E-commerce

Oh Christmas, the most spectacular period of the year and the most lucrative, if you are an E-commerce website owner of course. Although it may seem a little early to start talking about the holidays, it is never too early to start preparing your site for the holiday season.

If you are like many business owners, you may not have a website. Unfortunately nowadays, if you do not have a website it’s almost as if your business doesn’t exist. People and companies are on the internet, and you need to be too! Thankfully at emyspot it is free and easy to build your website. Below are just few of the reasons and advantages of building a website for your business.

You've created your online store, and have made clear product pages, but something is not working. Your page may be just… well, the details of the service or product. Or it can encourage your buyers – becoming the tipping point that turns them from interested to invested and opening the pocketbooks ready to spend.

A page that exists, or a page that sells… Picked the second? Good. Here are three tips to help get you there.

If you've chosen to use the free version of doomby's e-commerce pack to make an online store, then you'll know how easy it is to set up your products with just a few clicks. On the other hand, if you've chosen to subscribe to the full e-commerce pack and get unlimited products for your online shop, then you may find it a lot easier to use a spreadsheet like Excel or Numbers to quickly add information for a large number of products in one go. Or if you are transferring your store from another e-commerce platform, perhaps you already have an existing online store catalog just waiting to be imported.

Rest easy – you can now import and export products in just a couple of clicks. It's just one of the ways your favorite free website builder has made it even easier to make a website, quick and easy!

One of the biggest hurdles facing e-business start-ups is ensuring the webmaster or online store owner remain motivated. It's not always easy to make an online store and to keep it running, or to stick with it long enough to ensure its financis. It takes time tal succeso build website traffic, and to transform that traffic into sales and a loyal customer base for a new e-commerce website. And it can be disheartening to have spent time and effort to make a website with an online store, only to be rewarded with an empty bank account and a trickle of visitors.

Though it's vital to stick to a plan and to do whatever it takes to remain motivated as your online store grows, there are a few essential things you can do to give it a really good start, and to ensure you develop a successful e-commerce business.

It's rare these days that you come across free things online that are genuinely useful. I mean, sure, there's free stuff that's also neat, handy or interesting (like jedi cats). But little of what you'll find online manages to combine usefulness and gratuity, without you running the risk of ending up with a hefty fine, jailed, or both. Unsatisfied with that sad status quo, today's Earth-shattering doomby annoucement is our response. Today, we're giving you something for nothing that will actually make you money, won't see you in jail¹, and is super-useful². Ever since our e-commerce solution came out (you know, the thing you can add to doomby's free website builder to make an e-commerce website that rocks), we've been all like "ohhh" and "awww" (but you hadn't noticed, right?), because we've been really pleased with what we developed. Well, we like it so much that we wanted to share it with everyone. Free. Yes, now everyone can create a website and make an

online store, and rest soundly knowing it won't cost a dime.

Call us crazy, but we were partly inspired by the vertiginous drop in the euro, figuring if we didn't make it free, the new peso of the north would soon be at a level where – for the price – we'd practically be giving it away anyway. So that's just what we decided to do.

I've been thinking a lot about Jedi cats since last week, and about how I'd been living with a master of the Force for all these years without my even noticing it (though, with hindsight, his name – Yoda – was a fairly obvious clue). With just a stare, he can stop anyone dead in their tracks, forcing them - against their will - to drop everything and rub his belly. Like his namesake, he is truly a Jedi master.

Disappointing to me though it may be, not everyone seems to share my passion for feline mysticism. Nicolas is one such individual, and rather than spending his time pondering the levels of midichlorians in the blood of domestic pets, he's actually been doing something useful this past week, and has preferred spending his time thinking about online store stock management.

Imagine it: your online store looks great, you've set up your killer products with unbeatable pricing to leave the competition in your wake. You've spent hours taking multiple images of each and every item against a white sheet you hung up on your living room wall, so your customers can get a good look at them from every possible angle. You've painstakingly adjusted every single aspect of your product page design to fit perfectly with your website design, and have now built the world's most amazing (dare I say, magical) online store; not only have you learnt how to make a website that rocks, but you now have an equally brillant e-commerce website.

You are an overnight e-commerce success story.

Until you run out of stock, that is.

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.

Given the rapid pace of my colleague's recent programming exploits improving our free website builder, you could be forgiven for thinking he was either:

1. junked up on caffeine (or worse), or
2. a truly conscientious workaholic.

Although he does drink more coffee than I do, I couldn't reasonably describe his consumption as excessive. And as I'm not convinced he's the type who'd take illicit drugs (nor have I really taken the time to examine his pupils lately, what with being busy and all), I'll go for the second option (maybe he wants a raise – a car that old must cost a fortune to repair).

In any case, he's been feverishly working on fleshing out improvements to our e-commerce website tools and online store website manager, and it's really starting to bear fruit: yes, it's now even easier than ever to make a website with doomby. We really like what he's done - in fact, I'm even tempted to make a business website and build my very own little online shopping mall. Well, almost – it's a little hard, since I really haven't got a clue, and have nothing to sell*, save for a billion or so cottony hydrangea scale and about as many cat hairs (wanna buy some, cheap?).

As I mentioned at the end of last week, our development team has been feverishly working away on additions and overhauls to doomby.com and our free website builder tools. In last Friday's post, I detailed doomby's latest social networking additions (or social bookmarking, if you prefer), enabling you to create a website with easily sharable content through Facebook and Twitter integration.

This week we'll have a quick look at the latest improvements to our e-commerce website module, designed to help you make an online store that looks just the way you want it to, with a stack of new web design tools to provide greater control over the look and feel of your store's product presentation.

Our new online store website design editor is all about enabling you to make a business website that looks even better, by editing your store's CSS without needing to have the slightest idea of what CSS is, and giving your store a easy makeover you can be proud of (and that will keep your customers coming back for more!).

For those of you who actually do have an in-depth understanding of CSS, you can edit your store's CSS code directly - just as you can with your website design CSS - to achieve the same effect (and feel a whole lot cleverer).