, there are a lot more benefits of web scraping for not just eCommerce businesses but all the others too. The list would be long and even different for each industry. However, this gives a pretty clear picture of the benefits of web scraping.   

5 Best Shopify Apps ecommerce Startups Must Have!

Part 2 - Apps for enhancing User Experience 

Previously it was briefly covered why Shopify is one of the best eCommerce platforms and how it has a plethora of apps to add more value to your store. The 5 apps we spoke about in the previous article were primarily beneficial for your stores sales and marketing strategies. Apart from innovative sales techniques, another aspect of your customer journey from first contact to conversion that is very crucial is User Experience.

The reason why User Experience is of utmost importance is because it is the first step of the customer's journey. The facts state it in a very simple way, if the prospect doesn't enjoy their experience in your store, it is highly unlikely they will buy from you.

Luckily, Shopify has a number of different apps to enhance your user experience. Here is a list of the top 5 Shopify apps that are recommended by professional eCommerce developers:

1. Persistent Cart:

The persistent cart is rather a crucial addition to your eCommerce store. The function of this is that it saves the shopping cart of a user in the same state that it was in when left earlier. Often users shop on multiple devices and also during different times which might empty their cart when they close their tabs. This puts the users in a difficult situation and hence ultimately abandoning the website.

With persistent cart, once added in the cart, the items stay there until they are removed by the user themselves. When the user logs out, the cart is emptied. However, this feature can be turned off if required allowing the cart to empty out only when the user wants so.

2. Tidio Live Chat:

When shopping in a physical store, there is always a salesperson along to clear any doubts you have about any product. This is equally important when shopping online and this is what Tidio Live Chat offers.

With a live chat option, your potential customers can get in touch with you at any point of time. When you're online, you will get an alert whenever a query is raised and you can immediately chat with the user. When offline, a contact form will still be available for them to send in their queries. It is also mobile friendly and provides multi language support.

3. SocialShopWave:

Social Media is an important tool for both the users and businesses. Social media not only makes it easier for them to access your site but also lets them become a part of your online community which imbibes a sense of trust in them about your brand.

SocialShopWave allows you to enhance your user experience through social media remarkably. It allows your users to sign up for your websites using any social media platform they are comfortable with, lets them easily share your products on their pages and even send automated emails personalized based on what they bought or added to their wish list.

4. Yotpo:

When shopping online, the whole process is based on trust and hence it’s important for users to be able to establish that over your store. Yotpo helps you establish that trust through user reviews.

Yotpo allows users to give and see authentic product reviews from other customers and easily distribute those reviews on different social media platforms. As per researches by top eCommerce Development Companies, these not only help in establishing trust but also aid a lot in SEO through user content.

5. McAfee Secure:

Another aspect of trust that users need before being completely confident of purchasing from your store is how secure your site is. Especially in recent times with growing malware attacks, users need to be sure that sharing data and transactions can be carried out safely.

McAfee Secure is a pretty huge name in the market that people and eCommerce developers are aware of and trust. With a McAfee Secure Trustmark, users are ensured that your site has taken necessary precautions for securing the website and that they can confidently shop on it.

Conclusion

So that was the list of our top 5 Shopify apps that can enhance your store's user experience quite significantly. As mentioned earlier, user experience is the first step of a user's journey towards becoming a customer and your prime aim should be to make a digital experience delightful. These apps can definitely aid you in that process.

5 Best Shopify Apps Ecommerce Startups Must Have!

 Apps for Sales and Marketing Strategies

Shopify is one of the best eCommerce platforms that many eCommerce development companies recommend. It’s affordable and easy to use and is much more than an average storefront. Shopify features fully-secure checkouts that allow retailers to start taking payments instantly, while Shopify Shipping takes away the excessive work required for order fulfillment by managing the whole process for you. Shopify can even handle your marketing by automating emails and creating targeted social campaigns.

Shopify primarily aims at making it as simple as possible to start and grow an e-commerce business. By far it has been doing a really good job. It’s great for those looking to create an online store or move an existing store to a more user-friendly and comprehensive platform.

While the basic version of Shopify includes everything you need to get a store up and running, you can equip your store with a number of its apps that are available to get even more out of it.

Given below are 5 Amazing Shopify apps to help you boost sales and increase customer satisfaction.

1. Custom Audience Sync with Facebook:

This Shopify app by Audience Push is an essential app for all Shopify store owners who utilize Facebook advertising. After connecting your store to your Facebook, this app will automatically update your Facebook Custom Audience list with details of each new customer to your store.

Every time there is a phone number or email entered into the checkout, a sale or a customer registration, the contact details are instantly pushed to a Custom Audience list created on Facebook. This helps you focus on a more targeted group of users to boost your sales. Given the fact that almost everyone in the world now uses Facebook, this is an app your eCommerce developers shouldn't skip.

2. Exit Offers

The Exit Offers app is highly recommended by eCommerce Development companies help boost sales by helping you save customers that are about to abandon a purchase. Visitors who add items to their cart but then try to leave without completing their purchase are shown an offer designed to entice them to buy the product. The offer can be defined by the admin.

Another great feature of this is that you can split test offers right from within the app to help you figure out which type of offer performs the best for you. This app can easily help you increase your sales by 20% by targeting price sensitive customers. It also significantly decreases your cart abandonment rates which are a serious concern.  

3. Product Upsell

The product upsell app is actually a pretty impressive one that can have a direct impact on increasing sales. What it does is that based on the products in a user's shopping cart, it automatically recommends them related products that best go with it or sometimes are even important for it at the point of checkout.

For example, if a user buys a Laptop, this app will give a suggestion of buying a laptop case along, in case of a camera, it would suggest a memory card and so on. Users often don’t realize their requirement of another product that is often used with the one they wish to purchase unless reminded or suggested about. Hence, it might be rather essential to have your store equipped with this feature.

4. Quantity Breaks:

The quantity breaks app will allow you to create different pricing tiers based on the quantity of a product a user buys. It also has the flexibility of creating these different pricing tiers on products that fall in a particular group.

For instance, if a customer plans to buy a product in bulk, then you can set it up in a way to offer the customer a 10% discount on the purchase of 10 of the same products, a 15% discount on the purchase of 15 and so on. Setting it up for products within a specific group works similarly. This app could be immensely beneficial especially for those stores who mostly have orders placed in bulk.

5. Points, VIP, Referral Programs

No shopper would ever deny extra points or would skip a reward. BigCommerce reports that discount offers influence the decision to purchase for nearly 71 percent of shoppers. Hence, you should definitely consider providing offers and deals to your customers and this Shopify App by Sweet tooth does exactly that.

Sweet Tooth Loyalty Points app lets you reward your customers in over ten different ways. You can create a reward program to give shoppers incentives for making a purchase, referring a friend, creating an account, following you on social media, and a lot more. This could help you give a really good leverage over your competitors.

Although there are plenty of apps available to integrate with the Shopify platform, these are a few of the major ones that eCommerce developers especially recommend to boost your sales. Especially if you are just starting out, these can help you achieve your eCommerce dream. These apps can take a tremendous load off of you by automating a majority of your sales and marketing strategies and aid you in growing your business.